Table of Contents

OTHER BOOKS BY FRANK SCHAEFFER

Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE

PART I - Where Extremes Meet

CHAPTER 1 - How the New Atheists Poison Atheism

CHAPTER 2 - How Many Ways Are There to Say, “There Is No God!”?
CHAPTER 3 - Why Does Dawkins Oppose Faith with Lapel Pins?
CHAPTER 4 - Determinism Religious and Secular Is the Ultimate Insanity
Defense
CHAPTER 5 - Dennett Says Religion Evolved the Way Folk Music Did
CHAPTER 6 - Hitchens Poisons Hitchens
CHAPTER 7 - The Only Thing Evangelicals Will Never Forgive Is Not
Hating the “Other”
CHAPTER 8 - Spaceship Jesus Will Come Back and Whisk Us Away

PART II - Patience With Each Other, Patience With

God

CHAPTER 9 - So Naked Before a Just and Angry God

CHAPTER 10 - There Is More in Man Than the Mere Breath of His Body
CHAPTER 11 - That “Truth Button” Should Humble Everyone CHAPTER 12 -
How Do Spiritual Catalysts Work?
CHAPTER 13 - “Shedding over Every Daily Task the Light of Love”
CHAPTER 14 - He Never Left a Trace That He’d Been There
CHAPTER 15 - Much More Miraculous Than a Good Cup of Coffee CHAPTER
16 - “First and Last Alike Receive Your Reward”

Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
To my granddaughter Lucy

and to her mother Becky

 PROLOGUE

Why This Book May Not Be What You Expect

So let others admire and extol him who claims to be able to comprehend
Christianity. . . . I regard it then as a plain duty to admit that one neither
can nor shall comprehend it.
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

