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| Fruit tree. Image source. |
In my post The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology, I had a little parenthetical aside that said:
And, to clarify, I'm not saying being religious is better than being non-religious. There's a wide range of different ways that people map their religious beliefs [or lack thereof] onto questions of morality/purpose/how we should live our lives, and I would not say that religious people's mappings are better than non-religious people's.
In other words, we should look at the way that a religious [or atheistic] belief affects people's views on "morality/purpose/how we should live our lives", and that's how we say if the belief is good or bad. We have some sort of "common sense" feel for what good morality is, and that is the yardstick we use to measure and judge religious beliefs.
Here's the thing, though: Yes, that's how I see it now. But when I was evangelical, I would have disagreed with this. I would have said, we can't judge our religious beliefs based on the effects we observe in the real world; the whole point of religion is that we're claiming there is something bigger than the physical world. In view of this bigger spiritual "reality", our behaviors and morality are good and right, though they might appear to be harmful and wrong if you're only looking at the physical world we can see. And if you judge the religious beliefs only by their observable effects in the physical world, you're already assuming an atheistic worldview, where none of the religion's claims are true.
One could argue, if progressive Christians want to live according to the reality of the physical world, and never do anything that seems like a bad idea (but is actually a good idea if the religion's claims about the spiritual world are true), why not just go all the way and be atheists? If you never side with your religion, when assessing a concrete truth claim that people outside your religion would disagree with, which has practical effects on the choices you make in the real world, do you even believe your religion?
Let me give you an example.
When I was evangelical I believed this: Everyone deserves to go to hell, and can only escape this fate by believing in Jesus. Hell is an eternity of suffering; heaven is an eternity of happiness- infinities that make everything that happens in this life so small and insignificant in comparison. Whatever you do in this life, it doesn't really matter, except to the extent that it gets you "saved" and encourages other people to get "saved."
A big part of my Christianity, back then, was trying to get myself to believe in this spiritual world, to believe it so much that it would feel intuitive, and I would interpret things that happened by placing them in the context of this spiritual world rather than the physical world we can observe. (For example, you're praying a lot for a specific friend to become a Christian, and then that friend tells you something that happened to them, that pushed them in the direction of thinking about God, so you conclude that it happened because God worked behind the scenes in response to your prayers, to cause a thing to happen in the physical world.) We believed the spiritual world was more "real" than the physical world, but it's very difficult to actually live like that's true. But that was basically the goal of having a "personal relationship with God"- to get so deep into these beliefs that the spiritual world of your religion truly does feel more "real" to you than the real world.
To put it in concrete terms: Let's talk about the real-world actions one would take in accordance with one's belief in hell. If it is true that everyone we meet is in danger of going to hell and suffering eternally, then we should do everything in our power to coerce people, by any means possible, into "praying the prayer" and getting "saved." If you need to lie, if you need to pressure and guilt and threaten people, if you need to invite them to a pizza party which turns into a high-pressure evangelistic sales pitch, if you need to harass your colleagues at work, if your friends feel so annoyed and judged that they quit hanging out with you- well, all of that is nothing compared to an eternity in hell. (The Slacktivist has blogged about this before.)
Yes, I attended evangelism training sessions where we would talk about "we're scared of talking to our friends about religion because what if they get really put off by it and it ruins the friendship" and the answer was "how can you possibly care about that more than you care about your friend going to hell?" We would say things like "the most loving thing we can do is to warn people about hell." Going around telling people they are sinners who deserve to go to hell- from the perspective of someone who didn't share our beliefs, that looks really mean and hateful, but if our beliefs about the spiritual world were true, these warnings about hell were an act of love.
Another example: Believing that "God has a plan" to set you up with a perfect spouse, and therefore you shouldn't put any effort into trying to meet people or date- don't do that, because you need to just "trust God" and God will bring your partner to you when the time is right. From the perspective of observable reality, it doesn't make sense that one would find a partner by *not looking* (unless we hypothesize some mechanism where focusing on other things [rather than dating] helps you to become a more relaxed and fulfilled person who is then able to approach dating in a healthier way?), but you can imagine a spiritual reality where God sees you are "not looking" and then acts in response to that and brings you a perfect partner. My opinion is that this is bad advice because God doesn't do that.
