Category Archives: Christian Right

Practical Zen: An Approach to Secular Ethics

[This is a talk more or less as I gave it at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture on October 23, 2016. It is based on a chapter in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.]

Hello. I’m so pleased to be here today. Many years ago I lived in New Jersey. And in those days I often attended lectures hosted by the Ethical Culture Society in Teaneck. So I come here with an appreciation of what you’re about.

I have been a formal student of Zen Buddhism for nearly 30 years. Zen is my spiritual path. However, let me assure you I’m not here to sell you on Buddhism, but simply to offer a perspective adapted from Buddhism for your consideration. I’m calling it “practical Zen” because I intend to avoid the enigmatic one-hand-clapping stuff and keep this talk grounded in our common experience.

Let’s begin with a quote from a Chinese text that is not Zen, but Daoist. This is paraphrased somewhat from the Dao Dejing, verse 18 in most translations. This passage describes a series of fallback positions.

When the Dao is lost, we fall back on virtue.
When virtue is lost, we fall back on humanity.
When humanity is lost, we fall back on morality.
When morality is lost, we fall back on religion.

If I could provide an executive summary of this talk, it would be that to move toward a more ethical culture we need to climb back up this ladder, at least to virtue. And if you want to go for broke and aim for the Dao, great.

So let’s talk about how we might do this.

There’s a basic Buddhist teaching that says what we might call psychological impulses, including our emotions and thoughts, are the forerunner of all actions. One aspect of that is that the way we conceptualize the world around us conditions how we relate to the world. So the first step in considering a moral course is to look very closely at how we conceptualize morality.

I looked “morality” up in an English dictionary and found “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” Another definition says morality is “beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.”

But the fact is, we don’t agree about what’s right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Especially as our communities and nations become more diverse, we more and more often are butting heads with people who have entirely different beliefs about what right and wrong, good and evil even mean.

Where do these beliefs come from? I never heard of people putting them to a vote. Some of us are stuck in the idea that morality is about following absolute rules that are eternal and unchanging because God said so, even if those rules are making everyone miserable. And to an increasing degree, that rigidity is tearing us apart.

Is there another way to define morality? The Sanskrit word found in early Buddhist scriptures that is translated into English as morality or ethics is sila. Sila has a connotation of harmony; it’s acting in a way that allows people to live in harmonious families and communities. Sila involves cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security. Rules can be useful to help with that cultivation, but by themselves they are not the be-all and end-all of morality.

Buddhism does have moral rules, of course. Monks and nuns have hundreds of rules. Laypeople have five. We call them Precepts. The Precepts for laypeople are very basic ― don’t take life; don’t take what is not given, don’t misuse sexuality, don’t deceive others, avoid intoxicants. Those are the five Precepts every school agrees on; Zen throws in a few more. The Precepts are something like training wheels. We practice the Precepts in order to cultivate morality, humanity, virtue, compassion, kindness, and all that stuff, which is where true morality originates.

There’s an American Zen master who is also a Unitarian Universalist minister named James Ford. James Ford wrote about the Precepts recently,

“Frankly, there are times we just need the rules. Much of our lives we’re wandering around in the thickets. Haven’t a clue. We’re lost. And the precepts can become a life line thrown out to us. Sometimes we just have to grab that line. Sometimes we just have to follow the rules. …

… But if we live only in the realm of rules we are strangled by dead letters. And not only are our own lives constrained, we become caricatures of our true potentiality.”

Some rules really are necessary. Rules about theft and homicide, for example. Without some rules, we humans would never have left the caves. We’d still be huddled around our little fires, guarding our flint arrowheads from those people in that other cave. Civilization wouldn’t be possible.

But we’re still left with a lot of rules that seem to serve no useful purpose. We’re fighting over who can use which public restrooms, for example, because of some people’s rigid ideas about morality. We’re fighting about reproductive rights, about who can get married, and who has to bake wedding cakes.

What’s the point? What does denying people the right to follow their hearts, or in the case of the restroom issue, their bladders, have to do with cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect and security? In this case, rigid rule-following is having the opposite effect.

Another way to understand the religiosity-morality connection is explained in a book I bet some of you have read, which is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt provides a rigorously tested argument that we feel before we judge. The moment we are confronted with a moral question, something in our subconscious or intuitive mind churns up feelings about the question that determine our position. Our rational mind then constructs a narrative that explains to us what we think and why we think it. This happens so quickly we usually aren’t aware that’s what we’re doing.

Haidt’s explanation of how we respond to moral questions is very similar to what many Buddhist philosophers have taught for centuries, so it’s good to see science catching up.