When I place my five-month-old granddaughter Lucy on a blanket on my

kitchen table, and I help her stretch by rubbing her feet, legs, and arms in
what my wife Genie calls “Lucy’s Grandpa spa,” everything fades away—
bills, the economy, who got elected, even the background “sound track” of
my impending doom, that ticking clock of aging, never too far below the
surface these days. Lucy loves stretching after her naps. She smiles and
looks into my eyes with such contentment that I feel transported to a place
beyond time and reckoning where nothing exists but my hunger to reward
this little girl’s love.
I find myself praying, “Lord, may none but loving arms ever hold her.”
That prayer has nothing to do with theology. I’d pray it whether I believed
there is a God or not, for the same reason that on a lovely spring morning
when I’m looking at the view of the river that flows past our home I
sometimes exclaim, “That’s beautiful!” out loud, even when I’m alone.
Genie and I offered my son John and his wife Becky a place to live while
they got on their feet financially. It has been a long haul since John
unexpectedly volunteered to serve in the Marines right out of high school,
was deployed to war several times, returned home, concluded his time of
service, went to the University of Chicago, married Becky, graduated from
U of C with honors, had Lucy, and started a new job. This is the son I was
on my knees praying for while he was being shot at. He came home! My
son’s baby daughter Lucy is in my arms! Life is sweet! When I hold Lucy,
belief in God seems natural.
Why do I write about faith and/or include religion and religious people
in so many of my books? What’s it to me if I disagree with the New
Atheists and with religious fundamentalists? First, one writes about the life
one has experienced. I’ve lived religion. Second, I don’t like to be forced to
choose between lousy alternatives. Third, I think that I keep writing about
faith because my faith needs affirmation.
One person running around shouting “Jesus saves!” or throwing stones
at the Devil while circling a large black rock, or proposing that science is
the alternative to religion sometimes appears crazy, even to himself or
herself. Fill a church with a thousand people moaning, “Lord have mercy,”
or pack a million pilgrims on their hajj around that rock, or fill a classroom
with students applauding someone’s declaration of atheism, and each
member of the group can say to himself or herself, “So many of us can’t be
wrong! There must be something to this!”
Speaking of God, there are thousands of books hanging around in my
house worrying me. In those books are tens of millions of words. None of
those words (including these) explain why the greatest pleasure that I
experience during any given day is when I lose myself in the small yet
overwhelming presence of my granddaughter. Caring for Lucy feels as if
I’m diving through warm, crystal clear water above some shimmering
Mediterranean reef. Body temperature and water match. Everything is
stunningly beautiful. I disappear. The usual selfish “me” that is the sum
total of my genes and/or God/Mom/Dad/whatever-induced worries, is
temporarily forgotten.
The experience evokes the fondest of childhood memories, of being
once again truly carefree, as I was when my family traveled by train each
year from our home in Switzerland to Portofino, Italy, where we
vacationed, where sand and sea, freedom to wander, and the blood-warm
water and languid pace of life left such a lasting impression of joy that the
childhood memory of “my” Italy defines happiness for me fifty years later.
So it is with Lucy; I stop worrying when I hold her, and simply am.
Thanking someone for Lucy seems natural to me. I pray even though I’m
a “faith person” who often wishes he weren’t. I’m sick of religion for the
same reason that I’m tired of my body, how it’s getting old, how every
morning when I wake up, the dreary realization crashes in: I’m still me. Sick
of being me or not, I still brush my teeth, take a daily vitamin, stick to my
low-dose aspirin regimen, drink red wine because I like it and it’s better for
me than white wine, and get colonoscopies from time to time. I still go to
church, too, regardless of the fact that I get dumb hate emails signed “in
Christ,” blasting me for everything from my support of President Obama to
my having fled my evangelical/fundamentalist roots and the Republican
Party.
This is a book for those of us who have faith in God in the same way we
might have the flu, less a choice than a state of being in spite of doubt, in
spite of feeling wounded by past religious contagion, in spite of our
declared agnosticism or even atheism, in spite of the sorts of idiots like me
who are attracted to or, more accurately, bred to, religion and run around
defending and /or criticizing it.
This book is part of a conversation, not a sermon. I’ve written it the way
faith in God, and everything else, happens, to me. Happens is the right
word. In Hollywood when I used to work as a movie director, the
producers always wanted an “arc” to the story. The worse the script was,
and the more formulaic, the more obvious the arc. There was a beginning,
a middle and an end; good guys and bad guys; first, second, and third
“acts” leading to the conclusion. But faith in God, and great movies made
by the greatest directors (of whom I certainly was never one) such as Bob
Altman and Federico Fellini, don’t string along like cars of a train or come
in tidy packages. They are a slice of life, not a story about life.
My only promise is that I’m trying to tell the truth about my slice of life
as I see it, even when the best I can do is to say that I don’t know the
answers. So there are ideas here but also stories memoir and memory of
what shaped the person writing down the ideas. That means we jump from
ideas to stories that could be from a novel about the person writing the
essay. Don’t be surprised by these twists and turns. This is how
conversations go. This is what life, rather than false “arcs,” is like.
In Part I, the first chapters are a critique of the New Atheists. The next
chapters are a critique of the religious fundamentalists. Then in Part II, I
write about my experiences related to faith or lack of faith in God, and the
evolving nature of what I describe as the catalysts that may take us to
whatever the next stages of our personal and communal spiritual evolution
may be.
Bob Altman said of his movie directing that “accidents are what push the
‘truth button.’” I’ve tried not to edit out those accidents, even in the parts
of this book that tend to essay style. In other words, this book is for those
of us who are stuck feeling that there is more to life than meets the eye,
whatever we call ourselves or say we believe. Or put it this way: If an angel
showed up outside my office window and explained “everything” to me, I’d
simultaneously question my sanity, be scared as hell, and feel mightily
relieved, because believing in invisible things is tough.
I’m not the only person wrestling with issues of meaning, religion, and
purpose. You will find a small sample here of the several thousands of
emails from my readers who have been responding to my writing, radio,
and TV interviews and lectures about religion, politics, and society. Their
emails, including the following note, inspired me to write this book. (I’ve
omitted names to protect privacy and have indicated trims by ellipses. And
each email represents many similar to it.)
Hello, Mr. Schaeffer. I watched your Princeton lecture. I
found it interesting, but I learned nothing of your new
religious beliefs, except that you enjoy Greek Orthodox
liturgy. I presume you still avow some form of Christianity.
I do still avow some form of Christianity in spite of my doubts, the attack
on faith by the New Atheists, and the “certainties” of the religious
fundamentalists who claim their way is the only truth, which is another
way to attack faith because it drives people away from experiencing God. I
believe that the ideological opposites I’ll be talking about—atheism and
fundamentalist religion—often share the same fallacy: truth claims that
reek of false certainties. I also believe that there is an alternative that
actually matches the way life is lived rather than how we usually talk about
belief. I call that alternative “hopeful uncertainty.”
My hopeful uncertainty will either resonate with you eliciting a “me too”
and “been there” or not. I am not trying to make converts. If what I write
resonates, it will be because we’ve shared certain experiences, for instance
your own childhood stories and your own love for a friend, lover, or a
husband or wife, children, and grandchildren, not because I convince you
of anything. I offer no proofs. There are none. When talking about the
unknowable, pretending to have the facts is about as useful as winning a
medal from the Wizard of Oz. In this game—the meaning game—it’s all
about intuition, hope, and the experience of life, a letting go of all
concepts, words, and theologies because they can only be metaphors and
hinder our experience of the truth as it is—not as we desire, believe, or
hope it might or should be, but as it is.
Before continuing I have several disclosures to make. To begin with, I
have a vested interest in keeping faith in God relevant. Also, I’ll be talking
about religion but concentrating on Christianity. That is the tradition I
know a little about, having been raised by evangelical /fundamentalist
American missionaries.
As a young man in the early 1970s I did a really stupid thing and stopped
painting, drawing, and sculpting, thus truncating what was becoming a
promising art career. I’d had successful shows in New York, Geneva, and
London by the time I was twenty-two. I got greedy for a faster track with a
steadier income, and I became my parents’ (Francis and Edith Schaeffer)
sidekick. I then became a leader in my own right on the big-time
evangelical/fundamentalist circuit after we Schaeffers got famous—
famous within the evangelical/ fundamentalist ghetto, that is.
By the early 1980s, at the height of my involvement in the evangelical
/fundamentalist religious right, I was invited to preach from Jerry Falwell’s
pulpit, appeared many times on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson, and met
privately with many of the top Republican leadership of the day. In the
midst of these heady experiences I began to change my mind about what I
believed, and not just about religion but about politics too.
By the mid-1980s I began the process of escaping my family’s
literalminded religion and the political causes that had become
indistinguishable from it. I went to Hollywood, directed four indifferent-to-
pretty-terrible Rrated feature films, quit the movie business, and then
started to write novels in the early 1990s. I received encouragement from
the critics and my readers. I’ve been a “secular” full-time writer of both
fiction and nonfiction ever since.
Although I’m no longer proselytizing, I’ve profitably (in every sense of
that word) mined the divine mother lode of my background through my
Calvin Becker trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels Portofino, Zermatt,
and Saving Grandma and also in Baby Jack (where God shows up as an
African American Marine drill instructor on Parris Island), not to mention
my memoir Crazy for God. As my religion-preoccupied writing
demonstrates, one can run from a religion but can never entirely escape.
I not only grew up in the fevered atmosphere of an American religious
commune—L’Abri Fellowship (located in Switzerland of all places)—but at
age ten I was sent to an evangelical British boys boarding school called
Great Walstead, where I encountered an easygoing and refreshingly new
to me, Anglican-derived faith that embodied a level of religious tolerance I
wasn’t familiar with. Later in life the memory of that encounter shaped my
sense that there might be better alternatives to the strict fundamentalism I
was raised on. It may also be one reason why, much, much later when in
midlife, I discovered that sacrament-based liturgical worship was a
comfortable fit for me and I joined the Greek Orthodox Church.
So please note, as I conclude this disclosure, that my only “qualification”
for meditating on faith in God is no more than the better part of a lifetime
spent thinking about faith and reading about religion (and a few other
things) and then living among, and then fleeing, the faithful. I’m with
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he says of Christianity that
“one neither can nor shall comprehend it.”
Kierkegaard’s view was closer to many of the early Church Fathers—in
other words, to the first leaders in the early Christian Church (during the
first to sixth centuries) than it is to today’s fundamentalists. Until I was on
my way out of my evangelical/fundamentalist subculture and actually read
a little church history and some of the writings from the earliest Christians,