And there are so many examples like this, that I used to believe when I was evangelical. Churches that put restrictions on women- from outside the religion, this looks really bad and sexist, but the religion claims that the spiritual reality is that God told us it has to be this way, and God must have good reasons. If this spiritual reality is the real truth, more true than the harms of sexism that we can see with our own eyes, then yeah, it *is* right to put restrictions on women.
Same thing for the issue of acceptance of gay people. The religion claims that the true spiritual reality is that God didn't really intend for people to be gay, and it would be wrong to accept yourself as gay, and God will change you if you follow all the rules correctly, and people who are living "the homosexual lifestyle" are all unhappy- if you really believe this, then it *does* make sense to tell people it's not okay to be in a same-sex relationship. If you care about gay people, and you believe the religion's claims that no one can truly be happy living "the gay lifestyle", then that's what you'll do- you'll take actions which come across as really mean and bigoted to people who don't believe the religion's claims.
But isn't that what faith is? Believing in what your religion says, even when it goes against the evidence around you- the testimonies of gay Christians who talk about how they tried so hard to change, and it didn't work, and caused them to have depression, and then when they accepted themselves, everything got better. The statistics about queer people being at risk of depression and suicide, particularly if they're in an environment which doesn't accept them.
Yes, when I was evangelical, I believed in the religion's claims, over the real-world evidence. Whenever I read what a gay Christian had to say about how much better their life got when they accepted themself- well, I thought they must be secretly unhappy on some level.
Isn't that what faith is?
(And there are plenty of examples which are even more "out there" than what I believed when I was evangelical. Every now and then you hear about someone who believes that God told them to kill someone. Another example, Pat Robertson said that hurricanes were sent by God because of society giving gay people rights. If your beliefs about the spiritual world are true, then it makes sense to behave that way- but to everyone else, you come across as delusional and basically a bad person.)
I lost my faith- that is, I lost that framework of viewing the world, where my religion makes claims about the spiritual world, and we believe these claims are the real truth, more true than the physical world we can see, and we contextualize and interpret the things that happen in the physical world according to what the spiritual world says is the real reality.
Back then, my apologetics answers were all airtight- I knew all the logical answers, for why people were wrong about their own experiences, and my religion's claims were actually right. All the answers about why the rules we were given by God were actually good, even though they looked so bad. But eventually, after seeing in so much detail the actual damage done by those beliefs in people's actual lives... well, I couldn't believe that the abstract religious claims were more real than what people were experiencing in the real world. You could say I lost my faith...
A big thing for me, when I was leaving evangelicalism, is I now do NOT believe in any religious claims along the lines of "well, we don't really know why God commanded this, and it doesn't make sense from the perspective of the physical world, but we just have to have faith and obey it anyway." No, no more of that. That kind of thinking always turns out to be really harmful- of course it does, because it's an argument that we need to do things which seem like bad ideas. So yeah, if you do things that are bad ideas, they will turn out badly.
But again... I say that kind of faith is really harmful, but that's because I'm judging it from the perspective of what we see in the real world. So already I'm making the assumption that the religion is not true, right? If you looked at it in terms of a larger spiritual world, which our physical world is existing inside of, you wouldn't judge the results of a belief just based on the harm it caused in the physical world. You would also have to take into account the number of people saved from going to hell, the amount of sin being prevented, the satisfaction God gets from being worshipped, etc- and the argument that the religion is making is that those benefits outweigh what you see in the real world.
And it's impossible to disprove that. Like, what if there is a God who sends hurricanes because of gay rights? You can't disprove that. But I really just can't even with any kind of religious claims along those lines- anyone could claim anything, anyone could say "I need to do [some bad thing] because God told me to" and believe God must have a really good reason, even though we can't come up with any possible hypothesis about what that good reason might be. I just can't even with this- I refuse to have anything like that in my religion at all.
