Bill Maher thinks I’m a hypocrite but not nearly as much as I think I’m a hypocrite (part II)

If I’m to make a conservative estimate, I’ve attended over 1,300 worship services in my life.

In my Lutheran tradition, this means that more than 1,300 times, in the presence of others, I’ve said something like these words:

“Most merciful God,

We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves..."

I wasn’t really keeping track, but if I’m to make a liberal estimate, no more than 200 times, Bill Maher, in his aptly titled movie Religulous, reiterates his most forceful argument that Christians are hypocrites. Of his other two main arguments, one, clearly stated, is a truism (bad religion is bad) and the other is a non sequitur (bad religion = bad God), but I have to grant the keenness of this one very useful observation, Christians are hypocrites. He is exactly right, if a little too generous.

If we’re right that Maher publicly pronounced about 200 times that I, as a Christian, am a hypocrite, that’s about 1,100 fewer times than I’ve pronounced it.

In fact, so damning is the evidence that we as Christians are hypocrites that no one in my Lutheran tradition has bothered to cover it up. So indisputably right is Maher’s insight, that it’s a bit like telling someone twenty eight years into an AA program that he might have a problem with alcohol. It’s practically our core statement about ourselves. For Lutherans, who are arguably the denomination that is most wary of Pharisaism, not only is it a sin to sin, it’s a sin to stop sinning and so be accused of pride. To get to the point where we’re only hypocritical about our sin would be a joyous benchmark and a cause for celebration. We’re just trying to stop being so hypocritical about our hypocrisy. So deep does the assumption go that we are hypocrites, the statement that we’re “in bondage to sin” isn’t even the meat of our worship service. It’s more like a preface that we try to hammer out in the very beginning so we can move on to something that we all don’t already know.

Maher nails the matter of hypocrisy right on the head. It just takes him two hours to make the case that Sven and Agatha Ostberger of Duluth, Minnesota have already made before they’ve even turned to the right page in their hymnals on Sunday. Sometimes latecomers to a Lutheran service will lean over in the pew and ask, “What’d I miss?” and someone will dismissively reply, “Just the confession” as if to say, “You didn’t miss much, just the most obvious fact in the history of the world. We’re in bondage to sin. Resistance is futile. Yada, yada.”

It’s a level of honesty unknown to the humanist who naïvely proclaims that we’ll finally set the world right if we can just do away with all the religion.

That “we’ll finally get it right if…” is exactly the notion that Martin Luther insisted we need to give up on entirely if we’ll ever be brought to the point of faith. Far from promoting a squeaky clean image of Christianity, Luther believed that doing good things and thinking good things were as often hindrances as helps to our becoming people of faith. In fact, he believed that we had to be brought past the brink of despair in our own capacity to move beyond the hypocritical.

Luther would have agreed with Maher wholeheartedly that we need to disengage from the religion that gives us the overconfidence to say, “my team/tribe/ideology is right and we’re setting things right.” The problem is that this is easier said than done, and this religion goes by many different names, not all of them as forthright about the fact that it is, at the end of the day, the same old religion. Christianity and Islam are open about the fact that they're engaging in this sort of religion. Agnosto/Atheo/Secular-humanism less so. In the same way that alcohol has the most power over an alcoholic when he can’t admit that he has a problem, this religion has that much more power over it’s adherents when it claims not to be a religion. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the Manhattan Project were set in motion by humanists who didn’t recognize a religion when they saw one.

Luther realized that, for us, the option isn't between hypocrisy and no hypocrisy. The option is between confessed hypocrisy and blind hypocrisy.

When Religulous closes with Maher’s extended diatribe, it comes clear that he is not offering an alternative to religion at all but the same old religion in new clothes. “My team/tribe/ideology is right and we’re setting things right.” I hardly have to add the subtext. One time when defining his neologism, “apatheist,” Maher went meta (ironically self-referential) and offered us this head-scratcher, “there's atheist and there's agnostic, and I'm okay with us not splitting the difference on those; if you are just not a super-religious person, you are on my team."

Perhaps, though, seeing as he’s a comedian, the irony is intentional when he suggests that the answer to the problems caused by all of our self-aware, avowed religions is an un-self-aware, disavowed religion. I can only assume.

I’m aware too that there are gobs of people who haven’t been repeating this most obvious fact since the cradle, that we are in bondage to sin and that our religions have failed to free us. For these, it might be worth Maher taking a couple extra hours to bring us to that despair in our religion which Luther saw was prerequisite to any meaningful faith.

In that case, I thank Bill Maher for the clever evangelism. Well played.

Bill Maher has taken an important first step toward faith (part 1)

This isn’t exactly “current.” These are some of my thoughts as I’ve just gotten around to watching Bill Maher’s “Religulous.”

Sometimes you can take an idea that’s very obviously stupid and repeat it enough times until people sort of forget how stupid it is. Better yet, you can voice it enough times that, by sheer volume of chatter, it becomes a very real thing, and we’re forced to deal with it as such, even if it didn’t exist in the world before you started speaking it.

