One time I was walking through an empty hospital waiting room when on the television I saw a guy teaching passionately about Biblical prophecy. This wasn't a tele-evangelist or a mega-church "Brylcreem prophet" but a layman - thin, a beard, in a shirt-and-tie - maybe an engineer by day, or a teacher or an accountant. He was intelligent and he had elaborate (but not-professional) charts and graphs, and he poured his heart into teaching a tiny audience via public-access tv about his vision and calculations for the end times.
I was a minister at the time, but I had seen a lot of strife between Christians regarding differing views about prophecy, and I had also had too much of my own time wasted by ersatz prophecy experts. I also knew that 100% of end-times predictions have failed ("so far", I know). So I didn't feel good about what I saw. What I felt was:
"What a waste. So much intellectual effort and human passion, poured into this."
Then I wondered about the man on tv. "Maybe he works at IBM, or Denso or John Deere. He's probably been at his career for 15 years or more, and maybe he has a wife and three kids. He's good at his job, but it's nothing to live for. He longs for a bigger challenge, something with meaning commensurate with his desire to make a difference. And this is what hooked him."
Of course, none of that may be close to the truth. It's actually more a description of my own strivings for meaning and significance. And, as I increasingly realize, my Dad's. He really was an engineer and he had a nice, comfortable job as a professor of engineering. He had a wife and eventually five kids, and as his 30s rolled around, I think he was looking for something more significant. He and Mom bought a farm. He took a shot at starting a "tech company" (making printed circuit boards) in the 70s.
And (more to our point) he and Mom got us involved in a charismatic (speaking in tongues) evangelical church. And for awhile anyway, Dad got passionate about the Bible, investing himself in some unique and, um, unorthodox theories. If that pursuit had taken a major part of the rest of his life, well, what a waste that would have been. But it didn't.
When the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens wrote his 2007 book God Is Not Great, he gave it the subtitle: "How religion poisons everything". Hitchens was entertaining and funny and often bombastic, as you can see in his many YouTube videos. "Religion poisons EVERYTHING" is typical Hitchens - over the top and offensive to many. I can't quite agree. Then again, religion, as the great poet said, has "been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know I'm one!"
Not really. I wasn't ruined by religion, and neither was Dad, and I hope that the guy on the hospital tv wasn't either. But boy, all three of us wasted some serious time and emotion trying to squeeze modern life and science and experience into an ancient frame. We (well, I, at least) let our compassion and generosity and humanness be limited by what our religion taught us about faithfulness and right thinking. Religion may not poison everything, but it poisons a lot.
Case-in-point: I recently checked in with one of my old mentors to see what he was writing and doing these days. Honestly, "mentor" is a strong word. I only met him once (although that "once" was a whole week spent with him, along with a very small group of other ministers). It was through his sermon tapes that I knew him and learned from him. He had a huge influence on me. And not only me. Once at a preacher's conference, the man who introduced my mentor said, "He doesn't know this, but he and I have been writing sermons together for a long time!" A lot of us were doing that. My mentor was often quoted, occasionally plagiarized, and always admired. He was interesting, funny, and he had a way of cutting to the heart of every matter. His was among the first mega-churches I ever knew about.
In 2016, my mentor was the first Christian leader I heard say (in an article) that he was going to "hold his nose and vote for Trump". His reasons were familiar to me, because I used to espouse them myself, and they were commonplace among evangelicals: "Families are under attack. Abortion is running rampant. Gay marriage has just been legalized. Trump may not be our ideal, but we aren't voting for a pastor, we're voting for a president." In 2016, I could still understand why he would say that. But I couldn't buy it myself anymore. After that, I found my way out of the ministry and lost contact with what he was writing.
So, just recently, I decided to look up my mentor again. He's now in his late 70s, I suppose, and retired but continues to write funny, insightful, winsome articles on a blog and on social media. I scanned through some of his writing and realized that he still has the gift.
Then I thought: "I wonder what he had to say about the last election." I didn't see many posts about it, but one right before the election said (my paraphrase):
"We all understand the need to vote our Christian values. One candidate favors unrestricted abortion. The other, while not perfect, appointed justices to the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. Other important issues include the fact that religious liberty is in danger, as is the sanctity of marriage and the ability to protect our children from sinful sexual teachings. In the Bible, God uses imperfect people to do his will. Let's pray that God will use an imperfect president to slow the social and moral decline that has become so pervasive."
I wonder if he sees in the last 14 months a slowing of the social and moral decline in this country. I sure don't.
As wise and talented as this guy is, his idea of the most pressing and important issues facing our country has almost nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, but instead consists of an amalgamation of right-wing political scare-topics cloaked in piety and religious authority. You might get the idea from his article that Jesus spent his time pleading with his followers to stand up for religious liberty, oppose abortion, and protect children from hearing that homosexuals exist.
Jesus of course never mentioned any of these things. He did have a few things to say about feeding the hungry, comforting the sick and dying, loving your enemies, and helping the starving beggar at the gate. None of that made it into my mentor's summary of our religious duty. Instead his "imperfect" president has unleashed a reign of terror against working immigrants and their families (these are the real "families under attack"), has cut spending on programs that, while "imperfect", keep people alive, while remodeling the White House and planning an expensive ballroom. I could go on.
Maybe religion really does poison everything. It made this good man (and many others, good and not-so-good) define morality not as compassion or helping people or living a good life but as enforcing a cruel conformity on people without understanding who they are or why they do what they do.
We needed more from guys like my mentor. We didn't get it.