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.
