A Christian Country?

A newspaper referred to Canada as a Christian country because a majority of telephone respondents told pollsters they 'are' Christians, always keeping in mind that 'being' a Christian in a telephone poll does not necessarily entail going to church or reading the Bible or putting any thought or effort into anything religious. It may just mean you identify with it more than the other listed options. More to the point, if most of the Christians in Canada were Roman Catholic, would that make us a Roman Catholic country? My fellow Anglicans wouldn't want to think so.

What a country is, is not to be determined by who makes up a country. If most Americans are white would that make America a white country? Would you want it to follow policies based on its status as a white country? White-only immigration, a whiteness test for the Presidency? Canada may have more Christians than Muslims or Buddhists but you can't claim that makes it a Christian country, you can only say that more Canadians, when asked, identify with Christianity than do any other single answer. If more humans are Chinese than are any other single group, does that make humanity Chinese?

To know what a country 'is' you need to look at its constitution, laws, and institutions. The Charter says you cannot discriminate on the basis of religion - even in how you identify the country. The law makes no version of religion official. You don't even have to vote if you don't want to, never mind belong to a church, to be a citizen. There are, in fact, multiple religious institutions in Canada: mosques, temples, synagogs, churches of various denominations, even secular organizations. In practice Canada is pluralistic in every area, be it politics, theism, economics, sports, food, language, ethnicity. Officially it doesn't matter what 'most' Canadians like to eat, read, tweet about, or even who they vote for (you don't need the most votes to win power, only enough MPs).

Our laws are not based on Christianity or adultery would land people in jail and teenagers who disrespected their parents could be stoned to death. Our government is not based on the Bible or we would have liquidated the national treasury and given all the money to the poor in sub-Saharan Africa. Christmas is not based on Jesus anymore; even those who keep the Christ in Christmas also keep the Santa Claus and the presents and the turkey and the office parties and the commercialism in Christmas - we all do.

The place where church and state, religion and politics meet and mingle is in the individual, not in the state or its laws or our constitution or 'the country'. A person can be both religious and political, in whatever form, but a country cannot be religious. It has no self (say, no soul) and even believers don't really believe that Christ died to save Ontario from its sins and that Toronto can have eternal existence if 50% plus one of Torontonians will just answer a polling question the right way.

A Christian church is not one that is made up of Christian people unless it is doing Christian things. Otherwise, two Baptists getting into a car accident would make it a Christian car accident. Religion is religious people doing religious things. Churches are the way religious people do religious things. Canada is not the way Canadians do Canadian things because there are no uniquely Canadian values. You may have to believe certain things to be religious, but there is no value you have to hold to be a citizen, and no value you have to be a citizen to hold.

Miracles and Irrelevance

A miracle is most commonly defined as something happening that defies or breaks natural law. It's when something science says can't happen, does happen. What else could it be but a miracle? An intervention by a force superior of the laws of gravity, or entropy, or medicine. A break in the pattern of established knowledge or understanding. Something we can't explain.

Science, however, is full of things that it cannot explain. Its usual response is to say, "that's very interesting. We don't know the answer now, but one day we will." (Not a response allowed to the religious, who are expected to be able to answer literally any question that is put to them, on pain of revealing themselves to be fools and con men if they can't).

The reason nothing can happen that violates natural law is that natural law is made up of whatever actually does happens. If you have a law that says that what goes up must come down, and something goes up and doesn't come down, you have not violated natural law. What you have done is shown that that law needs to be rethought, revised, to take into account this new fact, this new occurrence. And natural law is perfectly able to do that. New information is built into the idea of science. Is there room for new information in your religion? Because, I've got to tell you, new information is coming at us pretty relentlessly.

It's one thing to say that scripture contains all that is necessary for salvation, to use Christian terms. It is another thing to say it must shut out all future facts, scholarship, experience, understanding, and social movements. Christians must respond to the world, interact with the world, yes, even learn from the world. That is because we must live in the world. Scripture must not be sealed off from life, a seamless web that must be forever protected, or a particular culturally-determined view of which, must be walled off from things like feminism and evolution. The Bible is not at war with life as much as you think.

