Liars: Erasing Your Own Soul

Liars: Erasing Your Own Soul

Dr. Roger Ray      June 30, 2024

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A teenaged girl in a church I served in Kentucky many years ago, quickly moved from being a quiet, low performing student, into a raging, anti-social, drug dealer wannabe. Her parents were good friends and I tried to be as helpful as possible, but it became clear that when she was forced to come to counseling appointments with me, that she would just tell me whatever she thought I wanted to hear. She ran away from home one night and her father and I set up in a large apartment complex parking lot where we thought she was buying drugs to see if we could find her.

 

We spotted her and my friend and I gave chase. Being the faster runner, I caught up to her just as she was entering an apartment with me close behind and it was a nightmare scenario, with dozens of people lying about on mattresses, hypodermics littering the filthy floor and a lot of very high and confused looking addicts staring up at a tall young man in a black suit. Before they could discern that I was a preacher rather than a detective, I took my young parishioner by the arm and led her out of the apartment.

 

We felt that there was no other option to save her life but to have her admitted to a mental hospital where I had a connection with an amazing psychiatrist who seemed to me to have almost magical powers in psychology. The psychiatrist and I held sessions with her jointly. Dr. O’Connor saw through her constant lying immediately and he said something to her that has stuck with me for 40 years. 

He said to her, “Every time you tell a lie, you fade a little bit. If you keep lying all of the time you will eventually become invisible, you will have erased yourself from the world of anyone you ever cared about.” This realization seemed to impress her for a little while but, folks, these stories don’t all have happy endings.

 

After a brief hospitalization she returned home and quickly ran away for good. The last I heard about her she was working in a cheap strip club to get her drugs. Her grief stricken mother drank herself to death and her father spent a couple of years, unemployed and just staring into the distance. He did, eventually get his act together well enough to go back to work and I was honored to go back to Louisville to officiate his marriage to a wonderful women, who helped to pull him out of the black hole of despair where he had been living. But his daughter succeeded in basically erasing her existence and I have little hope that she is alive today. 

 

Honesty used to be treasured as a virtue. Lying, on the other hand, was associated with criminals, con men, addicts, and philanderers. Now, lying by politicians, the news media – especially the ones that tend more towards entertainment than information, businesses, and even individuals, has become so common that I am no longer certain that honesty is regarded seriously as a virtue. With your permission, I would like to try to rescue truth telling from the trash heap of our current society.

 

Forgive me for getting into the weeds a little bit but let me distinguish between compulsive liars and pathological liars:

A compulsive liar will exaggerate or fabricate statements out of a felt need to lie, they lie even when telling the truth would be easier and would hurt them less. 

They lie because, like other compulsive behaviors, like avoiding stepping on cracks or locking and unlocking a door three times satisfies some felt need in them that serves no real purpose. If you have a kid with ADHD, you probably noticed them being horribly unreliable in the stories that they tell you. They are not con artists, they are not manipulating; they are just lying because they feel a need to lie.

 

A pathological liar is a different color of horse altogether. Pathological liars lie to get what they want, to control the behavior of other people, they are manipulative narcissists and their pathology makes them indifferent to what their lies do to other people. Pathological liars are often really good at lying; they are persuasive, and in the case of malignant narcissists, once they have told the lie four or five times, they come to believe it themselves, often to such a degree that they can’t even remember what was true in the first place, the lie has overshadowed any rational memory. 

 

Addicts are almost always pathological liars because they have to lie to cover for their illegal drug use, drunk driving, and the theft, irresponsible use of family money, and bad credit that it takes to stay in steady supply of their drug of choice. In AA and AlAnon, the family members of addicts are encouraged to not believe the lies because being gullible only encourages more lying. But, as I said, pathological liars are usually pretty good at it. 

 

When I have had an addict in counseling, I quickly get to a point where I could spend all of my time trying to get enough information to figure out if they are lying right now or if this happens to be one of the times when they are telling the truth. So, you tend to assume that they are always lying . . . this goes back to what Dr. O’Connor said about becoming increasingly invisible. 

A constant liar is someone that you either consciously or unconsciously just stop listening to. It simply isn’t worth the energy to try to figure out what is a lie and what may actually be true. 

 

For example, the hosts of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, eventually decided that they would no longer allow Trump administration spokesperson, KellyAnn Conway, on their show because you couldn’t believe anything she said and fact checking her would have taken up the entire show. She continued to be interviewed on Fox and other entirely unreliable news sources but she just contributed to the increasing disappearance of her credibility and anyone who risked being associated with her.

 

We saw this in the recent “hush money” trial of Donald Trump in which a key witness, Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney, had lied so often to cover up for Trump’s crimes and illicit affairs that the Trump defense team kept insisting that you can’t believe anything Cohen said. And to a certain extent, this was true. Cohen had erased himself to the point that he lost his law license and spent time in prison but in this trial, he wanted to tell the truth, but his reputation was so damaged that prosecutors had to find other witnesses to corroborate everything he said, lest it be dismissed out of hand by an appropriately skeptical jury. 

