Question Four

Nearing the finish line. Trying to call out my own bias in religion writing. Thanks for your patience.

Here's question four:

Who are the crackpots?

Definition according to Merriam-Webster: "one given to eccentric or lunatic notions." I like this query. It's fruitful right off the bat - really fruitful.

Go ahead, ask yourself - which religious figures or groups have it all wrong? "Antichrist" Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, maybe? The Scientologists? The Vatican? American Buddhists? Talk-show atheists? Wiccans? Televangelists? New Agers? Biblical literalists? Biblical non-literalists? Who do you throw out of the temple?

The suspects come to mind quickly, don't they? More quickly, I'd guess, than a list of folks who share your same rock-solid beliefs.

Why is that? Does embracing your faith (or non-faith) mean that you find the others absurd? I just read the interview with Bill Moyers in Christian Century (reprinted here - read it!). He drops this:

The religion of one seems madness to another. [Superstar scholar of early Christianity] Elaine Pagels said to me in an interview that she doesn't know a single religion that affirms the other's choice.

Madness? I bristled a little at this. (Maybe you do, too.)

But you know, I can't come up with good counter-examples. There are the more open-armed religions of modern times: the Baha'i, the Ramakrishna order, the Unitarians to name a few, who do take that high road to accepting everyone's path. But do they really "affirm the other's choice" - that is to say, affirm the truth of what someone else believes? I would argue no, since the vast majority of the world's faithful belief that only the narrow path of their faith leads to salvation, and that all others are out of luck. Hardly something the ecumenists "affirm."

Which is why, parenthetically, I'm seldom impressed with interfaith events. You never get the hard-liners in the room.

So. Is Pagels right? Do we mostly think that that others are wrong in what they believe about God? I think the evidence points strongly in this direction. And that should be no surprise.

But as Americans, we have built a tolerance into this deadlock, and that should never be underrated. We are unique like that, as we see Europe torn over the face veil and the Islamic world acting abominably towards the practice of other faiths in their lands. As decendants of religious refugees, we have a cultural legacy of showing at least a leeway of civility towards many other faiths. American employers respect many holidays, we publicly show deference to many leaders, and in general, Americans go out of our way not to publicly offend people of a religious faith that doesn't match our own.

That is, to a point.

And beyond that point lie the crackpots. And I think it's worthwhile to know where you draw that line.

Back in grad school, my advisor had - as far as I could tell - a simple chronological take on the question. I finally realized I could go up to religions started around the mid 18th century - Mormons and Baha'i, roughly - before stories got put in the "wacky" pile.

This is pretty widespread in religion coverage (said advisor is a very respected veteran of a very respected paper). You can still write about new religions, but "wacky" calls for a whole different set of tools. A quick primer:

a "religion" story focuses on newsworthy events, quotes church authorities, and steers clear of discussions on belief systems;

a "cult" story uses the group - not the news tie-in - as the main story, quotes ex-members and outside authorities, and there's an open season on describing beliefs and practices - which let's face it, in most religions, don't translate well to outsiders.

It's a shame, because it's worth being cautious when talking about newer religions. There's a constant ebb and flow in world history as the crackpots gain respectability and power. It's interesting to watch something get pulled over the crackpot divide in public consciousness (I just finished the first episode of the PBS special on Mormons, which makes this point nicely. Right Mitt?).

A great example of a religion losing some of its crackpot status hit a new chapter last week. The Department of Veteran's Affairs was forced to add a new symbol to their roster of 38 "approved" religious symbols that could be displayed on a vet's tombstone (here's the list of the 38). It was the Wiccan pentacle. Dead soldiers, Goddess worship... and the story just got juicier after allegations surfaced that the DVA was holding back official recognition of the religion due to comments from George Bush:

"This is a complete capitulation by the administration," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which filed suit last year on behalf of Wiccan veterans. The settlement stipulates, however, that the plaintiffs must not keep or disclose any documents handed over by the government during the discovery phase of the lawsuit.

Lawyers familiar with the case said that some documents suggested the VA had political motives for rejecting the pentacle. During his first campaign for president, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush told ABC's "Good Morning America" in 1999 that he was opposed to Wiccan soldiers practicing their faith at Fort Hood, Tex.

"I don't think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it," he said. Lynn, of Americans United, said references to Bush's remarks appeared in memos and e-mails within the VA.

Some liveliest debates on the story were on Get Religion (look here and here), which (predictably) wasn't content with the political angle that most reporters took and dared to hint at the "uncomfortable question" of whether or not Wicca was a religion. This led to a great link in the comments section, a legal round up of all the definitions the government has tried to give to religion, including those from the military (which I blogged about here) and the IRS.

This list of criteria is an interesting look at when the government, at least, will take you seriously. As far as I can tell it boils down to this: you're not crackpots if you can afford good lawyers.