The strength of science is its flexibility, it's openness. It can change and shift direction and absorb new events and new information and generate and respond to new ideas, all while still maintaining its integrity as science. Can religion? Can your religion? Are we locked in a once-and-for-all, full stop, hermetically sealed, self-contained system dropped on the world from outer space? Once an opinion of it is formed, must it simply be repeated over and over again endlessly and without nuance because that's what faith is? Which of those as described, science or religion, is more alive, more relevant?

It is not enough to simply repeat religious views over and over. Repetition is not faith. Being secure enough to reach out, branch out, to take in and turn over, even accept, modern issues, to dance a new dance because it is still you who are dancing, still your feet, your heart, your faithful self. Being faithful to dancing doesn't mean never learning new moves, or new music; we don't have to always and only dance to klezmer or panpipes. But we do have to dance. As faithful people we are not allowed to sit them all out. Try dancing to feminism, rather than sulking in a chair against a wall at the stupid music kids listen to today. Listen, the world is playing that tune, Evolution, again. Step out and take a twirl. The faith of the dance interacts with the music of social progress. Yes, you love your dance partner. Yes, it is heart pounding exercise. Yes it should be done joyfully. Be flexible, limber. Don't just stand there like you are up to your knees in gravel. Live, in the world as it is now, not as it was two thousand years ago. Faith is timeless, but belief in Noah's arc need not be. Jesus is for me, but I am me in this world, not AD 33.

The Bible is just the written down part of Christianity, and if all we needed was the part written down 2,000 years ago, then we would not have churches and denominations and theologians and priests and services/liturgy, music, sermons, communion, or the lived-in-this-world personal experiences of individuals relating to each other.

The difference between a novel and a play is that a play is alive. A novel happens inside you, in your head. A play outside you, in the world. Every performance of a play is different. Every actor brings something to the same script. Settings can change, costumes, techniques, scenery, machinery, - at one time females roles were played by men - classics are still performed, modern works are added. But if scripture is a novel, religion is a play. A play is acted on, acted out, in real time, by different generations. We have know Hamlet, but we neither present it nor experience it the way it was in Shakespeare's day. It is next to impossible to recreate that first performance, as interesting as trying to is.

I know you think the Bible is special because it was written by God but in truth it is Hamlet written by committee. Based on history, written by genius, expressed with poetry and plot and inspiration, insight, the Spirit; it attracts the most brilliant to it and is known even to the smallest in our culture. It has been studied for centuries. People devote their lives to understanding it. The Bible contains what is sufficient for Christian salvation. It is not the key to biological research or space travel. It is what brings God closer to Christians. But if the conversation ended in AD 100, no wonder some find it boring and irrelevant.

The metaphor of religion

I have this fear, this fear of an atheist coming up to me and boldly asking me if I believe in God. What would I say? Probably, that I don't really believe in anything, because I don't really know what the word 'believe' means. Is it different than 'think' or 'know'? I believe the earth is round, I think the earth is round, I know the earth is round - there must be a difference, but what is it?

Rather, I would say that I participate in the religious life of a Christian community, and that allows me to say, "I am a Christian". I can even say why I am a Christian: because it suits me. Do I really believe in God? As a Christian, I use Christian language, thought, values, characters and narrative. I take God seriously. I make God, and thinking about God, learning, reading, praising God, loving God, a real part of my life. It is difficult not to believe something you love is real.

But I would not say I 'believe' that God 'exists' or that the Bible is 'true', unless you agreed to a discussion on what 'believe' and 'exists' and 'true' mean. I am liberal enough, and Christian enough, to accept seeing my religion as it is now as metaphor - the way everything is metaphor, the way science is metaphor, the way the Law of Gravity is metaphor - that structures and allows the living of life in relation to something that is useless to us without, or at least is more useful with, that very metaphorical or symbolic or concrete-seeming language, that idea.

To the extent that religion is philosophy with narrative, the philosophy and narrative and events I value and live are of Jesus.

That said, I must allow equally for love of Islam among Muslims, or Yahweh among Jews, or Hinduism among Hindus, or Secular Humanism among atheists. Folklore beliefs among folklore believers. Language is how we think when we do think, and language is, even individual words are, round-about generalized descriptions and ways of suggesting at what we have no other way of getting to. You may think that language is precise and specific and exact, but the questions that can be asked about a single word are legion, and definitions use words that require definitions, and they all require you be a speaker of that particular language. After however many translations and/or popularizations. Words are mainly defined, or explained, by other words.

