CheapGrace, a New Phone App

I have just posted a new video about a new phone app, which allows you to sin all you want to and yet get forgiven a thousand times a second. Available only to Republicans.

There is no such thing as human nature, I think. We have instincts, some we consider good (such as love) and some we consider evil (such as hatred). As we live, we create our own human nature, by (one would hope) practicing the good ones and minimizing the bad ones. This is true for all humans individually, if mentally normal; all ethnicities; and at all times in history. It is the legacy of evolution, of altruism. The reality is much more complex than this, but there is no time to explore this topic now.

That is the evolutionary view. The fundamentalist Christian view, however, is that everyone is a sinner unless God specifically forgives them. But as soon as you commit another sin, you have to ask forgiveness over again. The good news is that there is no Biblical limit to number of times God will forgive you. Even fundamentalist Christians would say that you cannot ask forgiveness a hundred thousand times and expect God to keep forgiving you, but, strictly speaking, there is no Biblical basis for this assertion, however reasonable it seems.

Theoretically, then, you could just keep doing whatever you want, and every time you sin, say “Woopsie, forgive me,” and God will forgive you.

But you could sin a hundred times a day. What happens if you die right after unforgiven sin number 57? What you need to do is to keep muttering “Woopsie, forgive me” all the time. This would be mind-numbing, but it would work.

What follows next is fiction.

You would go crazy by praying “Woopsie, forgive me” a hundred times an hour. But you don’t have to! This is the age of the phone app. You can download a phone app, “CheapGrace,” that is named after a concept created, disparagingly, by the World War II era Christian martyr Dietrich Boenhoeffer. It will send text messages to God demanding forgiveness. The free version (available from Gotohell.com) texts God 10 times per second. The version that you pay for will do it a thousand times a second. You think that God cannot handle a thousand pleas for forgiveness from billions of people each second? Remember, this is an infinite God we are talking about. This app will run in the background, so you can just forget all about it, and your sins are taken care of.

There are a couple of caveats, however.

First, it is available only to Republicans. You must click on the box indicating “I am a Republican,” and another box saying, “I am not a robot.”

Second, it is not available while your phone is updating itself, but that is usually at night when you are asleep, and you cannot sin. Of course, if you have insomnia, or if it turns out you can sin while asleep, then you are taking a little bit of a risk.

Technology can be fundamentalism’s best friend, in some cases.

Why I Hate Fundamentalism and How I Emerged from It

I wish to tell my own personal story about why I hate Christian fundamentalism. My experiences are similar to those of thousands of other people’s, and I want to add mine to the online collection of accounts of religious oppression. Oppression of the mind.

There might be a gene for it. My paternal grandfather was a religious fanatic who spent his time and money on fundamentalist preaching, to the neglect of his family. He left on a preaching tour while his son, my father, lay dying in bed from an infection, from which he recovered. When my grandfather died, he left his biological family $1. His church parasites got the rest and spent it on luxuries.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was a devotee of Garner Ted Armstrong, a slick radio preacher whose every word I considered to be direct from God. I was even ready to, as soon as legally possible or sooner, join his church. His religion was a strange mutation of Identity Christianity, that is, the British and Americans were direct descendants of the patriarch Joseph and, as such, deserved world rulership. Many white-supremacist churches today believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to maintain white oppression, but Armstrong just said the problems of the world are too big for humans to solve, and that Jesus would come back and set things right, with white people ruling the world. I never realized the racist content of his message, since he never said “white” but just “Joseph.”

Part of the power of Armstrong’s influence upon me came from the fact that I first learned about the perils of the world from his radio shows—for example, famine and overpopulation; pollution; the threat of nuclear war. He said he and he alone knew the answer to these problems: God would solve them, not gradually, but in one big apocalyptic event.

Because of my devotion, I was blind to Armstrong’s immorality. One day, when I started to listen to his program—on which I took extensive minuscule notes—his father (Herbert W. Armstrong) was on the radio, giving Bible-centered fundamentalist sermon reruns. I found out later it was because Garner Ted had run off with a woman. Later the world found out that he had been systematically sleeping with girls from one of his Ambassador colleges, as described in In Bed with Garner Ted. Those young women, and his thousands of little donors, paid a much higher price than I did.

 

The reason I left the Armstrongs’s church was that I fell into another fundamentalist cult, the Church of Christ. They actually convinced me that they alone had the correct interpretation of the Bible. They had whole books and sermons about how “The Lord’s Supper” (communion or eucharist) was to feature just one cup, not multiple cups, of grape juice, not wine. The only way I could consider such a trivial point to be important is that they had complete control over my mind. This continued through my undergraduate days. Because I thought that it would be wrong for me to marry any woman who was not a member of our little branch of the Church of Christ (even other Churches of Christ were off-limits to “fellowship”), my social life was truncated into a frustrated loneliness. I drove fifty miles each way each Sunday to attend the one and only correct Church of Christ in my part of the world, ignoring the one right down the highway from me. They controlled my life. I remember how awful I felt when, even when I was in high school, the local preacher had denounced me as a dangerously wrong person when I taught a different interpretation of scripture than he did. I was seriously depressed from it. Gee, thanks, Brother Bob Sanders. One of the congregations to which I was devoted eventually closed, but was taken over by another openly oppressive fundamentalist church, this time Baptist.

Eventually, when I went to graduate school, I found I could not maintain this link. It was an emotionally wrenching experience when I tore away from my roots in that church. But, of course, I promptly fell into a new fundamentalist spiderweb: the creationists. My link with creationism had begun in my undergraduate days. As a biology major, I developed the intricate skill of believing the science that I agreed with and rejecting the rest, not realizing I was being dishonest.

After I began to learn scientific and careful thinking in graduate school, I questioned the creationists. I taught a church class about creation and evolution, which was basically a theistic evolution approach. Two old men, fierce creationists both, arranged to have me put on trial by the church leadership. I was not allowed to speak in my own defense. I found out later it was because the trial was just meant to let the old men blow off steam. But once again, it was an emotionally battering experience. Gee, thanks, Marlyn Clark.

Then I fell into the web of Christian colleges. My first two faculty jobs were at so-called Christian colleges. I was unspeakably inspired to be teaching students about science, not in opposition to but enriched by Christian views. This included environmental issues, about which I believed Christians should care. But, as I learned from these two jobs, a Christian college was just an excuse to pretend to have intellectual honesty. At the first college, The King’s College, factions of the faculty spent most of their time disputing with one another over college politics. Later, after I was gone, they chose a president (Dinesh D’Souza) whose only qualification for his job was that he hated Democrats and could write convincing lies against them. He would (and continues to) just make stuff up. The only thing that got him fired was when he had an extramarital affair. But even this King’s College experience did not disturb my idealism about Christian Higher Education.