But, Jason. Who are the crackpots?

Here I am tempted to quote one of my favorite books, the Damnation of Theron Ware. It was one of America's hottest bestsellers (of 1896). The story follows a Methodist preacher who loses his way while pastoring in a small town of Octavius, as he toys with Catholicism and atheism and paganism. A couple of Methodist revivalists named the Soulsbys drop in to save the church and Theron's soul (they fail).

Mrs. Soulsby is a charming rogue and an ex-showgirl and one of the canniest theologians in American literature. At the end of about ten pages of taking apart Americans and their faiths, she says this:

"I've got a religion of my own, and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't be done a minute before."

There are crackpots, but only God knows who they are. I like that.

But I'm not that enlightened.

So who do I think are the crackpots? As you can probably tell, I don't hold with the old vs. new divide (many practitioners of new religions seem like crackpots to me, but more on that later). There are two reasons for this.

First - it seems that religion can be new in the world, but old in a life. If someone is born into a religion, and lives it their whole life in that faith, it's hard for me to discount the richness of meaning that a belief acquires, as it is worn with births and deaths, marriage and crisis over decades, just because they are the first generation to practice it. Don't the early Christians hold our highest respect? And is it necessarily less profound to spend your life in such a new religion than to have a midlife conversion to the ancient practice of Kabbalah (tm)? I can't say - so I won't.

The second reason I often give new religions the benefit of the doubt - and bear with me - is that religion always seems to be, in some sense, new. Religions change drastically with the times. We see it in American Christianity. Look at megachurches, the renewalist and New Age influences on the modern Christian church. How different they are from the same pulpits that once held the stern views of old Europe for example - denouncing women's rights, endorsing slavery. Changes are slow and subtle, but they are always there - thank goodness.

To think that modern Judaism, for example, is the same as the polygamous, animal sacrificing faith of Biblical times is naive. There is constantly invention and reinvention, and religions move with the times. So if we are to hold to only old religions, they are hard to find.

But I come up with my list of religious crackpots, just as quickly as anyone else. My line is fairly defined, since there are two things that make me quickly throw someone's claim to religious respect in the crackpot pile.

They are Cruelty and Faking it.

Pretty simple, but a simple definition serves me pretty well. A person or an institution that cites piety to inflict pain, or one who talks one path and walks another, loses the right to my wide American legacy of tolerance. Pretty clear to me that it's not religion anymore, but a self-serving veneer for human frailty.

Not a high bar, but you'd be surprised how many stories every day end up in my crackpot pile.

I don't think definitions should be gone into too much. I know them when I see them. I've started a list of stories of people I'd give the crackpot treatment. I'll be adding to this list of shame. These are stories which I feel don't deserve the kid-glove treatment religion journalists usually show the devout, but instead should prompt outrage and intolerance - and, as Get Religion puts it, raise the "uncomfortable question" of what is religion.

Because what these guys are practicing is just their own lunacy.

The Cruel...

The Muslim man who raped a woman for reading the Bible, in the name of Islam...

The African Christian charismatic who kills his followers...

A church that advocates corporal punishment of children, to the point of death...

Priests who preach kindness but who inflict pain on the innocent...

The Fakers...

Monks who abuse kids and fake miracles...

Controlled substance beliefs that are a little too convenient, economically and legally...

Evangelists whose care for their poor followers is travestied by financial fraud...

...home or abroad...



Thems my crackpots. Who are yours?

I'll finish up this belief series in the next post. Thanks again for your patience.

Question Three

Who's Driving? Me. Who's that? I'm trying to answer that here. Why? Well...

Here's the next question:

What church do you call home?

This one may take a bit. Bear with me.

I don't have a church. I have churches that I like. I have synagogues I feel comfortable in, places that fill me with peace. There are communities I commune with. But I don't have a fixed home.

That's unfortunate, right?

I've mentioned a few surveys about the "unchurched." There is the particular flavor that made headlines a couple of years ago - depending on the source, anywhere from 20-30% of Americans think of themselves as "spiritual but not religious." Barna just released a survey a few months ago which said that 33% of Americans - which includes mostly self-identified Christians - don't have a place where they hang their hat, spiritually. Whatever you call us - the unchurched, the spiritually homeless - we're the fastest growing religious group in America.

A damn shame.

A shame, because religion is something you are supposed to DO with other people. It's having a "community of meaning" - people who see the world tied together in the same way you do. They are not just there for the weddings and blessings, but for times of crisis: funerals, sickness, catastrophe. Ironically, when you turn to God is when you also turn to other people.

Even on the most deeply personal level, the level of searching for truth, we need a spiritual community. The Buddha said that enlightenment - the bullseye of psychological release from all your hang-ups in this world - was something that was almost entirely the child of the Sangha: the organization, the community around you. American philosopher (and devout Christian) Josiah Royce went so far as to say that the very kingdom of heaven promised by Jesus is no more than the community created in his wake.

