Lenten Meditations In The First Person (1):Not So Good News From An Old, Old Story

When I was a kid, the time of the week I dreaded most was Sunday morning. On every one of them, my mother and I trundled off to church on the city bus at the time my father headed out in the family car for the golf course. It never seemed quite fair to me, Dad lining up long putts while I suffered through hell-fire and damnation sermons and Sunday School classes that always began with "Jesus Loves Me" sung off-key. When my sister came along belatedly, Mom gladly swapped the pew for the nursery, Dad eagerly made me his caddy, and I suddenly had a new lease on life, freed from preacherly harangues about having to be the kind of boy my pain-wracked Savior wanted me to be.

What eventually changed my Sunday apostasy was a group of lively, fun-loving, and occasionally spiritual high school buddies from the local Methodist Church who with their counselors set out to bring me back to Jesus. When they got through with me, Jesus and I had yet to become good friends, but a pretty primitive version of a "natural theology" was working well enough to make me do something almost unprecedented for my generation. I joined the church the first week of college. There I was: an almost Christian, sitting in the pews gladly, but watching with chagrin as a lot of my church gang declared a moratorium on religious practices altogether.

At one level, it is no mystery why leaving home and blowing off church still go hand in hand. For one thing, it is generally safer not to try church at all the morning after a grab-all-the-gusto-you-can soiree the night before. But for the more thoughtful late adolescents in my generation, there was something more important involved in the defections than mere wastedness: they were no longer making much sense out of the Christian story that they had been told from earliest childhood. By this time in my life, even my Mom had given up on it.

The story added up to something like this: The first two human beings on earth, who had everything going for them, went bad, passed their badness on to their offspring, and threw their Creator into several millennia of hand-wringing, second-guessing, and hissy-fits. His temper aside, the Creator had good reason to be righteously angry, and to demand recompense for the disobedience and dishonor done him. But, wonder of wonders, he chose to pay what was due him out of his own largesse, by sending his own son to sacrifice himself in our place.

The details were always a little fuzzy on the connections between Adam's sins and ours. But the big point seemed to be that unless all of us in the here and now get to thanking Jesus enough by being loyal to him and to his holy church, we will go to hell and remain there forever. I skipped enough of the high school and college soirees to make my way down the church aisles on Sundays without swaying, but not enough to render blotto my nagging questions about the story we were supposed to take as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I now think it was during those Sunday bus rides to church that I first began to sense how much coercion is involved in the church’s getting people to believe what its leaders have determined everyone should believe. One kind of coercion depends upon the promise of reward, e.g.: support our church and we'll support your advancement in life; praise and pay God enough and your life will be long and prosperous. Another kind depends upon threats and punishments, e.g.: believe and act as we do or there will be no place for you among us now and later on in the hereafter. Notwithstanding the frequency across the centuries of evangelization by coercion --- it began rather early with the baptism of whole households --- peoples’ allegiance to beliefs is more honestly won by credible arguments and a respect for genuinely held differences.

There may be some good reason lying around somewhere for believing that coercing religious behavior and the correct religious attitude through rewards and punishments is justifiable, but I have yet to discover it. Pressuring people to assent unquestioningly to prescribed religious beliefs and practices --- especially about the Atonement --- and always with a "proper" religious attitude, amounts to nothing less than repudiating one of the most precious of all God's gifts to humanity, the gift of freedom. With that gift comes the responsibility to choose wisely and well on the basis of the most reliable knowledge available and the most thoughtful deliberation of which human beings are capable.