Thing three: What If We’re Wrong? (spoiler alert, we are)
The words loom like the dark clouds of
a late summer thunderstorm. Essential. Matters. And what is more essential, and
what matters more, than truth? Was the real product of the Information Age bad
information? It is everywhere now, literally at our fingertips. Dishonesty and
deception thrive in spaces like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and similar loci
in their world. Propaganda is an ancient and effective weapon, aided in this
day by powerful technology and an intentionally engineered devotion to
ignorance. Mistruth polls better than truth. How do lies become reality? They
get repeated again and again. Psychologists call it gaslighting. Politicians call
it media strategy. Media magnates calls it profit. A rose by any other name.
Social media is an amplifier of
mistruth but the foundation of the proliferation of dishonesty is our
inability, our unwillingness, to accept something that we do not like. We prefer
our own instinct. We pride ourselves on the illusion that we already know
everything we need to know. Learning new things is hard, unlearning old things
is harder. We wear our ignorance like a badge of honor. We patronize messengers
who tell us what we want to hear. And we look down our nose at those who
presume to inform or educate us. How dare they act as if they were our betters?
For faith, truth is a much greater
challenge. It is a person, a pronouncement and a proclamation, a claim laid
upon us by God and set before us as a life-long journey of discovery and growth.
The world prefers an injudicious education system that churns out mindless cogs
on the economic wheel. Spiritual gifts like curiosity or inquisitiveness are disparaged.
New ideas are shunned. We burden future generations with nostalgic remembrances
of our own childhood, oblivious to the fact that they live in an entirely
different time and place. Why are we so surrounded by illiteracy and disingenuity?
Because those in power know it works. Surely we are seeing now the cost of our
self-serving myopathy in the suffering and death of our neighbors. Society cannot
survive deprived of reason and intelligence, bound by common ignorance and
immaturity. That is a freedom we cannot afford.
The world is a complicated place and
faith is hard. And trying to navigate this world faithfully without wisdom –
not merely doctrine or tradition, but the word of God that is Jesus Christ – is
perilous and trying. Stupid is not a virtue. Dishonesty is not clever. The God-given
gift of a mind is a terrible thing to waste. How do we expect to find our way
to a better world if we cannot comprehend the damage we have done to this one?
That is what this moment is trying to
tell us. We have been told lies. We have believed the lies. We have embraced
the lies. We have followed the lies. All because the lies give comfort and
solace, because they support our desire to avoid those very difficult words: I
am wrong. And if we are going to find the courage to say those words and
mean it, then we are going to have to turn our backs on one other religious
idol: fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism
pretends to be about holding on to the truth, about stripping the Bible and
church doctrine of the blight of modernism, but in fact the doctrine and
practice of fundamentalism is a newcomer to religion, to Christianity and other
religions as well. It is a 20th Century reaction to the advent of
historical and literary criticism of the Bible. It ignores the reality that the
Bible has always been read as the complicated and multi-layered work. Moving through
the word (small w) of the Bible and getting to the Word (with a capital W)
requires an investment of time, energy, scholarship and faith. Marcus Borg puts
it this way:
[Fundamentalists] also commonly see themselves
as affirming “the old-time religion”—that is, Christianity as it was before the
modern period. In fact … their approach is itself modern, largely the product
of a particular form of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant theology.
Moreover, rather than allowing the Bible its full voice, their approach
actually confines the Bible within a tight theological structure.[1]
Consider Rabbinical scholarship.
There, the word of God comes to life in the back-and-forth dialogue of the
Mishnah and not merely the dry reading of the Torah. Jesus himself did not read
or teach the Scriptures literally, applying the words “but I say to you” to Scriptural
texts six consecutive times in the sermon on the Mount (along with nine other
uses of the word “but” in the same passages) to enhance, illustrate, challenge,
and even contradict what was written and known. Fundamentalism is neither
biblical nor faithful. It is a fear-based reaction of a church that cannot even
allow the possibility of being wrong.
I am fascinated by the allure of
fundamentalism in American Christianity. Given our death-grip on the doctrine
of free-will, anything that demands strict adherence to or observance of a
singular irreducible doctrine or practice seems absurd. We like our options, our
choices. Fundamentalism is about taking options away, denying questions,
abolishing individuality of any kind. Yet there is a clarity to fundamentalism,
a focused choosing. This is how it is. Take it or leave it. There is one truth,
and those who willingly embrace it will be properly rewarded. Faith becomes
transactional, a win-lose proposition where the competitors are clearly identified
and the rules are straightforward. And there is one other benefit.
Fundamentalism is static. It proclaims
that things should and will always be as they have always been (and will always
be?). Having whitewashed any grey area, there is a desirable and affirming
clarity in fundamentalism that is often absent from the rest of life. But the
effort it takes to hold such an untenable position! Fundamentalism, in whatever
domain it is practiced, in constantly embattled with the dynamic world in which
we actually live. Intolerance breeds enmity, hate and violence. It justifies conflict
with a good dose of self-righteousness. Paul listed enmity as a “fruit of the
flesh,” a product of worldly living that should be unnatural to spirit-filled
people. Yet “strife, jealousy, anger, and quarrels,” (Galatians 5:20 NSV) are
go-to rituals in fundamentalist Christianity, the public face of faith in this
country. No wonder fewer and fewer want any part of it.
Fundamentalism will not, cannot,
perceive wrongness. It does not know humility. It cannot confess its brokenness,
it constrains the work of the Spirit within the limitations of human grasping. It
is self-aggrandizing, power-seeking, undeservedly proud. It is not
characteristic of followers of Jesus. It is a denial of the overwhelming,
abundant, free-spirited gift of grace.
And it will never, ever, get us to the
place we desire most: the Kingdom of God.
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