Sermon: Democracy or Theocracy (Forgiveness and the Altar)

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Democracy or Theocracy (Forgiveness and the Altar)

By Charles Rush

October 29, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 6.8Mb) ]

grew up in an Evangelical home in the South. It is who I am. I walked down the aisle at the ripe old age of 6 and asked Jesus to save me from my sins because, believe it or not, I already cussed like a sailor in first grade. I wanted to go to heaven. The problem was, for me anyway, if heaven was like Mrs. Fowler's Sunday School class, I wasn't sure how long I was going to be able to stay… Neither was she… I was one of those kids that spent many, many of my afternoons, writing on chalk boards, "I will not wink at Christy Reilly" one hundred times. "I will keep my hands to myself"… Two hundred times.

I'm a Minister today in spite of the fact that religion permeated my whole world as a child. At some point, you have to seek the truth as you see it regardless of how you grew up.

I remember sitting in my dorm room freshman year at Wake Forest. I was reading 'The Search for the Historical Jesus' by Albert Schweitzer. The book details 'historical criticism', how scholars determine the way the Bible came to be composed, and part of it traces how the preacher of the 'Kingdom of God' became 'the Son of God'. The book has been superceded but it is a classic of the history of intellectual ideas. I remember sitting there in my dorm room having something of a crashing awakening. I said out loud to myself and the whole witness of those who surrounded me, "They lied to me." I'm quite sure they didn't mean to. I grew up with the nicest, most well-meaning people. But they didn't tell me the whole truth because they didn't know the whole truth. Intellectually, I've never looked back. I had to leave the Evangelical world because the teaching is simply not accurate and, as it turns out, truth in religion is really quite important.

I will take just one example this morning to illustrate this point, the reverence for life. I basically agree with Evangelicals and Catholics on the sanctity of life. They believe that life begins at conception. I do as well. They are worried about the next generation not having sufficient appreciation of the sanctity of life. So am I. They believe that abortion is a sin.

The situations that people find themselves in when abortion is considered are almost always compromised, problematic. Abortion is almost always a tragedy.

Personally, when I was young and I was at the cross roads, I realized that for me the issue was really a broader reflection on commitment. This was the broad spiritual issue that was before me and pregnancy was the occasion for that reflection. I was not interested in becoming a father but I as I reflected on the immediate situation and my whole life, I chose commitment and through that began a dialogue with God that opened up a different path. I didn't want to act on my convictions, but I did.

But that does not mean that I want to live in a world where abortion is illegal. That world would be even worse. We would not eradicate the moral antinomies around abortion by making it illegal, we would only create a different set of complications. Especially for women, it is important that they are allowed the freedom to make that difficult and deeply personal decision for themselves and their spouses.

You know, as far as we can tell, abortion appears to be the first surgery we humans attempted. It is a deeply personal moral issue that has been with us from forever. But some moral issues are better left legal while others ought to be outlawed.

I love the character that Tom Hanks plays in 'Saving Private Ryan'. He is a sergeant in the Army that deploys on D-Day. He tells his unit nothing about himself so they all speculate about him. He is tough and he has to make decisive choices. The alternatives are stark and grave. His men will follow him practically anywhere. In the middle of the war, he develops a tremor in his hand. He would be outlining a map of attack with the rest of his unit and his hand would shake. Sometimes he would take his other hand and stop it. In front of his men, he would wonder aloud about the root cause of this tremor. His men would look at one another furtively.

At one point, he has to make a very tough judgment and his unit is divided about what they should do. They are so angry and divided that one of them threatens to go AWOL. He turns to them all and says, "I've lost 94 men under my command." He knows each and every name. He has to make a decision and he knows that he will lose 95, 96, 97, 98… Of course, his hand ought to shake. That is reverence for life in action it seems to me, tinged as it is with the element of pathos.

We don't want to live in a world of violence and death… It turns out that the sergeant is a High School teacher who just wants to go home and live anonymously with his wife. That is all he wants to do. But the world is not that simple. The world contains contradictions and it forces him to have to make choices between bad and worse. He has to act and live with the consequences and he would rather not be in this situation at all. But there he is. He has to hold fast to his humane values of the dignity and the sanctity of life and all around him, he is dealing with different grades of violence and death.

The character is profound because he embodies the moral and spiritual antinomies that we must hold in dialectical tension as we live between conscience and compromise. I may believe that abortion is a tragedy, that is it almost always wrong, but that does not mean that I want to live in a world where it is illegal.