Anyway, according to Haidt’s hypothesis, as much as we all want to think we are rational and logical and think the way we do for serious reasons, the fact is that we all allow rudimentary emotions to dictate what we think, at least about some things.

When you understand that much of “morality” is about rudimentary emotions and biases, you might also understand why conservative and dogmatic religions of all persuasion tend to get hung up on sex and on keeping women under control. This tells me that the men in charge of things are channeling their own anxieties about sex and women and projecting them into their scriptures. In doing so, they sometimes wander quite a distance from what their scriptures actually say, revealing how pathologically deep those anxieties are. And because they have the authority of institutional religion behind them, these men are given great moral authority in our culture. But in truth, often what we’re seeing from religious authorities is plain old bigotry. And religion is just being used as an excuse for it.

I feel strongly that one of the many steps we need to take to restore some sanity to this fractured nation is to de-authorize religious authorities from dictating morality to all of us. As a diverse society, we require a secular basis for our common ethics.

While we’re on the subject of thought and actions, I want to talk about good and evil. The way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

For example, on September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush said this at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:

“Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Rid the world of evil? That really should have set off a lot more alarm bells than it did.

Here’s another quote: In a New York Times column published February 11, 2004, David Brooks wrote, “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the weapons of mass destruction, our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.”

Now, what might we infer about “evil” from these quotations? The first suggests that “evil” is something tangible, with some sort of finite mass and material substance, and if we just work hard enough we can whittle ‘er down and be done with it.

The second suggests that evil is a quality or attribute that some people possess, and others don’t. And once evil has infected “the souls of our enemies” there is nothing to be done but to eliminate them.

Of course, it’s likely “our enemies” feel exactly the same way about us.

People are seduced into evil because they don’t recognize evil as evil. They mistake it for justice, or righteousness, or even God’s Will. And the seduction begins with the thought that “I’m a good person,” and “his hatred of me is evil, but my hatred of him is justified.” As soon as we identify ourselves as “good” and the Other, whoever they are, as “evil,” we’ve well on the way to giving ourselves a cosmic permission slip to do whatever we want to be rid of them. You see the problem.

I say this seductive impulse is at the root of most of the mass atrocities humankind has inflicted on itself through the ages. That’s why the way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

Please understand that I’m not saying people or nations shouldn’t defend themselves from those who intend to do them harm. What gets us into trouble is thinking that we’re entitled to Holy Retribution, or that we are somehow qualified to pass judgments and inflict brutality on entire populations, because we’re the good guys.

I used to run into the words good and evil in Buddhist sutras, and these words often nagged at me as being out of place. So I had something of a breakthrough when I found out that the Sanskrit or Pali words being translated as good and evil actually mean “skillful” and “unskillful.”

I’ll give you a mindfulness exercise. Very Zen. Sometime, either now or while you’re sitting in a quiet place, think the word “evil.” Don’t contemplate what it means, just hold the word in your consciousness. And as you do that, pay close attention to the subtle emotional cues within your body that are triggered by the word “evil.”

Now, think the word “unskillful.” If you are tuned in to yourself, you might notice a different reaction. It’s very subtle, but it’s real.

At the very least, maybe we’d be less likely to bomb people for being unskillful.

Zen teachers say it’s important to appreciate that “evil” really has no substance and no independent existence. It is no-thing. It does not infect people. Evil “exists” only in intentions, actions and consequences.

If we understand that neither we nor our enemies are intrinsically good or evil, does that change how we see traumatic events? Speaking as an eyewitness, as I’m sure some of you are, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers easily was the most terrible thing I ever saw, but I honestly don’t see why hanging the label “evil” on it makes any difference. It was what it was. But my perspective enrages some people who clearly think it is vitally important to label the event as “evil,” and if we don’t we’re somehow being soft or letting the terrorists win.

There’s some kind of magical thinking lurking around in there, somewhere.

I don’t agree entirely with the postmodernist view that good and evil are purely relative or matters of subjective judgment. Skillful or unskillful are not just relative. Causing harm to another is unskillful. Wasting natural resources or adding to global climate change are unskillful, even if they aren’t covered by the Ten Commandments. That’s the problem with moral rules left over from the Bronze Age; we’ve got different problems now.

And then there’s “moral clarity.” In the U.S. many religious conservatives place great value in “moral clarity,” which I define as a state of mind achieved by staking a fixed position on a presumed moral high ground and then ignoring the details of human life that fog the view.

For example, I have read many essays arguing for criminalizing abortion that go on and on about the humanity of the fetus without mentioning the pregnant woman at all. If she is mentioned, she is considered to be a kind of niggling technicality. Or worse, she is portrayed as weak-minded or otherwise unqualified to make her own moral decisions.