 

Michael was a true pathological liar. Most of what was discussed in this trial were lies he had told for Donald Trump, but he had told very many other lies to feather his own nest as well. He was an accomplished and seasoned liar. 

Now he would like to redeem himself and reclaim his credibility. He wants us to believe him when he apologizes for his past and insists that he can become a new person, its just that the only thing that restores the trust of family members or the public is a long period of telling the truth. Narcissistic pathological liars usually want a brand new soul instantaneously. The hard truth is that rebuilding a reputation is one of the hardest things to do. 

 

If you have ever been married to or in love with an addict or an alcoholic, you know what it is like to desperately want to believe the lies. You want to believe that this is the last time and that it will never happen again. There will never be another drunken disappearance for three or four days, there will never be another affair, there will never be another argument that becomes violent.

 

I suspect that every therapist in the world has had to often remind one client after another of this basic fact, that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. When I was first divorced in my mid 30’s, I dated a beautiful woman who was a part of my running and biking group. We had common interests and many common views and beliefs, and, I can say, that she was the most generous, loving, kind, and fun person in the world . . . . one day, and the next day, for no discernable reason, would be the meanest, most critical, hateful and resentful person you have ever met. Several months into the relationship, it was no longer a good day followed by a bad day but rather the moods would shift from one to the other, sometimes in minutes.

 

We saw a couple of counselors together. We tried everything to try to smooth out the good and bad times, but nothing worked. I loved the angelic side of her, and I was terrified of the demonic side. And if a minister can’t believe that a person is capable of changing, then why be a minister at all?

 

But a psychologist friend saw that I was tearing myself apart trying to make that relationship work and she sat me down and said it over and over: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior - The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior - 

I desperately did not want it to be true, but it obviously was.

 

That doesn’t mean that a person cannot change, but when the issue is a profound character flaw, you have to want the change more than anything in the world but, in her case, she just needed a new victim. And, even all of these years later, I sincerely believe that she really wanted to change and to have a stable, long term, relationship . . . she just didn’t want it enough to actually try to control her behavior.

 

That’s largely why I eventually stopped working with alcoholics and addicts. I always seemed to find myself in the position of wanting their sobriety more than they wanted to be sober and it always, somehow, became my responsibility to make sure that they stayed sober, which, of course, is something that never works. 

 

That’s why AA and NA meetings always start by going around the room and allowing everyone to introduce themselves by their first name followed by the stark, honest, and difficult statement, “I’m an alcoholic,” or “I’m an addict.” 

Some people just can’t bring themselves to say. Most of the people there have to say it five or six times a week for a couple of years before they start to believe it. 

One of the most strangely ironic cases of lying in our public conversation recently was the conviction of Hunter Biden in federal court. While he was actively smoking crack, he got the wild idea that he wanted to buy a handgun. The form he had to fill out to buy that gun asked the question, “are you currently addicted to drugs,” and like every other addict you have ever met, he easily and impulsively lied, insisting that he was not.

 

So, for 11, count em, 11 days, Hunter Biden owned a gun. The gun was never loaded, never fired, and his girlfriend finally just snatched it and threw it in a garbage dumpster. Now, folks, there are over 400 million guns in the United States. 

There are between 40 and 50 million alcoholics and drug addicts in the United States. Now, how many of those 50 million addicts own at least one of this country’s share of 400 million guns? 

 

I have spent almost all of my life in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and now Florida. I’m going to go out on a limb and say just about all of the addicts own one or more guns and nearly all of them have owned them for more than 11 days. Hunter Biden may be one of the least guilty gun owning addicts and yet he was put on trial and found guilty on these federal changes that have never been brought against any addict gun owner who had not committed a crime with a gun. 

 

In my opinion, the person who decided to just ask addicts if they were using drugs is the person who should be on trial. If we don’t want addicts to be able to buy a gun, then the purchaser should have to pee in a cup before making the purchase. The sad truth is that the gun industry doesn’t want to wait for test results, and they don’t even want to screen out potential buyers, they want to sell as many guns as possible, no matter who is buying them and no matter what they are going to use it for. 

 

If you want to know if someone is an addict, don’t ask them! You can ask their spouse, their kids, their employer, and probably their neighbors, but the one person you are not going to get an honest answer from is the addict. The hypocrisy in this case has been maddening but the day of the trial, when the verdict was read, the talking heads went straight to the point that this proves that the judicial system has not been weaponized by Democrats against Republicans.  

 

So we just sacrifice Hunter Biden on the altar of appeasing hypocrites who will not be appeased by anything? No, the obvious truth is that Trump has been shown every kind of favoritism imaginable, all of the way from the little Federal Court just south of me in Florida where the judge has made sure that Trump will not go on trial for stealing classified documents before the November election, all of the way up to the Supreme Court which is sitting on a decision about whether a president is immune from any criminal prosecution so that he won’t go on trial for the insurrection before the November election. 