I recently heard about a woman that had one of the first legal abortions in our country. She said that many years later, she would have done things differently and probably had that child and given them up for adoption. That is her personal spiritual/moral judgment. But she said, I will never make that decision for another woman, nor should we let anyone else. Humane dignity and sanctity and the right to make that choice.

The most important and difficult moral decisions that we have to make are so difficult and important precisely because we hold in dialectical tension competing values. There is no easy resolution when your deeply held values are in genuine competition.

No, the problem with the Religious Right is not in the values that they have. It is more the way that they use them. They have, no question, become a force.

I grew up in a world with conservative religion and conservative values and most of the South was like that. But it was not politically organized. Now it is. Since the early 80's, Fundamentalists and Evangelicals began to organize and today they are a formidable bloc that affects legislation in every state.

It was in the 80's that we saw the rise of the Moral Majority, the Chrisitan Coalition, Focus on the Family (which has 7 million viewers), The American Family Association, the Family Research Council, Trinity Broadcasting Network (which owns 6,000 Christian TV stations), the 700 Club, and a host of Televangelist preachers: James Robison, Charles Stanley, disgraced televanglists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, James Kennedy at Coral Ridge Ministries, plus a host of Adrian Rogers size pastors of churches 15-20,000; Likewise, the rise of Tim LaHaye series of books 'Left Behind' that dealt with our world as the 'end times' with Jesus coming back and Satan working through the United Nations; And there were other ministries like Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship; Bill Bright of Campus Crusade, Intervarsity,

These groups are loose, but they trade themes, trade speakers, trade literature, and have a variety of conferences that they share the platform.

Early 80's they started to develop a co-ordinated social/spiritual movement to 'reclaim America'. Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, Followed by the formation of Religious Broadcasters Network that hosts an annual dinner that invites members of Congress. Then there was the National Association of Evangelicals that led in the formation of the National Prayer breakfast that invited all members of Congress and the White House for a day of Prayer.

Through this, the Religious Right developed a social/political platform that they could agree on, they developed the organizational structure to implement legislation, and the developed a way to get donors to fund it. They did it all very effectively, so that by the time the 1992 Republican National Convention came around, they were able to boast that nearly 1/2 of all the delegates at the Convention were Evangelical Christians. From then to the present, they are an established force on the American social scene. There is nothing wrong with organizing and lobbying your cause, of course.

As I've experienced the Religious Right, there are 3 characteristics about their faith: one laudable, one understandable, but the last one is downright dangerous.

The first one that is laudable is that they are Evangelical. They believe deeply in the possibility of life change and that the Church is principally in the business of changing lives. They want you to become 'born again' and commit your life unequivocally to God. This is understandably annoying to Jews and Muslims because they also believe that there is only one way to God and they have it. But, it is important to understand why so many people go to these churches. They have had their lives turned around. And you know what, a lot of us need our lives turned around.

The second one is simply understandable. Evangelical religion has answers. They have a definite authority in the Bible. They can tell you what is true and look it up for you in scripture. They have a moral and social approach that can guide you on how to live. And in their bigger churches, they have groups that you can join, academies your children can attend, all of which reinforce the Christian way.

This one is just neutral. Years ago, when I first took the Meyers-Briggs personality profile, they feature this as one of their critical indices of personality types. Some people just like their life boxed up. They like things ordered. They like a definite authority. They admire tradition. They feel safe in control. They prefer questions that have definable answers. I remember when I saw the different personality types, I thought there will always be a spiritual tradition that matches these personality types.

And the opposite is also true. Some people prefer the journey more than marking where they are in relationship to the destination. Some people just feel boxed in when they are told what to believe. They would rather ask questions in an open-ended quest. They value the adventure. They admire tradition perhaps but they want to answer stuff for themselves. They don't really need or want the Minister of the Church telling them how to vote. My Evangelical colleagues are always perplexed when I tell them that we raise social issues regularly at Christ Church but my job is not to tell the Congregation what to do with it. You can figure that out for yourselves.

The final characteristic is that their leaders live out of their anger and they play to the fears of their lay people. In combination with a pre-miliennial dispensational view of the end of the world, I have concluded this is just inherently dangerous.

We all get angry from time to time, but the scriptures warn us about the toxic nature of anger. When you live in the south, you hear a lot of fiery sermons and you get used to it. But shortly after college, I began to realize that this is the driving force behind fundamentalism. They mask this anger behind 'righteous indignation'. It is usually 'secular humanists', 'activist judges', 'moral relativism', 'the homosexual agenda', 'Political Correctness', the 'United Nations', the 'ACLU'- all these groups that are trying to destroy Christian values and undermine our Christian Nation.

