The following is the second of a two part article on what it means to be a Christian adapted for use in The Salt Shaker, West Hill United Church’s newsletter. It appeared in its original form in the 2006 summer issue of the magazine Women’s Concerns*. Like the first part, this one can’t be taken on its own, either. * Just as The DaVinci Code was about to hit theatres last month, a member of the congregation remarked via email that the Vatican, being hit first with the controversy over the James ossuary and then with the movie, just wasn’t going to get a break. But her next sentence pointed out the reality of the situation–Of course, they’ve had a break for about the last two thousand years. It seems that has been pretty much true. Christianity, for hundreds and hundreds of years has been the normative perspective for much of the Western world. True, we’ve had a few other religious viewpoints hanging around for all of that, but the worldview that has created the foundations for governments, legislation, and the common law has been foundationally Christian. Think about what that means for a moment. Say you were born before the protestant reformation. You would have made sense of your world using Christian beliefs as the lens through which you peered. God, creator of the heavens and earth, resided in heaven, a somewhat nebulous place, but one that actually existed. Disease, misfortune, the weather, etc., were all at his control of God and that your ability to accept or survive them was pretty much dependent upon your relationship with him. That relationship could be improved through prayer, the participation in various sacramental rituals and the living of a godly life. If things were desperate, you might be able to purchase eternal salvation if you happened to have the coin to do so. Even if you’d been born later into a family that had split from the Roman Catholic Church after the Protestant Reformation, your worldview would have been much the same. God in heaven had the ability to grant mercy or not dependent largely upon your wholehearted acceptance of his domination of the world and his skillfully laid plans for its redemption. You would still see the divine hand in all the difficult places in life–illness, bad luck, and such–all part of God’s cosmic plan. Rather than participating in ecclesial rituals, you would search yourself, over and again, for any thought, will, or action that was inconsistent with that belief and, with sometimes heroic effort, purge it from your life. Indeed, were you born any time before the beginning of the modern era, you would have been living in a world whose boundaries were drawn by a Christian belief system but which didn’t know it. The world just was. In fact, as New Zealand theologian, Lloyd Geering, points out in his book Christianity without God, Christianity didn’t begin to be examined as something distinct from culture for its first 1700 years. My email correspondent was right: the church had certainly had a pretty long break. But that has come to an end. Despite it being a mere two hundred years or so since we all believed the world was a mere 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve were parents of us all, our post-modern society can no longer assert many of the beliefs once unquestionably normative. Science and discovery have moved such former truths to the archival memory, the mythologies of any serious thinker. It is a good thing. Religion is a primarily tribal undertaking. While it is true, as Geering has noted, that Christendom required no moniker to distinguish it for its first millennium and a half, the corollary of that is also true: those outside of its worldview felt the powerful condemnation of their alternative perspective. Judaism, the root out of which much of Christendom sprang, became anathema to it, ghettoes and pogroms a part of the distinction. Islam knew the violent peculiarity of the crusades. Even the protestant reformation, never an effort to create a distinctive branch of Christianity, but only an attempt at clarification of liturgy and ritual, brought territorial hatred that continued strong, heated, and legitimate until mere decades ago. Having been prodded off-centre, Christianity has been open to examination and critique for some time now. Indeed, we have become accustomed in recent years in the western world, to assume that those with whom we are speaking do not necessarily share a similar worldview to ours based on philosophy, religion, upbringing, culture, or nationality. The contrary might even be true, that is, that it might be considered offensive to assume they did unless you knew otherwise. Getting outside of one’s tribe can bring about an entirely refreshing perspective. Or a frightening one. Not that many years ago, the United Church of Canada participated with the Government of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada in establishing a school system across the country designed to cultivate Christian morals and values in the hearts of aboriginal children. Within the context of an exclusively Christian worldview, the concept was heroic. Children in traditional aboriginal communities were growing up in what many considered ignorance and squalor. Their communities lacked running water, medical and educational facilities, what ‘proper’ society would acknowledge as adequate housing, clothing, and nutrition. And, considered by many to be the greatest travesty of all, they had only a limited knowledge of the loving and