Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part two

Two of the main characters in Stan Rice’s Glass Cathedral are Dan and Misty. Dan is the atheist and Misty is the Christian, only of course it is not that simple. They are real people who are working through big questions, not like the stifling two-dimensional characters of Pilgrim’s Progress.

By the time God appears in the sky—or not—outside the California desert town of Susurrus, Dan is already an atheist. So what he sees is an unexplained natural phenomenon. But he does not arrive at his atheism thoughtlessly. His whole view of the natural world began when, as a kid, he saw a horsehair worm several inches long protruding from the anus of a cockroach. Nature, he realized, was an arena of struggle and parasitism. (He thus earned the name of Buttworm Boy.)

He did not have a comfortable atheism. He meets, is fascinated by, and is then attracted to a Mormon girl named Margaret. Dan never alters his strong opinion that Mormonism is the stupidest piece of illogical thinking he had ever encountered. But Margaret is not stupid. And as they slip into a physical relationship closer than either had expected, Dan finds himself wanting to believe as Margaret does. But he cannot. Dan’s background story is truly funny. He and Margaret end their contact as he goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Misty, also at UCSB, begins as a dreamily idealistic Christian who lived for her weekly Bible studies and for her fiancé Dwayne. Dan meets Misty just long enough to fall in love with her. Misty and Dwayne plan a mission trip to Ecuador, to convert Catholics to evangelical Protestantism, something of which the Catholics were not fond. Neither were the communist terrorists, who kidnap Dwayne. Just as they release him back into Misty’s loving arms, the communist terrorists shoot him dead, splattering Misty with fragments of the man who was her life.

It’s not supposed to happen this way, Misty thinks. Long after Dwayne’s death was no longer in the national news, Misty visits her old UCSB Bible study. She has changed; they have not; and she realizes how they all had such easy answers to the big questions. She grabs a Bible from one of them and reads from the book of Job, in which God Himself tells Job, you think you have all the answers, don’t you? Well, you don’t. That was her message to her former compatriots as she stomps out.

Misty encounters Dan and they have, despite their religious differences, a truly meaningful conversation. They end up working at the same newspaper out in the desert, where God appears—or not—in the sky. This event seems to wipe all doubt away from Misty’s heart. Or does it? Does it need to? That’s what the rest of the book is about.

By Their Fruits

Jesus famously said that “by their fruits you shall know them.” He made it clear that what he meant was that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and that is how you tell them apart. You cannot be good by just saying good and doctrinally correct things; you have to actually do them. Nothing in religion could seem more fundamental than this.

But right-wing American Christians do not believe this. They reject what Jesus said. The most obvious place to see this is in politics.

Right-wing fundamentalist Christians are almost all Republicans. Many Republican politicians do evil things. The most prominent example is Donald Trump, who has had repeated, well-documented scandals, both sexual and financial, in addition to encouraging a revolt against the United States government. He has publicly called on Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants” to NATO countries.

But it is not just Trump. Many Republican politicians have had scandals, such as Mark Sanford, who disappeared from the state of which he was governor, claiming to be hiking on the Appalachian Trail but actually in Argentina visiting his mistress; and George Santos, who was ousted from Congress after multiple financial scandals and misrepresentations.

Nor is it just Republican politicians. Jerry Falwell, Jr., then president of Liberty University, which his father founded, was spectacularly scandalous in arranging not for an actual affair but for arranging to watch someone else have sex with his (Falwell’s) wife. He resigned after a ten million dollar severance was offered to him. Ted Haggard, a megachurch pastor, had scandals related to sexual acts and to misrepresenting his book as a best-seller when actually his church had bought most of the copies. Both Falwell’s and Haggard’s churches proclaimed openly that the Republican Party, and specifically Donald Trump, were God’s choices for moral leadership in America.

And it just keeps going on. As I write, Liberty University has been fined $14 million for its failure to report, and sometimes to even acknowledge, incidents of sexual violence toward female students and staff. To Liberty University, as to the Southern Baptist church, a woman’s proper place is to let men do what they want with them and keep silence. And Steve Garvey, former baseball star with a history of sexual and financial scandal, was the Republican winner in the Super Tuesday election in 2024, running for a California U.S. Senate seat.

Of course, Democrats have scandals also. Some of us are old enough to remember the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewensky affair. I’ll let you look for other examples. But it appears to me that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a moral high ground over the other party.

And there is one outstanding example of truly good Democrats: Barack and Michelle Obama. For eight years, Republicans searched desperately for any scandal with the Obamas, and they didn’t find a single one. I read Michelle’s autobiography, Becoming, and I was astonished that such good people could actually rise to positions of leadership in our society.

Most evangelical Christians believe everything Trump says, approves of everything He has ever done, and appear to adore Him with religious fervor. They refuse to even consider that He might be wrong. To them, He is no mere human being. Sarah Posner wrote a book about it in 2020 (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump; Random House) and the white evangelical devotion to Trump has only gotten stronger each year since then.

If Christians obeyed Jesus’ command to evaluate people on the basis of what they do, rather than what they say, the result would be clear. Neither Democrats nor Republicans consistently have the moral high ground. One should judge candidates individually, not on the basis of their devotion to Donald Trump, and Trump must be subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

In some cases, the blasphemy is open. One Georgia billboard had a photo of Trump and a quote from the Bible: “and the government shall be upon his shoulders,” an Old Testament reference always attributed to Jesus. I would show you, but the image cannot be copied. You can, however, find it at the Ministry Watch wehsite. I also saw a billboard in Missouri, as I drove on I44, in 2023, which said that Trump, like Jesus, was being crucified; the poster showed a cross on a hill. The billboard was on a side road which I could not find. Christian responses to these billboards ranged from support to disturbance, but few if any evangelical Christians declared it to be blasphemy.

