03.29.06
Putting God Back on the Air
As you may have heard, the United Church of Christ has teamed up with Media Matters to create the Accessible Airwaves campaign to combat the religious right-wing slant on television. Specifically, the UUC points to how conservative religious leaders are invited to Sunday morning talk shows, but moderates and liberals are not.
Why do James Dobson, Franklin Graham, Al Moehler [sic], Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell warrant seemingly endless coverage when ministries of the United Church of Christ, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, among others, rarely receive a single mention?
But it's not just talk shows. The sensationalist nature of the mainstream media means that extremists always get more than their share of news coverage. Take Fred Phelps, for example, whose theology and politics are even more extreme than the rest of the Religious Right. His Westboro Baptist Church has less than 200 members; all the less reason to pay him any heed.
During and after Hurricane Katrina it was not hard to find someone blaming the natural disaster on homosexuals, abortion clinics or even *gasp* gambling. In the subsequent months when religion was mentioned in conjunction with the aftermath, it was how religious organizations were asking for compensation for their charity. Meanwhile, a host of clergy felt uncomfortable that the government offered religious institutions money. The only news show I'm aware of that included this perspective was only PBS' Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Once again, public television proves superior to its commercial counterpart.
Street Prophets' Pastordan summed it up well:
That's a real filter, and it doesn't just hurt faithful progressives. It hurts our churches, temples and mosques as well, by buying into the spin that conservative activists – who can give great soundbite on politics – represent the true face of faith in America. For that matter, it hurts all denominations, who are usually more interested in doing good than playing political footsie with the Republican party.
I hope that this campaign is effective. The only way it can be effective is if the UCC is ecumenical about it. I hope the UCC can keep this campaign seperate from it's recent ad campaign and that other religious groups can join in, Christian and non-Christian.
03.27.06
Religion isn’t Part of the Equation
The radio show State of Belief asked its listeners to write or phone in with their opinions of the role religion should or should not play in the same-sex marriage issue.
Here's my response.
The Religious Right's insistence on discriminating against LGBT individuals is contrary to my religious beliefs. The Founding Fathers set up a separation of religion and politics in this country because they knew that an alliance of one religious group with the political establishment would infringe on the rights of other religious groups. Assume for a moment the opposite of the current situation was taking place; that I was forcing my religious views on others, specifically forcing churches that were against same-sex marriages to perform them anyway. Such a situation would also be detrimental to religious liberty. The issue of marriage equality does have religious implications, but religion should not be used as the justification for legal action. The equality for LGBT individuals to marry should be recognized only because it is unconstitutional not to, and religious people should be able to decide among themselves whether to preform and recognize same-sex marriages within their own religious group, because it would be unconstitutional to force them either way.
03.20.06
Laying Down one’s Sword and Shield Literally but not Metaphorically
As you probably know, yesterday was the third anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war. At this time one year ago I was sitting down to dinner with my family, and watching reports on the news about the first few hours of the war. That day I had argued with my classmates on why the war was premature and unjustified while sporting a black armband. Over these three years I have maintained a pretty steady position on the war. The news has gotten steadily worse and worse and it is getting harder and harder not to say ‘I told you so.’
Despite the efforts of a minority – a significant minority – of Americans that argued and picketed against the immorality and short-sightedness of the proposed military action, the Bush administration went ahead with its plans for war. I was among this minority which opposed starting the war. My opposition was deeply rooted in my moral conviction that warfare should only be used the most extreme of circumstances, and that this was certainly not such a situation.
Things are different now. The mission, we were told, has been accomplished. And we’re still there. The war now is not against an organized military lead by national government, but against insurgents whose guerrilla tactics make them difficult to root out. The opposition to the war has grown steadily since the beginning of the war. The anti-war movement has set it’s sights on bringing back the troops, including UUA President Bill Sinkford.