So I can say that I speak Christianity, and that means it is an intrinsic, expressive, foundational, colouring, natural (after all, I have to speak some language) part of me that in some way is me, is part of how I live and think and feel and communicate with (be in communion with) others, and the world of ideas and values and decisions. Speaking religiously doesn't mean science is a lie any more than speaking Finnish means Spanish is a lie. Speaking science does not mean it is your duty to drive all other languages into extinction. But knowing a language, any language, does mean you speak to others, you communicate, dialogue, meet, learn, share, translate, teach, enjoy, grow the language, and yes, learn enough about other languages to benefit from and recognize them.

Language is not a perfect match for religion, even in the way I have been talking about them, but that also is the point. Using language as a metaphor for religion is sloppy the way using the facts of a specific religion as a metaphor for the heart of the mystery of love or life doesn't quite fit or cover all the bases. But so too science, logical positivism, utilitarianism, liberalism, economics, or anthropology. So too writing blogs.

The Truth About Religion

Let’s start with the basics: religion is bad. This is because a) religion has motivated human beings to do violent, destructive, and immoral things throughout history, and b) because religion is a falsehood and falsehoods, by their very existence, are negatives. They are intellectual affronts to the purposeful consciousness of humans. We are, as has been said, the consciousness of the world, and the highest and best use of that, is to discover all the facts about the world that there are, regardless.

​Of course, if you are put off by the number and brutality of religious wars throughout history, bear in mind that every war that has ever been fought, religious or not, has been fought with the most up to date technology of the time. Technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs like the Atom Bomb, or Mustard Gas, or Cruise Missiles, or Machine Guns, or Broadswords, or the Long Bow, Cross Bow, Flamethrowers, Hand Grenades, the Guillotine, Electric Chair or the drugs for Lethal Injection (never mind the chemistry knowledge needed for a Meth Lab), were brought to us not by priests, but by science and technology. Science, however, is morally neutral and a scientist formulating a poison gas is not responsible for its use by some political or religious person, but only for its actual existence. It should not be taken as a reason to do away with science.

People have been killed in the name of democracy, capitalism, communism, freedom, the nation state, politics in general, and living standards. The point about religion is not just that bad things have been done in its name, but that those bad things were unnecessary and pointless, because it is a lie. Killing people in the name of democracy or politics at least has the advantage of politics and democracy being true things, intellectually solid reasons to kill, if you so choose.

What makes religion so pernicious is that it is so unnecessary. Since there is no God, any good you can get from religion can be got through psychology, philosophy, or the Rotary Club. There is no need for religion. It has nothing to offer that you can’t get elsewhere except for God and spirituality, which are both fictions and therefore don’t count. That billions of people think they subjectively get some good in religion that they can’t get elsewhere is not the point. That is a subjective sense of wellbeing, not an objective, defensible, fact. It is facts we are interested in, not truths, and the facts speak for themselves (well, actually, if they spoke for themselves we’d have heard from all of them by now – a kind of divine revelation, if you will).

Niels Bohr, who was a scientist and one of the founders of Quantum Theory, said that there are small truths and that there are large truths, and that while the opposite of a small truth was plainly false, the opposite of a large truth may also be true. That just goes to show that while scientists can be wrong, science itself always leads up the mountain the top of which it is the only path to.

Chesterton said that when the common people are faced with two truths that contradict each other, they will take both truths and live with the contradiction. Theologians have said that if God exists God exists differently than the way everything else that exists exists. This just goes to show that the physical brain is capable of conceiving of non-physical things, that philosophy is at least as hard a subject as science and that if you have a science and theology that contradict each other, the common person takes both and live with the contradiction. Common people are fools – that’s why they are common.

Everyone knows that there is only one right answer to any question. Everyone knows there is only one way for things to be. Everyone knows a real truth excludes all other possibilities – it’s common knowledge. There is only one reality, one way for things to exist – otherwise the door would be open to literally anything. Members of one religion would have to concede the legitimacy of other religions, or Leprechauns, or ghosts.