The second college was Huntington College. Here, the pervasive assumption was that Christianity consisted of obedience to the Republican Party. This was at the time when Huntington native Dan Quayle was vice president. Since I taught environmental issues, which Dan Quayle considered to be leftist propaganda, I was in a precarious position. When I became the victim of secret political maneuvering, I was extremely upset and depressed for about two years. This time, I wanted to write a book about The Reality of a Christian College, an antidote to the widely read The Idea of a Christian College and to the hypocritical books written by Huntington president Eugene Habecker. I wanted to describe Christian Higher Education as corrupt while pretending to not be. It did not occur to me that nobody, including me, would want to read such a book.

The agony I experienced from these two jobs considerably lessened my ability to enjoy my beautiful daughter as she grew up from ages one to seven. I played the role of responsible father, but I could not experience the full delight of being her father, a delight I have thankfully recovered by enjoying my granddaughter at these ages. What joy I missed the first time around!

After these experiences, which lasted about 23 years, I settled into a calmer, more generalized Christianity. I could finally enjoy religion and life. All of the previous links, from Armstrong to Huntington, were dead to me.

But I eventually realized that even good religion was not worth the effort. For the last sixteen years, I have not been associated with a church. This, plus my rejection of popular entertainment such as cable TV and movies, has left me with an enormous amount of time to think about, write about, and enjoy the world of science. I had to wait until I was almost 50 years old before I could inhale the breath of freedom found in agnosticism. I now know that if there is a God, this God is a spirit of love, rather than a dictator of doctrines. My message to the world, in this blog and in many books, is not to hate religion but to hate its oppressive forms and seek inspiration directly from the natural and scientific world. I still read, and love, the sayings of Jesus, for example, without stressing out about the correct literal interpretation.

Religion Allows No Gray Areas of Uncertainty (for Abortion)

Nearly everything on Earth (and probably every place else in the universe) has areas of uncertainty between opposites. For example, there are plants, and there are animals, but there are some protists that could be considered neither one nor the other.

But religion is in the business of creating absolute distinctions. You are either going to Heaven, or to Hell; something is either sinful, or it is not; there are the sheep, and the goats.

One recent example of the difference between science and fundamentalist religion involves abortion. I have written very little about abortion, since I know little about it, and my opinions have little validity. I will let other people get angry on one side or the other. I am more interested in the light band of grayness between the two sides. Here are two relevant stories.

A Texas couple looked forward to having a child and were overjoyed with preparation for its arrival. Then, mid-pregnancy, an unthinkable tragedy occurred. The woman’s water broke, and all the amniotic fluid was lost. The fetus was thus doomed to death. But Texas has a heartbeat law. Abortion is murder if a heartbeat is detectable. In this case, the fetus still has a heartbeat, and under Texas law a doctor cannot abort the fetus. The woman has to carry the fetus, which has no hope of survival (unless God performs a miracle), perhaps risking her own health, until the heartbeat stops, something that could take a long time. What kind of law would insist that a woman carry a fetus until it inevitably dies? Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

In Ohio, a nine-year-old girl was raped, and became pregnant. But Ohio law forbids abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. She had an abortion in Indiana. What kind of law would force a now ten-year-old girl to carry through a pregnancy from a rape? This assumes that her body would even be capable of handling this. Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

I am not saying whether or not a state should or should not have an anti-abortion law. But it is clear to me that individual exceptions must be allowed. But individual exceptions are something that fundamentalist religions will not allow.

The only thing I am absolutely sure about is that we can trust the women. A mother’s love is a force of nature. Mothers are not looking for a chance to kill their fetuses unless an old white man points a gun and tells them not to. Abortion is an act of desperation, as the above examples and thousands of other news items illustrate.

Among other things, life is about gray areas of uncertainty. An absolute light/dark distinction is a characteristic of death. Science fiction writer Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis made this distinction in his Perelandra novels. In these novels, the forces of evil wanted to make everything black and white, as on the Moon; but on Earth, there is a lot of penumbra. Many religious fundamentalists today would side with Lewis’s forces of evil. But Lewis was a Christian and used to be, at least when I was younger, a very popular Christian writer. Times, apparently, have changed, or at least Christianity has.

Jesus for Agnostics

Religious people, especially fundamentalist Christians, believe that, in order to know God, you have to know all about him. You have to have your doctrines all figured out. To them, it is utterly impossible to know God if you do not even know whether there is a God. Furthermore, they insist that, in order to love other people, you have to have your doctrines all figured out. One can, therefore, summarize conservative Christian belief as “He who knows about God is born of God and loves.”

But the Gospel of John says exactly the opposite. It says, “He who loves is born of God and knows God.” Fundamentalist Christians have it exactly backwards, even according to their own Bible.

I love, therefore I know God (not necessarily about God). When I say I love, I mean that I care about other people, as individuals and as a world. I love God’s creation, even though I believe it was not supernaturally created; I love it because it keeps us all alive, and I love it for its own sake. Of course, I do other things besides loving. Sometimes I hate. Sometimes I lust. Sometimes I feel infatuated, although as I get older this is rare and mild. I am sometimes greedy. But these things do not negate the fact that I love. How about the rest of you? You probably do also.

One way of showing love is to encourage others. I spend a lot of time encouraging my students. I help them achieve their goals, and I also help to open their eyes to the wonders of the world and of creativity. I encourage my colleagues (usually). And I appreciate the encouragement of others.

Back in 1992, I was getting fired from a faculty position, by a process that I believed was unfair and inaccurate. It was a major disruption in my life at the time, although I am glad that I am no longer at that college. (It was a Christian college that considered Republican faith to be Christian faith.) I sought out a professor at a nearby major university. I am not sure how I chose him, but he was active in the American Association of University Professors, the professorial union. (Christian colleges generally do not have, or even allow, professors to band together for mutual benefit.) He was a busy man, in a field quite unrelated to mine. But he took the time to write a thoughtful, information-filled letter to the president of the college I was leaving, explaining that he had no personal connection to me but that he believed the process of my termination was unfair. (The college administration ignored him.)

I had forgotten all about this letter until, in the process of clearing out old boxes, I found it. This encouragement was powerfully important to me at that time. Although I had forgotten about it, it must have been one of the influences that turned me from a young professor who worried mostly about his own advancement into a mature professor who, as this man did, encourages and defends others.

By encouraging others, you can turn them into encouragers. He who loves knows God, if there is one.

Who Needs Nazis When You Have Fundamentalist Christians?

One of the unusual experiences you can have when you visit the South is that the airwaves are dominated by Christian radio stations. And not positive Christian stations, but stations that loudly proclaim all the worst things about fundamentalist faith.

When I drove through the Oklahoma City area recently, I found seven Christian stations. And on two of them, simultaneously, the preacher’s message was this: If you do not believe in an eternal hell of infinite and ceaseless torture, you CANNOT believe in Jesus Christ, and therefore YOU will go to hell. That is, the preacher was saying, if you do not believe in my interpretation of the Bible, you will go to hell. You will go to hell unless you believe in a literal, eternal hell.