 

Trump has been out of office for over 3 years and the judicial system is still just his fat little lap dog while the rest of the world suffers from abusive prosecution for petty crimes. 

The judicial system is rigged, its just that it is ludicrously rigged in favor of our criminal in chief, the former and possibly future president of the United States.

 

What I don’t understand is why lying has not made him invisible. It seems to work on almost everyone else, but somehow, this cult leader can spew the most obvious lies all day long and his loyal following will deny what they have seen with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, and insist that this tyrant has never lied. I have no explanation with which to assuage the cognitive dissonance I know that we are all feeling. 

 

But I am sure of this, Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict for a crime that would never had been charged against anyone whose last name wasn’t “Biden,” is evidence that somewhere in the distant back of Republicans’ brains is an awareness that lying is wrong and honesty is a virtue we should all cherish and strive to make our own. 

 

Trump’s daily spewing of propaganda, disinformation, lies, and self-serving exaggerations have somehow not made him disappear but association with him seems to make everyone else disappear. 

Eight of his staff and administration members have served time in prison and three more have been criminally charged. And even though Trump still manages to ride a wave of incomprehensible popularity, who would ever hire one of his sons or daughters for a responsible position in any kind of business? Who would want to be friends with Kellyanne Conway or any of the people who have repeated his lies, lied for him, and pretended that he was not guilty of multiple disgusting crimes? 

Trump has not become invisible, but I would contend that the Republican Party has lost all credibility because of their ongoing association with him and loyalty to his anti-democratic, fascist propaganda. What would it take for the Republican Party to become a trustworthy and reliable political influence again? . . . beyond several funerals?

 

People can change. Parties can change. But the recovery of honor, trust, reliability is a long road and I contend that it is paved with honesty . . . rejecting half-truths, gross exaggerations, and absurd conspiracy theories and deceptive propaganda, a whole lot of people are going to have to say a whole lot of true things to become visible again in a world where character really does matter. 

As you would learn in Al Anon, I beg you to stop believing the lies. I implore you to make lying wrong again. 

“What is a Cult and are You in One?”

“What is a Cult and are You in One?”    

  June 16, 2024         Dr. Roger Ray

 

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In 1973 more than a 1000 psychiatrists went together to publish their belief that the presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, was unfit to hold the office of president. Some even said that he was a dangerous lunatic. Don’t you miss the days when Barry Goldwater seemed like a dangerous presidential candidate? But there was a forceful professional backlash against psychiatrists using their position to diagnose a public figure whom they have never actually treated, tested, or even met, and the result of that pushback was the creation of what we call “The Goldwater Rule.” It isn’t a law, but it is a generally recognized matter of professional ethics . . . counselors should refrain from diagnosing anyone we have not actually had a clinical relationship with. And, kind of like the recently published ethical standards for the Supreme Court, it is more often ignored than it is observed. 

 

But, at least it makes us hesitate and think twice. I would challenge you to notice that in the first couple of years of the Trump administration, reporters never wanted to say that Trump had lied about something. They had all kinds of ways around it, saying that he had mis-spoken, or he was factually in error, or that he cited misinformation and then, finally, someone just came out with a “pants on fire” the guy is a liar statement and then it was like a dam broke and diagnosing Trump as a sociopathic liar was as common as weeds in my flower garden. 

 

As a public speaker, I know all too well the temptation to overstate, exaggerate, to strategically use hyperbole to drive a point home. During the invasion of Iraq, it was very tempting to me to say that George W. Bush was a 21^st century Hitler because so many people were dying and he obvious had entirely fabricated his case for war. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9-11 attack and we had no plausible reason to start that war. 

 

Especially when you have been preaching to more or less the same audience for 10 years or more, sometimes you feel like you have to preach something like the way a fire alarm sounds to get people to listen again, but the truth is, unless you are setting out to kill five or six million people in a genocide, you are not the same as Adolph Hitler. It is like what I was saying last month about the shepherd boy who cried “wolf” too often. As tempting as it is to use language at the extremes to press your point home, we have to know how to keep our powder dry for when a real Hitler show up.

 

Too many people were quick to label Bill Clinton as a narcissist but then, 30 years later, we had no idea how much we were going to need to be able to use that word to describe a president who makes Clinton look like Gandhi. Most commentators will add the qualifier “malignant” to narcissist to make it more emphatic. A malignant narcissist is, like, really really narcissistic rather than a Bill Clinton sort of narcissist. I might say that Clinton was arrogant, but it does deem that Trump is on a wholly different level of narcissism. 

 

Lately I have found myself recoiling when I hear people say too easily that Trump supporters are members of a cult. Some news commentators seem to have a need to say it a couple of times a day, just in case someone might have forgotten. 