I assumed that older is always stricter. In the case of the Christian religion,
this is not so. It’s mostly the later eras of Christianity that produced the
most rules-based approach to faith, something like the transition from the
sixties and early seventies to the “Reagan eighties,” as hippies got haircuts
and put on suits and turned out to be more middle-class and “bourgeois”
than their parents.
So for people who think that Christianity was strict, literalistic and
fundamentalist and filled with nothing but rules and regulations from the
beginning and that a more “mystical,” “tolerant,” “progressive,” or
“liberal” approach to faith is a lax modern phenomenon, the writings of
some of the most important early Christian figures are a startling wake-up
call. For instance, one fourth-century ascetic—Evagrius Ponticus—was a
revered spiritual leader. He led by example rather than by official standing
because he was not a bishop. Writing in The Gnostikos, he made this
antifundamentalist statement: “Do not define the Deity: for it is only of
things which are made or are composite that there can be definitions.”
Speaking of “the Deity,” I have a love-hate relationship with God—well,
actually not with God (as Evagrius said, who knows anything about that?)
but with the people who have tried to define God in ways that the more
tolerant earlier Christians didn’t. My love-hate relationship is with
fundamentalists who say they believe in God and with people who are so
sure there is no God that they’ve turned atheism into just another
browbeating religion. That means I have a love-hate relationship with
myself, because I find both sides of the faith/no faith debate coexisting
within me. Those “sides” are expressed well by juxtaposing the following
emails from two men with very different viewpoints:
Frank: Any religious faith is nothing more than an adult
fairy-tale. . . . Now I admit that I may be wrong . . . you may
enjoy Orthodox liturgy for its own sake. . . . Still, I find it
perplexing. . . . My question to you is: Why do you, a very
smart person, continue to hold to a fairy-tale?
Respectfully, T.
Just as I was about to try and come to the defense of the “fairy-tale,” I
received an email from an Orthodox priest. Unlike a lot of the emails I get,
at least this one was signed—but for current purposes, let’s just call the
sender Father X.
 The email questioned my Christianity because I supported a pro-choice
candidate like Obama. Since Fr. X believed that Obama represented
everything Christianity does not stand for, where did I get off calling myself
a Christian? Not to mention that I blogged on the Huffington Post, that
internet portal to damnation.
OK—comes with the territory. But here’s the kicker. The sender signed
what was a very insulting note: In Christ, Father X.
(Rant starts here:) When I got this email I thought it might be a joke,
because my long experience with Orthodox priests and bishops has been
almost uniformly positive. I googled the name and found that this man was
an actual priest. Father X badgered me for several weeks since I chose not
to answer him.Then I began to receive emails that Fr. X had been sent a
copy of, as had a growing list of others whose names showed up from then
on in my email letterbox. It seemed that Father X had “introduced” me to
his far right friends.
Abortion was their big issue, as were Obama’s “communism.” Several
people accused me of “supporting the Antichrist.” Nearly all of them told
me I was due for a severe punishment from God.
None of these prolific email writers seemed to bother to read my
replies, to which I attached articles I’d written for the Huffington Post
explaining in some detail why I was both pro-life and pro-Obama, given
that I believed that his social programs might help reduce the numbers of
abortions, just as he said that he hoped they would, and that, conversely,
the Republicans had been cynically using the “life issue” to drum up votes
while cutting funding for health care, contraceptives, sex education, and
child care. Of course I could have been wrong about all my political ideas
on the subject, but I certainly hadn’t become a “leading abortionist,” as
three of my email correspondents said I had.
I can only imagine the steady diet of junk ideology that must have been
spewing from right-wing websites, evangelical/fundamentalist leaders, talk
radio, and bizarre newsletters into the heads of these email writers to have
pushed them—including a priest no less, supposedly a confessor,
shepherd, and comforter—to put politics ahead of faith and berate a
complete stranger and question his faith on the basis of who that stranger
voted for and what websites he writes for and because of a disagreement
over tactics regarding how best to reduce the number of abortions.
The Religious Right has seduced millions of Americans with titillating
hatred and lies: The earth was created in six days and is not warming;
Obama is a secret Muslim (perhaps even the Antichrist!) and wants women
to have more abortions; gays are trying to take over America; the United
Nations (and/or Obama and/or the president of the European Union) is the
Antichrist; an unregulated market economy is Christian; guns keep people
safe; taxing the rich is “communism”; capital punishment is good;
immigrants are the enemy; national health care is “communist.” Some or
all these paranoid fantasies are accepted as truth by a whole substratum of
“Christians” determined to judge their country as “fallen away from God.”
They believe America is “doomed” because they don’t agree with their
fellow citizens’ politics or because, as their signs routinely proclaim, “God
Hates Fags!” They call people like me “abortionists” because I and others
say that maybe the best way to reduce abortion is to keep it legal but to
also help women escape poverty, educate young people, and provide
contraception rather than trying to reverse Roe v. Wade (realistically an
impossibility, on which pro-lifers have wasted almost forty years of effort
and untold tens of millions of dollars).
Appeals to facts get nowhere with these folks because they don’t trust
any sources but their own and listen only to what emanates from an
alternative right-wing universe. Thus arguments become circular. The
more impartial the source, the more suspect it becomes. Propaganda,
fulminating (and fundraising), and hatred of gays, women, our
government, big-city folks, black people, the educated “elite,” everything-
not-like-us-RealAmericans supplant compassion and even common sense.
And one is guilty by association. Write for the “wrong” people “these
people,” in the words of Fr. X or vote for the “wrong” president, or make
the “wrong” call on a practical way to reduce abortions, and it’s off to the
stake.
The late Neil Postman, author, New York University professor, and
prophet, predicted how and why people such as today’s members of the
evangelical/fundamentalist movement and other right wingers would be
living in a dream world cut off from reality. Postman is best known for his
1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he
wrote
Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by
creating a species of information that might properly be
called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false
information. . . . What Orwell feared were those who would
ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no
reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would
be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be
drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would
become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become
a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the
feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.
Postman is not the only person to have accurately predicted where we
are headed and the sort of society that our disjointed news-media-
asentertainment, texting as “writing,” blogging as “news” would produce.
RoboCop (1987) was a mediocre (and nastily sadistic) little movie, but
director Paul Verhoeven got one thing right: the “news” shows on TV in his
futuristic dystopia. His parody of glib, cheerful trivia clips as news has come
horribly true, even more so with the advent of the ideologically divided
Web, wherein people have their “information” filtered by likeminded
ideologues and rarely encounter views they disagree with. As Postman
predicted, Huxley’s prophetic vision came to pass: We are “a trivial culture,
preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies.”
We have become a nation of not terribly bright children who essentially
have a collective learning disability manifested by an inability to
concentrate or defer gratification, to hold one thought long enough to see
it through to a conclusion, or to contemplate making real sacrifices for the
sake of long-term benefits. The Father Xs of this world are one result.
Just in case you think that Father X’s excesses let atheists off the hook—
and also to capture a little of the tone of the atheist/religion debate these
days—here is another email I got from a reader objecting to an article I
wrote criticizing the New Atheists. (Misspellings in the original)
 Sir, You had an insolence . . . to call the brightest people of
our time “the fundamentalist Atheists.” These people:
Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris are the great Heroes of our time. .
. . These heroes are withstanding to the thousands and
thousands of years of corrupted, filthy religious fanaticism. .
. . We would avoid many, many deceases if not for religion.
Religion is the opium for the masses. It was said by a smart
man. I completely agree with this comment. You are, Sir,
brainwashing people and are filling your deep pockets with
the dirty money using people’s stupidity. Shame on you!
Sincerely
Y
No, I didn’t make that up. Though I was tempted to forward Y’s email to
Fr. X, feeling that these men would understand each other quite well!
(End of rant!)
Okay, about that “fairy-tale” of religion. I discovered from the emails I’ve
been inundated with since my memoir was published that there are more
of us perplexed former (or currently) religiously inclined or religiously
raised folks on a journey from past certainties to points unknown than I’d
been aware of. We want to have faith in God in spite of our bad
experiences with religion, oppressive family relationships, and/or doubts
and questions. We too worry that we’ve been hoodwinked by a fairy tale. I
hope that this book will provide a meeting place for those of us who count
ourselves among the scattered members of what I’ll call the Church of
Hopeful Uncertainty in the same way that this man’s email helped me feel
less alone.
Frank: Growing up, I attended a private Christian school which was started
by a very conservative religious right church connected with Bob Jones
University. . . . I have studied to be a preacher, and seem to have no desire
to be one but have no experience to do anything else. . . . Truth be told, I
have more questions than answers. . . . I have broken through the false,
religious right, closed minded doctrine of hate that was my past. However,
I have not found any answers from the religious left. The left is good at
saying what the right has done wrong but not at giving me anything to hold
on to.
Thank you, K.
This book is a search for that “something” to hold on to. I don’t know if
my up-and-down, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again faith in God persists
because I was conditioned by my parents to see everything in spiritual
terms or if faith is a choice. Either way, whatever I believe or feel, or think I
feel or think I believe, it’s flawed at best. Like most people, I’ve changed
my mind before about the so-called Big Questions and will again. Opinion
is a snapshot in time.
Because I belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, there are parts of this
book that reflect my personal experience with one form of liturgical
worship. In those Orthodox-oriented parts my aim is to offer an example of
one approach, knowing that other people take other religious paths (or
none) and find spiritual comfort. And I certainly do not speak for the
Orthodox Church. Nor has being in the Orthodox Church answered all my
questions. Far from it. And I know that some of what I say here may be a
departure from what some Orthodox (especially to the political right) think
is true. But I believe that my journey is worth describing because my life
experiences have led me to believe that there are better choices than
being asked to decide between atheistic cosmic nothingness and
fundamentalist heavenly pantomimes.
PART I Where

Extremes Meet
 CHAPTER 1

How the New Atheists Poison Atheism

He who became unhappy in love, and therefore became a

poet, blissfully extols the happiness of love so he became a
poet of religiousness, he understands obscurely that it is
required of him to let this torment go.
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