This is how propaganda works. If I went up to a calm person with even a pinch of empathy and asked, “Should people A remove people B from their country,” I’d expect them to gasp and say something like, “For the love of God, no! That’s terrible!” But if it were no longer a disinterested third party, and I were instead able to convince you (not through the quality of my ideas but through the sheer quantity of times that I voice them) that the situation is not neutral but that people B is “them” and “they” are a threat to “our” way of life; regardless of whether “they” are the Jews or the Tutsis or the Infidels, history is sadly unambiguous on how this normally turns out.

Propaganda is powerful not because it’s true but because it’s persistent. It doesn’t comment on reality, as such. It creates an alternative reality through volume and urgency. One of the most dangerous examples of this in the modern world is any version of the “we got saved” theology, which exists in segments of nearly every major religion around the world and appears to be the only kind of theology available to the producers of “Religulous.”

In each of these distorted sects, it’s never really made clear why this or that action should bring one into the inner circle of this or that god, it just does. And the religions might bicker on the details of how one might get saved and might not even call it getting “saved.” All that matters is that a clear boundary is drawn between who’s in and who’s out for those of a certain insecure disposition who cling to such boundaries.   

As a disinterested third party, like Bill Maher, it doesn’t take an abnormally active mind to see how silly this is. If I were to suggest that Zeragon is the goddess of Omega Centauri and she promises eternal life to the fair creatures of her galaxy at the moment that they spin around a baseball bat ten times (or the Omega Centauri equivalent, maybe a cricket paddle?), a disinterested Milky Way dweller might respond, “Assuming all of this is true, why, pray tell, would Zeragon choose something as arbitrary as spinning around a baseball bat? Why not counting backwards from M1.111 or going on a vision journey through the edible forests of Lemda-5? But moreover, how would a god of galactic proportions communicate such a requirement to her tiny subjects?” It’s not logically impossible but still a stretch for most of us to think of a very large goddess taking the time to post very small brochures on coffee shop community boards all over her domain.

But this is not objectively any more silly than saying that a god should be swayed by the saying of 30 Hail Marys or the joining of a certain denomination that was founded in 1847 except that the chatter about these latter methods has been enough and we have enough skin in the game to believe that these are somehow less arbitrary. And it’s not just the credulous who lend these methods more legitimacy than those of Zeragon, it’s  perhaps even more the unbelievers who actually consider it worth their time to critique them.

About halfway through “Religulous,” I succumbed to the realization that I was waiting in vain for its narrator to make a critique of my own Christian tradition that I haven’t already made myself (and often much more harshly). I got the impression of someone who was just dipping his toe in the waters of a debate that has been rushing forward like a deluge for thousands of years. I realized what one of my favorite theologians meant when he talked about the “banality of modern atheism.” I found it difficult to respond to someone who was trying mightily to be disagreeable but wasn’t far enough along in the debate to really say something with which I disagree.

Maher’s critiques of “religion” (he doesn’t really have a more precise critique of this religion or that religion) are functional. That is, religion is bad because it results in bad things in the world. If such a basic critique is going to be at all adversarial rather than obvious, it requires a naïve and easily preyed-upon opposition. So Maher scours the backwoods trailers and small town magisterial buildings of the most uninformed spokespersons for the faith that he can find.

I confess that for the first twenty minutes or so I myself was naïve enough to believe that this was just the introductory stunt before we moved into the serious interviews in the halls of Harvard divinity school or, for that matter, even just the local office of your mainstream parish pastor. That latter part never came. And it’s here that Maher gets short-circuited after what is otherwise an important first step toward a vital theology

Any person of faith whose theological worldview is worth a pittance needs to start with this same qualitative critique. But where the reformer would take the next step--

If such and such religion is madness

And assuming that God were to exist, God would not be madness,

Then God must not be synonymous with such and such religion--

it’s not clear that Maher ever fully crosses the important chasm of disassociating the god from the religion, and so he gets short circuited in this invalid loop:

The religion is madness

Therefore the god is madness

The first premise is correct. Religion is madness. So it should be obvious enough that a mad religion has told us nothing about what God is or isn’t.

If we don’t hold this against him and still appreciate his one correct premise for what it is, we have still only gotten back to square one, where any commonly sensible person would’ve been before all the insane propaganda brainwashed him or her in the first place. God must not be a religion. So we can critique this religion or that religion until we’re blue in the face and still have not said the first word about God.