However, at this time I cannot side so strongly with the anti-war movement. I am not convinced that immediate withdrawal of troops the is best course of action. You might think that I’ve fallen for the “stay the course” rhetoric, but it seems to me that civil war is imminent. The bombing of the Shi’a Al Askari Mosque last month would seem to be evidence of this, despite the many news reports of that have Shi’as not blamed the attacks on Sunnis in general. In fact I recall a certain Shi’a state that he believed the attack was contrived by Americans to intensify sectarian violence.
Iraqis are not the only ones that believe the Bush administration has been conspiring. Rev. Davidson Loehr said in a sermon last month, that the administration had a hand in causing 9/11. This provoked a number of individuals to walk out of his sermon. Loehr, who has been known for some controversial sermons in the past, admitted, “I didn’t do research, and I flung out some Web sites. It was a very sloppy thing to do.”
I tried to imagine what I would have done in the situation. I think I would neither have walked out nor given a standing ovation both of which many of the congregation did. I despise the Bush administration, and would be (unfortunately) only mildly surprised if there proved to be another parallel between Bush and Hitler. However, I have really seen little evidence to support the claim.
Though I label myself as very liberal, it seems evident to me that I am moderate by UU standards. The only conspiracy involving the Bush administration I am sure of is the one that should be known by all Americans by now (if only the mass media were responsible enough); that invasion of Iraq was planned long before 9/11. I find that current direction of the war and just how evil the administration can be to be issues that are much more complicated.
I find inspiration in Rev. Sinkford’s prayer of the third anniversary of the war, “May we have the courage and conviction to honestly engage the difficult questions.” Or, as a Presbyterian minister commented on Rev. Loehr’s sermon, “I [...] think it’s a shame that somebody can bring up issues, and it’s not acceptable to even explore those as possibilities.” Only by critically exploring these issues through research and debate, like I did those three years ago, will we be able to say with confidence what is happening, what has happened and what we will do about it. Already I see this happening. In a recent post, including a member of Loehr’s congregation, on the UU community on LiveJournal debate has begun about the events of 9/11. To achieve peace we will have to take up intellectual arms and spar with our friends and foes alike.
To quote Rev. Sinkford more fully:
May we have the courage and conviction to honestly engage the difficult questions;
to speak hard truths,
to accept our responsibility to each other and the world.
May we find the strength and vision to end the cycles of violence.
03.10.06
Tradition
As a religious liberal I can quite understand the impulse to constantly renew and reform my spirituality. This process requires me to rid myself of the unnecessary and superfluous. I also have a tendency to be skeptical of and rebel against bastions of authority. In these respects I have quite a bit in common with religious reformers of the past.
Many of the Old Testament figures rebuked the practice of idol-worship. The religion of the supreme, unified God in which Abraham and his descendants believed was strikingly different than those of neighbouring peoples. According to Jewish tradition Abraham’s father Terah produced idols and that Abraham rebelled and smashed up the contents of his fathers workshop. Another example is of King Josiah who destroyed the idols of all the gods besides YHWH that were in the Temple. Unlike the neighbouring polytheistic cultures the Israelites tried to maintain their distinctiveness by not allowing practices of other religions to be mixed with their own. It was by ardently avoiding foreign practices that Jews avoided the apotheosis common in other cultures, in which the ruler was elevated to godhood. This could be considered the first step toward the separation of church and state.
In the New Testament, Jesus opposed the hypocrisy and corruption he saw in the religious establishment. He was quite confrontational about it. Many time Jesus is reported to have gone into synagogues to preach. Often the crowds were amazed by his wisdom, but on occasion they were disgruntled with his iconoclastic message. Even in his own hometown, his message was not well-received (Luke 4:28-30). And who could forget the time he drove the capitalists out of the Temple? The essential theological conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees (the sect from which all forms of modern Judaism are descended) was their regard of the Oral Law. The Pharisees held to the extra-textual traditions, but Jesus rejected them. For better or worse, Jesus’ rebellion got him executed.