At a time when Islamist extremists strap bombs to themseves and blow up

women and children; when America has just comestaggering out of the
searing thirty-year-plus embrace of the reactionary, dumb-as-mud
Religious Right; and when some people are bullying, harassing, and
persecuting gay men and women in the name of religion, it’s
understandable that the sort of decent people most of us would want for
neighbors run from religion. There is a problem, though, for those who flee
religion expecting to find sanity in unbelief: The madness never was about
religion, let alone caused by faith in God. It was and is about how we
evolved and what we evolved into.
In other words, Pogo, the Walt Kelly possum cartoon character, was
right: “We have met the enemy and he is us!” If only making ourselves
happy, kind, and tolerant were as simple as giving up religious faith. If
that’s all it took, the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao would
have been such nice places to live, and for that matter, our secularized Ivy
League universities would be filled with saints, instead of back-stabbing
intellectuals ready to destroy each other over who gets tenure.
 Like it or not, we humans are flawed spiritual creatures peering from
biological brains. By “spiritual” I mean self-contemplating and/or
selfloathing. I think that our spirituality is best defined as our awareness of
our own consciousness. Rats, mice, amoebas, and planets aren’t
selfcontemplating and/or self-loathing. We’re different. So there is a
tension between what we are, material beings living in a material universe,
and how we feel about ourselves. We feel that we are more than the sum
of our parts. We try and bridge this spirit/body gap. We look to religion,
science, faith, psychology whatever to answer the question: Why are we
self-observing, or, to put it another way, who am I?
Here is an important question: Who, exactly, is doing the observing?
Why do we have a sense of a “self” that stands apart from, or thinks it
stands apart from, the biological machines we are? Who is this person
living within me asking questions about me? Joseph LeDoux, a
neuroscientist and a professor at New York University, has explored the
self in a number of books, including The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self:
How Our Brains Become Who We Are. LeDoux came up with a theory: It’s
the neural pathways, the synaptic relationships in our brains, that make us
who we are.
I don’t know enough about neuroscience to have an opinion about
whether LeDoux is correct. He makes sense to me, but the point here isn’t
the science of consciousness, but rather that we humans try to understand
how and why consciousness resides in our material bodies. We want to
believe in something to help us explain our self-contemplating natures.
One thing we can count on: Everyone has faith in something, even if it is
faith in having no faith. And as this woman wrote to me, our faiths are not
static, they evolve:
Frank: I was a preacher’s kid raised in Virginia in the
60’s. . . . From a young age, I openly questioned and
rebelled. . . . Thankfully in my 40s I found Buddhism and am
finding peace and a filter to look at Christian precepts that,
heretofore, were so tinny in sound and virtually
meaningless. . . . Today, my partner and I are caring for my
85 yr old mother who has Alzheimer’s. . . . This too is a
spiritual growing experience. . . . Over time it has allowed
 me the opportunity to “dis-identify” with her anger and
anxiety [and] . . . see them as less personal to me.
Sincerely, F.
The question is: Will our faith in God, or something nonreligious, be
practiced with the humility and tolerance discovered by F, or will it breed
Father X’s unfortunate “certainties”? How do we find peace? Perhaps the
choice isn’t between chaos and resolution. Maybe there is another
alternative: accepting irresolution. Maybe faith that doesn’t evolve is not
living faith because all living things change.
“Logic” is beside the point because we can’t look at ourselves, only
through ourselves. We’re stuck inside the painting we’re trying to critique
and paint at the same time—in other words, our lives. A scientist like
LeDoux is trapped trying to figure out what is going on inside his head
while using his head to do the figuring. So let’s admit the problem Charles
Darwin identified in his Autobiography. “Can the mind of man, which has,
as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by
the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”
In the prologue I wrote about my faith needing affirmation. I’m not the
only person writing books and thereby seeking allies and/or trying to
encourage fellow travelers. There have been many bestselling books
recently published proselytizing for or against faith in God. I’ll be discussing
a few of these books and their authors in a bit more detail (not necessarily
in this order), because they illustrate larger issues. (You don’t have to have
read any of these works to understand what I’ll be saying about the
questions they raise.)
As a token of the tens of thousands of books pushing the evangelical
/fundamentalist worldview, I’ll look at Rick Warren’s A Purpose Driven Life
and Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of novels presenting
their version of a Jesus-solves-everything born-again message. On the flip
side are the New Atheists’ books. These include Sam Harris’s The End of
Faith, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’s The God
Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. There are many
other evangelical/fundamentalist and New Atheist books, and more are
being published almost daily, but they tend to repeat the ideas set forth in
the ones I’ve chosen to focus on.
 Some of the New Atheists make insulting claims about religion. For
instance, Dennett coined a self-referential term for atheists, “Bright,” that,
by inference, leaves the rest of us, who believe in God, as “Dim.” And
Harris doesn’t stop with labels. In his book he suggests that some religious
people may need to be killed because of their dangerous beliefs.
I suspect, although I can’t prove, that the timing of the New Atheists’
crusade against religion has less to do with religion per se and more to do
with a post-9/11 reaction against militant Islam. Then there’s the politics.
The context of the heating up of the New Atheist movement also has to do
with the justifiable anger felt by reasonable people everywhere at the
horrible way George W. Bush led the United States. An unnecessary war in
Iraq, legalized torture, an unregulated market economy (which proved
ruinous), a badly managed war in Afghanistan, little-to-no action to repair
the earth’s environment, an unforgivably slow response to the devastation
of Hurricane Katrina, presidential sniping at evolution being taught in
schools, an affirmation of the most mindless sort of “born-again” faith, a
campaign against sex education, ties to the apocalyptic “End Times”
evangelical/fundamentalist cult that many suspect skewed Bush’s Middle
East politics toward the State of Israel (in a way that was harmful to all
concerned)—this and more was the context of the New Atheist reaction.
Bush was the born-again’s born-again, the evangelical’s president par
excellence. His voter base was the American evangelical movement. Bush’s
idea of governance (or should I say non-governance) was clearly shaped by
his religion.
I agree with the New Atheists: It is time for religion to go—intolerant,
politicized ugly religion as we know it, that is. I agree with religious people,
too: Atheism has killed many more millions of people, specifically in the
name of godless ideologies, than all religions combined ever killed in the
name of God or any gods. Or put it this way: The atheist yells, “Crusades!”
The religious believer counters, “Stalin!” The atheist says, “Faith in
science!” The believer answers, “Faith in God!” Are we stuck trading
catchphrases like school children taunting each other on the playground,
or is there a better way to discuss what boils down to just two issues: the
quest for meaning in our lives and the search for an answer concerning the
origin of everything?
 Although they usually seem to lack the self-criticism gene, and I do not
agree with a lot that the New Atheists have written or said, nevertheless I
think that they are doing us a service by offering their harsh critiques of
religion. The problem I have with the “solution” offered by the more
radical of the New Atheists—which is to get rid of religion—is that we are
spiritual beings with or without their permission, no matter what we (or
they) say we are. The New Atheists have proved this by turning their
movement into a quasi-religion with priests, prophets and gurus,
followers, and even church services.
It seems to me that the various New Atheist priests, prophets, and gurus
have one thing in common: They are old-fashioned literalists. The tone of
their books strikes me as stuck in a premodern time warp. They return in
spirit to the era before postmodernism when people from the intellectuals
behind the Bauhaus architecture and art movement to literal interpreters
of Marxism were given to pronouncing grand theories that set out to
explain everything, be it everything about art, politics, philosophy, history,
or architecture.
The term postmodernism as used here describes an aesthetic, artistic
worldview that is characterized by a distrust of ideology. I think it also
applies to the “certainties” on both sides in the religion vs. atheist debate.
The New Atheists pit religion’s literalistic truth claims against their own
literalistic truth claims. In that sense the New Atheists turn out to be
secular fundamentalists arguing with religious fundamentalists.
To me the secular and religious contenders seem to miss the reality of
our actual condition: We are specks on a tiny planet and our concept of
truth, time, and space is related to our limited perspective. It strikes me
that postmodernism possesses a healthy sense of skepticism when it
comes to grand theories. Truth is, if not only “in the eye of the beholder,”
nevertheless always seen through an opaque filter. And whatever solutions
we embrace had better be on a human scale and reflect something of the
paradoxes we encounter in real life.
Consider how Richard Dawkins proposes his alternative to God regarding
his idea of how we got here. As we shall see, he talks about the billions and
billions perhaps trillions of solar systems increasing the probability of life
originating, and he speaks in terms that evoke a kind of Russian roulette.
Because everything must have happened at least once in an infinite
universe, maybe that explains, well, everything. The problem is that these
are just words. They could just as well be used to argue the probability of
the existence of God in a limitless universe where everything must have
happened at least once somewhere—say, for instance, a virgin birth.
Words were invented by people to describe what they perceive to be
“true” from what amounts to an ant’s roadside eye-view of passing cosmic
traffic. Dawkins knows no more about the vast, forever-beyond-our-reach
totality of the universe than I do about God. He thinks, hopes, surmises,
does a bit of reading, uses words as metaphors to describe his ideas about
things (which is all words are), grows old, and dies. So do we all.
No one knows anything about the Big Questions, and what we “know”
about our minuscule place in the universe, and even of our own lives, is
spectacularly limited. In other words, humility is in order, or, as the biblical
writer of First Corinthians puts it: “And if anyone thinks he knows anything,
he knows nothing yet as he ought to know.”
Before moving on I’ll define the terms fundamentalist, evangelical/
fundamentalist and New Atheist as used here. My definition of
fundamentalism , religious or otherwise, is the impulse to find The answer,
a way to shut down the question-asking part of one’s brain.
Fundamentalists don’t like question marks. Fundamentalists reject both
Christian humility and postmodern paradox. In that sense an atheist too
may be a fundamentalist. And a fundamentalist wants to convince others
to convert to what fundamentalists are sure they know.
I also use the term evangelical/fundamentalist. I do this as a way of
drawing a distinction between the tolerant traditions within the Protestant
evangelical community (embodied in groups such as the Mennonites,
Quakers, predominantly black denominations such as the Progressive
National Baptist Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and
ministries like the Salvation Army and the Sojourners—this last led by
theologian and social activist Jim Wallis) and the all-too-common
conservative, right-wing, politicized “Christianity” of the
evangelical/fundamentalist establishment.
The term New Atheist is just a flash-in-the-pan media invention.
Nevertheless, I think it denotes a useful distinction from an older form of
atheism. The word new sets the New Atheists apart as especially
aggressive, political, and evangelistic. The “new” part is more about tactics
and tone than substance.
To put the New Atheism in context, let’s take a quick look at the older
atheism. British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, a
twentieth-century atheist, wrote in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other
Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, “Religion is based, I think,
primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown. . . . A
good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a
regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by
the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”
Most New Atheists are no more anti-religious than the atheists such as
Russell who denounced faith as “regretful hankering after the past,”—
they’re just louder. And for all their in-your-face “attitude,” the New
Atheists are positively polite compared to the religious fundamentalists.
Incidentally, if some of the earlier atheists (what I guess we should call the
Old, Old Atheists), such as Baruch Spinoza and David Hume, were more
polite than today’s New Atheists, they had good reason to be: fear of
bigoted religious believers ready to kill people who challenged their ideas.
Unlike today’s New Atheists, who have an army of adoring groupies
following their every move, the Old, Old Atheists paid a steep price for
their beliefs. Take Spinoza, a Jew born in Amsterdam in 1632 and trained in
Talmudic scholarship. Spinoza understood his predicament as someone
flying in the face of religious convention at a time when people were
sometimes hanged or burned for doing just that. He wore a ring engraved
with the word caute, meaning “cautiously.” Spinoza’s beliefs evolved from
traditional Judaism to pantheism, then to a sort of paneverythingism that
holds that God is everywhere and everything and therefore, in the
traditional sense, nowhere. Spinoza also became what today we’d call a
determinist and said that everything that happens occurs through
“necessity.”
The Jewish minority, fearing persecution by the Christian majority on
charges of atheism, offered Spinoza 1000 florins to keep his mouth shut.
He refused. He was called to a rabbinical court and excommunicated. The
Ethics and most of Spinoza’s other pantheistic /atheist works were
published only after his death. His manuscripts had been hidden by friends.
Another big name in the Old, Old Atheist pantheon was Scottish
philosopher, economist, and historian David Hume. Only a few years
before Hume began writing in the eighteenth century, a teenager named
Thomas
Aikenhead was hanged for “blasphemy” in Hume’s hometown of
Edinburgh. Aikenhead had called religion nonsense.
Hume wasn’t threatened with death but nevertheless expressed his
atheistic views in essays such as Of Superstition and Religion in a nondirect
manner, using dialogue to cast his speculating in the guarded form of
questions asked by others. Hume didn’t acknowledge authorship of A
Treatise of Human Nature, (one of his most overt atheistic statements),
but it was widely known to be his. He also attenuated the criticisms of
religion in the Treatise in relation to Bishop Butler, to curry favor. His
Dialogues on Natural Religion was posthumously published.
The style of the New Atheists’ books has less in common with Hume’s
indirect introspection or Spinoza’s pantheism/sort-of-atheism than with
the crusading fundamentalism of today’s right-wing American
evangelical/fundamentalist leaders. The New Atheists, like their
evangelical/fundamentalist counterparts, aren’t on an intellectual journey.
They are already at their destination, all i’s dotted and all t’s crossed.
Everything they encounter is run through a fixed ideological grid. To them
there are the good guys—smart atheists leaving appropriate comments on
their websites—and the bad guys—dumb religious believers who must be
answered with the correct arguments handily provided in the lists of
debate points found on Dawkins’s and other atheists’ websites on how to
deal with the other. The arguments tend to take on the tone of the pious
denouncing the sinful. As Harris writes in The End of Faith, believers are a
threat, enemies of happiness, actually, downright evil:
As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he
knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will
continue to murder one another on account of our
myths. . . . It is time we recognized that all reasonable men
and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near
 to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it
threatens to destroy the very possibility of human
happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.
Harris says that some Islamic states may not ever be reformed because
so many Muslims are “utterly deranged by their religious faith.” He
concludes, “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be
ethical to kill people for believing them.”
In the December 29, 2008, issue of The Guardian, journalist Andrew
Brown summed up what makes the New Atheists tick. He pointed out that
the New Atheism is largely a political rather than an intellectual or
scientific movement:
In some ways it can be understood as the canary in the
coalmine of American power and exceptionalism. Before
the [financial] crash [of 2008-09], when it was possible to
believe that globalised capitalism would go on making us
richer and more liberal forever . . . the new atheism was
one of the few ways to express disbelief and fear and
loathing in the way the world was going. Religion became a
synecdoche for everything that might go wrong, so that
belief in the evil qualities of Faith was not so very different
from belief in the evils of witchcraft.
According to Brown, the New Atheists believe religious faith is primarily a
matter of false belief and that the cure for faith is science. Science will lead
people into the “clear sunlit uplands of reason,” and in this struggle,
“religion is doomed.”
Whether we are embracing the life of the spirit or running from it, most
of us seem to affirm or reject faith too vehemently to claim we just don’t
care. The impulse to shut down debate with the other side hasn’t changed
much since those Scottish Calvinists hanged Aikenhead. His executioners
would have appreciated a line in one email I got threatening that “No child
of God gets out of here without the proper discipline,” and they would
have cried “Amen!” to Harris’s chilling line “Some propositions are so
dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”
The New Atheists have been so shrill in their attempts to put us Dims in
our place that even some other atheists find them abrasive. These critics of
the New Atheists might be called New New Atheists. They have come
forward to also proclaim atheism yet to denounce the New Atheists in a
way that to me is reminiscent of the contortions my family went through
as we became members of ever “purer” churches through one separation
after another, until the “Truth” more or less boiled down to just our
family!
For instance, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality the French
philosopher André Comte-Sponville tries to present a moral foundation for
the life of unbelief. Comte-Sponville says that his “way of being an atheist”
was influenced by the Catholicism of his youth. He acknowledges the
positive aspects of faith. And then there is Ronald Aronson, a philosopher
teaching at Wayne State University, and author of Living Without God.
Aronson’s book is somewhat of an answer to the atheist polemics of
Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al.
Aronson first laid out a critique of the New Atheists in a June 2007
review of their books that was published in The Nation:
Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? . . .
Living without God means turning toward something. To
flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that
effectively answer life’s vital questions. Enlightenment
optimism once supplied unbelievers with hope for a better
world, whether this was based on Marxism, science,
education or democracy. After Progress, after Marxism, is it
any wonder atheism fell on hard times? Restoring secular
confidence will take much positive work as well as the fierce
attacks on religion by our atheist champions.
In the Nation article Aronson also criticized The End of Faith for its
“intolerance” and “zealotry.” He advocated “the most urgent need” for
secularists to embrace “a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital
questions about how to live one’s life.” A “new atheism must absorb the
experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st,” he said. “It
must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning
forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a
satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot
know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms
with death and explore what hope might mean today.”
Then, in his book Living Without God, Aronson fleshed out his New
Atheist critique:
To live comfortably without God today means doing what
has not yet been done—namely, rethinking the secular
worldview after the eclipse of modern optimism. . . .
Religion is not really the issue, but rather the
incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness,
of today’s atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living
without God means turning toward something.
It might also mean that we should look for a less drastic alternative to
fundamentalist faith in God than a fundamentalist faith in no God. Perhaps
both atheists and religious fundamentalists have been looking through the
wrong end of the same worn-out telescope.
 CHAPTER 2

