Religious Parasitism, Part Two

My posts may continue to be delayed, because I and all of my computer connections are filled with viruses. I am posting this from a spare computer in a classroom.

In an earlier entry I mentioned three responses a child might make to extremely religious parents. The first two were to reject religion, or to embrace a more nurturing form of religion.

The third kind of response of a child to an extremely religious parent is for the child to follow in the footsteps of that parent. This is what Marjoe Gortner did, and continued to do even after he knew that his parents’ “ministry” was just a way of getting money and the admiration of followers. This is what Frank Schaeffer did, following the fame of his father Francis. He was particularly fond of writing conservative political screeds, as he described them. He later rejected this approach to religion. Herbert W. Armstrong convinced the Worldwide Church of God that his theology, about the coming utopia of God upon the Earth, headed by the United States and the nations of Western Europe, was uniquely correct, and they followed him. His son, Garner Ted Armstrong, used the same theology and had amazing charisma (on radio and television) besides. They got the church and its college to buy them a private jet, and they flew around the world to tell heads of state, everyone from President Suharto of Indonesia to the Duchess of Grand Fenwick, that God was going to usher in a utopia. Garner Ted used his influence for sexual exploits as well. In my early teens, I thought about becoming a follower of the Armstrong cult. One of my uncles (unknown to me until after his death) did so. Tulsa, Oklahoma, is famous not only for the late Oral Roberts, who openly admitted that his ministry was a very profitable business, but also for the way his son Richard notoriously abused ministry and university funds for private pleasures. I am currently a resident of Tulsa. I can’t seem to get away from these guys.

These are clear examples of people who parasitized the religious passion of their followers. In some cases, the parasitic leaders may be sincere in their delusion. In other cases, they may be in it solely for wealth and admiration, like Sinclair Lewis’s fictitious Elmer Gantry. Some, like Oral Roberts, may be a little of both. Oral Roberts considered the wealth he amassed from his followers (including my wife’s grandmother, who like many others sent him almost everything she could spare) to be evidence of God’s approval. He even said that he saw a 900-foot-tall Jesus telling him that people should give him money for a big hospital building as part of his ministry. Jesus died poor, but many religious leaders appear to believe that the rules have changed.

Religious memetic parasitism began nearly as soon as religion did. The Cro-Magnon caves contained drawings and hand paintings in their deep recesses. But in the outer caves, the chambers not far from the entrance, artists painted their most extensive artwork. David Lewis-Williams interpreted these entryways as being where the tribal members assembled to listen to the stories of their religious leaders. It must have been quite an experience: paintings of huge animals, still stunning to observers today, revealed then concealed by flickering lamplight or torchlight, with ecstatic voices ringing and echoing off of the cave walls, accompanied by wind instruments and percussion. Lewis-Williams said that it was not just the hills but the caves that were alive with the sound of music. This pattern of cave art can be found even in Chauvet, the oldest of the major Cro-Magnon caves (32,000 years old). There can be little doubt that tribal leaders used religion as a way of gaining power.

Agriculture allowed civilization to begin. A slave could raise enough food to feed more than just his own family, so others were free to be full-time priests, artists, and warriors, all roles that were less professionalized in tribal society. The leaders of earliest civilizations, including Egypt, Sumeria, and perhaps also Çatal Hüyük on the Anatolian peninsula, proclaimed themselves to literally be gods. Later civilizations, such as the Israelites, considered their leaders to be chosen by God. The use of religion for power is very nearly the story of human history. When a genius named Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that the federal government could not establish a religion, it was truly one of the most radical departures ever made from the direction of history.

Religious leaders have parasitized religion not only for personal profit and pleasure but also for influencing political opinions of their followers. The most widespread examples are of televangelists telling their followers to support the conservative wing of the Republican Party, starting with the late Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the 1980s. Pat Robertson has enough followers that he can maintain his own broadcasting network. He announces all of his own opinions as if they come straight from the mind of God, and none of his followers dares to dispute him. A typical example of one of his rants in 2008 (which I had to listen to in the hospital waiting room before a colonoscopy) can be summarized as, “Send money send money send money bomb Iran send money.” In January, 2010, a powerful earthquake brought incomprehensible misery to the nation of Haiti. The dead, those that could be pulled from the rubble, were piled along the same streets in which injured survivors writhed in pain. Some survivors covered themselves with rubble, only to be run over by vehicles whose drivers did not see them. Not even a day had passed when, on January 13, 2010, Pat Robertson announced that this earthquake was God’s punishment on the Haitian people. They had, he claimed, made a pact with the devil two hundred years earlier, that they would worship the devil in return for having the French colonialists ousted. I marvel that Robertson’s thousands of followers believed (or at least made little objection to) even this most outrageous and hateful statement, which was clearly intended to undermine political support for the Obama Administration’s relief efforts.

However laudatory some churches and religious leaders may be, it is clear that forces of selfishness and oppression have made extensive use of religion.

This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.

The Church of Hopeful Uncertainty: A Message from Frank Schaeffer

In the 1970s and 1980s, Francis Schaeffer was an iconic figure among evangelical Christians. He popularized the intellectual underpinnings of religious and political conservatism. Perhaps his principal sidekick was his son Franky, who wrote his own books, including one that defends capitalism as the Christian system by which the world should run. Franky now goes by Frank and visited Tulsa yesterday to tell us about the changes that have emerged in his thinking since the 1980s. He is now appalled at the monster that political evangelical Christianity created.

Schaeffer and many others describe the political right, today, as the American Taliban. It is no joke. The religious right does not want democracy; they want to establish a religious dictatorship, and they are accumulating caches of weapons to do so. Polls repeatedly show that a large minority of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. There is no more opportunity for dialogue or compromise with this position than it is possible to have meaningful compromise with Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Schaeffer pointed out that the conservatives among whom he grew up, such as his father and William F. Buckley, would not recognize the monstrous form of conservatism that now dominates the political scene. Schaeffer said that Barack Obama represents our last and best hope to avoid a religious dictatorship in the United States; if his presidency fails, a religious dictatorship is nearly certain. The motivation of the religious right is not godliness—an astonishingly large number of the leaders of the religious right lead immoral lives—but power, and they have no more esteem for truth than they do for godliness. He also pointed out that conservative leaders would publically talk about Christianity but in secret they would laugh at the Christians who played into their hands. Schaeffer changed his views when he realized that he would not want to live in the world he was trying to create, and that the secularists whom he publicly opposed were better people, personally and morally, than the leaders of the religious right. Schaeffer said that if Obama fails, this nation is screwed for the next hundred years.

Schaeffer also talked about what he now considers to be true religion. To the American Taliban, all that matters is that you assent to certain religious doctrines and are willing to use any and all means to oppose those who disagree with them. But to those who are truly religious, the right way is openness to the beauty and awe of the universe. The American Taliban fantasizes that it fully understands the truth; but we can never know the full truth. Our brains are biological structures that evolved within a physical universe; we are “stuck in” the universe and cannot objectively observe it or ourselves. Schaeffer opposes fundamentalist atheists as much as he does fundamentalist Christians, although, of course, the former are not dangerous like the latter. He describes his religious affiliation as “the church of hopeful uncertainty.” We cannot understand the universe any more than an infant can. We can never be certain but there is reason for us to believe that goodness and love are fundamental truths. Theology just gives us a rationalization for what we already know is true and good. In saying this, Schaeffer echoed the views of evolutionary psychologist Michael Gazzaniga, although Schaeffer may never have heard of him.

Schaeffer said nearly everything that people like me are saying, but much more powerfully—and from a position of being a former insider in the religious right.