The “moral clarity” crowd must never admit that the woman is a valuable and intelligent human being who may be in a terribly difficult situation, because empathy and compassion for her would block their “clarity.”

In short, moral absolutism requires ignoring genuine human life experience. This makes its rigid application anti-human and oppressive.

I want to cite the late Robert Aitken Roshi, who was one of the most revered patriarchs of American Zen. In his book The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics, he said, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines, including Buddhism, are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Does moral absolutism even work? There is data showing us that rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancy are higher in conservative “Bible Belt” U.S. states than in more liberal ones, and this pattern seems to replicate itself worldwide.

Reasonable people may disagree about whether abortion is immoral, but note that rates of abortion in overwhelmingly Catholic Latin America, where abortion is nearly everywhere illegal and harshly punished, are higher than in the United States and a lot higher than in mostly liberal and allegedly decadent western Europe.

And what does his tell us? It appears that when absolutist morality is enforced, either by public shaming or by law, actual human behavior — heterosexual behavior included — is driven into the closet, leaving actual humans with no practical guidance in their actual circumstances.

I say the absolutist approach to morality gets everything backward. It creates too wide a gap between public righteousness and what people are really doing in their private lives, so that the moral rules are not really guiding anyone. And when we cede the presumed moral high ground to the absolutists, too often we squelch open and honest discussion of our real-world circumstances and behaviors.

Again, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Secular moralists sometimes propose a utilitarian or consequentialist approach to morality. Very broadly, utilitarianism is the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many variations of utilitarianism, however, mostly because people disagree on what constitutes “good.” Further, this approach often fails to provide an incentive for “being good.”

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has proposed that science can provide a basis for morality. Harris is a smart guy and he says many things worthy of consideration. But he’s written that science can “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” and “give us answers about right and wrong.” I think that’s right up there with thinking we can rid the world of evil.

I have a more radical proposal here. Some things people need to work out for themselves.

Human life is infinitely complicated and messy, and circumstances have a way of confounding application of one-size-fits-all solutions. Some things people need to work out for themselves. And that’s okay.

I propose that given the infinity of variables, no two human beings ever faced completely identical moral dilemmas. When faced with questions about ending a pregnancy, or a marriage, or when to discontinue life support, or whether to intervene in a friend’s problems or let things sort themselves out — we need to be able to apply some subjectivity to matters that will change our lives and the lives of those around us, because we’re the only ones familiar with most of the variables.

We’re the only ones who have our medical history, or our parents, or our financial or physical resources, or our marriage, or our job, or our special needs child. Etc., etc. I think that in some circumstances we need the freedom to be subjective, to consider complex moral questions not just in the abstract but in the light of our particular life and situation.

The challenge to us as a society is to distinguish between those behaviors that cannot be allowed ― such as homicide ― because allowing them would damage civilization; and those problems that people need to work out for themselves, even if we don’t all personally approve of all the solutions. And then we have to persuade the absolutists to back off.

We can, as a society, draw parameters around moral questions — medical guidelines determining when life support is futile, for example. And I agree that science can help with much of that. And then we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done, which is argue among ourselves about where the parameters should be drawn. Maybe arguing with each other is the price we pay for freedom.

If all this sounds terribly ambiguous — yeah, mostly, it is. That’s because you and the world and human life generally are very complicated, and where there is complication, there is ambiguity.

I realize people often are uncomfortable with ambiguity. They want clear rules and sharply defined boundaries. They want all phenomena to be properly sorted into their socially acceptable conceptual boxes. That’s why some people prize moral absolutism. That’s a mostly workable strategy for getting through life, but it’s not real. It’s an artificial order superimposed on the messiness of reality. And sometimes failing to accept reality causes more trouble than it solves.

One of the great humanistic philosophers of the 20^th century, Erich Fromm, wrote that people often escape into authoritarian mass movements because they fear freedom. A lot of that fear of freedom is a fear of ambiguity, a lack of clear, bright lines that make your choices for you.

I think we see a lot of that fear in America today. And notice that some of the same people who talk about how they want to protect their freedom seem hell bent on destroying everybody’s freedom to do that. It’s like they’re protecting their freedom to be not free. But those clear, bright lines are not likely to come back, so this is a situation we’re going to have to deal with for a while.

Just about any psychologist will tell you that you can’t force other people to change. We can only look to ourselves. How do we find our own moral compass in the messiness of life?

And to answer this question I want to wade a little more deeply into Zen.

Here’s a question for you. “Can you identify yourself without reference to a relationship?” This is a question I first heard in a sociology class. I’ve never heard anyone provide an answer; I don’t think it’s answerable. It’s something of a koan, because if you work with it you end up exploring the paradoxical nature of the self, which is a very Zen thing to do.