How Many Ways Are There to Say, “There Is No

God!”?

I ask: what does it mean when we continue to behave as

though all were as it should be, calling ourselves Christians
according to the New Testament, when the ideals of the New
Testament have gone out of life? The tremendous
disproportion which this state of affairs represents has,
moreover, been perceived by many.
Journals, Søren Kierkegaard

Most of our heated chatter about meaning is something like children

talking loudly as they walk down a dark, scary road. The fact that we need
to talk so loudly—even threaten to call down the wrath of God on our
opponents and/or say that they should be killed—is more significant than
anything we’re saying.
Because of our limitless capacity for brooding over our distressingly
short lives, there’s always room for a little more speculating about faith,
life, meaning, and religion. Just ask St. Paul, Spinoza, Billy Graham, Sam
Harris, or me. Speculating about the unknowable and/or arguing with or
threatening and insulting those with contrary ideas, has provided a good
living for proselytizers and grand inquisitors from St. Constantine to
Voltaire, from pastor Rick Warren to Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins.
Frank: I grew up Methodist and remained so until I was 60 years old. I
always participated in my church but never knew much about the theology
of mainline [more liberal] Christianity. . . . I have done a lot of reading . . .
and am now a Unitarian. . . . One of the great ironies of our life is that we
have three children, all married and on their own, however, all of them
have become much more conservative [than me] religiously speaking. . . .
Fortunately we have worked around this and solved the problem by not
discussing religion.
J.
What does it say about our various faiths that belief has to be reinforced
by others and/or ignored to keep the peace? What does it say about the
nature of faith in God that when a believer—say, a former
evangelical/fundamentalist like me—questions his or her faith or changes
it, there are otherwise seemingly sane people so threatened that they take
the time to call down God’s judgment on the questioner?
I think it comes down to the fact that most of us take comfort in safety
in numbers. So the man or woman whose defection depletes the number
of the faithful is resented, shunned, even killed either literally, as in the
case of Muslim “apostates,” or figuratively, as in the character
assassination with which backsliders are “dealt” by
evangelical/fundamentalists defending their turf.
Evangelical/fundamentalists aren’t the only clan clinging to group-think.
Why do atheists write books and other atheists read them, if not to
reinforce each other’s faith in no faith? I mean, how many ways are there
to say, “There is no God!”?
Speaking of the need to reinforce one’s faith, Bill Maher’s 2008 movie
Religulous provided the atheist version of a church-going experience and
altar call. Religulous was a blunt (and funny) stripped-down example of the
you’re-in-or-out New Atheist method. When I was watching Religulous in
an Upper West Side theater in New York City, it seemed to me that the
laughter and shouted comments were just another version of “Amen!” and
“Preach it brother!” There were even several screams of “Yes!” after
Maher “nailed” this or that particularly asinine religious person. I assume
that these cries of joyful affirmation emanated from the more spirit-filled
atheists in the audience!
 Maher’s documentary built on the foundation laid by Harris in The End
of Faith. Harris began his book with a scene of a young Islamic terrorist in
Jerusalem smiling enigmatically as he commits suicide by blowing up a bus
full of innocent people. In Religulous Maher also included many images of
look-how-crazy-God-makes-everyone violence. The Harris/Maher message
was as clear as it was intolerant: The world would be better off without
religious people.
Maher’s movie struck me as similar to Sacha Baron Cohen’s wonderfully
mean-spirited and wickedly (if uncomfortably) hilarious Borat. Both movies
hit easy religious targets. However, Cohen is an equal opportunity insulter,
and he went after everyone from feminists to socialites and movie stars,
religious or not. Maher reserved his ridicule—with one brief exception
when he interviewed a scientist who is an evangelical—for the dumbest
religious believers he could find.
In a series of interviews, Maher set up pastors, imams, evangelists,
political leaders, and assorted flakes and actors (these last at a religious
theme park) to look their worst. Maher’s questions were those one might
expect from a literal-minded, fairly dim-witted ten-year-old stuck in
Sunday school who was trying to annoy his teacher into throwing him out.
The questions ranged from “How can you believe in a talking snake?” to
“How could Jonah have lived in a fish?” to “How can God hear the prayers
of everyone at once?” (To which one answer might be, if Google can do it,
why not God?)
When approaching the biblical narrative through his handpicked
interviewees (and how he edited their comments), Maher didn’t seem to
“get” allegory, let alone literary imagination or the results of religious faith
in ordinary people’s lives—for instance, the fact that religion has provided
a means, place, and tradition of forgiveness, charity, and mercy for
generations of believers. He also seemed to think that religion, and
Christianity in particular, is only about literal belief in the various biblical
stories. It’s not. It never has been.
Yes, there have been literalists and fundamentalists shaping religion
through a hard-edged fundamentalist “thread” running through Jewish
and Christian history. Yes, many Jews and Christians following this
literalminded thread have done terrible things. Yes, the Jewish and
Christian faiths are full of such people today. What Maher ignored is that
there has been a parallel tradition, another thread, running alongside the
literalistic tendency he caricatures.
The open and questioning thread weaves another and more tolerant
and nuanced color into the tapestry of faith. This too has been there from
the beginning of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It represents the
compassionate, mystical approach to faith in God—in other words,
enlightenment.
The word enlightenment has become commonplace in the parlance of
secular circles, but I would rather not hand it over wholesale without a
debate. Enlightenment is not necessarily only a secular version of
redemption. In all the major religious traditions, enlightenment is the state
of being said to be a “place” from which one is able to see things as they
really are, not as we believe them to be, want them to be, or hope they
will be. In some Orthodox Christian reckonings, the spiritual life is divided
into three stages: purification, enlightenment, and theosis (or “deification”
or “divinization”—the process of being united with God). Only in the first
stage do we have any control. The last two stages are Divine Gifts
bestowed as we are ready.
Back to my threads. Sometimes the competing threads—enlightened
verses dogmatic, the mystical versus theological—have even been found in
the same people. Individuals may veer one way, then another, are
sometimes compassionate and at other times judgmental, merciful and
vengeful, literalistic and then nuanced. My father was one such person:
compassionate personally, harsh in his early theology. And if you asked
me, “What was Francis Schaeffer about?” the only true answer would be
for me to ask you what stage of his life, thinking, and work you were
talking about. There were several “Francis Schaeffers.” By the way, that’s
true of me too, and, I think, of many people.
To ignore the open and questioning tradition and to dwell only on the
fundamentalist thread is disingenuous, or in Maher’s case more likely
simply ignorant. It’s as if Maher had made a documentary on medicine and
concentrated solely on the experiments done on duped prisoners, criminal
back-alley abortion doctors, eugenics scientists inventing racist “solutions”
for society, and so on, while ignoring Jonas Salk and his discovery of polio
vaccine or the early African American leaders in nursing, such as the
outstanding Mary Eliza Mahoney, who was the first black professional
nurse in America.
If Maher applied his Religulous approach to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he
would have been interviewing actors and asking, “How can Macbeth really
see a ghost? What sort of idiot believes in ghosts?”
Nuanced interpretations of religious faith within the Christian tradition
are not inventions of modern-era higher critical or biblical criticism studies
that have their origins in the context of the rationalism of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Rather, some of these subtle and complex
approaches hark back to the beginning of the Christian era. In the writings
of the Church Fathers in the third to sixth centuries one finds an
allegorical, non-literal, what today’s evangelical/fundamentalists would
denounce as “liberal” or “touchy-feely,” even “relativistic,” approaches to
faith and the Scriptures.
This is to say that if Maher had taken deconstructing religion seriously,
he would have at least tried to address the actual tradition that some of
the early Christian leaders passed on, a tradition that is still alive and well
today in parts of the Christian community. But instead he interviewed the
rube element of the American evangelical/ fundamentalist communities
and zeroed in on people who wouldn’t know a Church Father if one bit
them in the ass.
Ironically, the same historical representatives of the Christian faith that
Maher chose to ignore (or has never heard of) are the Church Fathers that
evangelical/fundamentalists also ignore for their own ideological reasons.
They ignore them (or even denounce them) because the very existence of
the early representatives of a more enlightened thread of Christianity
undermines the evangelical/fundamentalist claim that somehow only
fundamentalism represents the original ancient Christian faith. It does not.
One man whom evangelical/fundamentalists would rather ignore as too
“liberal” and who was nevertheless very big deal in the early church was
St. Clement. In the third century, Clement became the leader of the
Alexandrian School, the center of the highest level of academic learning in
the Christian world at that time. Clement included lots of quotations from
the Old Testament in his (not to be confused with St. Paul’s) Letter to the
Corinthians. Clement said that the literal meaning of Scripture is just a
“starting point . . . suitable for the mass of Christians” but that there is
always a “deeper meaning.”
Instead of being what today we’d call a literalist spouting off about how
the Bible is “inerrant,” Clement used the Bible to illustrate all sorts of
ideas. Clement didn’t go on and on about how all the details of various
stories were true, without error, or were science or history, but used the
stories to extrapolate wisdom about everyday life.
Clement was not alone. St. Ignatius, the second-century bishop of
Antioch writing about First Corinthians, took Paul’s words out of context in
a way that today’s American evangelical/fundamentalists would denounce
as heretical. He applied Paul’s words to his contemporary personal
situation as though they were abstractions he could fit into other forms
and derive subtle hidden meanings from. Today’s
evangelical/fundamentalists would have fired him from their seminaries in
a heartbeat.
Even Mr. Big himself, big in the Church’s history—St. Augustine—
promoted what today’s fundamentalists would denounce as a “relativistic”
approach to the Scriptures. He said that the Bible should be interpreted
several ways: as “literal” (some stories might be true), as “allegorical”
(made-up stories to illustrate a point), as “moral” (to give us direction on
how to live), and as “analogical” (some Bible stories obviously did not
happen but are a way of telling a made-up story to make a larger point).
Another one of the important founders of the Church was St. Basil the
Great, a bishop in the fourth century. Besides becoming a leader in
founding monastic communities, starting orphanages and hospitals, writing
a version of the Divine Liturgy, giving away his family inheritance to help
the poor, setting up soup kitchens, fighting against the Roman practice of
infanticide, and defending the use of secular medicine, Basil said that
Scripture and tradition are “equal in value, strength, and validity” and have
the “same power where piety is concerned.”
Talk about an idea that drives evangelical/fundamentalists nuts! As for
the New Atheists, they don’t much care for people such as Basil either.
How do you prepare answers to an oral and therefore evolving tradition
that this leading Christian placed on an equal footing with the Bible? You
might have to actually have a conversation with believers in a tradition like
Basil’s, rather than just trading scripted zingers. That would require
thought, because the people you’d be debating might be open to change,
to adding to their tradition as time passed, to elevating the human and
scientific contribution to the living of faith to equal standing with that
faith’s scriptures.
During a talk to a gathering of Harvard alumni (in his capacity as a
professor of philosophy and theology at the Harvard Divinity School) David
Lamberth nicely summed up the underlying problem with the New Atheist
argument:
The [New Atheists] see religion most fundamentally in
terms of belief, and this is, in large part, a key to where they
fail. . . . All these authors appear to think . . . that adherence
to religion depends on beliefs in a given system . . . [but]
religion, in its broad and multifaceted character as a human
social phenomenon, is not only much more than belief, but
is not necessarily founded primarily on it.
Besides ignoring what historical Christianity actually is and was, Maher
also seemed unaware that there are intelligent contemporaries of his who
are deeply religious and who have spent lifetimes thinking about faith in
God in ways that are far from the absolutist verities of the (mostly) North
American evangelical/fundamentalism Maher set up to knock down. For
instance, Maher ignored many brilliant intellectuals, writers, and artists
who are practicing Christians that he might have talked to, such as the late
John Updike. (Updike was alive and well when the movie was being made.)
Maher might also have interviewed then Senator, now President, Obama.
Had Maher interviewed Obama, he could have asked him about
Obama’s 2006 lecture on religion and public policy, delivered at the “Call
to Renewal” event sponsored by the evangelical Sojourners group. On that
occasion, Obama described his own faith in Christ and also spoke about
how he converted. He talked about how faith should or should not impact
policy making. Obama also castigated some elements of the secular
community for being short-sighted in their anti-religious views. As he said,
“At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square
as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious
Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word
‘Christian’ describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.”
Obama continued:
I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not
raised in a particularly religious household. . . . It wasn’t
until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a
community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that
I confronted my own spiritual dilemma . . . It was because of
these newfound understandings that I was finally able to
walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on
95th
Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my
Christian faith. . . .
That’s a path that has been shared by millions upon
millions of Americans—evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants,
Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at certain
turning points in their lives. It is not something they set
apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is
often what drives their beliefs and their values. And that is
why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re
at—to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s
relevant to their own—then as progressives, we cannot
abandon the field of religious discourse.
Or Maher might have asked Updike why he included smart and
conflicted people of religious faith as characters in his books, or how the
writings of Kierkegaard had inspired Updike’s religious thinking. It’s not as
if Updike’s faith was hidden. (His last book, Endpoint and Other Poems,
published posthumously in 2009, includes beautiful reflections on religious
faith written literally on his deathbed.)
Updike’s Christian belief is well known. As Religion and Ethics
Newsweekly, a publication of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
noted,
At a talk on religion in his work Thursday evening, Nov. 18,
2008 . . . Updike told the audience that his Christian faith
 had “solidified in ways less important to me than when I
was 30, when the existential predicament was realer to me
than now. . . . I worked a lot of it through and arrived at a
sort of safe harbor in my life. . . .” Responding to a question
submitted from the audience on whether orthodox
Christian theology’s invocation to accept God’s will runs
counter to progressive politics, Updike concluded, “Yes, I
think to a certain degree it mitigates against trying to
change the world, instead trying to find a peaceful,
satisfactory place within the world that exists. It is consoling
to think that if not every detail is the will of God, there is a
kind of will bigger than your own.”
Maher also ignored the inconvenient bits of the history of the twentieth
century, not to mention the present. Unlike the New, New Atheist Aronson
who, as we’ve seen, wrote, “New atheism must absorb the experience of
the 20th century and the issues of the 21st,” Maher ducked inconvenient
facts. Maher never mentioned the violent side of the recent experiment in
secularism: the blood-drenched twentieth century and the inhumane
barbarity of today’s Chinese rulers, or, say, the greed and bloody brutality
of the Castro family.
Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, the scientists who recently led the
eugenics movement, and the like did not oppress their people and/or
liquidate them in the name of God. The bloodiest of all historical periods is
not that of the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, or even that of today’s
Islamic terrorism, but the recent and ongoing history of secularism run
amok. “Rational” science has not been blameless either.
People have slaughtered each other in the name of Christ and
Muhammad, and Hindus have been killing Christians and Muslims, and vice
versa. But people have also—and recently in exponentially greater
numbers—been slaughtered in the name of nationalism (World War I),
secular political ideology (the Gulag), tribal rivalry (Rwanda), a master race
informed by the secular “science” of eugenics (Nazi Germany),
consumerism (America’s Middle Eastern oil wars), and state atheism
(China’s continuing pogroms against believers from all religions and forced
and brutal late-term abortion programs). Science has also created the
plethora of earth-destroying and often unnecessary products and provided
science-based ways to sell them to consumers.
Maher’s attempt to put religious belief in its place only reinforces the
fact that for most people, one belief system is always replaced by another.
In an act of unintended self-parody at the end of his movie, Maher
preaches a fiery sermon against religion, even begging “moderate religious
believers” to abandon their faiths and convert to his point of view. Like
some old-time evangelist, Maher wants to save us from his version of hell
via his version of a born-again experience. It’s Maher’s way or the
Apocalypse. Where have I heard that before?
 CHAPTER 3

Why Does Dawkins Oppose Faith with Lapel Pins?

Christianity takes a prodigious giant-stride . . . into the absurd

—there Christianity begins.
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

One doesn’t have to buy Richard Dawkins’s books because he’s found a
way to offer his wisdom to passersby. Just hang around New Atheist
gatherings and you may read Dawkins’s writings on T-shirts worn by his
disciples or emblazoning their sweat shirts, tote bags, and bumper stickers.
Here are some samples taken from Dawkins’s official website of the
means and methods for spreading the Dawkins’s gospel and/or for
collecting his life’s work. What follows is just as I found it on the Dawkins
site in the spring of 2009. And this sampling represents a mere fraction of
what would, if downloaded, run to hundreds of pages of products, tips for
atheist living, resources, further thoughts posted on bulletin boards, and
so on.
NEW! The God Delusion T-ShirtProduct 5/7 $20.00

sizes m, l, xl and 2xl are in backorder, and will be shipped as soon as

they come back in stock (approx. 2 weeks).
The God Delusion T-Shirt with what is perhaps the book’s most famous
quote: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant
character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving
control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard
Dawkins, The God Delusion

White text on slate grey t-shirt. 100% cotton, American Apparel. Made in
the U.S.A. These sizes may run a little smaller than some are accustomed
to.