Oh, but God loves you.

Now, suppose that the preachers, being mere humans, might have misinterpreted scripture. But, of course, this is impossible, since they consider themselves to be infallible and inerrant as individuals. They cannot be wrong, because God exists. They are no more likely to be wrong than for God to be wrong. What they are saying is, of course, blasphemy.

But they take their blasphemy even further. One of these preachers, representing Rhema Church in Tulsa, insisted that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. All Jews are guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus, His blood is upon them, unless they become Christians.

This is exactly the message that preachers, under the orders of Hitler, proclaimed to Jews who were about to be transported to the death camps. The difference is that, if a German preacher under the Third Reich refused to say this, he could be killed. There is utterly no obligation for modern preachers to say this unless they are, in their heart of hearts, Nazis.

Why do they say this? Because, according to at least one gospel, a crowd of Jews insisted that Jesus be crucified, and they said, “Let his blood be upon us and upon all our generations.”

Leaving aside for the moment whether this really happened, the modern preachers are making a totally incorrect assumption, but one that they keep secret. They assume that the people in that crowds that day in Jerusalem two millennia ago had the AUTHORITY to condemn all Jews in all generations after theirs. Furthermore, that God Himself was OBLIGATED to obey them; God had to condemn all Jews through all time for the sins of the ones in the crowd that day long ago.

This is as ridiculous as for me to commit some evil, and then call forth condemnation on my daughter, her soon-to-arrive baby, and all my descendants for such evil as I may commit. This would mean that I can send my daughter and all my descendants to hell just by calling for God to do so.

Of course, those Jews had no such authority, nor did God have any such obligation. But the modern preachers assume upon themselves the authority to proclaim that God is so obligated. The only reason the preacher said this on the Rhema station is that he deeply loves what the Nazis did and hopes that some group of people do the same again. The assumption upon which they build their belief—and, apparently, their entire framework of faith—is so utterly ridiculous that no other explanation is possible except that they want to believe the Jews deserved the Holocaust.

It is things like this that make fundamentalist Christianity an imminent and severe danger to the future of the world. And if you want to hear things like this, just come to Oklahoma or any place else in the South and search the airwaves for just a few moments and you will find them.

Christians Worship Trump

In America today, Christianity consists entirely of the worship of Donald Trump. Christians believe that everything Trump says is correct and must be believed, is good and must be obeyed. The Bible, and Jesus, are totally irrelevant to modern American Christianity.

Of course, you will immediately say that there are millions of Christians regarding whom this statement is incorrect. And you would be right, of course. I happen to know a few and so do you. But there are many other millions of Christians who loudly proclaim the near-divinity of Donald Trump.

What I have chosen to do, for the sake of simplicity, is to assume that all Christians are worshipers of Trump. I will then make individual exceptions for those Christians who make a public denunciation of Trump in some way or other. If you are a Christian who does not worship Trump, your denunciation must be public, as on Facebook, or a blog. Something that is searchable on the internet. You cannot secretly worship Jesus while publicly worshiping Trump.

I realize that it is something of a risk to identify yourself as a Christian who denounces Trump. His followers have guns and love them. But the danger is not nearly as great now as it will be later, once Trump’s worshipers have more power. And your public denunciation is likely to have more of an effect now than later.

The German churches largely went along with Hitler. If they had stood up to him in 1933, history might have been different. But by 1939 it was no longer possible for the churches to change anything. By then, not just Germans but Vichy French and other sympathizers were committing acts of unspeakable cruelty—acts that they might sincerely have not wanted to commit—while claiming that they were just following orders.

Some possible places to post your opposition to Trump:

• The whitehouse.gov website (keep a copy)
• On Facebook
• Your blog

So if you identify yourself to me as a Christian, I will assume that you worship Trump and wish Him to be the great spiritual leader of America. But I will ask you if you have publicly denounced Trump, and where you posted your statement. If you can answer that question, then I will concede that you are a Christian. Otherwise I can only assume that you are a worshiper of Trump, with whom for my own personal safety I must communicate as little as possible.

Lord, Liar, Lunatic…or Lourdes

Was the resurrection of Jesus an illusion? I’m not saying that it was, but on this blog you should expect such questions to be asked.

A famous fundamentalist evangelist of the 1970s was Josh McDowell, who was well known for turning the piercing light of logic upon the Christian religion and proclaiming that its fundamental tenets had passed the test of credibility. Most famously, he posed the question of Jesus’ divinity. If Jesus was not Lord, then He must have been a liar, for He claimed that He was, or a lunatic, for believing Himself to be. Lord, liar, or lunatic—a catchy phrase.

Catchy but wrong. If, in fact, you can eliminate the liar and lunatic options for Jesus, then the only possible conclusion is “Lord,” which is true only if McDowell considered all the possibilities. But there is a fourth possibility: the resurrection was an illusion, which people wanted so badly to believe that their minds created the beliefs.

This does not mean that the early Christians, or their successors, were lunatics. Perfectly normal people can have illusions; they become lunatics only if the illusion overwhelms their common sense ability to function in society. I will use a couple of examples from the Catholic Church, which is actually less prone to illusion than many fundamentalist sects.

First, consider the “miracle of Lourdes.” In 1858, a girl named Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in a grotto near Lourdes in southern France. Not once, but eighteen times. Two of the things the Virgin told her were, first, that she (not just Jesus) had been immaculately (asexually, presumably through mitosis) conceived, and second, that if believers would dig a hole at the base of the grotto they would release a spring of water that would have healing properties.

Consider the claim about the immaculate conception of Mary. Some people say that this had to be revealed by the Virgin herself to Mlle. Bernadette, because Pope Pius IX had not declared this doctrine until 1854, only four little tiny years before Mlle. Bernadette’s visions, and during those four brief years Mlle. Bernadette could not have possibly heard about it. Of course, she most certainly could have known about it.

There is a spring from the grotto and it ejects enough water that people can go swimming in it. And millions have done so. The grotto of Lourdes has had 200 million visitors since 1860. Claims have been made that the waters cured nerve damage, cancer, paralysis, even blindness. The Catholic Church recognizes that many of these hundreds of claims have been delusions, but has certified 69 of them as genuine. We all know, however, about the placebo effect: almost anything can make you feel better, or even feel cured, it you sincerely believe it to be so. The placebo effect has long been the bane of pharmaceutical development. But the placebo effect works so well, especially if the placebos are expensive, that some scientists wonder if possibly the placebos should be used to unleash the body’s self-healing capacity. Numerous scientific studies have been conducted with the water from this spring, and no curative effects have been found.

The people who make pilgrimages to Lourdes (the second largest tourist spot in France after Paris) are not lunatics, but they are experiencing an illusion. The human mind, even a normal mind, sees what it expects to see.

