Treasure in Heaven

Jesus talked about laying up treasure in Heaven rather than on Earth. The treasure to which he referred, we may deduce from context (the Sermon on the Mount), was that of creating a better world for others around us.

It has been my experience that the most zealously conservative Christians have been the worst at laying up treasure in Heaven. It is liberal thinkers, people like me, who lay up the most treasure in a heaven that we are not even sure exists. We forego opportunities to pile up riches in our own bank accounts or to push other people away; instead, we encourage others and build them up, even at some expense to ourselves. We do it because we believe passionately in altruism and, quite simply, we enjoy being good.

I have a lifelong list of experiences with conservative Christians who devote themselves to creating hostility and destruction. I will briefly summarize my decades of experiences.

Very soon after I was baptized into a fundamentalist church in 1973, while I was in high school, I was recruited into being a lay preacher. This was a good way of building my confidence. I thought it would be a good way to cultivate religious wisdom and careful thinking, but in this I was wrong. In fundamentalist churches such as the one I was in, each speaker’s responsibility was to simply repeat what the church leaders say, and claim that it was straight from the Bible, even when it was not. So I gave a Sunday night sermon about the New Testament passages predicting “a new Heaven and a new Earth” after Jesus’ Second Coming. I looked forward to a Heavenly City but also to an Earth renewed from the ecological disasters we have inflicted upon it. About a week later, the official preacher in our congregation delivered an entire Sunday morning sermon about how evil my little sermon had been. He was pretty fierce. Remember, I was in high school. And his line of reasoning was pretty absurd. He said that what the passage about the New Heaven and New Earth literally meant was that the New Heaven was a new Heaven but the New Earth was the New Testament. He had to carefully explain his contorted reasoning to reach this interpretation. This was a really bruising experience for me.

When I was in graduate school in 1982, I was a member of a different fundamentalist church. I was invited to teach a class about evolution and Christianity. Some of the people in the church assumed that only the most literal form of creationism would be allowed. They were wrong. But they did not accept this. They insisted on putting me on trial before the church council, at which I was not allowed to defend myself from the lies they told about me, the same lies that they had spread throughout the church. The church council wanted me to continue teaching the class, but the life had been kicked out of it. These bitter people had decided that their belief in creationism gave them permission to make false accusations against me. Intimidation.

My first faculty position, in 1987, was at a fundamentalist Christian college. The faculty, all deeply conservative, were tearing each other apart in a civil war that eventually brought about the downfall of the college (the students got tired of it and stopped coming). I was largely unaffected; as a newcomer, I managed to stay neutral in the big war over an issue I do not even clearly remember.

I was kicked out of my second faculty position, at another fundamentalist Christian college, in 1992 by the decision of a secret committee to which I was not allowed to provide any information and whose information I was not allowed to question. More intimidation.

Then this year there was the hate mail I described earlier.

I am sure Jesus is very proud of all of these Christian warriors.

Not. If you survey the political scene, the conservative Christians either revile and lie about those who disagree with them (like Ann Coulter) or are openly hypocritical (like the thrice-married twice-philandering Newt Gingerich). On the religious scene, the most vociferous conservative Christians are those who attack others and who frequently use false information, both to sway voters and to get money. In my life I have seen an almost perfect pattern of bitter, lying conservative Christians and gentle, honest liberal Christians and agnostics. An outside observer (which I am not) would say, if there is a God in charge of things up there in heaven, why do the people who believe in him most do such terrible things? Conservative Christians are one of the best evidences against the existence of a God of Love who is actually in charge of the world.