Religion As It's Supposed To Be

 Anyone who has or can make the time, PLEASE go watch this.

I especially mean that for people who reject Christianity and religion in general. I don't think even the most devout atheist would find overmuch to quibble with in here, aside from certain choices of words. The man uses "God" because he is a Christian, but he makes abundantly clear and even says outright something I believe with my whole heart and have been preaching since high school: there are many paths to the sacred.

Put into my own words, which I have spoken and written many times: mine is not a better way, mine is only another way.

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My relationship with religion has been...complicated. I was baptized Roman Catholic at a year old and again at fourteen -- something that is not supposed to happen under any circumstance. I never grasped the theological complexities as to why the first baptism was found to be invalid; I had about as much interest in religion at fourteen that I did at a year old. It was something forced on me by my mother, and mother-forcings were not to be questioned in any way lest it summon the dragon. 

Church was a sometimes thing for me throughout my childhood. My babysitter, Martha, lived next door to me and her family -- which included a daughter named "Faith" -- took me to Sunday school tolerably often, until I moved to London at nine. I bounced back and forth between the Catholic and public school boards. Other than extra added ritual, there isn't much to differentiate the two educational options: I actually got a damned good grounding in world religions that weren't Christianity at Sir Arthur Carty Catholic School in grade six. 

But religion meant little to me at that age. I barely touched my Bible; my mom had obtained a book of Bible stories (from the Watchtower Society,  which means post divorce when money was nonexistent, likely the only reason she accepted that book, as you'll soon see). They were considerably easier to read. At six years old, fables are fabulous, not fabulistic. And as I grew up, I found church had more questions than answers. I was particularly unhappy whenever I was told "it's a mystery". A mystery? You seem to care very much about Jesus and God but you've had two thousand years to solve the "mystery" and you haven't even TRIED? You're all frauds. 

Or I'd routinely hear "it's God's will" as a thoughtstopper. Who are you to question the will of God? Especially when it just so happens to align with the will of a Christian taught never to question the will of God? There's a simple, direct way around that prohibition: turn "what would Jesus do?" into "what would I do if I were Jesus?" The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven, no pun intended. 

In grade thirteen I had two unlikely friends. One, the Kieron I have mentioned at intervals, was a very strong atheist, which suited my temperament at the time. The other was Johnathan, who was raised strict Jehovah's Witness. The three of us made an odd trio: I often found myself mediating theological and philosophical arguments between two wickedly intelligent and diametrically opposed minds. (Johnathan graduated high school with a near perfect average, including all the science course he memorized but did not believe.) 

Jehovah's Witnesses do not permit higher education. The waste of Johnathan's febrile mind fundamentally offended my best friend and sincerely puzzled me. I asked to borrow one of Johnathan's Watchtower Bibles, wondering what could possibly be in there to so enslave and stunt a person of such smarts. 

My mom hit the roof. I may as well have brought home a copy of the Necronomicon to summon demons with, as far as she was concerned. She threatened to burn the book, and I got the distinct feeling she wouldn't have cared if the flames jumped to me and consumed me along with it. I took it out of the house, leaving it in the shed until I could bring it to school, and then I read it over the next few months, surreptitiously, while listening to teachers drone on about stuff I mostly already knew. 

Their Bible is, um, fundamentally different from the one I had a glancing acquaintance with. JWs explicitly deny the divinity of Jesus, instead stating Jesus is the archangel Michael incarnate. They also don't believe that the "Holy Spirit" is anything other than the will of God. These seemed like trivial differences to me at the time. I was more interested in the JW belief that only 144,000 people would enter the higher levels of heaven. 

As of 2023, there were a shade under nine million JWs in the world. Somethin's gotta give. Expressing the 1990 equivalent to Johnathan yielded little more than a shrug. "We all  do our best to qualify," is all he'd say. 