Second, consider the “miracle of Fátima.” Based on persistent rumors, somewhere between thirty and one hundred thousand pious Catholics had gathered near this Portuguese town, fully convinced that some unspecified solar miracle was going to happen on October 13, 1917. They would latch onto anything out of the ordinary as a miracle. The people were watching the sun, many of them having smudged smoke onto glass to make solar filters. Some reported seeing the sun itself become a spinning disc in the sky, which careened toward the Earth and then zigzagged back to its original location. Others reported seeing multi-colored sunlight. Others saw both. Some saw nothing.

Since the sun is so big and so far away, this event could not possibly have happened any more than actual stars could fall from the sky the way the Bible says. So what did happen? The spinning and zigzagging could have been retinal after-images. Haven’t you ever seen these after glancing at the sun? Happens to me all the time, if I happen to look toward the sun and then away. What about the colors? Sometimes high-altitude atmospheric ice crystals can refract light into a rainbow of colors, even forming colorful bright blotches to either side of the sun. They may immediately precede a snowstorm. They are called false suns or sundogs. They can cause the appearance of three suns, such as in the Wilhelm Müller poem (Die Nebensonnen) that Schubert used in Die Winterreise: “Drei Sonnen sah ich am Himmel steh’n…” I have seen them. If I had not studied the rudiments of physics, I might have considered them a miracle.

Jesus’ disciples might have wanted so badly to believe that Jesus was not really dead that their otherwise sane and normal minds played tricks on them. Christian apologists claim it could not have been an illusion because the disciples were not expecting to see Jesus rise from the dead. But it cannot be denied that they hoped He would. In one account, two disciples walked with a stranger, whom they did not recognize, upon the Emmaus Road. Only after he was gone did they “realize” that the stranger was in fact Jesus, but with a different face. This is exactly what a psychologist would expect to hear from someone who was experiencing an illusion.

The disciples weren’t crazy. They were just human.

Liar and lunatic are not the only alternative to Lord. There are two alternatives: Lord and Lourdes.

Not So Inerrant After All

Fundamentalist Christians believe themselves to be personally inerrant when it comes to interpreting the Bible. The Bible is capable of many different interpretations, but a fundamentalist believes that whatever interpretation s/he chooses is inevitably the correct one. For example, they believe that “day” in Genesis 1 means 24 hours; but this cannot be the meaning of “day” in Genesis 2. So they claim that the word has two different meanings in the two chapters. And they believe that this rule of interpretation cannot be wrong, and you are headed straight for hell if you think they are wrong.

But they have quietly allowed their inerrant interpretations to change. A few decades ago, conservative white Christians were absolutely certain that some people were black because of the Curse of Cain, or maybe it was the Curse of Ham, or something, and that they had literal Biblical justification for hating black people and undertaking acts of violence against them. There are still white Biblical fundamentalists who believe this, but it is a comparatively rare belief today. Somehow, in the last few decades, many fundamentalist Christians have changed their beliefs. This has not happened because of federal government force. Maybe it started that way; they were furious about the government enforcing school busing and integration. But today you will find very few fundamentalist Christians who say “I get along with black people only because the federal government forces me to.” Most white fundamentalists genuinely like people of other races. Now.

Why the change? The Bible has not changed. Nor did God appear in the sky and announce, “Hey, uh, listen up; I just decided, uh, that it’s okay to like black people now.” It is the fundamentalists themselves who have changed their beliefs. If fundamentalists are inerrant in their Bible interpretations, then why have their beliefs changed? It is because they learned some things. They learned from experience that black people are just people, with good and bad individuals just like any other race. This means that somebody was wrong sometime. Either modern fundamentalists are insulting the Bible by liking black people, or else their recent predecessors were insulting the Bible by hating black people. Somewhere along the line, somebody interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

When a modern fundamentalist claims that they and they alone know what the correct interpretation of the Bible is, they should remember that earlier fundamentalists made the same claim about beliefs that are now widely rejected.

What Fundamentalists Think about Themselves

I wrote the following as an introduction to a book I am working on. I decided to not use it, since it has a very negative tone. But I believe it is true and I will post it here for you to look over briefly if you wish.

The term fundamentalist was first used in the 1920s in a series of books, The Fundamentals, published in the United States, which clearly outlined the beliefs that a Christian was supposed to have, based upon a “literal” reading of the Bible. All around these authors, the world was changing rapidly, and they had to figure out which of their beliefs were fundamental, and which could be surrendered. The authors were reacting against a tide of loose morality that they believed was sweeping the country during what we still call “The Roaring Twenties.” The Roaring Twenties came to an end not so much because fundamentalism triumphed but because the Great Depression brought an end to exuberant and spendthrift living.

But “fundamentalist” has come to mean something very different today. It no longer means someone who simply believes the Bible to be literally true. It has come to represent a person who almost treats a Bible as a talisman that makes them superior to other humans—spiritually superior, as if it makes Satan flee from them in terror, and mentally superior, as it makes their minds capable of understanding all eternal truths. It also serves as a badge of membership in an elite society of God’s very, very special Elect. It no longer represents a person who humbly accepts the Word of God; it has come to represent a person who considers himself or herself to be personally inerrant and commanded to be ready for action in God’s name. They may not literally make these claims about themselves, but if you listen to what they say and look at what they do, this is the conclusion that you will have to reach. I used to be a Christian fundamentalist and I did not literally make these claims about myself. I was hesitant and quiet about asserting myself to be superior to non-Christians, and even to non-fundamentalist Christians, in this way. But I knew plenty of other fundamentalists who were neither hesitant nor quiet. Eventually my level of discomfort was so great that I left fundamentalism. I was quite aware of my own imperfections, and finally decided I could no longer place myself in a superior position of authority over other people.

First, consider the unspoken fundamentalist belief in personal inerrancy. They hold their Bibles in the air, and believe that they know the answer to every question about the history of the universe, the story of mankind, and the meaning of life. They know the single correct answer to every political question. They don’t even have to read that Bible. They would be hard-pressed to tell you very many things that are, in fact, in that bible. Ask one of them what the prophets Joel or Amos or Obadiah said. Most of them have never read the entire Bible, or even very much of it, which is strange since they say that a Christian has to live by all of those words. But just having it in their hands gives them the power to know everything, at least everything that matters.

I used to admire my fellow fundamentalists whose Bibles looked well-worn with study. Then I saw one of them, after church, talking with others. He held his soft-leather-bound Bible in his hands and bent it back and forth in a harmless and meaningless manner. So that’s why it looks well worn! Not because he reads it, but because he bends it back and forth whenever he talks to people after church! My Bible looked unstudied, because I kept it in the blue box in which it had originally been given to me and took it out only to use it. My badge of distinction was, of course, the deep stains from the oil on my fingers on the box. This Bible, by the way, was a gift from the other fundamentalists. They were tired of me using my Revised Standard Version. They insisted, quietly since they could not prove it, that the only version of the Bible that was really valid was the English translation that was made in 1611 under the oversight of a king, King James (who was a closet homosexual and had a lover’s-tunnel built between his room and that of his male partner.)