But “cult” is a very specific term, and I would like to ask us to pause for a few minutes and think about it.

 

Of course, in academic circles, the word is not necessarily a negative term. Sometimes it is used to describe a tribe or a culture. I remember my Old Testament professor often referencing Hebrew “cult rituals,” and by that he did not mean that Jews are a cult but rather that the dietary laws, the dress code, and even restrictions about head coverings and haircuts, all of which distinguished Hebrews from their neighboring tribes, were cult observances. Not in a bad way but in a way that distinguished their tribe from neighboring tribes.

 

But in our common vernacular, the word carries negative implications. We call a group a cult when we think that they have gone off the rails of rational thought and behavior. I am not a fan of Taylor Swift’s music, even though I am keenly aware of several laudable aspects of her character. Still, songs about adolescent heartbreak are just not my cup of tea, but I have heard several people reference her fan base, “Swifties,” as being a cult, which is absurd. If she starts advocating for putting fans of Billie Eilish into concentration camps, we might have something to talk about but until then, she is just a wildly successful recording artist who has won over all but a few of us who still long for substance in song lyrics. 

 

To seriously talk about what we mean by a cult, we have to consider, as painful as it is to think about, the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978. 

Jim Jones had been a young Pentecostal preacher who eventually sought ordination in my former denomination, The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) back in the days when the denomination was totally open minded and had no real restrictions on their clergy. Jones actually did a lot of good things. His racially integrated church was very involved in civil rights and poverty issues. 

He was an ardent critic of capitalism and eventually insisted that his church members surrender all of their assets and live in a kind of socialist commune, sharing everything in common. 

 

But he mixed that message in with no small amount of paranoia, persuading his members to leave Indianapolis and move first to San Francisco and then into the remote jungle of Guyana, next to Venezuela in South America. His paranoia and need for control grew until he finally insisted that the whole church of nearly a thousand people, including more than 300 children, participate in a mass suicide, drinking cyanide laced Kool Aid. 

 

That was in November of 1978, and I started seminary the following fall at Vanderbilt. My advisor, the late Herman Norton, was one of the nation’s only real experts on religious cults, but prior to the Jonestown suicide, he had done most of his research among snake handling Pentecostals in Appalachia. In his course on religious cults, we spent a lot of time going over the evolution this church that went from a poor neighborhood church in Indianapolis into being a cult in which it was impossible to disagree with or criticize the minister, Jim Jones . . . even though it became evident that he was taking sexual advantage of men and women in the congregation, that he was an obvious drug addict, and month after month, he became more grandiose in his claims about himself until he insisted that he was a messiah. 

 

You don’t have to claim to be divine or lead a group in mass suicide to be a cult, but I think that we need to keep in mind that such things stand at the extremes of what it means to be a cult and we shouldn’t be too quick in throwing the term around.

 

Most cults do have a charismatic leader who tells people how to think and how to behave and who are almost entirely above being criticized, not even in regard to their most obvious failings. They typically make grandiose claims about themselves, if not claiming out and out divinity, they at least claim to be unique in their gifts, insights, and usually in their ability to predict future events. 

 

I want to be quick to say that not all cults have a singular leader. In Dr. Norton’s course on cults, he insisted that churches like the Mormon Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were cults, and they don’t even have ministers. They don’t have an ordained head of their cult, but they do insist on conformity to a set of beliefs which, when plainly stated, seem to be too absurd for any rational person to believe, but within their ranks, they police conformity to these often silly beliefs and will assign virtual handlers to anyone who seems likely to stray from the rules of behavior or belief. 

 

If you put cults on a scale of 1 to 10, with Jonestown being a 10, you can make a pretty good case for Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses being a 3 or 4, and, if you promise not to quote me, I would say that the Church of Christ and Catholic Church would give Mormons and the JW’s a good run for their money in the mind control and silly beliefs arena. And scientologists have to be a 5 or a 6. But that’s none of my business. 

 

And, we have to acknowledge that there are religions and political groups that can be healthy in one area and quite cultish in others. 

Most Muslims, for example, hardly stand out from your other neighbors. They tend to be morally circumspect, peaceful, generous, and hard working. But we also see Islam expressing itself in extremely controlling ways, beheading men for being gay and killing women for not wearing their head coverings in public. 

 

The news never talks about the majority of Muslims and their reporting on extremists could make us think that Islam is the same everywhere all of the time and it most certainly is not . . . still, the cultish expressions of Islam are way too common and dangerously out of touch with reality. 

 

So, it would be wrong to say that Islam is a cult but clearly, it is for some extremists while it is not for most Muslims. There are those for whom the Mormon Church was a cult, and many have gone through deprogramming counseling programs to get away from it, but, as with Islam, for most Mormons, it isn’t a cult . . . still kinda strange from my perspective but hardly deserving of being categorized on the whole as a cult. 