Add to Cart:
If T-shirts aren’t what you fancy by way of proudly displaying “perhaps
the book’s most famous quote,” there are many other fine products. For
instance, you may purchase the “Scarlet A Lapel Pin” (I’m not making this
up.) And if you don’t know what that is, you may “watch [as] Richard
Dawkins explains his Scarlet A lapel pin during an interview, just click
Here.”
According to the atheist product catalogue, the Scarlet A Pin is a “Red A
with silver edging and back,” and it costs $5. The customer reviews
published on Dawkins’s site are glowing. The pin gets Five Stars from just
about everyone.
Oliver gives the pin Five Stars! and writes, “Brilliant badge. Sublime
concept. Let’s get in their faces. Thank God for Dawkins!” Rich also gives
the pin Five Stars! and says, “Excellent. Worn it for a couple of months
now; four conversations followed I have to order two more.” Another
satisfied customer writes, “I love it, but you should really consider offering
a Scarlet A necklace.” The next reviewer gives it only four stars, but moving
on, Yvonne gives the pin Five Stars! and says, “It looked awesome on my
black bag.” Luke gives the pin Five Stars! too and notes, “Great product. I
actually turned mine into a pendant by bending the pin and attaching a
wire loop.” Then we get back into four star territory: “This is great, but I
would much rather have it as a necklace.”
 The comment that most interested me was the one from Rich: “Worn it
for a couple of months now; four conversations followed.” That really
brought back the memories.
When I was a young child, and to my eternal mortification, Mom used to
carry something called the Gospel Walnut. It was a hollowed-out actual
walnut shell filled with ribbons of different colors sewn together into one
thin, shoestring-like, yard-long band: black for sin, red for Jesus’s blood,
then white for how clean your heart would be after it got washed of sin.
You cranked it out with a little handle attached to the walnut shell, and the
ribbon would seem to emerge from the nut magically. The point of doing
this was to invite questions from strangers, which it did. This would lead to
what Rich said the A Pin he wears leads to: conversations. In other words,
both the Gospel Walnut and the Scarlet A Pin offer a chance to witness to
potential converts.
If my experience as a child is any guide (regarding the just-kill-me-now
embarrassment I felt as Mom accosted strangers on trains and buses with
her magic nut), we can expect that the mortified children of Dawkins’s
atheist pin-wearing missionaries will someday become zealous
evangelicals, Muslims, or Druids—anything but atheists, that is. Who
knows, the children raised by Dawkins’s groupies may well be the
foundation of the next Great Awakening.
Anyway, Oliver was also onto something with his “Let’s get in their
faces” comment. That too induced flashbacks. It reminded me vividly of
how we evangelical/fundamentalists regarded those who weren’t “saved.”
“They” were always they to us, and “we,” the born-agains, were as saved
as they were “lost.”
So Dawkins, it turns out, is my mother, circa 1959! Hi Mom!
Just in case the dedicated Dawkins follower watched only the edited
version of The Enemies of Reason, now there is The Uncut Interviews, a
“full length version” to add to your “cart” before “proceeding to
checkout.” (All major credit cards are accepted.)
The Enemies of Reason + Enemies of Reason: The Uncut Interviews $40.00
$33.00 Save: 18% off Buy together and save $7.00!
 During the filming of Channel 4’s The Enemies of Reason, Richard
Dawkins conducted several extended interviews which were cut down for
the program’s final broadcast. . . . Explore the issues in more depth . . . .
There are two ways of looking at the world through faith and superstition
or through the rigors of logic, observation and evidence in other words,
through reason. Reason and a respect for evidence are precious
commodities, the source of human progress and our safeguard against
fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth. Yet, today,
society appears to be retreating from reason. . . . Richard Dawkins
confronts what he sees as an epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking.
He explains the dangers the pick and mix of knowledge and nonsense
poses in the internet age, and passionately re-states the case for reason
and science.

Run Time: 96 minutes—1 DVD

Dawkins will “safeguard [us] against fundamentalists and those who
profit from obscuring the truth” by selling us the uncut version. And when
the Dear Leader is not picking the “most famous” of his quotes for his
Tshirts, or designing atheist conversation-starting witnessing jewelry,
Dawkins also writes books that contain grand zingers: “Atheism is the only
logical belief once one accepts evolution.” And “Religion is incompatible
with science.”
But what Dawkins says he’s most proud of is the part of his website
called “Convert’s Corner” where, as he told Bill Maher in an interview on
Maher’s TV show in 2008, “You can go and read all the testimonies of
people who have been converted!” Then he said, “When I’m on my
deathbed I’ll have a tape recorder switched on because people like me are
victims of malicious stories after they’re dead of people saying they had a
deathbed conversion when they didn’t.” Maher looked a bit puzzled, so
Dawkins explained that he suspects creationists may already be plotting to
do this to him and pointed out that “they now claim Darwin had a
deathbed conversion.”
When Maher asked Dawkins about The God Delusion, Dawkins said little
about the book’s content but exclaimed, “It’s sold a million and a half
copies!” Then Maher, like an enthusiastic puppy scampering around a big
dog, yelped, “And now it’s in paperback, it will be even more available!”
Maher paused to take a breath then added, “I’m your biggest fan!” Then
Dawkins, slipping into his rock star mode, explained that he has so many
fans because “I think people are getting a bit fed up with other people
thrusting their imaginary friends down their throats.”
Prompted by Maher, Dawkins also explained one of his other ideas.
“There is a scale of One to Seven of atheism,” said Dawkins, “but I’m only a
Six on my scale.” Dawkins laid out the details of the Atheism Sincerity
Scale. “A One is a complete believer in God and a Seven is a total
disbeliever.”
Something was bothering Maher, and he asked, “Why are you only a
Six? Why aren’t you a Seven?”
Dawkins didn’t miss a beat; “As a scientist I can’t definitely commit to
anything, including that there are no fairies!” Big laugh and cheers from
both Maher and his audience. Dawkins added, “I can’t say I know there are
no pink unicorns either, so maybe I’m a Six Point Nine is reasonable!”
Louder cheers from the audience, and I think I actually heard Maher
squeal.
This intellectually rigorous Dawkins/Maher exchange put me in mind of
one of my favorite scenes in the movie This Is Spinal Tap that also had to
do with numbers. It didn’t seem much of a stretch to picture Maher in the
role of the rockumentary interviewer Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner) and to
imagine Dawkins doing a splendid interpretation of Nigel Tufnel
(Christopher Guest as lead and rhythm guitar, backing and lead vocals)
discussing the band’s extra powerful very special amplifier.
NIGEL TUFNEL: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board,
eleven, eleven, eleven, and . . .
MARTY DIBERGI: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
NIGEL TUFNEL: Exactly.
MARTY DIBERGI: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?
NIGEL TUFNEL: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most
blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up,
all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you
go from there? Where?
MARTY DIBERGI: I don’t know.
NIGEL TUFNEL: Nowhere. Exactly! What we do is, if we need that extra
push over the cliff, you know what we do?
MARTY DIBERGI: Put it up to eleven?
NIGEL TUFNEL: Eleven. Exactly! One louder!
Apart from the sales figures (and what I’ll always think of as the Atheist
One-to-Seven Dawkins/Tap moment), then, what is The God Delusion
about? For one thing, it seems to mainly be about Dawkins’s website. I’ve
never read a book in which the author works his website addresses into
the actual text—not to mention the front and back matter—half a dozen
times. But according to Dawkins his book really isn’t a book, so perhaps
literary customs don’t apply. As he puts it, The God Delusion is a
“consciousnessraising” tool. “Atheists” he writes, “as well as theists
unconsciously observe society’s convention that we must be especially
polite and respectful to faith.” He wants to change all that.
In the preface to the paperback edition, Dawkins responds to the
criticism that he is just as much of a proselytizing fundamentalist as those
he criticizes. Dawkins answers, “No, please, it is all too easy to mistake
passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will . . .
it is impossible to overstress the difference between such a passionate
commitment to biblical fundamentals and the true scientist’s equally
passionate commitment to evidence.” As a scientist Dawkins claims that by
definition his passion can’t be like other, lesser people’s passions, because
as a scientist he is above such things. Maybe the same can be said for his
entrepreneurial passion, which might, in ordinary people, be mistaken for
televangelist-style hucksterism but, because he is a scientist, is no doubt
just research carried on by other means.
Even Dawkins’s compassion seems strangely self-serving. Take the story
Dawkins includes in his book about an atheist doctor who wrote to him
describing the moving atheist ceremony at his young atheist son’s funeral.
Dawkins uses the story to point out that atheists can be comforted by their
beliefs at the big moments—death, for instance—just as religious people
are comforted by religion. However, Dawkins also works in the address of
his website, by just happening to mention that the grateful bereaved
doctor asked the mourners at his son’s funeral to make donations to
Dawkins’s foundation’s website—once again listed in the context of the
father’s letter.
On the first page of the preface to The God Delusion, Dawkins asks us to
imagine a world without religion and tells us that without religion, the
World Trade Center would be standing, John Lennon would be alive, there
would’ve been no Crusades and no witch hunts, no partition of India, no
Palestinian/Israeli conflict. He then tells us that what he objects to most
about religion is the way it captures children.
“I want everybody to flinch,” Dawkins writes, “whenever we hear a
phrase such as ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child.’ Speak of a child of Catholic
parents if you like; but if you hear anybody speak of a ‘Catholic child,’ stop
them and politely point out that children are too young to know where
they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know where they
stand on economics and politics.” Given that a few pages earlier in the
book Dawkins tells us the story of the atheist doctor and his devoutly
atheist child, I wonder whether Dawkins wrote to that father asking him if
he’d given his son the chance to make up his mind about religion by
regularly taking him to attend church services. For that matter does
Dawkins object to babies being given passports before they get to choose
their country?
Just in case not all past or present scientists have gotten Dawkins’s
consciousness-raising memo re their God delusions, Dawkins notes that
“Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be
so when you examine their beliefs more deeply.” He makes a particular
point of saying that Einstein was horribly misunderstood when it comes to
the impression that he had any sort of religious sensibility. Dawkins writes,
“Let me sum up [Einstein’s] religion in [a] quotation from Einstein himself:
‘To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a
something that our mind cannot grasp and this beauty and sublimity
reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In
this sense I am religious.’” Dawkins then says of the Einstein quote, “In this
sense I too am religious, with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp’ does not
have to mean ‘forever ungraspable. ’” Dawkins adds, “My title, The God
Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened
scientists. . . . That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the
way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse.”
It takes a lot of hard work by Dawkins to make sure we’re never
confused and to prove that the big-name scientists have all been atheists,
or at least not believers of the kind he doesn’t approve of. “Newton did
indeed claim to be religious. So did almost everybody until significantly I
think the nineteenth-century . . . great scientists who professed religion
become harder to find in the 20th-century. . . . I suspect that most of the
more recent ones are religious only in the Einsteinian sense which, I
argued . . . is a misuse of the word.” Dawkins notes that today he knows of
only three scientists in Britain who claim to be religious. And as for those
scientists in the past who claimed to be religious, Dawkins says that
because everyone had to say nice things about religion in those days, they
probably weren’t religious anyway, just pretending to be.
Cleaning up of the historical record is an obsession with Dawkins. Not