They believe that we live in the End times, that the book of Revelation is to be understood, more or less literally. They believe that we are seeing the signs of the End Times all around us, that the world is going to slide into a prolonged moral decadence in which anything goes, that the 'true remnant' of authentic believers will suffer greater and greater persecution for their uncompromising witness to Christ, that the world will eventually be mislead- probably through the United Nations- into following the Anti-Christ, that a world-wide war will ensue that will wreak untold destruction on every nation, and that Jesus will miraculously re-appear and rescue the righteous remnant and the rest of us are all going to experience endless perdition.

You haven't heard this sermon at Christ Church and there is a reason…

Apocalyptic literature was never meant to be read like this; it doesn't actually speak to the End Times, despite the fact that it is cast in that scenario….

But, I can't go there right now. That is just what they believe. What I noticed is the way they come back to this context and use it as an opportunity to get worked up into a lather of anger about secular humanists that are taking over our colleges, the ACLU that is doing this or that- on and on it goes- and this anger sharpens the divide between us and them. In fact, I finally figured out that these guys constantly need an enemy to defeat and they are constantly calling their parishioners to war fare against evil.

And it manipulates the ordinary fears that people have in the heartland of our country, fears that the world appears to be headed towards hell in a handbag, fears that decadence is winning the day, fears that our traditional way of living is going to erode right from under us. And if you live in the middle part of our country, it is not unreasonable to start thinking that there is a conspiracy of power between folk on the two coasts. So they find a lot of these sermons plausible. Right here in New Jersey, just this week. The 'Gay Agenda' lined up with 'Activist Judges' and now we have 'Gay Marriage'. Trust me, 1500 churches in Texas are preaching on just that right now.

I don't want to talk about Gay Marriage or the Homosexual agenda… The point is, they are living out of negative spiritual energy. It is negative. I decided I didn't want to live like that anymore and I left. I want to be positive.

And let digress and say a word of thanks on this, and I mean it. Spiritually speaking, it has been a great gift at Christ Church for me to be able to live out of my positive energy. More than a beautiful sanctuary, more than a great salary, more than speaking to millions of people, being able to be positive and free… that is more important. You let me do that because we do that together and I'm grateful. Money and power would be okay too… but….

They live out of their negative spiritual energy predominantly and it is toxic. I recently noted that the spiritual/theological challenge of our life time, the next couple decades, is whether all of us in the Abrahamic Faith Tradition- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam- can collectively reach a consensus that we are going to renounce our religious roots in violence. Can we agree that there is no religious justification for the use of violence and collectively stand for reconciliation and peace, which is also a major part of our traditions?

That is the challenge. And right after that, we need to do some spiritual inventory and begin to renounce and corral the use of Anger to motivate and stimulate religious zeal. I was listening to Sheik Nazrallah address half a million Shiite Muslims for Hezbollah in Beruit at the end of the summer. It was an angry screed, full of verbal violence. I was thinking how much it resembled an evangelistic rally by James Robison in Texas, as he was inciting the crowd to a mob frenzy; I was thinking how much it reminded me of the last time I heard Louis Farakhan address the Nation of Islam and then I was thinking that there is not enough difference there is between all of these religious addresses and the fundamental demeanor and 'righteous fury' that Adolf Hitler embodied at those speeches in Nuremberg. We have to collectively transcend the use of Anger. We have to corral it, reign it in, that voices of sober reason, voices of healing peace, might lead instead.

Too often in the past, we just ignored it, we just let it run, and the mob coalesced like… right out of nowhere, and next thing you know irrational exuberance carried us into places we couldn't believe we could go…

There is a place for anger. Jesus got angry. There is a place for righteous indignation. Jesus was righteously indignant. But.. he didn't stay mad. He didn't stay indignant. He didn't live out of this spiritual dimension. He lived out of healing, love, and he taught us the higher way of reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace.

No, it is not so much the values of the Religious Right, that are a problem, it is the degree to which they live out of their anger. This is truest on the farthest right, where fundamentalism resides. The principal difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is that evangelicals aren't so mad. But this anger infuses from the far right the middle right as well, the evangelical mileu as well. Though I do not think we need to fear the Religious Right, we should be wary. Because at root, this is a wide-ranging discussion on many fronts, but it is ultimately not just about what we believe as Christians, it is at root what kind of country we want America to become. Here in Metropolitan New York, we can ignore this phenomenon because we do not see this preaching on our Cable TV, we do not have organized people petitioning our school boards to teach Creationism, and we do not have people on our side walk outside carrying posters that read 'God Hates Fags'. We can ignore them… but we do so at our peril. Amen.