The Comfortable Pew

Back in the 1960s, the Anglican Church in Canada asked the most famous Canadian writer of the time, Pierre Burton, who had withdrawn from active church affiliation, to write a book about why he had problems with Christianity. The result was his book The Comfortable Pew.

The major point was that churches, in Berton’s view, were irrelevant to important national and world issues. The title says it all; Christians withdrew from dealing with the problems of the world by hiding in church on their comfortable pews.

Imagine! That was the worst thing he could say about religion. Berton could not have imagined, I suspect, that in the next century powerful churches would practically control the American government and deliberately head the world toward war and Armageddon, that they would glorify politicians who lived in all the ways that they claimed were sinful. Today, in America, most fundamentalist Christians celebrate Roy Moore. He is famous for, as Alabama chief justice, defying federal courts regarding stone monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments on public property in Alabama, defying court orders to do so. He is now running for the U.S. Senate. Numerous women have accused him of sexual harassment. Apparently, to American fundamentalist Christians, you don’t have to actually obey the Ten Commandments, but just carve them in stone and then ignore them.

I almost wish we could go back to the time when the most dangerous thing about religion was irrelevancy.