Second, consider their unspoken belief that God has commanded them to be ready for action. They are legislators, or vote for legislators, who want to enshrine a special status for fundamentalism, even if not by name, in state laws. And not just for fundamentalism, but for a whole bushel full of conservative laws that have no direct and clear connection with fundamentalism. Take, for example, gun rights. Nearly all fundamentalists believe that Americans should have nearly unlimited access to firearms. Where did they get this idea? They cannot show it to you in the Bible. Jesus even told his disciple Peter to put his sword away because “those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” This was clearly meant by Jesus as disapproval of weapons.

At the moment, most fundamentalists believe that all of their actions should be within the law of the land. But I would like to point out how tenuous this belief is. It is based upon only a few scriptures, each of which can be interpreted differently than what fundamentalists currently believe. Jesus said to render under to Caesar what is Caesar’s, so they pay their taxes. The Apostle Paul told them to be subject to the government authorities, so they obey the law. But they all know that there are limits to this authority. Jesus testified during his trial before Pontius Pilate that “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, then my servants would take up arms.” Nevertheless, when the Roman government or its local subsidiaries commanded Christians to worship Caesar or local gods, they refused. At some point, a line is crossed.

And it is a moving line. Sometimes the line moves back. Fundamentalists find themselves spending less and less time opposing things that they used to consider utterly fundamental, such as racial segregation in the past and gay rights at the present time. Sometimes, as with racial segregation, they will even admit that they have learned some things and that fundamentalists in the past had been wrong. In other cases, as with gay rights, they still believe the same things they did before but are now unwilling to make such a big deal about it—so long as gay people stay out of their churches and don’t teach school and don’t run for public office.

But the line can, under the right circumstances, move forward. Fundamentalists have immense numbers of firearms which they claim they will never use against any human who simply disagrees with them. They want their assault weapons only to play with them, and their handguns only for self-defense. But they are ready. All that is needed is for the religious leaders whose commands they follow to say, “The time has come for us to use those guns.” You think it can never happen, and I hope it can never happen. But there is nothing to prevent it from happening during a time of social disruption, when the government that they claim to respect in God’s name appears to not be functioning in a manner they consider viable. They are ready, at least many of them are.

Many fundamentalists consider themselves commanded to be ready for action because they believe themselves to be personally inerrant. If and when the time comes, they will not have time to consult a Bible for answers about what to do. Should they support Texas secession from the Union, as hundreds of thousands of them now do, or not? Should they oppose government-mandated or even government-encouraged measures for energy efficiency, or should they continue to insist that God wants us to burn up all the oil and coal we can, right now, as millions of them believe? Should they join a militia, as thousands of them have, or not? And should such a militia take up arms against the government, as claimed by one local elected official in Texas, or not? The Bible, which they haven’t read anyway, has no clear answers spelled out to such questions. They have to use their own judgment which they believe is inerrant, so long as they hold that Bible up over their heads.

My Skepticism: The Early Days

Perhaps the first seedling of skepticism germinated in my brain long, long before I became a skeptical inquirer of Christianity. It happened back when I was still a fundamentalist.

The church of which I was a member insisted that everyone in the world who believed differently from us, or ever had, were going to burn in hell forever. This would include people who were members of other Christian churches. Even at the time, I simply could not believe this. I personally knew lots of people who were not in our church but whom a God of Love would simply not be able to send to hell, unless he was an evil God.

That was it. It took decades for the realization to emerge in my mind that the whole doctrinal infrastructure of who is going to heaven and who is going to hell was invented by humans. As I write these words, the climactic theme from Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is booming in my mind—at the climax of which, everyone is amazed to discover that the Resurrection is for everyone and not just for the doctrinally orthodox.

Emails from Hell, part seventeen.

{beginning of email}

            It was easy for us to find the Chamberlain’s house. It said Chamberlain on the entablature in flashing neon. All the houses looked like the wood frame houses from a medieval village, all crowded together.

            The man who answered the door must have been an impressive piece of work when he was alive. He was tall, fat, and had red hair. He wore gold and silver and silk and jewels and silk and silver and gold. He had a crown on his head. He yelled at Andrew. “Andy, if you weren’t Pete’s brother, I’d have your head struck from your neck. Not that it would do any good, of course. And who is this miserable commoner?”

            [Response omitted]

            “And why should I let this person in to see God?” Then, to me, he said, “Kneel down before me, you loser. Grovel! Don’t you recognize me?”

            “And if I don’t grovel?” I asked.

            “Look, Harry, do I have to remind you each time? I don’t tattle on you when you come down to visit the whorehouse, so you let my guests in for a visit. That’s the deal. Grovel or no grovel.”

            “And no, I don’t recognize you,” I said. “But you look like a king of some kind.”

            “Took him long enough to figure that one out,” said the Chamberlain.

            “And you have a British accent. Harry. Wait! You can’t be…”

            “Oh, yes, he can,” said Andrew.

            I was standing in the presence of King Henry VIII.

            “Isn’t it kind of a step down to be a chamberlain?” I asked him.

            “I’ll brook no disrespect, no disrespect!” He was fuming and out of control. “One word from me and you will…oh, I guess you will not,” Harry said, calming back down. “A step down? Not really. I am second only to God, in Heaven as I was on Earth back when I not only was the head of but when I started the Church of England.”

            “Second to God?” I asked. “Aren’t we forgetting someone?”

            “I’ll explain it when we get back,” Andy said.

            “So, you want to see God? Well, he is a lot like me. He yells a lot, always angry; he has reddish hair; he demands deference from everyone who approaches him; and he has had lots of wives. Like me in all four ways.”

            “Gee,” I said. “I wonder who God could be? Someone who is angry, demands deference, has reddish hair, and lots of wives? And, of course, thinks he’s God.”

{end of email}

Tune in next time to find out who God is!

Emails from Hell, Part three

Here is the third email that I received from a soul recently arrived in Hell. The first two are in the posts immediately below. When we last left off, the Apostle John, in Hell, had taken our informant to a telescope where he could look into Heaven.

{Beginning of email}

            I don’t know what I was expecting. Souls walking on clouds of blue cotton candy, playing harps? Actually, there were one or two of them doing this. But most of them drove around in Jeeps. The cloudscape looked like a barren landscape, which looked a little bit like the Middle East or Afghanistan. I was soon to discover that there was a very good reason for this.

            At first I could not quite understand what I was seeing. It was, indeed, a whole bunch of Jeeps, and it had the souls of men in it. They wore combat fatigues and carried AK47s. They drove around in random circles—there is no place to actually go in Heaven—but they were obviously waiting for someone. And they were whooping in ecstasy. They took sharp turns that threw up clods of cloud.

            Then I saw another bunch of Jeeps approaching them. It also had men in it with AK47s, but these men had head scarves and long beards.           

            A man from the first group held up what appeared to be a Bible, waved it in the air, and screamed out, Praise Sweet Jesus! Someone from the second group of men held up what appeared to be a Koran, waved it in the air, and screamed out, Praise Allah!