Many schools of Buddhism, including Zen, have a doctrine called the two truths. The two truths describe what seems to be a paradox. On one hand, we are all precious and unique individuals, worthy of respect and compassion.

But at the same time, we take our very uniqueness, our identities, from our relationships. From our roles in our families, from our professions, from the interests we share with others, from the arts and intellectual pursuits we enjoy, with our circle of associations. We are who we are because everyone else is who they are. We are not the entirely self-contained, stand-alone people units we think we are.

This interdependence extends to our biological existence as well. We depend on other life forms to sustain our lives and to maintain the conditions on this planet that make life possible. All beings are interdependent. All beings inter-exist. This comes directly from the teaching of the Buddha.

A metaphor used to help resolve this paradox is attributed to a Chinese master named Dushun who was born in the 6th century. This is called “Indra’s Net.” Imagine a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each “eye” of the net is a single brilliant, perfect jewel. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel affects all of them.

This means every jewel matters. Every person matters. You matter. And everything you do affects everyone else. This is the most essential thing to understand. Everything you feel and think, everything you do or say affects yourself and everyone else. Most effects may be extremely subtle, but they’re still effects. And sometimes even subtle effects can have big real-world consequences.

And at its most basic, an ethical life is a life that produces beneficial effects.

Now, it may seem inconsistent to say that we need to be allowed some subjectivity in our moral choices, while at the same time everything we do impacts everyone else. So let’s take this to another level.

Twenty-five centuries ago, the Buddha emphasized purifying oneself of what he called afflictions or defilements. The chief afflictions are greed, hate and ignorance. This ignorance is ignorance of the inter-existence of all beings, because most of our problems come from thinking of ourselves as separated from everything else. We think that whatever is within our skin is “me” and what’s outside our skin is “everything else.” It’s this misperception that is the chief source of our fear, our greed, our anger, our hatred.

You can follow moral rules to the letter, but if you are harboring greed, hate, and ignorance, you are not living a beneficial life. You are not living an ethical life. You are not cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security.

The Buddha taught many practices, including meditation and mindfulness, to reduce our afflictions.

There’s nothing magical or supernatural going on here; it’s all about becoming more intimate with yourself. You become more aware of what jerks you around and pulls you out of harmony. You learn to let those things go. If you don’t have some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice already, I encourage you to look into one.

Finally he encouraged us to develop four particular virtues above all others. The first is metta, goodwill, or loving kindness to all beings. The second is compassion, which is the active desire to reduce the suffering of others. The third is called “mudita,” which means “sympathetic joy.” This is joy in the good fortune of others. It’s the opposite of envy.

And, finally, equanimity. With equanimity, we are not being constantly pulled back and forth between things we want and things we want to avoid; we accept what life brings us. We learn to remain in balance in the middle of chaos. We learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. And we learn to not be pulled into one-sided views. The Buddha gave many, many sermons about all of these virtues.

Now, developing these virtues isn’t something you can do in three easy steps, and none of us is ever perfect, and that’s okay. Just making the effort, even if you fall short, makes the whole universe a better place. And while Buddhism provides a lot of tools for cultivating these virtues, it doesn’t have a patent on them.

Every day we have opportunities to actualize goodwill and compassion, and to share the joy of others. Every day, there are opportunities to develop equanimity. I propose that these virtues harmonize well with the commitment of Ethical Culture to “always act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby yourself.”

For several years I was the student of a Zen teacher named Jion Susan Postal, who died in 2014. She founded the Zen Center in New Rochelle. Susan taught us to be grateful for these opportunities. She said,

“For all beneficent karma ever manifested through me, I am grateful. May our gratitude be expressed in our body, speech and mind, with infinite kindness to the past, infinite service to the present, and infinite responsibility to the future.”

And to all of you, metta.

The Latter-Day Dimwits of Televised Religion

What’s With the War on Christmas?

“Religious Violence” Isn’t Just Religious

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I recommend Sean McElwee’s article at Salon, “What we really talk about when we talk about religion.” Citing the recent Harris-Maher-Affleck “debate” on the culpability of Islam in violence, McElwee writes,

At the core of this debate is the extent to which the religion of Islam is responsible for the violence of ISIS, and other atrocities often committed in the name of god. But the problem with such debates, as I’ve argued previously, is that they mistake cause and effect. Religious belief is ultimately historically contingent: Religious beliefs, like cultural beliefs, are shaped by the material circumstances that give rise to them.