 

When people say that the Trump movement is a cult, we should be aware that while it may be for some of the most radical followers of Trump, for many it is simply a conservative political movement that they generally prefer to the other options on the menu. We cannot rationally say that 45% of American adults are cult members. 

 

But what does identify a cult? I think that there are a few markers on which we can generally agree. Cults attract members for whom the cult provides something, it solves a problem for them. 

Cults demand a high level of conformity from their members while simultaneously demanding that the cult or, more specifically, the cult leader, cannot be criticized. And because of that, they can defy facts.

 

Jim Jones always wore sunglasses because, he said, the intensity of his eyes could hurt people if they looked into his eyes. That is obviously not true. 

He wore sunglasses so that you could not see how dilated his pupils were from all of the amphetamines he was taking. 

Donald Trump says that he is 6’4” and weighs 215 lbs. but if you look at him compared to someone who actually is 6’4” and 215 lbs. it is obvious that he is much closer to 300 lbs. or more and yet he got the White House physician to report his obvious lie. Now, this is just one really minor example, but when he says something like this, which is an obvious lie, his more cult like followers will not allow themselves to question the veracity of his claims. When you are expected to believe things that are clearly not true, and you actually do make yourself believe the lies, then you may be in a cult. 

 

Trump loyalists will insist that the more than 90 indictments against Trump are all fake, not just some of them; all of them. But some of them are regarding election fraud for which we have tape recordings of phone calls in which he was demanding that votes be thrown out and votes for him be fabricated. He has been charged with taking classified documents which he initially claimed to have returned but dozens of boxes of classified documents were found in his home and golf clubs. We’ve all seen the pictures! 

You cannot rationally deny these charges but if you refuse to believe what you have heard with your own ears and seen with your own eyes, you may be a member of a cult. 

 

It is one thing to know that Trump interfered with the Georgia election in 2020 and that he stole nuclear secrets, secret military battle plans, and thousands of other classified documents but to still prefer Trump to other candidates. But if you refuse to believe what you have heard with your own ears and seen with your own eyes, if you can flatly refuse to accept reality, then, I’m afraid, you are a cult member. 

 

I think that it is safe to assume that all national leaders are arrogant if not narcissistic, but cult leaders tend to go beyond simply thinking that they are uniquely qualified to hold such leadership positions. Cult leaders will make grandiose claims about themselves, saying things like, “I’m the only one who can fix it,” or “If I had still been president, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.” Or, “I could end the war in Gaza in one day.” 

 

For most people, when they hear claims like this, we may shrug and say, “That’s just Trump exaggerating,” but for a cult member, they may actually believe these things, and the cult leader will come to believe it themselves. And that does go to the narcissistic personality. They will tell a lie about themselves and repeat it until they actually believe it. 

We have lots of reasons to believe that Trump raped E. Jean Carrol, that he had sex with Stormy Daniels, and that he had a months-long affair with Karen McDougal, but Trump will deny and deny and deny these facts until he convinces himself that he is innocent. Just as Jim Jones actually believed that he was a messiah. 

 

For people who have felt that they were unseen, unimportant, that they had been cheated by employers, the government, and probably their own family and neighbors, the Trump cult gives them a feeling of belonging, of importance, of empowerment. People who have had to hide their fear of immigrants, their anxiety about gay and transgendered people, who have had to deny their rabid racism and their fear of being replaced by illegal immigrants, Jews, Muslims, or people with higher education, the Trump cult validates their racism, they misogyny, their homophobia and xenophobia. Being in the Trump movement makes C and D high school students feel superior to and smarter than their peers who made good grades and went on to college and grad school. They are no longer the underachieving failing students and those who made them jealous and ashamed before are now just “lib-tards,” to whom they feel superior. That sense of being seen and heard, of being understood, validated, included, is hard to give up, so hard in fact, that the devoted cult member will not even allow themselves to let facts influence their delusional beliefs. 

 

Trying to be as fair and objective as I can possibly be, I cannot help coming to the conclusion that while many Trump supporters are certainly not in a cult, I am afraid that very many of them are . . . many if not most. And what I find to be even more disturbing is that while Trump is not a modern-day Hitler, he sure says and does a lot of the things that Hitler did on his way to power. And Trump is no Jim Jones, but he sadly exhibits the more extreme narcissism that led Jim Jones to become the monster that he was when he died. 

 

I realize that when voters are angry, when they are dissatisfied and longing for change, that they are more inclined to vote for a chaos candidate, someone who will be a disrupter, who will change the way things are . . . and Donald Trump is surely a chaos candidate but I am fairly certain that very few people would actually like the country he would like to turn America into. 

 

Conservatives clamored for an end to Roe v Wade but when they got it, many realized that they didn’t really want to give up their personal choice. And I know many religious people who are adamantly anti-abortion but even they are discovering that you can be against abortion, but you still want civil rights, you want the right to choose for yourselves . . . and that is just one example of what you will lose if Trump’s fascist agenda is successful. 

