Tag Archives: complacency

Obama is Buddhist?

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“God has taken them home.”

So U.S. President Obama accounts for the wanton killing of grade schoolers in Newtown, CT.  But does this view sit well with us?  Does it ease our pain or explain the unthinkable?  And does it present God in a way that encourages trust or hope?

My answer: e) None of the above.

Situations like Sandy Hook are so terrifying that it can be tempting to think that God must be pulling the strings.  We want to believe that someone is in control and that somewhere there is good to be found in it.  Yet ironically, by diminishing human agency and responsibility for evil we likewise strip ourselves of our agency and responsibility for good.

For if this is all God’s will, then really we can do nothing about it: who can resist God?

No.  Far from rekindling hope or even allowing fuller expression of our grief, at best this view results in complacency.  At worst, I reckon it results in despair.

Complacency because taking what is evil and “sanctifying” it (through ascribing it to God) subverts our most natural human responses: should we grieve or feel upset about God’s will?  At best the implication is that our grief and rage are really misplaced—the result of being too limited (or if you theology is more heavy-handed, too sinful) to understand that this is all for some “greater good.”  Ironically again, such a view has more in common with Buddhism than Christianity.

Despair because, faced with this perspective, we must necessarily understand our emotions, goals, and even our children as insignificant—unimportant before the lofty designs of God.  For a god who “calls home” little children via such murderous and seemingly purposeless action is, like a maleficent version of Zeus, a fearful entity indeed.  Before such a God we cannot but despair.

Many reject this god.  And those that accept it?  Well, is it any wonder that so much of evangelical Christianity seems based on fear and rule-following rather than on love and truth?

In reality Obama’s view denies us the very substance that the Psalmist would have us rely upon, both in coming to embrace God and as that which fosters and furthers right relationship with God: the created order, within which we are called to “taste and see” God’s goodness.

Now hear me rightly: I see no goodness in this situation.  It is not something “in light of which” I believe in God but something “despite which” I still believe.  But neither is this a situation where Christians should encourage complacency or despair.  Rather, I think the first step is to recognize that the problem of evil is not simply an issue or even a big issue.  To my mind it is the issue.

And if my personal experience with evil is any guide, the second step is for Christians to stand against it and—in evil’s overwhelming shadow—to tell our tales of how God has acted in our lives to heal and mend us.

And this, I think, is where goodness can possibly be found amid evil: not that God solves our issues or addresses all our concerns, but that in place of evil God offers Godself.  Not through the historical work of Christ or theological explanation, important as these are.  But rather as acts of healing and liberation within our everyday existence that convince our minds, inspire our imaginations, and win our hearts—acts of knowing us more truly than we know ourselves and loving us more deeply than we love ourselves.

So against the view that God’ goodness is invisible or, at best, unfathomable, Christians must not only claim with their words but demonstrate—and attest to how God has demonstrated—in their lived existence that God is good.  And we do so not because of but despite the wanton evil that we are able (and clearly, all too wiling) to inflcit upon each other.

Truth-seeking (in the sticks)

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“My fiancée is having an affair with my friend.”

“My pastor was caught having sex with the principal of the Christian school.”

“When my baby came I started going to church.  Not because I believed, but because I needed a place where I could sing—a place to express my joy and thankfulness.”

The price of truth-seeking is high.  Ask anyone who has walked away from a relationship or a belief that turned out to be false, or whose entire life was changed because they fell in love.  And where this thing is central to our self-identity, we do not simply choose what to believe or how to act but must actually—and necessarily—embody who we most truly are, and wish to become.

A philosopher I read called such moments “boundary situations,” situations of intense grief, despair, or love, where the stakes are so high that one cannot but respond with one’s whole self.

1 year ago I moved from a big city to a small rural town, in part because I hoped to find more authentic community here, in part because my pastor friend here seemed enthusiastic about my grad work in philosophical theology.  I had hoped to jump-start this process through the summers that I spent here with friends I had had, and through exposure to people in the community through my friends’ church.

However, I came to see that these pre-established relationships were mostly based on who Church people thought I was or, better, what they thought I believed.  They were based on them thinking that I was a member of their Christian “tribe.”  They weren’t so much accepting me (there was little interest even in who I am or questions about what I believed) as granting me membership, by association.

In small towns I had assumed ignorance to be the main reason that certain, faulty, religious beliefs were held: lack of information and / or lack of better formulations of the information that they have.  But after living here for a year I now see that ignorance or, better, complacency about knowledge, also has a social value.  It is an important denominator in communal identity.

In other words, where the most important thing in a small town is being part of the community, holding certain beliefs (or sets of beliefs) cements identity and delimit inclusion (and exclusion).

On the one hand, then, the content of a set (or sets) of beliefs is only every generally expressed and is not much at issue.  Rather, belief sets indicate which group one is part of, with different groups having different combinations of belief sets with variously different, though general, content.  Instead, membership is what counts.  On the other hand, attempts to examine (or worse, critique and modify) such belief sets will often be met with staunch resistance, because the issue is not so much what people believe but who they are and how (and whether!) they are rightly related to their fellows.

So the point is not that obtuse or uneducated people feel at ease with other such people.  Nor is it that rural people can’t be bothered thinking about whether a given belief is right or wrong.  Rather, it is that life is already hard enough and ready explanations and traditional views make life easier, particularly by facilitating bonding between people.  So by believing (by and large) what Joe believes I am accepted by Joe.  Or more generally, by believing what a group believes, I am accepted by this group.

And in a small community avoiding conflict and maintaining acceptance is crucial (to my identity and, to a certain extent, even happiness and prosperity).

Sadly, because they idolize acceptance, they also disparage conflict (and so avoid dialogue on contentious issues).  So tribal churches necessarily orient themselves toward anti-intellectualism (versus critical investigation) and conformity (versus diversity).  By thus dumbing-down the process of truth-seeking with respect to the gospel they also trivialize conversion into a mere “decision,” rather than a living encounter with a being toward whom one cannot but respond with one’s entire self.

For how could an encounter with a being who is love be less than a boundary situation?