The psychological consequences of this isolating trend seem dire to me. Unchurching seems like the newest form of Bowling Alone, that particularly American vice. It says: communities are tough. Easier to choose a gated community of one.

I clearly disagree. So why don't I have a home?

It took a few days of digging around this question to come up with anything really satisfying. On the one hand, there's that journalistic mindset, everything I learned at Columbia: keep your judgment open to all good arguments, and never join one side. I've also told you about my folks, both of whom hold deep ambivalence about institutions. I was raised to think of religion as personal, not public.

And it's not as if you can suddenly "church" yourself. In fact, having to choose a "home" is kind of awful. For one thing, there is an unreasonableness to a deeper faith that rarely makes sense from the outside. Faith is what we achieve without reason. An example: the current Harper's magazine lists the beliefs among the Mandaeans, an ancient gnostic-type sect being decimated in Iraq. They believe that the alphabet was once at war with itself, and that children born on the sixteenth of the month will suffer from constipation. Sounds kooky, no? But to the utterly unchurched, the idea of the Virgin Birth, the night ride and the burning bush seem equally fantastic.

And the smorgasboard is vast - especially here in America. We invented it, we feed it, we revel in it. Church marketing has a history older than Saul/Paul, but you have to feel that the megachurch moment and the New Age have brought things to a new level. Snack bars in church? Astrology at the check-out? Venerable religion sociologist Peter Berger has a few great comments on the long-standing "pluralist" state of American religion at a recent Pew Forum talk. In our religious lives, as in everything else, we live in an age of agonizing choices.

Choosing a tradition is also fraught with ethical choices. As a child of my age, I have strong beliefs about the equality of women, the place for science, the equality of gay men and women. Most of our heritage around religious practice in the west stem from an ancient Middle east where these ideas are tenuous, at best.

I marveled at the pronouncement from the Archbishop of Canterbury the other day. He was trying to say that the anti-gay voices in the Anglican Communion were misreading the Bible. He quoted the passage from Romans, "Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion," trying to defend the modern western view of homosexuality, saying that the passage was actually a warning against self-righteousness. Come again?

As someone at least culturally Christian, I am particularly fascinated by the spectacle of Christianity and homosexuality in the arena. Surveys show show that our ideas about homosexuality are only going to become more tolerant as the current generation grows up. The Bible is unambiguous about the sin of gay men and lesbians. Who - or what - will emerge from this clash of absolutes?

History is full of these cultural battlefields. Norms change, wills bend... eventually. But where is home in the meanwhile?

Ahem. What church do you call home?

You may have noticed that I sign my posts "ttaylor," though my name is Jason Anthony. Thomas Taylor is a hero of mine. He was one of the original Seekers. I think they have something to teach us - and, for what it's worth, can offer a home for people like me.

The Seekers? I'm not talking about modern "seeker churches" - Christian churches that bring in wavering souls through savvy outreach. No, the Seekers I'm talking about have them by almost 400 years.

Taylor's "Seekers" were the product of the religious chaos that followed the Anglican break from the Catholic church. Throwing off the traditions of 1,000 years must have been psychologically overwhelming. If you know your English history, there were upheavals and religious wars for the next century. Scores of new groups were formed, including the Quakers, our forebears the Puritans, and other less well known groups like the Levellers, the Diggers... and the Seekers.

These guys weren't very explicit about their beliefs. Their organizational was shambolic (I'll save you a trek to the dictionary - "utterly disorganized"). A few landed in jail, and they didn't last too long. Their great contribution was to recognize that they were not content with the options that they saw in the torn-apart world they lived in - and that, not being content, they would wait.

So they waited together. When Seekers met, they met in silence. You can see remnants of this observation today among the Quakers, who absorbed most of the Seekers by the 1640's. Many considered themselves Christians. Some did not. Some sources indicate that their ambivalence even embraced possible truths in "Heresy, Blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even Atheism."

It's not the only time in history when people have studiously honored a kind of holy expectancy about the bigger mysteries of life. When Paul preaches at Mars Hill in the Acts of the Apostles, he points to the altar devoted "to gods unknown." I get a shiver of recognition when I read that verse. I could see a Hellenic version of myself taking a look at that altar when I passed, always somehow throwing a few drachma to the priest. Then, as now, I see myself thinking - who can be sure of the answers? Mysteries are too big for names.

The Seekers were the reemergence of this idea in the modern world. Like unstable isotopes, this kind of uncertainty doesn't last long.

But in honor of Taylor and his ilk, I've convened my own Seeker church, in its way. Every month, I lead a group of New Yorkers to different temple, synagogue, or church in the City. We've spent Cheesefare Sunday praying with the Greek Orthodox in Grammercy. We've heard the Hebrew school singing cowboy songs in Central Synagogue. We've sat with urban Buddhists in Chelsea, learning about the mind.