 

I grew up in the Christian Church. I can still vividly remember the stained glass window in the Christian Church Historical Society in Nashville, TN that depicts the 25^th chapter of Matthew where Jesus says that people will be divided between those who showed compassion on the hungry, the immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned and the sick and those who did not. Those who showed compassion were welcomed into the Kingdom and those who did not, well, it is right there in Matthew 25:41 . . . Jesus told them to go to hell. That’s my translation. In the NRSV he says, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;” which means, you know, just go to hell. 

 

Trump, who wants to cut programs that serve the hungry and the poor, to take away the health insurance offered by Obama Care, to close the borders to immigrants and even lock up their children in detention camps, please, don’t let this monster lead you right into the gates of hell.  in the Christian Church. I can still vividly remember the stained glass window in the Christian Church Historical Society in Nashville, TN that depicts the 25^th chapter of Matthew where Jesus says that people will be divided between those who showed compassion on the hungry, the immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned and the sick and those who did not. Those who showed compassion were welcomed into the Kingdom and those who did not, well, it is right there in Matthew 25:41 . . . Jesus told them to go to hell. That’s my translation. In the NRSV he says, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;” which means, you know, just go to hell. 

 

Trump, who wants to cut programs that serve the hungry and the poor, to take away the health insurance offered by Obama Care, to close the borders to immigrants and even lock up their children in detention camps, please, don’t let this monster lead you right into the gates of hell.  

“Your Jesus, My Jesus, and the Jesus of History”

“Your Jesus, My Jesus, and the Jesus of History”     June 2, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

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Long time listeners will know that I am a huge fan of the work of the 19^thcentury Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. In fact, I have quoted him so often that several church members and a few listeners became intrigued and decided to pick up one or two of his books to read on their own, with almost universal disappointment. They found him to be so dense that his work is virtually incomprehensible as it certainly would have been to me if I had not dug into secondary sources about his life in 19^th century Copenhagen.

 

Kierkegaard wrote in the present moment, without much thought of readers paying attention to him a hundred years and thousands of miles away. So he assumes that his readers are familiar with the state of the church in Denmark in his lifetime, about politicians and popular authors. This is complicated by the fact that Kierkegaard was a very cagy writer who wrote under pseudonyms which, themselves, carried meaningful interpretive skills.

 

Kierkegaard’s barber once commented on what he thought about Soren’s most recent book which infuriated and insulted him, the very thought that a barber could understand his work, so he doubled down and became more obscure. 

 

Everyone notices that Kierkegaard’s thoughts are rather dark but unless you understand the tragically broken engagement he had to Regine Olsen, and the embarrassing circumstances of his birth, that is that his mother had been his father’s housekeeper, hired to take care of the sick and dying first Mrs. Kierkegaard, but who then had to quickly marry Michael Kierkegaard upon the death of his first wife. Though his mother tried to protect him, Michael was cruelly controlling, demanding intellectual and moral perfection out of Soren. Soren’s one act of rebellion was to visit a brothel and have sex with a prostitute, a moral failing that appeared to haunt him for the rest of his life. 

 

He was a tortured soul who had such a massive case of depression that he once wrote in his journal, “My depression has been my most faithful mistress. Is it any wonder that I return her affection?” So, if you don’t have the backstory clearly in mind, you will have less of a chance of understanding “Fear and Trembling” than Kierkegaard’s barber had.

 

Still, this is a nineteenth century, western European writer, much closer to us in culture, time, and circumstances, than anything written in the Bible and yet, rather arrogantly, modern people pick up a Bible and read an English translation with remarkable, and may I say, unfounded confidence in their ability to properly interpret it. 

 

You open the cover and begin reading Genesis without any awareness that more than 500 years had passed between the origin of chapter 2 and chapter 1 and that they were written in different nations and markedly different languages. Without secondary sources, a modern reader would have no idea of what the intricate word play between Hebrew and Babylonian myths that carry most of the meaning, nor that many myths, such as the story of Noah, and a lot of Psalms, are virtually plagiarized from previous Ancient Near Easter literature. 

 

Most of us easily accept that we need help to understand the nuances buried in Shakespeare’s plays but still stubbornly insist that we are able to interpret scripture unaided. I would like to suggest that such a belief is both arrogant and self-deceptive. 

 

Most of us who grew up going to church feel like we are at least familiar enough with the gospel accounts of Jesus that they are readily available to us, but I dare say that only a fraction of the members of clergy can easily tell you which of the gospels have a birth narrative. Almost none could tell you which gospel is organized around five sermons the way that Deuteronomy is organized around five speeches from Moses, and that this author is striving to present Jesus as a new Moses. Shockingly, even most seminary graduates could not tell you which of the four gospels does not contain even a single parable or which one does not have a resurrection appearance. All things that I have expected my freshman college students to know by the end of the semester though I would hate for any of them to be tested on this a year after their final exams. 