At the same time, in grade thirteen, my Classical Civilizations teacher was making religion and spirituality accessible and relatable to teenagers, no easy feat. I've praised Reverend Roger "Uncle Rog" McCombe to the high heavens, because quite frankly that's where he is right now. He was there throughout his life, too. He was a man who saw the holy in everyone everywhere all the time...the closest thing to a saint I've actually met. He was especially interested in the Greek gods and their stories, and he would relate them using terms from Christianity and other religions interchangeably. Uncle Rog opened my mind, my heart, and my spirit.

In second year university, my girlfriend at the time lived in the Lutheran Student House at Wilfrid Laurier. I was living there rent-free for almost the entire school year, in blatant but unpunished defiance of their beliefs. Sex was had. Often. By more than just Cathy and I in that house. I can tell stories.

Because Cathy was Lutheran, and because she didn't seem at all God-besotted, I tried attending church with her. This time was a little better: I could at least see the truths behind all the dross. I undertook to read the Bible thoroughly, with commentary, and mostly succeeded at that (never mind all the genealogical tables, a man can only read the word "begat" so many times). 

Buried under centuries and centuries of ground axes and (often purposeful) mistranslations, if you dig hard enough and refrain from taking everything so gods-damned literally, there is a message there.  A very powerful message. In the video linked above, the Texas Representative and seminary student James Talarico distills that message to an essence and presents it in direct opposition to what Christianity has largely become in the U.S: Christian Nationalism. 

Talarico's vision of Christianity is both expansive and much more historically grounded than what often (not always, by any means)  passes for the faith in the political arenas Americans and many Canadians call churches. He insists that Christianity is blatantly political, but not in the way many of its adherents think. Jesus was, after all, an activist who pissed off the people in power with a message that sidelined them. 

He died for that. Powerful people don't like being bypassed. That doesn't change with the historical era. 

Neither does love. 

As Talarico notes, Jesus himself was not Christian. He called his faith "The Way" -- and it represents nothing less than a complete repudiation of the values driving society, then and now. It actually aligns very closely with my own values -- which really ought not to be a shock since, again, there are many paths to the sacred. 

Jesus' faith was highly communal. His followers shared land and possessions. They greeted one another "with a holy kiss". It wasn't top-down; it was bottom-up. Many of His followers were the literal bottom, the  dregs of society, which would have alarmed the Pharisees. The most dangerous thing in the world for an artificial overclass (and all overclasses are artificial) is for the rabble to realize they are collectively more powerful than even the most brutal tyrant. 

Jesus never elevated himself above his followers. He explicitly told them "these things and more will you also do". You can see him patiently explaining that the value system his disciples had learned was upside down. They continually ask him who will be the greatest, the most powerful, among them and Jesus continually redefines their notion of power in response. 

Talarico is like this. He doesn't seek to import his religion into politics: he seeks to import a certain kind of politics into his religion. A radical kind of politics that says, among other things, "by their fruits you shall know them" (not their power, not their status, not their bank accounts). 

This to me is the essence of Christianity -- and it's not much different from the essence of any other religion, or the basis of secular humanism, for that matter. I no longer get hung up on God talk even though I don't believe in the Christian God. There are many paths to the sacred. Taoism even calls itself "the way" and there is nothing in Taoism to negate Christianity.

I still do, sadly, get hung up on individual Christians. To my mind, more of them ought to be doing what Talarico does, calling out the hypocrisy. But then I remember I'm an idealist and frightfully naive, often. For instance, I question anyone's belonging to a church that fully endorses, defends and even encourages child sexual abuse. The Catholic Church has more blood on its hands than any other organization in the world and I question how much good can come out of something so rotten.

In the secular realm, I'm just as disgusted with any person or entity still using Twitter. So I guess I'm consistent in my naivete. 

I'm glad to see someone who truly understand what religion is supposed to be for. I'm doubly glad to see he's bringing his faith to bear on real world issues in a similar way to how Jesus would. And I'm in awe the guy is only, as of that video, in seminary. He has a bright future...sharing his Light.