And afterwards, we sit and have coffee. Some people already have a faith they cling to, and they refute. Other times, we'll just sit and question. If we're lucky, someone from the church will tag along with us to share a view from the inside. It's our own way to pray and ponder, as best we can, until the dust settles.

This, I guess, is my home. If you're interested, come along for the ride.

Stay tuned.

PS - Thanks for your patience as I s l o w l y churn these out. It's obviously taking a lot longer than expected - partly because of my everyday workload, partly because, well, these are tough questions. Right now, I'm planning on posing five questions in all, finished this week. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE - There are also lots of statistics showing restlessness even among the "churched." Accordingt o the 2001 ARIS survey, 1 in 7 Americans change their religious affiliation - that is to say, leaves "home" and goes shopping. I''ve seen other studies up that number to 25%. In USA Today this morning, a study sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention about those people. It's here.

Question Two

Again - I'm interrupting the news coverage to ask and answer a few questions about myself. Self-indulgent? Maybe. The goal is full disclosure. The roundup will return in about a week.

Here's the question for the day:

Where do you come from?

Is this really a "query" - a good question to come back to more than once?

Yes and no. Of course, there are all the hard facts about how I came to be here. Immigrant father, American mother. Raised in conservative corners of wacky California. Years of living abroad, school, then traveling and working in the US. Those don't change.

But I'm beginning to realize that the story of your life and your family grows up as you do - develops interesting twists seen from the distance of years. Especially the question of parents, once such reliably fixed figures, who become more and more enigmatic as you unbelievably reach the same age they were when they reared you. Who are they? For this reason, I think "Where do I come from?" is a touchstone.

Especially from the standpoint of what I take for granted about faith.

My mother was the one focused on getting us "churched," which here meant dragging my brother and I to a Methodist service near the public library for the big holy days. I think it was architecture that got us there more than anything else - the place had a stony, rough-hewn look that appealed to a Californian's fetish for history, real or imagined.

As a kid, mom had been in charge of her own religious schooling. Her parents were two wild, hard-working children of the post-war years: her dad managed a Sears store, his wife kept the house. They were probably Christians if you pressed them - I don't know if anyone did. Cocktails with friends and bridge were more of a religion than anything else - Sundays were devoted to quiet hangovers by the pool.

My mother took herself to church as a young girl - the closest one she could walk to in her nice clothes was a Baptist church. She says she fell in love with the singing and the vibrant voices. She went regularly. The services also kept her out of the house during morning hours when making much noise was flirting with disaster.

The sermons perplexed her though - all of the rules for clean living, and the hell and brimstone for unbelievers. When her father died young, and she heard her preacher's take on the fate of drinkers and bon-vivants, she flat-out stopped being a Baptist. She became her own breed of Christian and didn't really return to church until we were old enough to need some God in our lives.

Some Sundays that effort would get a little more exotic - my family would pack up and head south to the nearest Greek Orthodox church. It took about an hour. We did this maybe a dozen or so times growing up. We'd arrive hours after the orthos had begun, which always seemed embarassing to me, though very common (we weren't raised Greek - arriving late wasn't second nature to us). We also didn't speak Greek, so the divine liturgy went on and on mysteriously for hours, eis tous aionas ton aionon, steeped in incense, with aerobic stretches of standing, kneeling, and intoning prayers. Still, as a kid, I preferred this to the Methodists - the jeweled robes, the ceiling painted sky-blue and filled with saints, and a big chunk of leavened bread with wine as your reward.

He never insisted on going regularly - my dad isn't that type. He also wasn't hungry for the fellowship of the other Greeks, a big reason to go to church in immigrant communities. He came over to America as a refugee at age 18, married an American, and rarely looked back.

His religious upbringing was... unusual.

My grandfather was executed during WWII by the Germans while my dad was just a child. In the hard years that followed the war, when Greece was torn apart by a communist uprising, his mother was faced with keeping four children safe while running a small farm in the hills of the Peloponnese. She took an extraordinary step, taken so often by parents in areas of poverty and unrest - she sent her sons away.

They were very young. There was a high-school in Tripolis, the regional capitol, but she had no way to pay for their room and board. So one day she marched them up the mountain to a remote monastery, where her husband's oldest brother had taken orders as a monk. He was called "Parthenios," the Virgin. "These are your nephews," she said to him, holding my father and uncle by their scrawny arms. "You sit up here on the mountain while people are starving below. I want you to take them in and help them go to school. A Christian would help me care for them."