            Then both groups dropped their books, got out their guns, and started shooting at each other. This went on for a long time. There was a sun in the sky—not the source of light, but a sort of timekeeper—and one of the Bible guys held out his arm toward it and commanded it to stop so that, just as in the days of Joshua, they could have a longer day for slaughtering their enemies.

            Finally they had fired enough rounds that several of the men were literally pulverized into little puddles of flesh. Others ran from their group toward the other and started fighting at close range, until one of the jihadists blew them all up. What was left was a big, quivering, bloody pile of protoplasm. The jeeps were smoking hulks.

            As I was watching, the Bible slipped off the edge of the cloud and fell down into Hell, landing close enough to me that I could run and grab it. The other group apparently lost a Koran in the same way. It was covered with blood and gore (no mud; it was from Heaven) but, as I started turning the pages, I saw no evidence that it had ever been read.

            John urged me to go back and look in the telescope again. The giant amoeba that had once been two armies of men started separating into two globs and moving apart from one another. Slowly, they formed back into the men who had slaughtered one another. But this time the two groups ignored one another. The men who did not notice the loss of their Bible sat on lawn chairs and joked with one another—of course, I could not hear what they said—as women with coiffures and lipstick brought them bottles of cold beer.

            Meanwhile, the men who did not notice the loss of their Koran sat on rugs as women in robes—twenty-four virgins for each man—ran to them and started feeding them dates. It didn’t take long before each group was swirling in an orgy of food and sex, followed by naps.

            “You mean,” I said to John, “they can live off of beer and dates forever?”

            “They’re spirits, remember,” he said. “No actual nutrition is necessary.”

            Then both groups of men started doing the whole thing over again. I asked John what was going to happen next.

            “They do the same thing over and over again, forever,” said John. “This is heaven to them: to slaughter heretics and infidels. Sometimes they use bayonets and scimitars, just for a little variety.”

            Then I saw a woman, eternally old, sitting off to the side, weeping. I could not tell from her clothing which side she was on. I asked John who she was.

            “She is a mother who has lost her son,” John said. “Oh, her son is right there, she can see him, but every day she has to watch him being killed and then, when he comes back to life, he doesn’t ever think of her, because he is totally engaged in the orgy.”

            I asked John if this was the only thing that ever happened in Heaven. What was his answer? I will save that for a later communication.

{End of email}

Biblical Contortionism

Fundamentalists like to claim that they believe the plain and simple literal statements of the Bible. But this is not true. I know this from my own painful experience.

It happened in high school. I had joined (by my own choice) a little Church of Christ cult. To them, belief in Jesus was not enough; even Biblical literalism was not enough. They believed that you could not do anything during a worship service that the Bible did not authorize. For example, the Bible did not authorize the use of instrumental music in church, therefore you cannot use it. (Incidentally, the Bible says nothing about this.) In particular, this little cult said that, since the Bible did not authorize the use of multiple little cups during communion, then you could not use them; you had to use a single large cup for everyone in the whole congregation. This was how they identified “saved” congregations: any congregation that uses multiple cups (individual cups) during communion was damned. This cult was hyper-über-literalist.

Except when they weren’t.  The Bible talks about God creating new heavens and a new earth, both in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 65:17) and the New Testament (Revelation 21:1). The old heavens and old earth will pass away. After all the blood-soaked apocalypsing, God was going to make all things new. I loved this idea, because I was then as now a great lover of the natural world, the clean and green forest, and at that time I thought it was God’s pure creation. I did not understand why God would create something so beautiful as the Earth and then destroy it forever. And so, one Sunday, when I was invited to give a sermon at a small congregation, I preached on this subject: we can look forward to not just heaven but a new earth as well.

Brother Bob was following every word. And the next Sunday, he went for the kill. Remember, I was a high school kid and he was in his upper middle age years. He said that the very idea that there was going to be a new Earth was a damnable heresy that would lead anyone who believed it to hell. Of course, that meant that I was going to hell.

But how could he say this, against the clear and plain teaching of the Bible? Here is where the contortionism comes in. A skillful Fundamentalist can take sentences of scripture and weave them into pretzellations (I just made that word up right now) and tie them into knots that make them mean the exact opposite of what they say. What Bro. Bob said was this. The old earth, he said, referred to the Old Testament, which is where the ancient Israelites lived: they lived in or on the Old Testament. Therefore the new earth was the New Testament. The old heaven and old earth had already passed away, and we were already living on the new earth. Therefore, when John wrote Revelation 21, he was wrong; he referred to the new earth in the future tense, and he should have referred to it in the present tense. Or even the past tense: the “new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven” in Revelation 21 had, from Bro. Bob’s viewpoint, already happened. So, this is where we ended up: when the Bible says there will be a new heaven and a new earth, what it means is that there will not be.

There I was, wilting in a front pew as I heard myself denounced as a heretic in front of the congregation that I thought was uniquely saved. This borders on abusive behavior on the part of a man who was supposed to be the spiritual leader of our congregation. It took me weeks before I got out from under the cloud of depression from this. Couldn’t there have been a private discussion with me first? But no; the first I heard about it was in this public forum.

So you can see why I sneer at the idea of Biblical literalism. The “literalists” aren’t really literalists. They certainly ignore the parts of the Bible that are inconvenient for Republicans. For them, the Bible is only a source of rope to hang people with. They have no more respect for scripture than does any atheist.

Creationism and the Ten Commandments

Christian fundamentalists are fixated upon the Ten Commandments. That’s pretty much all there is, as far as they are concerned, at least this is what it looks like to outsiders. Get those commandments etched in marble and put up at the courthouse or the capitol building, and we’re all set, we are a godly people.

And creationists say that the Ten Commandments depend upon young-earth creationism. Without creationism, there is no basis for the Ten Commandments. They may have a point there. In Exodus 20, it says that because God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh, humans should work six days and rest on the seventh. (Fundamentalists note: the seventh day is Saturday, not Sunday. But we’ll let that pass.) So without a six day creation, the Ten Commandments are invalid.

Well, there is no way around that argument. And since young-earth creationism is clearly incorrect (I refer you to my Encyclopedia of Evolution for 350,000 words of proof), then the Ten Commandments are out the window.

Lest you think this is bad news, think again. Trashing the Ten Commandments does not mean that we are all going to start jumping on each other and having wild sex and murdering one another like animals. (Actually nonhuman animals don’t do this; only humans do.) And this is because, even if the Ten Commandments as a list of commandments are invalid, the principles behind them are not. It is the principles that count, according to someone whose wisdom I trust a bit more than that of creationists. I refer to Jesus.

Back up a bit, to the Roman era Jewish theologians. One of them was asked, “Could you summarize the law of God while standing on one foot?” His answer was, “Don’t do to anybody else what you would not want them to do to you.”

The Golden Rule.