 

For more than 100 years, biblical scholars believed that there was an undiscovered source that Matthew and Luke both possessed from which they drew many of the Jesus sayings that are not in Mark but are in both Luke and Matthew. In recent years, the Q theory has fallen into some doubt because it is quite possible that either Matthew copied these sayings from Luke, or Luke copied these sayings from Matthew. 

 

A couple of years before his death, I had the honor of hosting Bishop John Shelby Spong at a dinner in my home. The subject of the elusive Q document came up in conversation and for the remainder of the evening Bishop Spong insisted Matthew was Luke’s source, while I insisted that Luke was Matthew’s source. Six guests nearly fell asleep at the dinner table and my friend, Bishop Spong, and I both left with certainty that we were right. While neither of us could claim to be primary gospel scholars, we both had way too much education in New Testament and in spite of agreeing on most things and remaining close friends, we saw this matter very differently. I mention this only to say that both lay members of the church and scholars and clergy, need to approach the subject of understanding an important religious figure like Jesus was some cautious humility. 

 

And though, sadly, Bishop Spong is no longer able to defend his view, given some sincere requests, I am willing to explain why that I am so sure that I am right about this. I believe that I could make it sound more interesting than I have here. Still, we all miss Bishop Spong, no matter how stubborn he could be about some things.

Most mornings I drink my coffee while watching Morning Joe on MSNBC and I often have to suffer through Joe Scarborough’s religious pronouncements of what Jesus said and what the meaning of Christianity is based on his childhood Sunday School classes in a Southern Baptist Church. Scarborough is often unsufferable to me but I really feel it when he quotes the gospels to actual Biblical scholar, Eddie Glaude, Jr. Glaude is always reserved and respectful but I believe that I can see, as in this image, that sometimes he is having to consciously restrain himself from just slapping Scarborough . . . which I am not sure that I could do if I were live on the set. 

 

But I am here using poor Joe Scarborough to represent a host of church folk who way too confidently announce their encapsulated definition of what true Christianity is and who quote way too confidently what they believe that Jesus said. The truth about the historical Jesus is not simple and the best understanding lies buried in the scholarship of those who actually understand the language and culture of 1^st century Palestine.

 

The truth is that none of the four canonical gospel writers had ever met Jesus. All of them were deeply influenced by the writing of Paul and John was certainly influenced, mostly negatively, by Marcion. All four had an agenda for organizing their Jesus quotes and stories based upon their particular circumstances. They gave themselves liberal permission to edit and adapt that material for their own purposes. 

 

Within the scholarly community, we talk about the layers of development of the Jesus tradition. The historical Jesus was a religious reformer who grew up in the synagogue version of Judaism in the first century and who traveled and taught in an effort to offer some correction to his religious peers. He was probably an exorcist and a faith healer, as many traveling preachers were in his day. He probably had some very harsh things to say about the Roman occupation and the Jewish surrender to it. 

 

In his lifetime, there was no talk of a virgin birth nor of him being a son of God, and no one called him Christ or savior. 

His entire career probably lasted no more than six or seven months. We only say that he preached for 3 years because there are three Passovers mentioned in John but John is neither linear nor historical and should not be relied upon for any historical resources, especially not a timeline. The historical Jesus was executed by the Roman government for insurrection in the way that they executed many other would-be leaders of a rebellion, by crucifixion.

 

 As happened with many other prophets and religious teachers, his disciples continued to meet in his name after he was dead. This certainly happened to Isaiah, unless you think that he had a preaching career that spanned more than a century, and the same could be said for John the Baptist. There were probably more disciples of John the Baptist meeting in his name at the end of the first century than there were disciples of Jesus . . . which is why the gospels try so hard to put John in a secondary light to Jesus . . . there is more than a little propaganda in the New Testament. 

 

In 1985, former Vanderbilt professor, Robert Funk, called together 50 leading New Testament scholars and about a hundred interested lay people to do a deep dive into a historically critical review of the gospels, the four in the New Testament as well as the Gospel of Thomas which is believed to have had some first century roots. Their task over a period of more than ten years, was to try to reach agreement on which of the sayings of Jesus might have originated with Jesus, himself, and which might have echoes of his thoughts, and which had no connection to the historical Jesus at all. 

 

You can read the results of their research in The Five Gospels, readily available on Amazon and in a lot of used bookstores. The seminar included such notable scholars as Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, Jon Dominic Crossan, and my friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong. 

 

Much to the chagrin of many church folks, they concluded that only six or seven of the Jesus sayings likely originated with Jesus and fewer than 20% even reflected his thinking. The rest are the product of the early church which used Jesus as a mouthpiece in much the same way that Plato used Socrates as an interlocular to express his own thoughts. These later authors certainly loved and respected Jesus and because they held him and his memory in high regard, they used him to articulate what they believed that the church and the world needed to hear in their time.      