The monastery had a small community house in Tripolis, and she wanted the boys to live there while they went to high school. In return, they would work at the monastery, keeping the stables and cleaning, running errands for the bishop. She would look after their clothes and washing and bring what she could from the farm. In addition, my grandmother said, Parthenios could leave the mountain and perform weddings and funerals in the surrounding villages, which paid in cash and barter. A deal was struck.

My father is enigmatic about those years. Growing up among the monks gave him an eyeful, that's for sure - priests who accepted the last lamb or sheaf of grain from a poor widow who wanted a blessing. Bishops who proscribed fasting but ate well behind closed doors. Sexual goings-on in the ranks. He chuckles and shakes his head when he talks about them.

But his eyes light up when he talks about Parthenios. "He was a holy man," my father says, gravely. "The other monks made fun of him - he would just laugh. Winter and summer, he would wear a simple monk's robe. He loved God. And his passion was music."

Parthenios composed Byzantine chants, an ancient tradition in the eastern church. "Come and give me your young ear," he would say, and sing a phrase in the old scale: Pa, Ni, Pa, Vu. True to his word, Parthenios shuffled away from the cell where he spent all of his time and made the rounds of the villages, blessing weddings and the bereaved.

After high school my father was finally sponsored to come to Boston, as a refugee. When he came, the Greeks in America were still torn by the ideas that had laid waste to Greece - forward to a socialist atheism, or back into the grips of a powerful church? Although he had spent years as the personal secretary to the bishop, he had no firm answers to these questions.

To this day, he is humble when he talks about right and wrong. Like my mother, he is content to believe in God, without being firm on the specifics. But I gave him a tape of Byzantine chants a few years ago, and he'll play it in the truck as he heads to work. He says it makes him happy.

My parents met and raised their kids in California. For a taste of what that's like, check out The Visionary State, a photo book from last year which rounds up images from the temples, cathedrals and retreats that show up the largest diversity and tolerance of the religious mind in the west. It suited them.

Though they were technically an interfaith marriage, I think they still have more in common about what they believe than otherwise. They'll still make it to a service or two. Our town is conservative and devout; Sunday traffic is impossible in the mornings, and every new flavor of "contemporary worship" gets its premier there. But their faith is based on something more fixed and personal, I'm coming to believe. Both of them are drawn to God, but skeptical of his franchises on earth.

They were a little relieved when my brother and I started to explore in our teens - I sniffed around eastern religions, and my brother began to embrace a scientific rationalism. Better to ask, better to seek. Despite all of the gaps in our formal religious education, they taught my brother and I the importance of being, first and foremost good people - and that this, somehow, what being a Christian means to them.

My mother gets flack at her office for being one of Barna's 33% of the "unchurched." "God knows my heart," my mother will say - end of the discussion.

That's where I'm from.

Tune in tomorrow.

Question One

For those just tuning in, I'm spending a few days away from the regular religion news roundup. Instead, my goal is to "come clean" to my sea of readers about my personal faith. It's something I always wish I had at hand when I'm reading religion coverage.

As I've said, I'm framing the entries in terms of questions I return to, inspired by a Quaker tradition of "queries" - spiritual questions worth pondering, which rarely have permanent answers.

Ready for Question One? Fundamental, but fruitful.

Why aren't you an atheist?

There are many, many atheists in my world. A love of my life was one of the first card-carrying "brights" (click here if you missed the euphemism moment of the "brights" and the "supers"). My brother is a personal hero, and a brilliant research chemist - last I heard he and his colleagues worship at the altar of the flying spaghetti monster. And the whole journalism world is rife. When I was covering the Billy Graham crusade in 2005, an author who was also sitting in the press box leaned over to me and said, "Doesn't it feel like you're sitting in the atheist's section of the church?"

I mean, my hometown paper used to be the Jyllands Post, home of atheist Flemming Rose and the Mohammed cartoon fiasco. It's not like the road to atheism hasn't been an option.

Not to imply that all atheists are dear to my heart. The pundits making the news rounds and the stories that quote them are making THAT one a little hard. Now, I respect Dawkins, Dennett or Harris - these guys are continuing dialogue with an antique history. But I don't think I can listen to another interview where one of them is quoted in vaguely condescending soundbytes, which seem always to bring out the worst in whomever they're talking to. If you caught the tete-a-tete between Sam Harris and Rick Warren in Newsweek, you know what I mean:

INTERVIEWER: Sam, is Rick intellectually dishonest?

HARRIS: I wouldn't put it in such an invidious way, but—

INTERVIEWER: Let's say Rick's not here and we're just hanging out in his office.

HARRIS: It is intellectually dishonest, frankly, to say that you are sure that Jesus was born of a virgin.

WARREN: I say I accept that by faith. And I think it's intellectually dishonest for you to say you have proof that it didn't happen. Here's the difference between you and me. I am open to the possibility that I am wrong in certain areas, and you are not.

For, what... 10 pages?