Those, such as Maher and Harris, who wish to defend “liberalism” against the tyranny of “religious fanaticism” are attempting to shift the blame from actual historical circumstances to ephemeral ideologies. Should we blame the rise of ISIS on “religious fanaticism,” or on the failed 2003 invasion of Iraq, the de-Baathification policy, the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the disastrous regime of Nouri al-Maliki? Furthermore, there is a long history of colonial oppression, military aggression and economic hegemony. These complaints, as well as historical grievances relating back to the Crusades, inform the views of radicals like Osama bin Laden. …

… This leads to the core delusion pushed by the Maher/Harris/Dawkins “New Atheist” team: that religion exists independently of social, political and economic systems, and that religion influences these structures. In fact, the opposite is true: Religion is largely the handmaiden of economic and political power. It is fluid, able to mold to whatever needs are suited to those wielding it.

I made the same argument in Rethinking Religion. If you look closely and objectively at incidents of religious violence throughout history, you see it’s never just about religion. More often it’s really about politics, or greed, or colonialism, or some other thing, and religion is just the packaging.

Even when the violence appears primarily motivated by religious beliefs, there’s something else going on beneath the surface that is pushing people to become, shall we say, aggressively pro-active about those beliefs. Psychologically healthy people who are reasonably content with their lives and not feeling particularly aggrieved about anything cannot be incited into violence by scriptures and sermons alone. And I believe this is true even if such persons are very devout. However, people who are angry, afraid, or nursing some sort of fanatical grievance are another story.

McElwee also makes a good point at our tendency to misinterpret the causes of violence.

The criticism of “radical Islam” in fact bears resemblance to another dodge today. In the wake of usurpation, violence and plunder, white Americans look at blacks and worry about “cultural pathologies,” where only economic deprivation exists. At the core, the fallacy is the same — ascribing a negative culture to an oppressed and maligned group.

Gay rights protest in front of San Fernando Cathedral, San Antonio, Texas, 2008. By Charles 210, Flickr.com, Creative Commons License

That said, there is probably no group of people more likely to become dangerous than religious fanatics — and any religion will do — nursing a grievance. I wrote in the last post about the fanatical grievance growing among some Christian conservatives in the U.S., who interpret interference with their discrimination against others as discrimination against them. Christian conservatives assume rights of tribal dominance and demand that government carve out for them exclusive discrimination privileges not extended to other groups. And if they don’t get what they want, they think they are the victims.

In Rethinking Religion I propose that most group violence comes about when a mass movement bears both a holy cause and a fanatical grievance. The “holy cause” doesn’t have to be religion. It could be nationalism — especially belief in a glorious national identity — or a belief in racial superiority, or a lot of other things. But a holy cause by itself usually doesn’t cause people to become violent, especially if there’s a way they can work within the system to get what they want. It’s the fanatical grievance that pushes people over the edge.

That’s why the Christian Right’s obsessive, fanatical belief in its own victimization — the myth of Christian oppression in the U.S. — is seriously dangerous. If fanatical right-wing Christians in the U.S. become more and more frustrated with the system, and feel it is no longer responding to them, some of them could very easily become violent. The elements are there. I doubt such violence would be as extreme or widespread as has happened in Islamic countries, but not because Islam per se is more violent than Christianity per se. The difference would not be religion, but that the U.S. hasn’t been invaded by foreign armies or subjected to colonial oppression, at least not for more than a couple of centuries. Being forced to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple is not quite in the same league as foreign occupation. But fanaticism is still fanaticism.

The Christian Right’s Pitiful Rearguard Action

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The cause du jour among some conservative Christians is maintaining their sacred entitlement to discriminate against people of unauthorized sexual orientation — LGBT — in public matters. And if they aren’t allowed to discriminate as they please, they honestly believe this amounts to discrimination against them.

Let us be clear, much hysterical rhetoric to the contrary, that no one is proposing churches must perform same-sex marriages or accept homosexual congregants. But in the public realm, in business and housing and employment, no one gets to discriminate against other citizens. Period.

As Eliel Cruz wrote,

You can’t victimize yourself in a situation you started in the first place. Christians, in general, have a hard time remembering that as we choose to oppress, due to our sincerely held religious beliefs, yet cry “discrimination” when we feel a push back. This is especially true when those people are queer. Within the Christian community, there are those who believe we are being discriminated against. However, no one is pushing legislation that excludes Christians from basic legal rights in the U.S. (such as job protection and marriage). Nor is anyone physically assaulting Christians due to their religious beliefs or advocacy. Christians are not facing actual tribulations, rather, the “discrimination” they cry comes from not being allowed to discriminate [against] others. It’s a double standard and they keep crying wolf. Or we, I should say, since, like many other LGBT people, I am also a Christian.

