Leadingchurch.com

I wrote this in a discussion on Calvin-in-Common responding to the article I posted from Newsweek on “We are all Hindus Now”.

I think it’s interesting that as a culture we find it fashionable to offer inclusion into our concept of heaven and hell. We feel embarrassed by any whiff of exclusivity but we’re completely blind to the cultural imperialism of establishing the landscaping and the furnishings. To me this illuminates a key facet to our new brand of western hinduism, the wholesale gutting of traditional religions while never admitting we’re doing so. Our pattern has been to implicitly read our religious values onto other religious beliefs and to rather condescendingly correct them by saying “what you meant to say was this”.

What interests me is how on one hand we can simply dismiss (or conveniently chose not to hear) enormously contradictory assertions by different religious groups by basically asserting “it really doesn’t matter”. Somehow after we die and are no longer able to vote (except in Afghanistan, New Jersey and Chicago) whatever we’ve said or done in this world is received by the great divine sea, a deity or the community of the gods as being inconsequential while on the other hand we fight like cats and dogs over health care, women’s rights or global degradation. Is history consequential or isn’t it?

The assumption that “all religions are basically the same” is of course an assertion for which I think finds little evidential support. The more I read the Bible the more I realize that the passages people stumble over, passages about creation, food, wars, women or gays, the passages that many people in our context elevate as deciders for their metaphysical menu selection are nothing compared to hosts of passages that simply say the most outlandish things. My canon of outrageous claims include:

“blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth”
“all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”
Ephesians 1:20-23, Colossians 1:15-20.

Really, every week in my line of work as I work on a text I am amazed and astounded by the boldness of the assertions. Two weeks ago I looked at Jesus’ story of the great dinner in Luke 14 which follows up on the nicely glib declaration in 14:15 about “blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God” with a story that Jesus’ audience could not have liked. (And if your squeamish you’d better avoid the Matthew 22 cotext.)

Either the modern re-writers of religious history are not taking seriously the people and texts where they are finding such commonality or they are simply lying through their teeth (as this guy says Karen Armstrong does . I don’t know enough history to evaluate his critique of Armstrong but I certainly never heard that Columbus was a Jew!)

As a Calvinist it is easy to acknowledge that we’re all getting plenty wrong, and that God’s valuation of our conduct likely doesn’t fall neatly along the factional lines we draw, but not taking seriously all of the murder, pain, abuse, war, savagery and corruption of human history seems an odd way to bring peace on earth. I think Miroslav Volf in Exclusion and Embrace deals with this handily.

“If you obey the Bible as an experiment it’s cool. If you obey it out of conviction you are naive and backwards.” This is what I discern our culture to be telling us. AJ Jacobs wrote a book “The Year of Living Biblically” where he tries to follow what the Bible says as literally as possible. I love what he says on his website: “I’m officially Jewish but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant”. That’s a great quote and it reveals both a lot of truth about ourselves as well as a deep suspicion we hold about all kinds of religious people.

I can imagine the reactions that AJ Jacobs got from all sorts of people when they learned of his project. I’m sure many thought it was strange and they were happy someone else was trying it, yet I suppose others affirmed it as being clever, cool, chic, spiritual. The irony of this is that if he were an orthodox believer of one stripe or another, especially if he was raised that way people would have likely thought less of his project. He would have been either thought to be dim or ill served by family and kin.

Diet spirituality is also in vogue. Refusing to eat animals or only eating locally grown food clearly has social currency in some groups. These disciplines express spiritual values. Again, however, if you inherited a religious tradition complete with dietary restrictions you’re likely accumulating social debt rather than capital. What is the difference? Self-determination. A bit of exegesis on this subject helps tease out some interesting assumptions in our culture.

We have assumptions about individualism and free choice. Even if all sorts of emo hipsters refuse to consume the flesh of animals, whether raised in cages or free range, each one feels that their choice to do so is somehow more free and individual than those who as adults follow a religious tradition. If you do it without being told to do it, then it’s free. If you do it because someone who within a community is assumed to have some sort of authority tells you to do it, then what you’re doing is “inauthentic”. The act is spiritually evacuated by some group or traditional sense of authority. That subtle (and actually deceptive) assumption is that implicit authority which clearly exists in an community or movement which elicits all sorts of group behavior, commonalities in language, dress, and custom including food prescription somehow is freed from the taint of “telling” is of course hollow. As communal creatures even from a very young age most of us are very adept as discerning acceptance, rejection, criticism and approval from groups that never codify their values.

What does all of this say? We have very strong issues surrounding “being told what to do”. If we are all self-determined, in the same sort of way, just like all the school kids that freely chose their own clothing, but all dress according to their implicit canon. We are self-determined like each generation that names their children freely, all with the same half dozen names, or with names that all sound alike. In other words its cool, as long as no one told you you had to do it that way. You’re free to be an individual, just like everyone else.