So I have no faith, then. Because if you never side with your religion when it conflicts with observable reality, isn't that the same thing as saying you don't really believe your religion?
Sometimes I feel like, leaving evangelicalism and moving to a "progressive" Christianity, does it mean we don't *actually* believe our religion's truth claims, and we're only doing Christianity for inspirational moral reasons, and somehow I missed the memo on that?
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In Matthew 7:15-20, Jesus said,
Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
By their fruit you will recognize them. Jesus says you should look at the real-world results of people's actions or beliefs, and that will tell you if what they are doing is good or bad. A good tree bears good fruit, and a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. It's not going to be the case that some religious truth about the larger unseen spiritual world should compel us to act in ways that produce bad fruit here in the physical world. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit.
If that's what faith is- believing the bad fruit is okay because "God said," and surely God must have a good reason- cut it down and throw it into the fire.
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Here's a different spin on "faith means doing things that don't make sense from the perspective of people outside your religion": What about people whose religious beliefs lead them to be extremely self-sacrificing? Religious people who dedicate their lives to doing good and helping others, in ways that maybe "don't make sense" because they involve such big sacrifices? They're seeing the larger "spiritual reality" that God cares for all people, and all people deserve to have a good life, and that God would want them to make these sacrifices to live a lifestyle in service to others, and that God will reward them for it- and that larger spiritual reality is more real and meaningful to them than the things they are giving up in their own personal life in the real world.
On the one hand, I kind of believe in that myself. (I literally believe that if you are a rich person who didn't do anything to give back and help others, you will have to explain yourself to Jesus after you die. Good luck with that!) On the other hand, I kind of want to argue that this isn't really a case of "this looks like a bad idea from the perspective of people outside your religion"- like, they *are* doing good and helping people in the real world, and it's just a matter of how much you prioritize your own desires/comforts vs the larger abstract project of helping the world. And there's a whole spectrum- on one end, there are rich people who never do anything to give back, and that is morally wrong- but it's okay to land somewhere in the middle that spectrum. You're not morally required to give up everything and go be a nun or a medical missionary or something.
I mean, one concern about people being "too self-sacrificing" is that it's bad for their own mental health. If you're making yourself feel guilty all the time, well, you feeling guilty doesn't actually help anyone. So don't do that. So I suppose I do agree that, when this kind of self-sacrificing ideology produces "bad fruit" in the real world, that's a problem. Maybe this is also an example of me not having faith.
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Perhaps there are religious people who view religion as being about morality and purpose and meaning, rather than about truth claims related to things that happened or will happen. So we tell stories about how Jesus did this and that, and Jesus will do this and that in the future, and the point is to teach us about what kind of people we should be, how we should live our lives. And none of the stories are actually true.
That's not me, though. I really believe things happened. As the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." I still have a very evangelical perspective on the definitions of "faith" and "truth."
Except, do I really believe any of this? Like I said, I now refuse to have anything to do with any religious beliefs along the lines of "here's something that follows logically from our religion's truth claims, but it looks really bad and harmful from the perspective of people outside our religion." And if you never have any "faith" like that, if you only take actions that people who don't believe in your religion agree with, how can you say you actually believe your religion?
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But maybe I do have religious beliefs which conflict with what we see in the real world. Believing in resurrection, even though what we see in the real world is violence and war and genocide. Believing that Jesus will hold people accountable, even though what we see in the real world is that rich and powerful people exploit others and get away with it- "when you're a star they let you do it."
Still, though, I don't think it's good to really really really believe in those things- resurrection and justice- because then that would mean it's *okay* that terrible things are happening in the real world. It's okay because when you look at the bigger picture of the spiritual world, all wrongs are righted. I don't think we should believe that too strongly, because then we will not try hard enough to make a better world now. (Then again, if it really *is* true, then it truly *is* not necessary to try harder to make a better world now. But no, I just can't even with that.)
So it needs to be something that just makes us feel better, not something that's actually true?