But most evangelical Christians totally reject Jesus’ authority in this matter. They worship Donald Trump.

Christianity Used to be Interesting

I was an active fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), and went to their national meetings whenever I could, mostly in the 1990s. This organization consists of evangelical Christians who are in the sciences and who get together to exercise their brains to try to figure out possible answers to important questions about faith, science, and reason. At every meeting, you would find scholars, many from Christian colleges, struggling with questions about what God wants us to do in the world with regard to scientific topics. Just a few examples that come to mind are: What does it mean to be in the image of God, when we are biological animals? What does it mean to be created, when we clearly evolved? What should a Christian response be to the threat of nuclear war? This was a big topic at the 1988 meetings, when Richard Bube condemned nuclear war but David Siemens said, if you have nothing to die for, you have nothing to live for, as if that was relevant to the topic. What about advances in biotechnology, or to the stewardship of creation? What can we learn from the new physics about what God is doing today in sustaining the creation moment by moment? This was an important topic in the New York Metropolitan section of the ASA in 1989. I can still remember David Wilcox visibly struggling with what to believe about Adam and Eve. He was trying very hard to say that Adam was the first evolutionarily modern Homo sapiens, the primate into which God poured His spirit, but the evidence simply did not support this belief.

What the ASA focused on, very passionately, was, what would Jesus do?

And this was also the focus of many evangelical churches as well. I remember many very intellectually challenging sermons in evangelical churches in the 1980s.

That’s all gone. Instead of What would Jesus do, the only question of interest to evangelical Christians is, What would Trump do? To them, Trump is the very presence of God upon the surface of this planet. Every question has a simple answer: whatever Trump says the answer is.

This is why you never hear very much about creationism anymore, or about evangelicals attacking global warming science. Because evidence doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is Trump.

For the time being, a few evangelical Christian leaders are questioning Trump. You can read about a few of them here. One example is Mike Pence. But Pence, along with all other Republican candidates, have promised to support the eventual nominee, who will probably be Trump. Nothing else matters now. Pence will fall in line and say Yes, Lord, to Trump. In the end, the few evangelicals who oppose Trump will be silenced.

Evangelical Christianity has not only become blasphemous, but also boring. There are no more complex and challenging questions for evangelical Christian intellectuals.

The Mind and Eternal Torture in Hell

One of the most important abilities of the human mind is the ability to “tune out” sensory information that is constant and ongoing. This allows the mind to respond to new information. Examples include scent and sound. If you smell something new, you notice it, but after a while your mind tunes it out, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. After a while, people cannot smell their own body odor. If you hear something new, your mind pays attention to it, but after a while it is relegated to “background noise.” People often literally do not hear the barking of their own dogs. We call this sensory adaptation. It is one of the standard concepts I taught in general biology classes.

Sensory adaptation may be a property of minds in general, not just human minds. It is certainly true of other mammals, such as dogs that do not react to their masters’ presence, or birds that get used to you when they build their nests near your patio. You can even find examples of it on the level of single-celled organisms that respond to their environments but do not have what we would call minds. And it might also prove to be an important part of AI (artificial intelligence). A mind, even an artificial one, would “go crazy” and stop working if it reacted to every bit of information as if it were new and important.

And pain.

After a while, a person can often begin to ignore chronic pain. Pain exists for a reason. It is a body’s way of telling us, don’t do that. My painful knee tells me that I should give it a rest and let the tendon heal up. But my brain mercifully allows me to ignore this pain except when I am actually moving and need to be reminded. Pain is important, but it should be modulated by sensory adaptation. Let us call it mental adaptation, since it does not depend on actual sensory input.

But, according to Christian fundamentalists, there is one exception. Hell. They believe that Hell is unending, infinite pain, especially the Fires of Hell, but maybe all other kinds of pain as well. This picture is not consistently found in the Bible; for example, Job 10:21-22 talks of the afterlife (for both good and evil people?) as endless darkness. If mental adaptation is a characteristic of minds in general, including the alert minds of souls suffering in Hell, then after the souls have been in Hell for a while (a week? A century? But who’s counting?) their minds will at least partially tune out the suffering. That is, if they have minds at all, the damned souls should begin to adjust to the fires and tortures of Hell.

But fundamentalists insist that the pain and suffering of Hell are not only infinite and endless, through all eternity, but that you remain infinitely conscious of the exquisite pain during that entire time (so to speak; time does not exist in Hell, I suppose). But for this to occur, God would have to specifically create a miracle to suspend mental adaptation. The Bible makes mention of no such miracle. The fundamentalists just made it up.

Why would fundamentalists insist that the pain of Hell not only continues forever, but remains as fresh as the day it started? How could a God of infinite love specially create minds that are unable to ever tune out pain? Would such a God want souls to suffer as exquisitely in Hell after a million years as they experienced the first day? What kind of God would this be? Yet this is the image of God that fundamentalists offer to us.

The reason fundamentalists insist on this is that they want to make themselves infinitely deserving of our obedience to and reverence of them. To them, specifically, by giving money. If people began to suspect that Hell might not be so bad after a few centuries, they might not let the big fundamentalist churches tell them how to live or give the churches their money. It is not faithfulness to God, but to the evangelists Themselves, that is threatened by the concept of mental adaptation.

By the way, the same thing would apply to the pleasures of Heaven. You would think that, after a few million years, the blissful souls would start to get bored. Flying around on cloud banks and playing harps might be oodles of fun for, say, a couple of thousand years. This idea was elaborated by Mark Twain in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

One of the characteristics of religion is that it creates little artificial worlds of thought that are impervious to any outside evidence. Only within such an artificial world would rich evangelists be able to get people to give them money regardless of what they say or do.