Soon to join the circuit: Christopher Hitchens and "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" to look forward to next month (the answer to: what is your follow-up act to bashing Mother Theresa, posthoumously, at the Vatican?). I can't wait.

There was (finally) a more even-handed treatment of atheism in the AP (courtesy of RNB). A great story, though the focus is primarily on Europe. They give mercifully meager ink to Dawkins and Harris, and instead talk about "Christian" atheists and "Muslim" atheists - and on the way, reference Karen Armstrong, Pope Benedict XVI, Thomas Hobbes and Socrates.

Both atheists and their foes agree on one thing: God — declared dead over a century ago by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — is making a comeback, at least as a focus of controversy....

Secular Europeans voice dismay at American religiosity and worry that faith-based reasoning is spreading in Europe, too. Many Britons, for example, believe the Christian faith of Prime Minister Tony Blair helped lead him to entangle Britain in America’s war in Iraq.

There is also deep suspicion of Poland, a devoutly Catholic new member of the European Union. Its deputy education minister late last year urged the teaching of creationism, the Bible-inspired alternative to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

God has made a comeback even in secular Europe, and around the developed world, the battle lines are being drawn. Now more than ever, it's worth asking the question - which side?

Deeply, deeply personal, and hard to articulate. I can talk about how an atheist worldview seems flat to me: how art and music seem unhinged from their source; how virtue in a closed room seems pointless; levels of interaction with the world around me go missing. Yet I'm sure there is a kinder, gentler atheism, one full of aesthetic and imagination.

The turning point for me, critically, is that life loses a central narrative. As a writer and as a person, that idea of the Greater Story is something I can't live without. And there's something even more fundamental in my rejection of atheism. And for that, I'm going to quote a VERY out of date source.

One of my favorite olde-tyme scholars, Gilbert Murray, was a writer and a scholar of ancient Greek. When writing about religion, he had to wrestle to find a definition of the subject that could encompass 1,000 years of the most varied spiritual practice in history: fertility cults to the aesthetic flights of Homer; Delphi to the rationalist schools of Epicurus and Diogenes. If these are all religion, he asked, what in the world IS religion?

His answer thrills me. In his sober don's voice, he writes, "Religion, like poetry and most other living things, cannot be defined..." but promptly plunks down his definition. "Religion essentially deals with the uncharted region of human experience." It is, he says, how we know what we don't know. This is true for him of all the world's religions, from Christianity to cargo cults.

"It is obvious that most, if analyzed into intellectual beliefs, are false... Yet the fact remains that man must have some relation towards the uncharted, the mysterious tracts of life which surround him on every side. And for my own part I am content to say that his method must be to a large extent very much what St. Paul calls pistis, or faith: that is, some attitde not of the conscious intellect but of the whole being, using all of its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and most inarticulate feelers and tentacles in an effort to somehow touch with these what cannot be grasped by the definite senses or be analyzed by the conscious reason. What we gain this is an insecure but a precious posession. We gain no dogma, at least no safe dogma, but we gain much more. We gain something hard to define, which lies at the heart not only of religion, but of art and poetry and all the higher strivings of human emotion."

That's an answer I can sign on to. A search for a more complete truth is important to me, a search that reaches out not only with the tools of science and intellect but also of faith. And that is why I'm not an atheist.

Tune in tomorrow.

UPDATE: I just found THIS posted on the blog of Ruth Gledhill, the religion correspondent for the Times. Same idea, same day, more elegantly written. Somehow I don't mind getting scooped. She devotes some elegant ink to stating why she is a believer. Stated simply, it is "fundamentally about turning to life." Give it a read.

Pause to Reflect.

I'm learning a lot about blogging, here at In Your Faith.

I've become a voracious reader of other religion blogs - some great, some not-so-great. The big appeal for me is the fact that a blogs is almost certainly up front about its bias.

Sometimes it's obvious from just a quick read, like the lean left with The Revealer or the lean right with Get Religion. But more often, religion bloggers will somewhere or other just tell you straight out about their religious beliefs and backgrounds, which we rarely get to read about in paper pages. And I trust that. I like to know what the writer believes, so I can read in the right spirit.

So, I've decided to devote the next few entries here to doing that - coming clean about my take, what I believe, what intrigues me, and why I write about religion. I'll link these entries to my home page for future readers.

That said, the task has been hard - hence the week or so that has gone by since my last post. My religious affiliation has never been as easy as "I'm a conservative Christian" or "born-again urban Buddhist." I find myself sitting once again across from the vexing question: what do I call myself? For a man who spends a disproportionate amount of time in pews and cushions, the census takers would have to lump me with the "unchurched" - the 33% of Americans who don't have a place of worship to call home.