beneficent God who had sent Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to him. All these things were prized by the prevalent Western/Christian culture. To turn away from the challenge of offering the hope of a ‘normal’ life to the children of such communities, could only be seen as a travesty, a shirking of responsibility. The residential schools program was conceived and developed to address what were perceived to be the disgraceful realities of the aboriginal peoples of Canada. We can see, now, what that program did. Certainly, it increased the literacy rate, but hugely undermined the ability of whole generations to speak in their original languages. Absolutely, it entrenched Christian values in the hearts of the children who passed through its many doors, but at the cost of the dignity and respect due the traditions of the elders. And yes, it managed to introduce the Christian God to hundreds of little children, but that God should never have tried to take the place of the arms of a mother and the warm, familiar traditions of a loving community. Generations of men and women were disconnected from the maternal and paternal patterning of their communal systems. The devastating results of that dis-connection are a legacy with which aboriginals will always live. They will haunt the Canadian Christian culture forever. It is only when we get perspective that we can see what a system is capable of doing, good and bad. So it is that we celebrate that Christendom no longer has the monolithic world-ordering power it once had–it was in desperate need of that perspective. We are left, then, with the task of assessing what is good, worthy of being safeguarded, taken into the future, and what is wrong, ill-founded, needing to be set aside. And, while it is crucial that we hear the perspectives of those who stand outside the tradition, it is also important that we, who stand within it, bring these challenges to its attention. The responsibility for repentance and transformation lie within the heart of the beast, not outside of it. At the same time, it is also important we keep our sights set on the far horizons, not on the limits of our own backyards and that we use what we know of humanity and the earth to focus them. We live in an increasingly diverse world. The death of the single monolithic worldview coincided with the maturation of manifold alternate perspectives, each with a gift and a challenge to offer the world. Yet if we continue to hang onto what has been the legacy of religious dogmatism–a tribal mentality that champions the truth and rightness of each particular perspective, we run the risk of creating more and deeper divisions within humanity. While we know the perils of the single, monolithic perspective, we need, somehow, to come to a place where we can set aside our differences and work together as a community. How we do that is the task with which we must currently engage ourselves. Geering uses a simile to explain the development of Christendom, the changes that have taken place over time and the future of religion as he sees it. He likens it to a river flowing down a mountain to the sea. Its source is not a single, pure fount gurgling up from below, but several rivulets of thought and belief–our Jewish antecedents, the mythologies of Egypt, the gods and rituals of the Gentiles, the Greek philosophies. Each rivulet brings its understanding and perspective into the river and carries on with it. As it moves down the mountain, the river twists and turns, often breaking into several different streams–the Gnostic communities, the Manichean ‘heretics,’ the Essenes, the Pauline perspective–as thought and practice is influenced by particular perspectives and teachings. Some dribble into nothingness; others follow their distinct paths for a time and then rejoin the main river. Eventually, it breaks into three main currents–Judaism Islam, Christianity–and each of them, in turn, has seen oxbows and tributaries break off, rejoin, break off again as the river has flowed steadily down. But Geering notes a change that has been happening over the past three or four hundred years, a new current that flows and bubbles up, taking strength from and lending it back again to all the various streams that flow. He calls it secularism. Rather than a negative anti-religious current, he sees it as that which will necessarily flow out of what Christendom has been. Beyond the tribal grasping that our multiplicity of perspectives might offer, secularism streams on bringing to the surface virtues consistent across the breadth of the river. They are the things we have in common. They are the lenses by which we judge our past failings and triumphs. They are our hope. And they will be the making of that new worldview, one which might offer hope for the future to what is, indeed, a planet under attack. At some point in that future, we will stop using the word Christian. Rather than unite, as we once, long ago, sought to convince ourselves it might, the original purpose of the word will resurface and we will see it clearly as a tool created to divide, not unite. We will set it aside. So, too, with those who use other names to describe their particular rivulet or current. Perhaps then, Geering’s simile will buoy us up as we find we are no longer rivers or streams but the ocean, deep, broad, and full.
Gretta Vosper is a minister and atheist. She is a Best-Selling author of two books and founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.