In this and many other “culture war” matters, the Christian Right wants to frame the issue as Christians versus non-Christians, but that isn’t accurate. It’s really cultural reactionaries, some of whom are Christian but some not, versus everybody else, including other Christians.

The most recent example of attempted religious overreach involves a fight over anti-LGBT discrimination laws in Houston. A new city ordinance bans anti-gay discrimination among businesses that serve the public, in private and public employment, in city contracting and in housing. The ordinance also exempted religious institutions from having to comply.

In spite of the exemption, several churches gathered signatures to get the ordinance recalled. They thought they had enough signatures to put the repeal on the November ballot, but the city attorney disqualified many of the signatures, so the petition drive fell short. Some of the Christians sued the city. The city attorney subpoenaed documents related to the signature gathering effort from five pastors not involved in the lawsuit but who were thought to be involved in the ballot petitions. Apparently the point of this was to find out what instructions the pastors had given people regarding how they would collect signatures.

According to several news stories the original subpoena mentioned sermons, although this has since been revised. Nevertheless the usual howlers on Fox News and elsewhere began to howl about the subpoenaing of sermons — leaving out the details, of course — and holding this up as an example of the abuse of innocent Christians at the hands of godless unbelievers. For example, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, got on Fox News and flat-out lied about the fact of the situation, falsely claiming that the city was trying to “dictate what pastors preach.” The commandment about “bearing false witness” seems often overlooked.

A theology professor from Georgia named Dr. Joel McDurmon, writing for a Christian “Biblical worldview ministry” website, pointed out that Christians cannot file lawsuits and expect to be treated differently from anyone else filing lawsuits.

The headlines read as if the city has made some move to start monitoring all pastors’ sermons, and this simply is not the case. It also gives the impression that this is some out-of-the-blue, general attack tactic by the activists upon the pulpit. It is not. It is not out-of-the-blue, it is not broad and general as far as the implicated pastors goes, and it should not be a surprise at all.

The City is not making a move to monitor sermons. The city is merely responding to a lawsuit against it and using standard powers of discovery in regard to a handful of pastors who are implicated as relevant to the lawsuit. The issue is here: once you file a lawsuit, you open up yourself and potentially your friends and acquaintances to discovery. This is the aspect that has not been reported, but it is an important part of the context.

A commenter to Dr. McDurmon wrote,

Thanks Dr for the very needed trusting-in-Christ reasonableness.

What I’m always mystified by, is one: how we evangelicals/christians think we can have (or demand) a laundry list of special privileges/exemptions etc, yet we are a minority who claim to follow a faith/religion that is so at odds (or should be) with the society we live in – yet we expect to carry on as before, unmolested in anyway whatsoever? That’s illogical. That’s never happened before in the history of humankind – yet we act as if it’s our right to be otherwise! If we have any understanding of church history or Scriptures we should know better…and be a lot more grateful about what we do have and less complaining about the few annoyances that come our way…

Second: How we think we can keep getting away with over-hyping and misrepresenting/mischaracterizing (and nearly lying sometimes – a la “death panels”) situations like this and not pay a price? When you cry wolf or in this case “persecution” over and over again; when in relative terms compared to real persecution; it is anything but persecution… Then how do we expect to be taken seriously, EVER!

I point this out to make it clear that some Christian conservatives get it, and understand that they actually have to recognize they live in a pluralistic society.

However, the other conservative Christians are thumping their chests and declaring they are doing God’s work by trying to stop civil rights protections for LGBT folks. But, y’know, they said exactly the same thing when the issue was race, not that many years ago. And they said the same thing when the issue was equal rights for women. What we’re looking at here isn’t so much a slippery slope as it is, in Freud’s words, a “pitiful rearguard action.”

In the past conservative Christian groups in the U.S. not only defended slavery, they also opposed such things as Catholicism, women’s suffrage and allowing women to have anesthesia during childbirth. This list is far from complete. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries American Christians were active on both sides of many social issues, including such matters as prohibiting child labor, and both sides claimed a mandate from the Bible for their position. The progressives won many of the battles, but one could argue they lost the war. These days conservative Christians have managed to persuade much of the public — and much of news media — that they alone speak for Christianity.

But they don’t.

And there is no doubt in my mind that if people were allowed a dispensation to discriminate against whomever because of religious convictions, large parts of the country would revert to Jim Crow laws and male-only professions before the next “war on Christmas” season.

This isn’t just the Golden Rule; it’s acknowledging that we live in an enormously diverse country, and if everyone were given carte blanche to discriminate as he liked there would be chaos. And I have no doubt if conservative Christians ever get the discrimination permission slip they are demanding, new religions would suddenly appear whose core belief is that Christians are evil and must be discriminated against.