History repeated itself a millennium and a half later when the likes of Jan Hus stood up against Catholic hegemony and were summarily executed. It was not until Luther, Zwingli and Calvin that the Reformation began to gain ground. Protestants took Christianity in a very different direction than the Catholic Church. Their reforms have been summarized in the Five Solas. They did away with the concept that good works could absolve a sinner, and that only faith in Jesus Christ, and through his grace could the soul be saved. Another major difference was the rejection of a number of books as not being the word of God.
While I can admire the spirit of these religious reformers and even draw inspiration from them, there is something vastly different between them and myself. All of their reforms were of a conservative nature. According to these men, they were returning back to the original religion. It is a very common claim made by many religious reformers in the past including Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra and Muhammed. In Chinese religion the ancient kings were held as the quintessential model, and many major Chinese thinkers attributed their beliefs to these kings. In Islam innovation is generally frowned upon. The Bible, it is believed, has been corrupted over time by human intervention, and Jews and Christians have deviated from God’s will. If one listens to the rhetoric of a fundamentalist of any religious background their message will be one against innovation.
As both a religious liberal and a student of religion I know just how necessary and inevitable innovation is in religion. For a religion to survive, it must change. If religion cannot adapt to new conditions in which people find themselves it will die. Religions, philosophies and other belief systems that do not sufficiently allow people to address the things that happen in their lives will naturally be discarded.
In the major reforms of “the” Judeo-Christian tradition there is a pattern. The reformer brings a religion that is more individualized than its predecessor. The Old Testament Patriarchs led people away from the religion of their more powerful neighbours, needing not idols to connect with the divine. Jesus lead people against the priestly class of the Temple, needing not sacrifices to connect with the divine. The Protestant reformers lead people away from the Catholic Church, needing only a Bible to connect with the divine. With each reformer the religious authority is given to the individual, but over time the authority is returned back to an institution. I speculate this is because people need to feel part of something bigger.
It is only through liberal religion that one can be part of something bigger and still maintain ultimate authority. In liberal religion, one is able to see the divine manifest in numerous ways. A certain religious text might not be divinely inspired, but that does not mean it does not contain wisdom. It seems to me that the Protestant reformers threw the baby out with the bathwater in a number of ways. To my mind one of the most powerful concepts in Catholicism is the Seven Deadly Sins. Gluttony, vicarages and pride are especially alluring sins in our culture. It could also be argued, that by focusing only on faith and not on works Protestants have rid themselves of any obligation to do good. And in rejecting texts they do not find canon and forgetting about the saints, they have severed themselves from a great wealth of lore and mythology. The fact that popular media like Dogma and Sandman tap primarily into a Catholic cosmology is attests to this.
Likewise, it seems to me that Jesus was rather hasty in rejecting all of the Oral Law. There exists a wealth of Jewish folklore outside of the Bible, including the above story about Abraham. Today the Talmud contains the Oral Law. Without this exegesis, the bulk of modern Jewish practice would not exist. This is because the commandments that appear in the Torah are primarily do-not’s, whereas the Talmud offers do’s.
I think that even the ancient Israelites were a bit rash in trying to set themselves apart from other cultures. No man is an island, and the Bible demonstrates it. A number of elements appear in other cultures, the most well-known being the Flood story, but even Proverbs 22:17-24:22 appear to have been taken from the Egyptian text Instruction of Amenemope. Father Abraham may have lead us to more abstract conceptions of God, but he also set the precedent of righteous indignation that has been the underlying cause of innumerable wars about or justified by religion.
In liberal religion I can take a critical look at both side of any theological claim and come to my own conclusions that work for me. I can read the works of any scribe, rabbi, classical philosopher, protestant reformer, or theologian and be inspired. Or choose to respectfully disagree. The beauty of liberal religion is that I am constantly forced to galvanize my beliefs and worldview. Like a religious debate with another person, I can read a text to challenge my beliefs and either strengthen them or replace them. By avoiding a conservative mindset that thinks in absolutes I am opening myself up to unlimited sources of wisdom and inspiration. That is why I am glad I belong to a tradition that questions tradition.