 

The second and third waves in the evolution of the Jesus tradition probably took place alongside one another. Paul, as I have recently mentioned, had no interest in the historical Jesus, to the point of even refusing to be taught by Jesus’ biological brother whom Paul met in Jerusalem. For Paul, Jesus was an eschatological figure whose death would bring about the end of the current age and usher in a new world which would physically be the Kingdom of God on earth. Paul evidently believed that this would happen any moment, and certainly believed that he would live to see it. 

 

He was clearly wrong about this very important and central aspect of his beliefs, which should certainly help modern readers to place Paul’s version of Christianity into a more honest context. He may have been very sincere, but he clearly was totally mistaken in his eschatological predictions. 

We think that most of the rest of the gospels reflected the early church’s reaction to the growing threat brought on by the occupation of Palestine by Rome. An occupation which eventually ended in the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and the near annihilation of the Jewish people. The association of early followers of Jesus with Judaism and the obvious fact that their primary prophet had been executed by Rome for insurrection put them in a position for persecution themselves. 

 

Rome allowed their subject states to keep their own religions as long as they accepted emperor worship as being both mandatory and primary in all of the empire. This is when the Jesus community began to present Jesus as an alternative to the emperor. 

 

The well documented tradition of requiring everyone to show fealty to the emperor by throwing a pinch of incense in the flame in front of the statue of Caesar and announcing that “Caesar is Lord” was being replaced with the affirmation that Jesus is Lord. Caesar was called king, savior, he was said to have divine parentage and was born of a virgin. All of these accolades were taken from Roman emperor worship and applied to Jesus. Though there is some crossover here with the language of Paul’s letters, the intent is certainly quite different. 

 

The historical Jesus was probably a revolutionary against the occupation of Rome and much of the early Christian tradition only furthered that revolutionary perspective. Paul didn’t worry about politics like overthrowing Rome. He didn’t even worry about changing social institutions like slavery. For him, the world as we know it was coming to an end and his interest was in bringing as many people into the kingdom with him. 

Apocalyptic communities continued into the second century and certainly continue into our own time. But, for the most part, the Christian community eventually evolved into an other worldly salvation cult that took its place in the Roman culture. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in the early 4^th century, the Christian church had grown in number but it had distanced itself from the historical Jesus. By that time, the preacher, Jesus, had become the preached, Jesus, the Christ, the only Son of God.

 

The task of the Council of Nicaea was to define Christianity to help bring unity to the movement. Look at the creed that they wrote. It says:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
 of all things visible and invisible.

 

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
 the Only Begotten Son of God,
 born of the Father before all ages.
 God from God, Light from Light,
 true God from true God,
 begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
 through him all things were made.
 For us men and for our salvation
 he came down from heaven,
 and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
 and became man.
 For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
 he suffered death and was buried,
 and rose again on the third day
 in accordance with the Scriptures.
 He ascended into heaven
 and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
 He will come again in glory
 to judge the living and the dead
 and his kingdom will have no end.

Please note that this early 4^th century definition of Christianity does not include even one reference to what Jesus said, what he taught, what his purpose, his mission was. They reference him only as being of divine parentage, born of a virgin, executed under Pontius Pilate, and raised to rule from on high. At this point, Jesus is hardly even a historical footnote to the religion that claimed to worship him. 

 

I attended my first Jesus Seminar meeting shortly after I had finished my fellowship at Harvard. I was introduced to Bob Funk with lots of accolades from some of my friends, but that meeting didn’t go very well. Funk was dying of cancer and was possibly feeling an uncommon amount of urgency, but he lit into me in front of a number of my peers, berating me for going back to being a church pastor after my time at Harvard. Funk felt that the church had become hopeless, and that the only way for me to be useful was to become a university professor.

 

Honestly, I was offended, and I thought that his cynicism about the church was unfounded. It was only a few months later when I began to feel like I should have taken him more seriously. I don’t know if the church, broadly speaking, is unredeemable. But, folks, I am standing here alone in a recording studio making a video and podcast for listeners scattered around the globe in part because no bricks and mortar church would tolerate the content of my sermons. 

 

I am old enough to be retired and I am enjoying my freedom in my life with only a sermon to record every two weeks but if I wanted to return to a public pulpit, I seriously doubt that even a Unitarian Church would accept the kind of unvarnished content that I offer, though it is what they would find in a legitimate academic seminary. 

Is the modern church hopelessly mired in magical and superstitious thinking or is there a chance that we might return to a more revolutionary, anti-empire mission that might offer the world a new reason for hope? Well, it obviously is up to you, isn’t it?

 

So, let me end as I began, with a quote from the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard:

This has to be said; so let it now be said. . . . by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool by calling that the Christianity of the New Testament, which is not the Christianity of the New Testament... the official worship of God...is, a counterfeit, a forgery."

 

I still don’t want to give up on the church. I am eager to find reason to believe that it can change. I hope that some of you also hope for this transformation with me.