Is this a slippery slope argument? Consider that recently some groups identifying themselves as Satanists have demanding that if Christian symbols are displayed in public buildings, Satanic symbols must be displayed also. One suspects this effort is less about devotion to Satan than it is about pushing back against right-wing Christian tribal dominance in America.

Must Satanists be recognized as a religion? The government is loathe to get into the business of determining what is a religion and what isn’t, mostly because most religions look ridiculous to outsiders who aren’t used to them, and such determination would no doubt freeze out many legitimate minority religions. So, recently a few people have insisted on wearing pasta strainers on their heads for their official driver’s license photos, saying they are “Pastafarians” and followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the government can’t say they aren’t.

Can of worms, folks? Do we really want to have the government regulate and license what religion is supposed to be? I certainly don’t.

We have a reasonably clear, bright line that says government can’t go into churches and temples and determine who can be married and receive communion. But in the public sphere citizens don’t get to discriminate against other citizens. This is workable. It is the least government-intrusive solution to our problem of respecting both religious freedom and civil rights. No one is saying you can’t believe as you choose, but if your religious beliefs say you cannot do business with LGBT customers, don’t go into the wedding catering business.

Weirdly, the conservative Christians barred from exercising exclusive discrimination privileges complain that they are victims of government overreach. They are too myopic to see that the same policies actually protect them from government overreach.

Ultimately, if you can’t handle life in a socially, religiously and culturally diverse nation, buy an island and live as you like. There is also an old and time-honored American tradition of allowing religious groups such as the Amish or Hasidic Jews to build exclusive communities and more or less operate as laws unto themselves. But you can’t live among people who don’t believe as you do and carve out privileges for yourself that don’t apply to everyone else.

Why is this so difficult to understand?

Have Some Fries With the McJesus

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Victoria Osteen, co-pastor with her husband Joel of the massive Lakewood Church of Houston, is catching flack for something she recently said that was posted on YouTube. Here’s the juicy bit:

When we obey God, we’re not doing it for God…we’re doing it for ourself. Because God takes pleasure when we’re happy. Do good ’cause God wants you to be happy. When you come to church, when you worship Him, you’re not doing it for God, really. You’re doing it for yourself because that’s what makes God happy.

And here is the video:

And boy howdy, have we ever come a long way from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Other Christians were shocked at Mrs. Pastor Olsteen’s words. An op-ed in the Christian Post slammed Victoria Osteen and Her Joy-Robbing Brand of Cheap Christianity, for example. And this is from the Houston Chronicle:

At Christian News Network the sermon was labelled indicative of a “me-centered” church.

“She honestly believes that God exists to make us happy rather than holy,” Pastor Steve Camp told the network, “She honestly believes that worship is about our fulfillment rather than His glory. That’s the bottom issue here.”

Note that I do not endorse the positions of the Christian Post or the Christian News Network, either. But American public religiosity has long been a content-free celebration of Me Me Me.

The late Susan Sontag said that religion American style is “more the idea of religion than religion itself.”

True, when, during George Bush’s run for president in 2000, a journalist was inspired to ask the candidate to name his “favourite philosopher,” the well-received answer — one that would make a candidate for high office from any centrist party here in any European country a laughing stock — was “Jesus Christ.” But, of course, Bush didn’t mean, and was not understood to mean, that, if elected, his administration would actually feel bound by any of the precepts or social programs expounded by Jesus….

… This modern, relatively contentless idea of religion, constructed along the lines of consumerist choice, is the basis of American conformism, self-righteousness, and moralism … . [Susan Sontag’s acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis peace prize, Frankfurt, Germany, October 12, 2003]

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For many, it is enough to declare oneself Christian, and one is Right With God. No sacrifice is required, no personal struggle or self-examination, none of that dark night of the soul stuff. Just say the name Jesus and all the rewards of tribal membership and smug self-righteousness shall be thine.

Of course, through most of the history of Christianity that’s not how it worked. This is one of the reasons I wrote a book about religion.

I wrote in Rethinking Religion that the megachurches appear to have turned Christ into McJesus — God rendered into a consumer product designed to validate, affirm and gratify ME. This is what they’ve been selling for a long time. Mrs. Pastor Olsteen is just being honest about it.

This column from the Houston Chronicle is a few years old, written by a Unitarian Universalist minister who visited Lakewood Church:

So, imagine 10,000 people (at least) standing for almost an hour dancing and singing, hands in the air, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, with loud pop music playing (including a very strong bass beat that literally shakes your insides). Three big screens project the performers and the lyrics to the songs, which are simple and repetitive. No, this wasn’t the Jimmy Buffett concert at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion last week (I went to that too), but it might as well have been…I’ve never left a church service before with temporary hearing loss…Lakewood was LOUDER than Jimmy Buffett.