So religion and science agree. There is only, can be only, one truth. If something is right, everything else must be wrong; that is the lesson. The truth is that there are (to paraphrase Shakespeare) fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. Either that or there are more things. Or both. Depending. It’s hard to say.

But be of good cheer, and rejoice always; it isn’t about truth, it’s about life and having it more abundantly. It’s about what attitude to take to life and what community you want to be part of. It's about faith, for atheist or theist; faith as the making real in your life what you value. And nothing comes closer to being capital-T truth, than Life.

More Christians or Better Christians?

One of my biggest problems as a Christian is the notion that I am a recruiting agent for my religion. It is essential to my faith that I try to expand my grouping, and therefore my grouping's power and profile and resources. I am encouraged to do this not just as a practical matter - our church needs more supporters - but as part of being Christian. I am always to be at odds with non-Christians, always struggling to defeat their non-Christianness. It is a matter of winning souls for Jesus, which is a very individualistic view.

Christianity is about saving your individual, personal, soul from its individual, personal, eternal punishment. I express Christian love by trying to spare you, who I am called to love, from such a fate. And I repeat the process on as many other personal, individual, souls as I can before I die. There are seven billion people on earth and I am already well past my youth - it is a monumental task. But I must try, because God and the Devil are keeping score: so many for Jesus, so many for Satan. Maybe they have money on this game. There is a precedent for God and Satan making bets.

I am drawn more to the vision of the kingdom of God than to the vision of a personal afterlife in heaven. The kingdom is a transformed earth, one of justice, peace, plenty, an absence of death and war and sin, a flourishing of life without conflict. Does that in any way sound like a world in which everyone is Christian? It doesn't to me. Christians fight in wars, abuse minorities, break into sectarianism, display greed, just like everyone else. Indeed we often say we are not people who don't sin, just people who are forgiven for our sins. In what way is, and does the bible ever say that, the prerequisite for the kingdom is everyone in the world converting to Anglicanism?

As a liberal Christian I respect and feel I can learn from non-Christians, not just pity them and try to change them. I do not see Christianity in individual terms, or in scorecard terms. I see it in terms of a way of life that requires faith, and love, and hope. Faith in Christ, love for all (and love respects other people's difference and does not just try to remake the other in my own image), and hope for the kingdom, trust in God. I do not feel I am being tested to see how many I can recruit to a given 'side'.

I do not think Christianity has all the answers because I know it does not have all the questions. 'Sin' is not an issue in other faiths, so a cure for sin is not a something they even seek. Before we can introduce the idea of the forgiveness of sins we have to introduce the idea, convince them of the idea, of sin. It may be an idea that grows naturally out of Judaism, but that only makes it more specifically Christian.

I struggle with recruiting, and it may be that I am just justifying my own reluctance to put myself forward and in people's faces. But is a Christian supposed to relate to non-Christians with pity, scorn, desperation, seduction, argument, and politics, even if those things are disguised as love, rather than respect, openness, dialogue, softness, explanation, example, and working together for that kingdom to  come? Is it really about increasing the number of Baptists in the world and decreasing the number of Buddhists, or about convincing God not to torture you - by getting you to agree with me?

The thing is, it may in fact be about those things. I may be naive thinking everything will be all right in the end, or that the struggle I engage in should be with harm, war, injustice, materialism, loneliness, poverty and fear, and not with atheists, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. Maybe my job is to increase the number of Christians in the world, rather than increase the quality of Christianity people who are already Christians practice. But Jesus, who was Jewish, criticized the Jewish leaders for the quality of Judaism they practised. That is one reason why I think too much emphasis has been placed on the number of people who are Christians, and not enough on the quality of the Christianity they
practice.

Managing Truth

Religion, like science, is fuelled by the sense that there is 'something out there'. The 'something' is known to both the scientific and the religious community as The Truth - whether we are called toward it by it, or strive for it with our own wits, it is our justification for what we do. The one equation, the Theory of Everything, the completion of that long list of all the facts there are to know about the universe, progress in the never-ending pursuit of 'pure' knowledge, or God, the pursuit of the elusive Goodness, or Peace, or oneness. 