Jesus said it too. His summary was to love God (which is the point of the first commandments) and to love your neighbor (which is the point of the last commandments). It is sort of intuitive to humans who evolved as an at least partly altruistic species. It shows up in most religions and philosophies.

So let the creationists have their Ten Commandments. I will pay attention more to the Golden Rule.

When Religion Is Really Just Politics

A brief post as I get ready to teach a class.

Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. He was born in Canada. The Constitution says that the president must be born in the United States. But apparently Cruz and many other Republicans believe this does not apply to them. In contrast, the “birther” contingent is still powerful within the Republican Party: they consider that Barack Obama is not really an American despite the fact that he was born in Hawaii. Clearly, many Republicans do not consider themselves bound by the Constitution.

Cruz made his announcement at Liberty University, which is the pulpit of the late Jerry Falwell. For both Cruz and Falwell, God’s work on Earth consists entirely of whatever the conservative wing of the Republican Party decides it wants to do.

Christianity is sort of irrelevant to all of this. The only relevant connection with religion here is that Republicans consider themselves to be the chosen people of God upon the face of the Earth.

Does Anybody Really Believe in Hell?

Conservative Christians claim to believe that everyone who disagrees with any of their doctrines (and presumably, intertwined with them, their political beliefs) will be condemned to uninterrupted torture literally forever in Hell. And it is the God of Infinite Love that will make this happen.

This is such an outrageous doctrine that nobody really believes it. If you can believe that a God of Love can do this, then you have the ability to totally jettison all mental faculties. Conservative Christians (and perhaps extremist Muslims too, I don’t know) claim to believe it, but they don’t. They simply cannot make themselves really believe it. If they did, they would be relentless in their attempts to get us to repent of being Democrats. They would not just denounce us but keep doing so in a desperate attempt to rescue us from infinite eternal torture. When one of them talks to me, friendly banter is more likely to come from their mouths than condemnation. And I believe that none of them would be themselves willing to be the people who subject us to eternal torture. They simply would not be able to stand over us and keep us at the end of a poker and roast us and listen to us scream forever. They probably couldn’t do it for five minutes.

That is, they—even the most ferocious of them—are more loving and merciful than they believe God to be.

Not So Inerrant After All

Fundamentalist Christians believe themselves to be personally inerrant when it comes to interpreting the Bible. The Bible is capable of many different interpretations, but a fundamentalist believes that whatever interpretation s/he chooses is inevitably the correct one. For example, they believe that “day” in Genesis 1 means 24 hours; but this cannot be the meaning of “day” in Genesis 2. So they claim that the word has two different meanings in the two chapters. And they believe that this rule of interpretation cannot be wrong, and you are headed straight for hell if you think they are wrong.

But they have quietly allowed their inerrant interpretations to change. A few decades ago, conservative white Christians were absolutely certain that some people were black because of the Curse of Cain, or maybe it was the Curse of Ham, or something, and that they had literal Biblical justification for hating black people and undertaking acts of violence against them. There are still white Biblical fundamentalists who believe this, but it is a comparatively rare belief today. Somehow, in the last few decades, many fundamentalist Christians have changed their beliefs. This has not happened because of federal government force. Maybe it started that way; they were furious about the government enforcing school busing and integration. But today you will find very few fundamentalist Christians who say “I get along with black people only because the federal government forces me to.” Most white fundamentalists genuinely like people of other races. Now.

Why the change? The Bible has not changed. Nor did God appear in the sky and announce, “Hey, uh, listen up; I just decided, uh, that it’s okay to like black people now.” It is the fundamentalists themselves who have changed their beliefs. If fundamentalists are inerrant in their Bible interpretations, then why have their beliefs changed? It is because they learned some things. They learned from experience that black people are just people, with good and bad individuals just like any other race. This means that somebody was wrong sometime. Either modern fundamentalists are insulting the Bible by liking black people, or else their recent predecessors were insulting the Bible by hating black people. Somewhere along the line, somebody interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

When a modern fundamentalist claims that they and they alone know what the correct interpretation of the Bible is, they should remember that earlier fundamentalists made the same claim about beliefs that are now widely rejected.

How Can We Know Whether Organized Religion Is a Big Scam?

The answer is quite simple.

I have read several books by Bart Ehrman, and am currently reading How Jesus Became God. Like all his books, this one is clear and delightful and reasonable. I will have more to say about this book a little later, but for now I would like to briefly examine something that Ehrman has said in book after book after book. He always says that the things in his book are common knowledge among pastors.

Nearly every divinity school teaches about scriptural contradictions and historical influences on the Bible. Nearly every divinity school teaches that the Bible is a human document, not dictated by God, and it contains within it the evidences of its own evolutionary ancestry. Of course, places like Bob Jones University do not teach this, but every mainstream divinity school does.

This does not mean that we should not esteem the Bible; its authors were making the best attempt they could to understand what was going on. In Ehrman’s current book, it is clear that early Christians had numerous ways of trying to understand how Jesus could be both human and divine, how he could be both killed and resurrected. They did the best they could. They were not liars. But neither were they dictating fully-formed truths from God.

But apparently most people who go to church—not just fundamentalists—want to believe that God wrote the Bible. And so their pastors do not tell them about the very human origin of what we call scriptures.

This does not mean that clergy are lying (although many do). But it does mean that they take their role as pastor (shepherd protecting stupid sheep from confusing truths) more seriously than their role as guide to the scriptures. They quite rightly assume that, if they told people the full truth about the Bible, they would make them upset; and clergy, in their role as pastors, have a duty to try to help people cope with life. And with death.

So is organized Christianity a scam? Sometimes. But in general it is deceptive, even when it is not a scam. Pastors in general believe that we cannot handle the truth. And they are usually right.

Christians Think the Rest of Us Are Just Places to Pile Their Shit

My next door neighbors seemed to be the nicest Christian people in the world. They just had a baby, their firstborn, and have been cheerfully preparing their house to accommodate the new arrival. Derek Brewer is a realtor, just starting his own business. His wife Whitney was one our our brightest and smartest alumnae from Biological Sciences at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

I counted myself really lucky to have them as neighbors, especially since we have a shared driveway. They are very quiet, even when they have a lot of visitors. Because I wanted to encourage them to stay, and not move away—nearly anybody who might move in after them would be worse, I figured—I have given them unlimited right to park in the shared driveway, half of which is mine, and I waived my right to park there.

Apparently I was a fool for trusting Christian goodness.

I generate very little garbage. I am proud of treading lightly upon God’s good green Earth. I do not use disposable dishes except when the alternative is very burdensome. And my lovely wife Lee spent many, many hours washing cloth diapers when Anita was young. (One of the pleasures of having an almost-28-year-old daughter is that it has been a long, long time since this was necessary.)