When I think of the constants in my worldview, they are all persistent questions. And that makes sense. There's a practice among certain Quakers for writing their community guidelines. In the book of their beliefs and practices, they'll offer the flock "queries" in place of laying down rules (God keep the Quakers from rules). In essence, queries are a set of questions that believers can return to, time and again, to challenge, to ponder, to beat against and to refresh themselves.

Starting Monday of next week, I'll try to ask one good question a day, and tie it into how I read the news. I hope you'll be patient with me. In the end, I think it will make for a better blog.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.

Bibles in Schools... Redux

This just in, courtesy of Worldwide Religious News: Bulgaria wants religion in the schools.

More than 85% of the students and 70% of the adults interviewed by pollster Alfa Research said they wanted such a class. Three quarters of the interviewees said it should focus on informing about religions, while half of the respondents said it should be optional.

The wide majority of interviewees also believe the class should be taught by qualified teachers, rather than clergymen. Such a class could help check juvenile delinquency, aggression and drug use, according to the survey's respondents.

Me, I think the timing is fishy. I think the Bulgarians are just looking to exporti last years exam questions to Georgia High School students - a time-honored cottage industry.

Missionaries of Charity

I spent Palm Sunday in the South Bronx with the Missionaries of Charity - this is the order founded by Mother Theresa in 1950. They serve the very poorest of the poor, running soup kitchens and the like. I attended an early morning mass, then spent a few hours in the kitchen chopping lettuce and cutting the hot cross buns into pieces, so there would be enough to go around. We ended up with a lot of hot dashes.

I am still processing the experience. I puzzle over the place for the conservative Catholic movement in the modern world, but watching this group of barefoot women taking care of my city's homeless population - which the city does a very bad job at - affected me very deeply.

I didn't know that Mother Theresa was born in Albania - or that Albania was the first officially atheist country in the world. These facts and more from a story in today's Washington Post, about the floodgates being opened for religious freedom there, and the huge response of evangelists from around the world - Mormons, Greek Orhtodox, Muslims, Hare Krishna.

The Catholic cathedral that communists turned into a basketball arena for two decades is now busier than ever, drawing more than 2,000 people to a single Sunday Mass. An ornate Albanian Orthodox church with three grand, peach-colored domes is readying for Easter celebrations and popular midnight candlelit processions. And a few days ago, the latest of more than 50 mosques in the area opened with fanfare and a call to prayer.

There are also Bektashis, "a distinctive Sufi Muslim sect that maintains its world headquarters here."

Little Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu - aka Mother Theresa - should be proud.

ABBA meets INFERNO

Having a crisis with that "easy to assemble" IKEA bookshelf? Can't stand the taste of lingonberry? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm afraid the URL godhatessweden.com has just gone off the market.

Yup the tedious Phelps family is moving online with their public war against the socialist scandinavian country. God's elect are warned to "leave Sweden now" (you know who you are).

The fag-hating clan from Topeka, Kansas is kind of making a cultural tour of Europe at the moment - I guess holding up those homemade "God Gates Fags" placards isn't getting them airplay at home anymore. What with their constant presence at gay pride marches, the funeral of Matthew Sheppard and of US Servicemen, it seems that Americans - at last - have exported his over-the-top evangelizing like so much Jerry Lewis slapstick.

Why Sweden, particularly? Take a look at this article from the Daily Telegraph, if you really want to know - a loose princess, an intolerance for homophobia. I don't know. Björn Ulvaeus wore tight gold pants?

Just the other day, ur-geek Louis Theroux had in interview in the BBC about a program he was filming with the Phelps clan - "The Most Hated Family in America." Should be a hoot, though don't expect any sophisticatied tackling of the American landscape of outspoken faith. Sez Theroux, "It shows you what strange avenues the religious impulse can take you down. I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird."

Amish Aftermath

A story in the Washington Post, courtesy of the AP, about the new schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Nickel mines, as you remember, was the Amish community where a gunman killed 5 schoolgirls last October, and wounded 5 others.

The new schoolhouse has:

...a steel door that locks from the inside. It has no phone, but its location behind a row of non-Amish homes provides a way to quickly summon help in an emergency, [Bart Township zoning officer John] Coldiron said. During the rampage, a teacher had to run to a neighboring farm to call 911.

"For an Amish one-room schoolhouse, this one is spectacular," said Coldiron, who inspected it last week.

There are also skylights, sod lawns and a modern whiteboard. Over $4 million in donations were sent to the community, according to the article. I wonder how they spend that kind of money, deal with the logistics of it in a small, simple community?

We don't know. There is a lot of wondering with this story. The reclusiveness of the Lancaster Amish is legendary - reporters seldom spoke with anyone in the community during the entire ordeal of the murders, and then it was often members on the fringes. It has taken some deft journalism. In today's AP story, quotes from the zoning officer and a neighbor. Glimpses of the children walking with their lunch coolers, with state troopers guarding the one lane to the schoolhouse.