Ask why we want to know how the universe works, or what value there is in scientific knowledge, and the answer is obvious: scientific knowledge lets us do stuff. If science had not given us things - measles vaccines, jet aircraft, microwave ovens, poison gas, automobiles and assault rifles, i.e., technology - we would think of it the way we think of Philosophy; a bunch of academics sitting around arguing about what the meaning of an 'atom' is. 

Science is credible, important, demands recognition and priority, because it allows us to do things, and have things (with which we can do more things). Thus the question 'how' can we do it lends itself almost entirely to science. The question 'should' we do it, or 'why should we', is harder to answer scientifically. Give us your goal and we can help you reach it. Ask us what your goal should be and we say can only say to "learn more facts". Because if we say anything else, such as, "enhance human flourishing" you will ask us why you should value that, and then what will we say? 

What will we do when we have all this knowledge, when we know so much? Probably the same things we are doing now, only more so. Even faster travel, and travel even farther. Even more efficient ways to make war. Entertainment that is even more entertaining. Stronger medicines than the medicines we have now (and stronger poisons, of course).

Science has the sense of something big going on in the universe and says what is going on is knowable, reducible, pin-down-able, intellectually own-able, and therefore finite. It is a matter of listing all the facts we know. Literalists who absolutize their religion are in kind with the scientific impulse of the knowable: explicable, hard fact, controllable, own-able. Science is about managing. We know so that we can do. When we absolutize religion we are mimicking the scientific need to manage.

What This Religion Is To Me

I saw a production of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting For Godot at Stratford once. It was both dumbfounding and thrilling. I sat enthralled, excited, quickened, eager, daunted, happy -  in short I had a heightened and intensified version of the reaction I have to life in general. Enthusiastic bafflement. As great a piece of theatrical experience as it was, it was not a clear or straight-forward one. My excitement came from the fact that while I was absolutely convinced something brilliant and profoundly meaningful was going on, I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. That, I think, sums up my religion, or at least my spirituality. 

Without a religion, spirituality would be formless. It would amount to "what a pretty flower," or "I had such a nice time," - and what can I do with that? Religion provides bones, scaffolding, structure, stories, characters, values, words, themes, writings, a community and yes, God - a spirituality I can process in, engage in, grow in, toward. Dwell in. My religion is Christianity because it works for me. Had I been born in Iraq instead of Canada I'd probably be Muslim, or India, a Hindu.

The only reason to be anything, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, farmer, accountant, sailor or scientist, is that it suits you. The question is what sort of life do you want to live. If I choose life lived in the Christian community of Anglicanism, it is because it provides some subjective sense of benefit to my life. If billions of people subjectively say their religion adds something valuable to them, it is not for anyone else to say they are wrong, or stupid, or lying. You are, subjectively, the only authority on your own subjectivity. 

If you absolutize that, however, and project it into places and onto people without that subjective, personal, shareable-but-not-enforceable, sense that you can't quite pin down what it is you mean, and try to browbeat others, or indoctrinate, or trick, or use sophistry to 'win' another person or a contest over some idea, then expect to be called out. The fundamentalist believes the bible is trying to answer scientific questions and its answers are right and should be taught in school. The atheist believes the bible is trying to answer scientific questions and its answers are wrong and religion should be done away with. It will be my belief that the bible is not trying to answer scientific questions, that it is a theological work. That is step one. 

Step two is that religion only matters, only works, as religion. Translate it into science and you get nonsense. Translate it into philosophy and you get axioms. History and you get a movie. Politics and you get wars. Jesus walking on water, what it means and how we respond to it, is important only from inside the religion. How can it have any meaning or value for someone outside of it? It is in what it says to me as a Christian, not you as an atheist, that its importance lies. 

Always I will remind myself Christianity is a religion. A direct, subtle, nuanced, strong, broad, valuable, old, tangible, honest, powerful religion. One that sees God as love, and people as compassionate and as treasures, the future as light and hope, and puts it all and so much more inside my heart and head and hands, places it in life and this world, in a way that only religion can. The Bible is not true, because I don't know what 'true' means. Christianity is not fact, because what are 'facts'? They are defined as "truly existing or happening" (Webster) and again, what does 'truly' mean? There may be more than one way to be true. We could argue that for a long time. But is Christianity good? Well, that depends on Christians, doesn't it?