only the present and future must go his way, but the past too. He finds
himself compelled to make sure that we know that “The deist God of
Voltaire and Thomas Paine . . . [is not] the Old Testament psychotic
delinquent . . . the deist God of the 18th-century Enlightenment is an
altogether grander being: worthy of his cosmic creation.” Dawkins says
that (1) Voltaire and Thomas Paine and Einstein would actually be on his
side whatever they said, if they had only had the foresight and moral
courage to be a little clearer, and that (2), the Fathers of the
Enlightenment, who may have believed in God, believed in a God that
somehow would also be on Dawkins’s side and that their God is not to be
confused with the God Dawkins doesn’t like.
It turns out that the deism of the founders of the American republic was
also actually mostly atheistic, if properly understood. Dawkins asks how
these enlightened men founded a country that became so religious?
“Precisely because America is largely secular, religion has become free
enterprise . . . what works for soap flakes works for God, and the result is
something approaching religious mania amongst today’s less educated
classes . . . the Founding Fathers would have been horrified.”
 What’s to be done about America’s “less educated classes” who love
soap flakes and religion? One answer is to organize speaking tours
featuring Dawkins. In his “An Atheist’s Call to Arms,” a talk he gave in
California in 2002, Dawkins opened his show with a blast of music from
Aida and volunteered, by way of explanation, that he’d “chosen this
triumphant music for my funeral.” He will feel triumphant he said . . . then
corrected himself quickly since, well, he won’t be feeling anything at his
funeral, but, you know, if he could feel, he’d be feeling so good, “at being
given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here
before I was here.”
The audience seemed somewhat bemused, so Dawkins asked, “Can you
understand my quaint English accent?” Big laugh from the audience
anxious to prove that although they might not quite get what Dawkins
meant by playing and then “explaining” his funerary music as the opening
to his remarks, nevertheless, they weren’t members of the less educated
classes. So, oh “Yes! Yes!” they called out amid warm laughter, we can
understand English accents! They’re like soooo cool!
But, as in so many operatic plots, after the laughter must come the
tears! Once the opera selection had played, Dawkins turned to the
business at hand and sternly waded into the main point of his talk. “In this
country you can’t be too careful,” Dawkins said; “it’s fair to say that
American biologists are in a state of war! The war is so worrying that I
have to say something about it.”
In The God Delusion, Dawkins paints a similarly sinister picture of the
ongoing conspiracy against atheists in America, citing as proof (though he
laments that the reporter who heard the president say this didn’t use a
tape recorder) a story about President George Bush Sr. saying, “No, I don’t
know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be
considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” (My family got to know
President and Barbara Bush quite well and this story seems very unlikely,
given Bush’s rather liberal religious views.)
Dawkins claims that America is in the grip of oppressive religion, to the
extent that even the police organize purges against atheists. He explains
how the police persecuted an atheist street protestor, or so Dawkins has
heard. As he points out in his book, “Anecdotes of . . . prejudice [in
America] against atheists abound.” Dawkins relates one such anecdote
about a cop who was ready to beat up someone who organized a peaceful
demonstration to warn people about a fraudulent faith healer. Dawkins
supplies us with the cop’s dialogue: “‘To hell with you, buddy. No
policeman wants to protect a goddamned atheist. I hope somebody
bloodies you up good.’”
When not regaling us with anti-atheist cop dialogue, Dawkins explains,
as if to not very bright infants, that
Constructing models is something the human brain is very
good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we
are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally
vivid, hallucination. As Chapter Ten will show, children who
have “imaginary friends” sometimes see them clearly,
exactly as if they were real. If we are gullible, we don’t
recognize hallucination . . . for what it is and we claim to
have seen or heard a ghost; or an angel; or God or
especially if we happen to be young, female and Catholic
the Virgin Mary.
Oh those young female Catholics!
A few chapters into The God Delusion Dawkins gets to his main, and
only, point: that the Darwinian biological theory of evolution should be
applied to explain the entire universe. Dawkins starts his argument by
saying, “A deep understanding of Darwinianism teaches us to be wary of
the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance.”
Dawkins then grasps at and pushes his own easy assumptions. But first he
tells us how and why he will be making his argument: “Feminism shows us
the power of consciousness raising, and I want to borrow the technique for
natural selection.”
Dawkins borrows from the science of biological natural selection too and
adapts Darwin’s theory of the evolution of life forms into the speculative
field of the creation of everything—in other words, cosmology. Dawkins
tells us that his solution to understanding how we all got here is what he
calls “the Goldilocks zone,” as with the three bears and the porridge: The
conditions for life had to be “just right.”
 To find the Goldilocks zone is to discover that with the billions, actually
trillions, of planets and perhaps innumerable “other universes” chances
are that somewhere conditions would be “just right” for life to evolve. “We
live on a planet that is friendly to our kind of life,” Dawkins writes; “there
are billions of planets in the universe. . . . Now it is time to take the
anthropic principle back to an earlier stage, from biology back to
cosmology. . . . Some physicists are known to be religious . . . predictably,
they seize upon the improbability of the physical constants . . . in their
more or less narrow Goldilocks zones, and suggest that there must be a
cosmic intelligence deliberately [doing] the tuning [to get the porridge ‘just
right’]. I have already dismissed all such suggestions as raising bigger
problems than they solve.”
“I have already dismissed. . . .” So that settles that, God is out.
“Goldilocks zones” are in. Narrow-minded physicists, who, unlike Dawkins-
the-biologist, deal with cosmology as part of their field of study, are out, or
rather “already dismissed.”
Dawkins borrows Daniel Dennett’s phrase about what Dennett calls “the
trickle down” theory of creation. Dawkins explains it as “the idea that it
takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing.” This, said Dennett
(and Dawkins quotes him), is why people believe in God as creator. But
Dawkins goes the next step. Given the improbability, verging on
impossibility, of the convergence of factors needed to make and sustain
life, Dawkins has his own trickle down theory of a Big Fancy Smart Thing
(the huge universe) to make lesser things, in other words: us.
What simplistic evangelical/fundamentalist theology tries to explain
about creation, using God as the magical Big Thing, Dawkins does with
brain-melting Big Numbers wrapped in meant-to-obfuscate and meant-
tointimidate science jargon. The problem is that neither religious
fundamentalists nor Dawkins can explain any of what they claim they are
explaining. Why? Because they are deep into the realm that Einstein was
talking about: the realm “that our mind cannot grasp and this beauty and
sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is
religiousness.”
It turns out that Dawkins agrees with creationists who say that it’s nutty
to credit pure chance as responsible for the design of something as
complex as life. But Dawkins says that whatever that something is it can’t
be God, because “Then you would have to ask, who created the creator?”
Instead of God, Dawkins says he’s discovered “the anthropic principle.”
So Dawkins has invented a theology with a scientific-sounding name. He
even has doctrines, what he calls the “six fundamental constants of
nature,” which for him fill in the “gaps.” Believers could say that God chose
these six “laws” to encourage the evolution of life, but Dawkins won’t buy
this, because God can’t be explained by Dawkins. Apparently the origin of
life, however, can be explained by Dawkins. Dawkins says that the chance
that a God exists who was able to figure Dawkins’s six rules out, and thus
create the “just right” conditions for life, is as improbable as these rules
being “created” by chance.
So after all that we’re back where we started! There is no reason to have
a God because in our limitless universe (or universes) anything is
statistically possible, except for there being a God. Why? Because Dawkins
says so. Dawkins’s “anthropic principle” turns out to be Dawkins.
Dawkins’s Big Idea seems closer The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy than
to science.
As Robert Stewart (a professor of philosophy) wrote about Dawkins’s
book when reviewing it on the Evolutionary Philosophy website,
Dawkins’ claim about differing probabilities appears very
naive. Whatever explanation you give for the existence of
our universe, whether you believe that the ultimate source
of all reality is a mindless cosmic machine, an infinite cosmic
chaos, or a purposeful creative force; they are all logically
impossible. Without a shred of evidence to support it, the
only difference between cosmological evolution and any
other kind of creation myth is that it is cleverly shrouded in
scientific words. Dawkins does this a lot throughout his
book. He takes questionable concepts and shrouds them in
scientific words in order to give them the look of scientific
legitimacy. Intelligent design theorists use the same tactic.
Once Dawkins has made his case for his Goldilocks cosmology, he pads
the remaining hundred pages or so of his book with a numbingly repetitive
attack on the creationist movement and all the other things he doesn’t like
about religion and religious people, from the “dark side of absolutism” and
the sanctity of human life, to priests molesting children and, of course,
Pastor Ted Haggard’s malfeasance, Oral Roberts’s fakery etc., etc. It all
seems a long way from science.
For those who become impatient with reading Dawkins’s complete
works in bits and pieces off assorted merchandise, and who want to buy
“the” Dawkins book, I recommend The Selfish Gene. The big noise has been
about The God Delusion, but The Selfish Gene is where Dawkins as a
serious Oxford professor—back in 1976, before he won the talk show
lottery and went into the clothing trade—provided some interesting
conjecture about biological evolution. Dawkins invented the term selfish
gene as a way of saying that evolution is acting on our genes and that
selection of populations doesn’t override selection based on genes. He
says that our genes are selfish in the sense that they seem to manipulate
us their hosts to their own ends, often with goals.
These “goals” aren’t necessarily going to make us happy. Our genes
delude us with emotions we take at face value, but in reality these
emotions are a charade. We’re fooled into doing what’s good for our genes
(and not necessarily good for us) by feeling love, fear, hate, and loathing in
ways that push us to procreate, defend our children, and stay alive long
enough for our genes to move on into and through the next generation. To
Dawkins, love and altruism are at least partly explained as crafty genetic
ruses, based on a biological trick perpetuated by blind chance.
In The Selfish Gene Dawkins makes a dispassionate scientific observation
that may not have his later atheistic spiritual fervor, but he seems to come
to a sort of spiritual conclusion in terms of human strategies of
cooperation that are in line with what he would regard as our gene-driven
behavior. In other words, he tries to come up with an answer (and perhaps
a reason) for altruism and cooperation, and thus a society not entirely
based on genetic-inspired selfishness.
Although the thought is descriptive, it has prescriptive overtones, I think.
An evolutionary stable strategy is defined as strategy which,
if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be
bettered by an alternative strategy. . . . Another way of
putting it is to say that the best strategy for an individual
 depends on what the majority of the population are doing.
Since the rest of the population consists of individuals, each
one trying to maximize his own success, the only strategy
that persists will be one which, once evolved, cannot be
bettered by any deviant individual.
In other words: our genes “say” be nice and cooperate on behalf of the
needs of the many. It’s too bad that Dawkins couldn’t live by this genetic
theory of cooperation in a way that might have motivated him to find
harmony with religious believers and (for instance) jointly advocate the
sort of ecological agenda we all need to agree on to save our planet. But
like all fundamentalists, Dawkins would rather be proved correct
“theologically” than compromise in order to win a larger, more important
(and real) battle. In that sense Dawkins’s book title, The God Delusion,
seems to describe a disorder that the author suffers from himself.
 CHAPTER 4