Were they guarding the children against another gunman? Probably not. Chances are that they were there to keep the journalists at bay.

How do you report a story like this? Late last year, Matthew Teague wrote a piece for Philadelphia Magazine that is thankfully still online. Check it out here. With only one Amish source - a reclusive man who deals with outsiders at the auction house - he weaves a story about Amish history, our fascination with tragedy, and, finally, the frustration of journalism. Gorgeous stuff.

Get Smart

This is a little belated... but props to TIME for their cover story on teaching the Bible in schools. David Van Biema makes an unapologetic case for adding the Bible to school curricula. Forceful and poetic:

Without the Bible and a few imposing secular sources, we face a numbing horizontality in our culture--blogs, political announcements, ads. The world is flat, sure. But Scripture is among our few means to make it deep.

Van Biema states and anwers arguments across the spectrum. I note that The Revealer had some positive words to say today about the emphatic feel of the piece, rare in one of the glossy behemoths: "It's good stuff, wherever you stand -- it's not a declaration from Big Media, it's an argument -- so read and argue."

Van Biema mentions the recent decision in Georgia to add Bible courses at the high school level (as electives). He doesn't ask, however, a question I think is fruitful (and which I blogged about here): does a secular study of the Bible strengthen faith... or weaken it?

Well, I ran across an excellent article about just this... in the Biblical Archaeology Review. of all places.

It's called "Losing Faith," and it's worth a peruse.The author interviews four scholars to see whether a life spent studying the Bible hurts or helps your belief in God. Bart Ehrman and William G. Dever lost their faith. James F. Strange and Lawrence H. Schiffman kept theirs.Here are a few great quotes from both sides:

Strange: My faith is not based upon anything like a propositional argument. When I indulge myself in all this scientific research and explication, I’m not doing anything about faith.

Shanks: What is your faith based on?

Strange: I'm still a baptist minister... my faith is based on my own experience—a good old Protestant principle..... Based on my own experience with God. For a lot of people, this makes me sort of a mystic in a cave or something. But I think it’s eminently practical and out there....

Shanks: Does this God of yours have any attributes?

Strange: I suppose so, but I’m not really much interested. If I’m passionately in love, I hardly ever want to discuss the attributes of the person I’m in love with. Or if I do, I wind up saying superfluous things for everybody listening. “She’s wonderful.” “Can you give me some more information?” “Yeah, she’s really wonderful.” [Laughs] When you’re in this state, you don’t utter propositions.

and

Ehrman: ...faith is rooted in certain historical claims. As historical claims, they can be shown as either probable or improbable. And I got to a point where the historical claims about Jesus seemed implausible, especially the resurrection. Not the crucifixion—I think Jesus was crucified like a lot of other people were crucified, and I think that, like a lot of other people, he stayed dead. And so, for me, that had a damaging impact on my faith.

and

Schiffman: From a Jewish point of view, these kinds of problems aren’t problems. First of all, the Bible was never taken literally in Judaism. It doesn’t mean that it’s not historical, but it is not taken literally in the Protestant sense. It’s not an issue in Judaism. Admittedly there is a literalist strain in a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers and a minority—maybe a growing minority—in modern Judaism, but it’s not classical Judaism. The Talmud doesn’t take the Bible literally in the Protestant sense. Jim [Strang]'s approach of taking a kind of experiential approach to the whole thing is one that is much more primary in Judaism.

I get into debates about these historical types of issues all the time, especially within the Orthodox community. I don’t want to say they aren’t important—they are important. We sit around and debate these kinds of questions all day.

and

Dever: ...the call of Abraham, the Promise of the Land, the migration to Canaan, the descent into Egypt, the Exodus, Moses and monotheism, the Law at Sinai, divine kingship—archaeology throws all of these into great doubt. My long experience in Israel and my growing uncertainty about the historicity of the Bible meant that was the end for me.

Shanks: Well, then your scholarship did destroy your faith?

Dever: Absolutely. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of my first trip to Israel. I worked there for 49 years and let me tell you something: Seeing Judaism and Christianity and, God help us, Islam up close and personal does not help. Living in the Holy Land, I became extremely cynical about religion. I began to think, more or less, maybe like all of you, that I had no talent for religion, that faith might be a matter of temperament as well as training. I never had a pious bone in my body. And I realized I was never really a believer, but it just took me 40 years to figure out that it was no longer meaningful. That’s when I converted to Judaism. [Laughs] I did it precisely because you don’t have to be religious to be a Jew. And I’m perfectly comfortable where I am.

Good mindbending stuff. What's interesting to me is the fact that none of them give much credence to literalism, and that the archaeologists who continue in their faith practice it on a metaphorical level. If this is the outcome of more biblical scholarship, then bring it on - in the schools, on TV, on the web.