The real secularists
Religious ignorance is a runaway problem in the U.S. [→ READ ]
Religious ignorance is a runaway problem in the U.S.:
Citing a bizarre 1997 poll that showed only a third of Americans could name the four Gospels, while 12 percent of us identified Noah’s wife as Joan of Arc, Prothero goes on to make an important if familiar point. We live in the most religiously believing and observant advanced industrial nation, but our level of actual knowledge about religious doctrines — our own and others — is significantly lower than in religiously indifferent countries elsewhere. …
As the 1997 poll illustrates, Americans aren’t just ignorant about Muslims or Sikhs or Hindus or even Mormons — they often know little about the doctrines or history of their own faith communities. …
I don’t know the exact statistics of who knows and doesn’t know what, but ignorance of scripture and church history is the least ghastly — and possibly most forgivable — explanation I’ve seen for Christian support of U.S. policies. When the light finally dawns, when the Spirit finally breaks through en masse, thousands upon thousands of us are going to fall to our knees and onto our faces in weeping and repentance: because what some of us are now supporting, Jesus commands us — and always has — to turn away from, whatever the cost.
The rampant secularization of much of the American faith tradition in the not-so-sacred cause of cultural and political conservatism must be laid at the parsonage door of those religious leaders who have abused the prophetic function of their ministry to acquire a “seat at the table” of secular power.
If we take scripture seriously at all, the outlook is grim for these abusers. (“Millstone around neck” comes to mind.) Repentance is always an option, always the way out*, for them and for us, but it is as compatible with our prideful nationalistic ignorant warmaking as water is with oil; it’s gonna take a lot of soap (and study) to cut through this thick-clotted blood of others we’ve spilled, this oil-drunk vomit we’ve soiled ourselves with.
If people of faith don’t know their own basics, if we aren’t self-consistent, if we fall like rubes for doctrines so divorced from what we say we believe, if we cheerlead behaviors that Jesus condemns, what is our point? Why should anyone listen? Why should anyone care?
Redemption may happen, but no thanks to us.
[via eeh]
*Repentance is the way out from death and judgment but not from consequences. The biblical record is especially consistent on this: we’re almost always required to endure the earthly consequences of our actions, sometimes for life, sometimes for generations. What we can do is stop acting in ways that provoke — and accumulate — further negative consequences.
(I’m fascinated by this Judeo-Christian parallel to the Buddhist/Hindu/Jainist idea of karma, popularly known as “the law of cause and effect.” Alas, the finer points of karmic understanding still elude me; my own extra-Christian ignorance is showing.)
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