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I've heard people say this about prophecy: Typically people think prophecy is "foretelling", ie, predicting something that's going to happen in the future, that you only are able to predict because God told you. But, that's only 1 kind of prophecy. The other kind is "forth-telling", which means telling it like it is about what's going on right now. Calling people out on their bad behavior. Speaking truth to power.
So, this kind of "prophecy" isn't about God telling you a secret that people will just have to take on faith. It doesn't need God at all- it just needs the "prophet" to have the insight to draw connections between the injustice they see in the real world, and big, abstract ideas about how the world should be.
Maybe religion should be like that. Calling out injustice and telling people that we can be better. Rather than being about an invisible world that you need to have faith in.
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It seems like, if the purpose of religion is just to teach us about morality and meaning, and not to let us in on the secret knowledge that unlocks the power of the spiritual world... well, if it's just about morality and meaning, we don't need religion for that. There are non-religious ideologies which do a good job on those aspects.
"You're going to hell because you don't believe the same thing as me" and "gay rights cause hurricanes"- those are the kinds of beliefs you can only get from religion. Are any of those kinds of beliefs worth having? Seems not? Then why even have religion? But again, I'm judging from the assumption that the religion is not true. I'm judging from the perspective of the effects we observe in the physical world, and I'm not taking into account the possible existence of a spiritual world where those things are actually true. "You're going to hell if you disagree with me" is a bad thing to believe, unless it turns out that it's actually true that people are going to hell for disagreeing with you.
So I'm judging based on the assumption that it's not true. I'm judging a tree by its fruit, like Jesus said.
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Or maybe my assumption that there is "common sense morality" is wrong. The idea that it's just obvious to everyone that the right thing to do is help others and make sure everyone has equal rights. Maybe that's not obvious in any objective sense, and we just feel like it's "obvious" because of the cultural influence of various religions which teach that kind of morality. Maybe on some level we do need religion for that?
Or, maybe I should say it like this: Typically, the people who are talking about things bigger than our lives, like right and wrong and purpose and what we owe to the world, are in some kind of religious system, because religion gives a convenient platform to talk about those topics. But I don't think there's any reason they *have to* be in a religious system. There are non-religious people speaking out about those things too. But perhaps it's easier if you're in a religion, because you already have an audience of people who say they are following God, and all you have to do is point out that God would want them to treat everyone decently, and the ways they are failing to do that.
There are also plenty of people using religion as a justification for why they should get to control other people's lives. So like, don't take this as me saying that religion overall is a good thing.
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I'm writing about this because sometimes it feels to me like the target that my own religious beliefs are swirling around is "we don't actually believe any of this." (Or even, "it would be bad to *actually* believe one's religion- fortunately, we don't.") You know, just like the evangelicals warned us, you stop believing in "God's word" on this or that culture war issue, and then eventually your Christianity gets so wishy-washy and meaningless that you just become an atheist.
The thing is, though, I feel so much more excited about my Christianity now than I did when I was evangelical. Back then, it was white-knuckled chasing after a God who was so big, who could crush me, who believed I wasn't good enough, and I loved him and let him take everything out of me, to replace it with what he wanted me to be. I wasn't allowed to explore my own thoughts or feelings- everything had to be submitted to Christ. And I was a spy he sent to manipulate people into changing their religion, so they could escape hell- and I lived with that constant tension in that, the way my love for my friends motivated me to be dishonest with them.
But now it's like, I believe in things that are actually exciting. Let's feed the hungry. Let's welcome immigrants. Let's celebrate all the diversity of the queer community. Let's make a better world. Watch how people thrive when their needs are met. And all of this feels connected to my religion, to Jesus, to making God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
I lost my faith- because faith means believing in an invisible spiritual reality, and taking actions consistent with that reality, rather than actions that make sense in the observable world. Instead, I just want to follow Jesus' teaching, to judge a tree by its fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit.
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Related
"Faith" means "doing something that is a bad idea"
Maybe I had more faith when I was complementarian, and that's a bad thing
I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches
The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God"
Don't know why I never realized this about Old Testament prophets
How long will you wait for your experience to match up with the bible?
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