Put aside, for now, that the sum total of Maher’s other arguments amount to a truism (i.e. bad religion is bad) and a non sequitur (bad religion = bad God). Next week, I will write on where else we might go if, rather than short-circuiting, we use that one invaluable premise to move to what serious theologians, who were conspicuously absent from “Religulous,” call a “second naïveté.”

why fundamentalism is an atheistic response to pain (part III)

If some silly thing like a job, or a family, or Netflix kept you from lapping up the sweet wellspring of wisdom that was parts I and II, I’ve been trying to make the case that art—writing a novel, directing a movie or singing a song—is more helpful and truer to the biblical methods of dealing with pain than, say, writing a fundamentalist Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

In many ways, these are opposite strategies. The handbook is written to help us distance ourselves from our pain and look at it analytically. Art pulls us in deeper so we can experience the pain at a more conscious level.

A handbook writer starts out with the intellectual assumptions that God must be a certain way, that pain exists, and that the one needs to be justified in light of the other.

A painter just expresses his pain and assumes that God will provide the defense—that is, of course, if God is God. A musician that’s worth even half the liver in her belly doesn’t talk about God. She talks to God. Poets feel no pressure to speak reasonably in their moment of need. In fact, they’re liable to air all kinds of short-sided, irrational, even unfair grievances because they're only responsible for what’s honest, not what’s true.

Here’s an analogy from our bodies (if you’re medically trained, don’t correct any inaccuracies or it won’t work). I understand there are certain types of back injuries where our body’s first impulse is to engage the muscles around the injury to protect us from feeling the pain fully. But eventually this becomes counterproductive as the tightening and inflammation becomes the source of a more enduring pain long after the original injury would have healed.  What we really need to do at that point is learn to relax those muscles so that we can really feel the pain and let the healing process work more directly. 

I say the artist's method is more true to the Bible because, anywhere other than a handbook writer’s desk, the Bible pretty obviously isn’t a collection of logical assertions about God but of family myths, and petty songs of tribal vengeance, and morally questionable parables, and seemingly off topic sidebars, and poems. Lots of poems.

And just as good art isn’t a random hodge-podge of colors or sounds but a creative use of the rules and boundaries of a particular medium, the Hebrew culture that generated our Bible developed structures and forms for their poems that helped them deal with their pain more effectively.

For instance, the poems of the book of Lamentations, written shortly after everything the Israelites knew was demolished, killed or shipped off to exile, are written in acrostic. With the first word of each line corresponding to one of 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the lamenter was free to make whatever raw and sometimes venomous grievance he or she would like to make toward God. But just as the alphabet comes to an end, so too must the lament.

We’ve all known the mourner who refuses to go on whatever other love and blessings are poured into her. Or the former jock who insists on not showing gratitude for his stable job and beautiful family at present because sometime in the past he “could’a been a contender.” We can be just as narcissistic about using our pain to gather attention around ourselves as we can about hoarding blessings. The lamenter isn’t encouraged to deny her pain, but she isn't allowed to identify with it indefinitely, either. This structure provided a lamenter a means of addressing her pain without becoming unhealthily co-dependent on it.

The Psalms of lament often end with a line of praise and thanksgiving that always looks a little out of place in an otherwise ugly string of complaints and accusations (E.g. Ps. 13:5-6).  These lines are more than just token happy endings. They provide a way for the Psalmist to acknowledge, “However raw my feelings are right now, I will still acknowledge that this lament takes place within a relationship that is more enduring than my current emotional state. So I will end with a word of praise even when I don’t feel like it, because I know there will be other times when I do feel like it.” 

This kind of directness is only possible if, beneath the pain of the moment, the poet has a deeper trust in the integrity of the relationship surrounding the words.

My wife has committed to me for better or worse. I wear evidence of that commitment around my finger and keep paperwork for it safely filed away. So around her, I might spout out all kinds of hair-brained nonsense in a moment of frustration, nonsense that I might think to filter out in the context of a lesser relationship. The more secure our relationship, the more she is able to suspend any judgment on my temporary irrationality or any fear that this might be a permanent threat to our relationship.

It goes both ways, of course. I have a responsibility not to let frustration and accusation become my normal modes of relating to her, and surely I’ll need to become the more mature and rational one at some other point when she is having a moment.

The covenant secured relationship that we’ve made becomes the kind of container for unedited speech that a shaky, superficial relationship can never be.

So people are arguably at their most faithful when they're comfortably expressing their frustration and doubt to God. 

For all this, you’ll notice that the handbook writer will usually sell more books than the poet. Logically Why-ing away pain will always be a sexier alternative to engaging it head on.

But you’ll notice that at the end of the day, when the handbook writer has dried his final sheet and closed up his ink well, when all arguments have been exhausted, questions settled, the victim stripped of any reason to gripe, no one actually comes away from the ordeal with the responsibility to actually do something about the pain.

The fundamentalist handbook writer is similar to the atheist. He either believes that (1) God does not exist or that (2) God is not capable of doing stuff. Otherwise, he would not feel such enormous pressure to make God's case.

By way of contrast, the Psalmist, by not providing any explanation or justification, has put the ball in God’s court to actually do something about the pain. No questions have been answered and no grievances settled, so it’s incumbent solely upon God to come through on the back end.

The Psalmist doesn’t seek answers for pain but healing.