Getting To Heaven In More Ways Than One

There was a time during my years on a theology school's faculty when I began to wonder whether seminaries were becoming the place to go for healing from the abuses that sick churches heap upon their members in the interest of saving souls from hell. A number of my students told me very disturbing things about growing up in the church, and were worried whether they would ever fully recover from it. The fictional (I hope) Prophetic Mission Church of Jonah, Indiana, which Haven Kimmel described in her Faulkneresque novel, The Used World, reminds me a lot of what they shared with me.

Prophetic Mission was one of those sealed off from the world churches which evoke bewilderment, anguish, and even horror: no associations with outsiders, no movies, TV, dancing, alcohol, travel, sex except --- and you are somehow just supposed to "know" how to get into it then ---, obey the (male) elders, discipline the wayward, ostracize those when discipline fails. In short, spare no threats or punishments in the service of a loving Jesus. And also: treat Catholics as members of a demonic sect, and get washed in the blood of the Lamb in preparation for the coming world-wide, angel-sent slaughter of Jews, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindus, Unitarians, Mormons, and all the members of Peace and Pentecostal churches as well. Rebekah Shook, one of the three heroines of Kimmel's novel, left this church around her 23rd birthday, and her life was never the same. It was worse. At least until the happy ending of the book.

The Prophetic Mission Church proclaimed with vengeance one and only one way to salvation, its own. Just as Christianity has and does, sometimes with the violence that Rebekah's elders at least had the decency to leave to their badly calumnied God, and not to themselves. I have never been able to appreciate deforming the message that God is Love into a summons to go out into the highways and byways and compel non-believers ("infidels" is the word trumped up by Christianity; Muslims later on borrowed it for their own purposes) to come in by any means necessary, conversion by conquest the especially favored one. If John's Gospel did indeed get Jesus' words right, to the effect that no one comes to the Father except by him, the Way that Jesus taught to the Father was nevertheless a very different one than it has often been understood to be. Jesus' way is the way of leaving the judging of others to God, and the way of grace-filled, uncompromising, unconditional loving and serving, especially of people who do not love us and who do not serve anybody but themselves.

So what does all this have to with anything anyway? Well, this: we have recently learned, again from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, that around 70% of this country's adults no longer see religion in the terms of the elders of Rebekah Shook's cast-off Prophetic Mission Church. More specifically, a lot of Americans are no longer convinced that there is one and only way to God, or salvation, or heaven. The hard data that yields this finding warrants closer scrutiny, of course, and will get it in the months and possibly years to come. But from what I have studied of the Pew survey so far, one especially important finding is that acknowledging other ways of being religious does not seem to diminish confidence in one's own. It only indicates a greater humility about the capacity of any one religion or religious group to discern the mind and will of God. If this finding proves out, it will give the lie to a treasured assumption of One Way types, that even considering the possibility that there might be truth in a very different religious outlook from yours can only weaken your own personal faith.

I have little doubt that people who still hold to the view that the pearly gates are at the end of only one road will be distressed by this survey and the conclusions that are being drawn from it. Hopefully, in their distress, they will find a way to avoid what became common early in Christian history, the following up of very personal and institutional confessions of faith with very public demands that hearers agree with them or face being rejected not only by the community of faith, but by God as well. It is not what Christianity asks people to believe that can make life miserable for people. It is what Christianity demands that they deny. Loving Jesus more does not have to mean loving less those who do not know enough about him to love him at all.