But when I did open my city garbage bin to put a tiny bit of refuse in it tonight, I found that it was almost completely filled by a big plastic garbage bag full of disposable plates and newborn diapers (used, of course). This bag was as much garbage as I generate in two months. I know where it must have come from. In order to put the garbage in my bin, one of them had to open my gate, walk across my back yard, and put it in, then walk back and close the gate. It could not have been a simple misunderstanding. Anyone stupid enough to do this by accident would not have been smart enough to open a gate.

I’m fucking tired of Christians treating everybody else in the world as places to pile their shit, and I mean this literally, or for target practice, or as scapegoats to blame everything on. If only us fucking Democrat bleeding-hearts would get the fuck out of the world, all problems would be solved.

The possibility remains that someone else, maybe a space alien, just happened to have newborn diapers at this very moment when my neighbors do, and put them there. In that event, I will delete this blog entry and replace it with an account of Derek and the space aliens or whatever is appropriate.

It is, in itself, a small thing, since I generate so little garbage. I just wish they had ASKED first. But Christians don’t fucking need to ask before dumping their shit on neighbors, or parking their fucking cars in their neighbors’ yards, or any other fucking thing they want to do. They are the chosen of God and the rest of us are just standing in their way.

Now, if I trespassed in someone’s yard for ANY REASON they would consider it their right and God-given duty to shoot me. I do not have a gun or any plans to get one. But (see the previous blog entry) it appears that there are two groups of people: the people with guns who believe they have a right to do whatever the fuck they want, and those without guns who must just accept whatever the others do. Happy July 6, and God bless America.

Here is the letter I will be leaving for them, to give them a chance to set the record straight in the event that the garbage came from somewhere else:

“Derek and Whitney—In my trash I found a large trash bag full of disposable dishware and used newborn diapers. Would those happen to be yours? Or did you happen to see anyone enter my back yard through the fence and leave a bag of garbage there? They should know I am not the neighborhood dump. If you need extra space for trash please in God’s name ask first. You have my number. Dr. Stan Rice. P.S. If you see anyone doing this, please let them know it is a bad example for Christians. –S.R.”

If anything should change the accuracy of the above information, I will update this essay or simply delete it.

Elmer Gantry

Last weekend I saw the Tulsa Opera’s production of Elmer Gantry, based upon the famous novel by Sinclair Lewis. I read the novel decades ago, so my memory may not be clear. I have a copy of it in front of me, but not enough time to reread it. I also saw the classic Burt Lancaster movie decades ago.

The primary message of the novel is that religion is just a way of getting money from gullible people. (Lewis modeled Gantry after Billy Sunday who, despite the image created by Lewis, was apparently a sincere man, and who did not drink and dally.) Gantry’s principal launch to success in the opera was the generous support of local businessmen, who saw religion as a good source of black ink.

But the opera changes this message ever so slightly. The opera, as the novel, begins with Elmer Gantry (star football player for a Bible college in Missouri) drunk in a bar, in the company of his more level-headed roomie Jim Lefferts. Well, that’s the name in the novel. The opera changed it to Frank something. And changed the character. In the opera, Frank became a preacher, just like Elmer, only he was sincere. There is a long scene in the opera in which Reverend Frank struggles, with intense sincerity, with the fact that he cannot force himself to have the simple faith that his parishioners have. He sits alone at a piano, picking out the tune of “Take it to the Lord in prayer,” with harmony that starts falling apart. If there was such a scene in the novel, I cannot relocate it now. In a move that Sinclair Lewis—in his quest to prove that everyone who disagreed with him was evil—would presumably have never made, the opera presents an honest clergyman. Only he is an agnostic clergyman.

The opera also presents other religious figures as sincere, although deluded. First, consider the evil ones. The president of the Bible college, Quarles (changed in the opera to Baines), was deluded enough to overlook the obvious insincerity of Gantry in order to get him to become a preacher. In both the book and opera, Gantry’s arch-enemy is Eddie Fislinger, a sincere zealot. In the movie, Gantry is framed when he sincerely tries to help the prostitute Juanita with whom he had previously interacted; but in the opera, the bait is none other than Lulu Baines, the daughter of the college president and the wife of Eddie Fislinger. Baines and Fislinger and their women were sincerely religious, but blind to the fact that the ruse they designed to entrap Gantry (in the opera, Fislinger offering his wife as sexual bait to Gantry) was if anything more evil than anything Gantry did. The opera’s Lulu was so primly innocent; or was she more sinful than Juanita?

Second, consider other sincere but deluded religious figure, the evangelist Sharon Falconer, whom Lewis modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson. This character apparently believed herself chosen by God to spread the gospel of love. In the opera, Falconer finally gives in to the amorous advances of Gantry; but she remains sincere to the end about her vocation. The famous climax scene is when the tabernacle catches fire and everybody dies except Elmer Gantry. Sharon Falconer has the chance to flee with Gantry, but chooses to die with her parishioners.

In the movie, Gantry had been an insurance salesman before getting into the religion business, and he went back to selling insurance at the end. But in the opera, Gantry goes off to join an Eastern mystic and, we presume, to eventually turn faux Buddhism into a money-making venture. So the opera presents other religions, not just fundamentalist Christianity, as ways of making money. The novel, in contrast, ends with Gantry continuing to preach about morality from his pulpit, even while ogling the choir girls.

The opera did a good job of focusing on many important ideas. It had a great dramatic structure too: Act One ended with Eddie Fislinger’s rage and his vow to take revenge against Gantry, the perfect way to keep the audience in anticipation of Act Two. There were running gags, also: the sermon topic of “What is love?” kept resurfacing, much to the amusement of the audience; and Fislinger’s anger at the end of Act One took the form of writing a sermon about “What is rage?”

But the impression I came away with was that this was an opera I should have liked. It did everything right. But the music, dramatic at times, just seemed chaotic most of the time. And when it was over I was glad to leave; in the parking garage, where voices boom, I sang operatically and atonally, “What was I think—ing? To come to this opera?” The echoes gave me a feeling of relief. The climax fire scene could have had flames projected on the back screen but instead there were big red mounds that did not look like fire but rather like tubeworms along a deep sea volcanic fault.

During the intermission, I had a book to occupy me: Lame Deer Speaks, the biography of a Lakota medicine man, published in the 1970s. I read the part about how some diseases were caused by gophers shooting porcupine quills and blades of grass into people, and medicine men would cure the people by sucking the quills and blades out of them. I have seen documentaries of this practice, in which the medicine men sneak quills and grass blades in their hands and pretend to suck them out. It would appear that much of Native American religion is also psychological manipulation. But there is a difference. Lame Deer said that the medicine men got lots of gifts in return for their healing, but then they gave these things away, and continued to live in shacks. They were psychologically manipulating their people, but not to accumulate wealth. One could say that they were knowingly purveying placebos. But placebos sometimes work, so long as the patient does not know that they are placebos.

From this juxtaposition, I began to think that even if religion is a placebo, it can do some good. It is just that in many cases preachers use the placebo as a way of getting your money and controlling you. Caution advised.