Many of my readers know that I was a professor of educational psychology prior to switching careers to ministry. I have a PhD in educational psychology, am a member in good standing of the American Psychological Association, and teach a seminary course on psychology and religion. From a psychological point of view, worship at Lakewood is basically intentional desensitization, stimulating natural endorphins and dopamine in the brain with extended physical activity and emotional stimulation.

I looked up desensitization, and in the psychological sense, when intentional, it is a treatment approach in clinical psychology used to treat trauma, fears and phobias. I’m not sure how this works, but the point is to make the patient less emotionally sensitive to stimuli. But what are the Lakewood congregants being desensitized to? Life? Themselves? Each other?

This desensitizing went on for nearly an hour, followed by the offering (of course), then prayers, then the sermon. The UU minister, the Rev. Matt Tittle, wondered how long the emotional fix lasted.

I wrote in Rethinking Religion,

Yes, it’s exhilarating to be part of a group having a big, rowdy, cathartic experience, That’s why people like to watch big sporting events like the Super Bowl in groups, because if your team wins — wow. How much fun is that, right? Watching the same game by yourself just isn’t the same experience.

At their peak, such experiences can give you a temporary sense of being liberated from yourself, as some part of your identity forgets itself amid the collective excitement. I’ve been talking about experience or perception beyond the limits of the self, and intense group experiences where everyone gets emotionally high together can give you a fleeting taste of that.

However, a church with rousing services may generate the high every time and attract a huge following, but without also allowing for personal reflection, contemplation and questioning, it’s feeding the congregation spiritual junk food. You might be better off sticking to being a sports fan.

I don’t want to slam the Olsteens too much, though, because at least they don’t seem to have gone the hateful way of Franklin Graham. And does anyone remember Ted Haggard? It could be worse.

Why the U.S. Christian Right Is Dangerous

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Amanda Marcotte writes about The Christian right’s obscene, defining hypocrisy.

Whether it’s liberal college professors supposedly turning kids to Marxism or gay people who are accused of recruiting, over and over you hear the claim that the children of conservatives are in serious danger of being talked into everything from voting for Democrats to getting gay-married. …

… I think I know where conservatives get the idea that other people are sneaking around trying to indoctrinate children into unthinking ideologies. It’s because they themselves are totally guilty of it, both in terms of trying to recruit other people’s children and trying to frighten their own children about the dangers of exploring thoughts outside of the ones approved by their own rigid ideologies.

Marcotte provides several examples, from a group operating in Portland pubic parks that entices children with games and then teaches them about Hell, to the growing “home schooling” movement that encourages parents to keep their kids out of public school so they won’t be exposed to any but an extremist, right-wing religious ideology.

You can trace the anti-public school hysteria back to Brown v. Board of Ed. (1954). Before court-ordered school desegregation, even (white) conservative Bible Belt parents thought public school was one of the great things about America, and only those idol-worshiping Papists sent kids to parochial schools. After Brown, however, suddenly public school education was no good.

Parents yanked their kids out of public school and sent them to all-white “Christian academies,” which sprang up suddenly like mushrooms after the rain. The first voucher programs began then, so that tax dollars could follow the white children into their new white schools. But when the private schools also had to desegregate to survive, the home schooling movement was born.

By now, the home schoolers probably don’t consciously associate home schooling with racial segregation. Their “cause” has morphed into a general mistrust of mainstream America.

Karen Armstrong, who writes about religious history and fundamentalist movements around the world, defines fundamentalism in a broad sense as a reaction against and rejection of modern Western society. Fundamentalists, in different ways, all attempt to establish enclaves of pure faith that shut out any other views. Those they come in contact with who aren’t “them” must be assimilated. And in time, if that doesn’t work, they must be eliminated.

There are two chapters in Rethinking Religion dedicated to religious mass movements and religious violence. These chapter propose that the two factors always present in violent mass movements are a holy cause — defending the faith against those they think are its enemies, in this case — combined with a fanatical grievance, or the belief they’re the ones who are the victims. You see this in violent Islam, in the violent Buddhists in Myanmar, and also in mass movements that are not expressly religious. If religion isn’t the “holy cause,” sometimes belief in a glorious national or racial destiny will do nicely as well.

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The “Christian Right” in America definitely shows all the symptoms that lead to violence. They are obsessed with the belief they are being persecuted and are surrounded by enemies. A growing subculture of ignorant religious fanatics could prove to be a huge and violent threat eventually. I’m not sure what to do about it, but it’s not healthy.