Determinism Religious and Secular Is the Ultimate

Insanity Defense

Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the

temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short it
is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors.
So regarded, man is not yet a self.
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

I agree with the atheists who say that an ethical life doesn’t require belief
in God. We judge an atheist and a religious person by the same standard:
what they do, rather than what they say they believe. Atheists can live as
moral a life as any religious person. Where atheists have a problem is in
pinning down a definition of what morality is.
Religious people have that same problem. Because religions and factions
within religions don’t agree, we’re all in the same boat. So there is no
reason to pull a New Atheist tantrum, or preach a proselytizing
evangelical/fundamentalist sermon and try to lord it over one another.
There is no “they.” There is only us. Life is too short to know, so religion’s
most basic lesson—humility—is not just a good idea but also logical. And
humility is, I think, also the most basic lesson taught by science, which, by
definition, illumines the vastness of our ignorance.
If I’m to pass some sort of exam on what it “means to be a Christian,”
theology and belief aren’t relevant to the test. What is relevant is what
Genie and my children can tell you about what I’m like to live with, and
whether my years spent on a sacramental path have made me less of a
selfcentered idiot. That is what faith in God is about, just as that is what
being a moral atheist is about.
If you want to know about the truth qualities of Dawkins’s or Maher’s or
Hitchens’s philosophical/moral claims, it’s relevant to take into
consideration what their wives, girlfriends, maids in hotels, taxi drivers,
agents and editors, or even people who stood in line to get a book signed
might have to say. What is it like to live with these icons of reason, meet
them, or work for them? It’s relevant to ask because the New Atheism isn’t
just about non-belief in God. The leaders of this movement make loud,
repeated, and bold claims about atheism being better and more moral,
more ethical, and a vastly improved alternative to religion. If we are to
dismiss Christianity partly because of the likes of Oral Roberts, Ted
Haggard, and their shenanigans (not to mention child-molesting Roman
Catholic priests) it is just as legitimate to ask about the characters of the
people pointing out religious people’s many moral faults.
The discussion between reasonable atheists and reasonable religious
people might better focus not just on what it means to be a good person
but also on how to become one, rather than just on competing truth
claims about the abstract Big Questions, let alone swapping horror stories.
For instance, is it being a good Muslim to stone to death a girl who was
raped? Is it being a good Christian to slap your wife silly because the Bible
“says” she is to submit to you? Is it being a good atheist to beat Tibetan
monks to death because they reject the enforced secular education
policies of China’s government?
Do life, history, common sense, culture, the needs of our small fragile
planet, religion, and science hold clues to what the word good means? Do
we all have blind spots, such as, say being someone who claims he’ll save
us from religion turning his career into just another religion and gathering
goofy followers who collect Scarlet A pins and exclaim “Thank Dawkins”
instead of “Thank God”?
We all face the same questions and demons. Genes may push me to
love, but why does it hurt so much to contemplate the idea that my love
for my family might be a chemically induced delusion? Why do we all
struggle against the idea of meaninglessness? Surely our all-knowing and
powerful genes could make us seamlessly accept our fate. Foxes and
rabbits, snakes and birds are also slaves to their genes. They aren’t
worrying about meaning or starting wars on the basis of religious ideology.
Wouldn’t evolution work better if there weren’t so many people doing
irrational things driven by angst to despair? Our genes certainly seem to
have screwed up a few philosophers and artists, some of whom became so
despairing (over the atheistic proposition that life holds no transcendent
meaning) that they committed suicide or tried to. Gauguin tried to kill
himself after painting his bleak Whence? What? Whither? about which he
wrote, “I have finished a philosophical work on this theme comparable to
the gospel . . . Fate how cruel thou art, and always vanquished, I revolt.”
In his 1991 essay “Viruses of the Mind,” Dawkins says his “memetic
theory” explains why religion exists. He says it’s like a computer virus.
Dawkins wants to inoculate us sufferers from the religion virus. He calls for
anti-virus intellectual programs to cure us of our religious illness. He
believes we need his help because, “Like computer viruses, successful
mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect . . . and [they]
may even vigorously deny it.” Or, as David St. Hubbins (lead guitar of
Spinal Tap) said about other hard-to-detect facts, “Dozens of people
spontaneously combust each year. It’s just not really widely reported.”
Dawkins gives the reader signs to look out for related to those about to
spontaneously combust with religious delusions. These signs include,
“Some deep inner conviction that something is true.” He describes the
religious person as a “faith-sufferer.” And yet another symptom is
believing that “‘Mystery,’ per se, is a good thing.”
The points that Dawkins raises sound less like science and more like a
high school debate wherein one debater has learned the trick of
mentioning his opponent’s beliefs first in order to strip them of their
power, not by proving anything about them but just by mentioning them in
a disparaging way that puts the other person on the defensive. Refer to
“mystery” with a sneer so that you strip the word of its power to remind
people that there are indeed mysteries. Mention inner conviction snidely
and you’ve made the way most people actually function, by ill-thought-out
but nevertheless deep inner convictions about what is right and wrong,
seem childish. It’s a cheap diversion—of the same kind that some men use
when they throw around the word hysterical while discussing a woman’s
ideas—but it achieves nothing other than to affix the label “stupid” to the
ways in which most people— including most atheists—actually work out
their problems in real life: we combine reason with emotion.
The truth is that logic has little to nothing to do with the way we think.
We’re lucky this is so. If logic ruled us, no one would fall in love, write a
novel, go skydiving, or help an old lady across the street.
There is another way to look at people’s inner convictions and their
intuition—that the words mystery and faith do describe something hard to
pin down but true: If people have strong inner convictions, might that not
be a symptom of God’s revelation to human beings? Dawkins would
probably answer that he is arguing for truth over falsehood, but it’s just his
word against religion when it comes down to it. One man’s virus is another
man’s faith.
To me Dawkins’s zeal echoes the paternalistic Victorian “civilizing”
missionary impulse that sent the white man to “darkest Africa.” His
mission field is “darkest America” and those “Catholic females,” not to
mention the “less educated” American classes. Why do his genes make
Dawkins want to be a secular missionary to the ignorant religious tribes
and motivate him to send his apostles amongst us, organized into local
clubs and armed with debate points? Does anyone in his movement have
enough of a sense of humor left (after all the hours spent in v-e-r-y s-e-r-i-
o-u-s debate) to see that there is a bit of irony in Dawkins-the-rational
using exactly the same kinds of religious witnessing tools (remember the
Gospel Walnut) that my missionary parents used in the 1950s? (Mom and
Dad had the good sense to realize that witnessing tools are trite, and they
abandoned them, much to my pre-teen relief.)
How the atheist call to convert to atheist faith squares with our being
conditioned by our genes is not explained. Are atheists less conditioned?
Do they have better genes? If an atheist and a religious believer marry, are
their children likely to have agnostic genes?
Dawkins and company preach with moralistic passion but also make the
argument that there is no ultimate meaning to be passionate about
because it’s really their genes doing the talking. Of course, some Christians
believe the same sort of thing when they follow the sixteenth-century
French Protestant reformer John Calvin.
Calvinism is also a form of deterministic fatalism. It’s not quite right to
say that Calvin thinks people were created for damnation, because that
leaves out the relevance of “The Fall” to the whole process. Elected to
eternal damnation is the correct term, but it depends on something called
“foreknowledge” by God of what would happen. So the “out” for the
Calvinists is that they can say that humans are created as possibly meriting
damnation, but are not created for damnation. However one parses his
theology, Calvin believed that his monster “god” had determined
everything, including who will be saved or lost. This means that Calvinists
(no matter how much they try to worm out of this conclusion) actually
must believe that their “god” created some people in order to damn them.
That idea puts Calvin’s followers in a strange position.
My father was a Calvinist until later in life, when he had the good sense
to give up the stricter Calvinistic ideas of his youth. As a young child I knew
that we Calvinists were supposed to evangelize everyone to get them
saved but, at the same time, we also believed that God had already
decided everything. My novel Zermatt takes my young alter-ego
protagonist, the aptly named Calvin Becker, on a bizarre mental journey
while he’s trying to unravel the mind-bending idea of predestination and
foreknowledge in light of his emerging sexuality (and a horny waitress
hitting up on him). God predestined everything, so is God making my
protagonist masturbate? “Did God make me do it?” Calvin wants to know,
while trying to square the idea of moral choice with being trapped in the
web of God’s foreknowledge.
Believe me, when one has been raised on Calvinist theology, it can, as
we put it in the sixties, “mess with your head.” I imagine that somewhere
out there, some kid being raised by Dawkins’s groupies is also worrying
about whether he’s in love with his girl-friend or whether it’s just his genes
talking, and if so, why aren’t her genes sending her the right message
about wanting to have sex?!
How curious that the Calvinist wing of the Protestant religion finds its
soul mate in the atheist’s determinism. Both get rid of free will
theoretically while demanding that their followers choose to go out and
save the world with correct thinking. And both lace their demands with
guilt. God hates you if you disagree with correct theology, and/or Dawkins
dismisses you as “less educated” if you question his ideas. God will get
even for eternity, Dawkins with his next paperback.
But if we’re just the product of brain chemistry or of God’s omnipotent
will, or of what we learned in our evolutionary ancestral home, and/or of
genetics, then all our ideas about free will are also part of what we can’t
help or change. From whence does the determinist Dawkins derive a
morally freighted, even imperial-sounding “You should”? Or, more bluntly,
where do Dawkins and the Calvinists get off telling the rest of us what to
believe when both insist we’re in the grip of powerful cosmic factors
beyond our control?
With the notable exception of Daniel Dennett (whose work we’ll look at
in Chapter 5), the New Atheists seem to underestimate, or even ignore,
the mitigating influence of the religion “virus.” We don’t hear much from
the New Atheists about the fact that hospitals as we know them developed
in the fourth century and are inextricably related to monastic and other
Christian groups (as Andrew Crislip points out in his book From Monastery
to Hospital ). Nor do the New Atheists say much about William Wilberforce
and other evangelicals like him, who, while in the grip of “some deep inner
conviction that something is true” fought successfully to abolish the slave
trade on the basis of their specifically evangelical religious beliefs.
It was Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s Christian faith that led
them to pursue reconciliation rather than vengeance in South Africa. And
many atheists enjoy religious music by Bach, applaud biblically informed
plays by Shakespeare, love paintings made by virus-infected believers such
as Rembrandt, and/or call 911 when hit by a car, expecting that ambulance
services, first established by religious people on the principle that humans
are little lower than the angels and therefore worth saving, will show up!
Even Dawkins calls himself a “cultural Christian,” which is a pleasantly
frank (and, for him, an unusually honest) acknowledgment of the fact that
a moral/ethical (or, in his case, an aesthetic and nostalgic) viral infection
may be comforting. As the BBC reported in December of 2007 on its
homepage, “Prof Dawkins, who has frequently spoken out against
creationism and religious fundamentalism, [said], ‘I’m not one of those
who wants to stop Christian traditions. This is historically a Christian
country. I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call
themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. So, yes, I like singing carols
along with everybody else. I’m not one of those who wants to purge our
society of our Christian history.’”
Most of the time, atheists won’t admit that they’re borrowing ethical
and/or aesthetic cultural traditions from religion. I’ve read the work of just
two recent atheist thinkers—philosopher Richard Rorty and ethicist Peter
Singer—who seem to have tried to avoid all the assumptions of religious
moral norms in their writing. Most atheists cop out, as Sam Harris does in
his book The End of Faith. He finishes his slam on religion with a feeble
religious-sounding sophomoric whine. He says that he knows we all need
meaning. So hey, how about we embrace a sort of secularized Eastern
mysticism to help get us through the night, you know, being that hard-
edged secular Truth is, well, absolutely true and all, but it hurts our
feelings, being as it’s sort of like, you know, depressing.
What Harris doesn’t do is reexamine his atheistic ideas based on the fact
that if he’s right, and in a raw, pure and absolutist form, atheism is
unpalatable to most people, then that might be an indication that there is
something to all this “religion stuff” besides feeling better. Maybe, if
wanting meaning is the way people are, and we are part of nature, then
those feelings, however they express themselves, might indicate
something true about the reality of nature and the way it actually is, rather
than just signaling an emotional need for religious therapy. Or as author
(and brilliant writer on evolutionary psychology) Robert Wright puts it in
his book The Evolution of God, “If history naturally pushes people toward
moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive
their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this
growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe—conceivably—the
source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.”
As I said, one atheist who tried to bite the bullet in a way that Harris
lacked the testicular fortitude to do was Richard Rorty. Rorty argued that
we make up morality. He believed that bright people are “ironists” who
understand that we know nothing except our own “vocabularies.” He said
that morality is merely “the language games of one’s time.”
 Rorty was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, a theologian, a
Baptist minister, and a leader in what was called the Social Gospel
movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So Rorty’s
nihilism is nihilism with a twist of religious awareness. Rorty is clear about
his legacy from the Social Gospel/theological liberalism of his grandfather.
Maybe that’s why he brings a bare-knuckle honesty to his work that, by
comparison, makes Harris seem positively wimpy. In Rorty and His Critics,
Rorty writes
The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students
think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is
engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. . . . [W]e
do our best to convince these students of the benefits of
secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing
up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same
reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period
assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . . So we are going to go
right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children,
trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of
dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than
discussable. I am just as provincial . . . as the Nazi teachers
who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only
difference is that I serve a better cause.
Rorty was honest enough to admit that he had problems with selling his
idea of an individually invented moral vocabulary, because no society
raises children “to make them continually dubious,” as he said. So he
wrote that “ironists” like himself should keep their views secret or at least
separate their “public and private vocabularies.” In other words, Rorty
admitted that his ideas had to be lied about in order to succeed, because
the way people actually are does not correspond to his stark atheist
philosophy.
Then there is the Princeton University professor, atheist, and bioethicist
Peter Singer. Singer also has tried to invent an ethic with no nostalgic nod
to religion, especially not toward Judaism or Christianity’s sanctity-of-life
beliefs. He has said that some defective children should be destroyed
during a trial period after their births. Similar to his argument for abortion,
Singer argues in his Practical Ethics, (2nd edition, 1993) that newborns lack
the characteristics of personhood—“rationality, autonomy, and
selfconsciousness”—and that therefore “killing a newborn baby is never
equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” In
Germany, his positions have been compared to the Nazis’, and his lectures
have been disrupted all over the world by groups representing the
handicapped.
According to my friend Angela Creager (she’s one of Singer’s colleagues
and a professor of the history of science at Princeton), Singer is a kind man
moved by compassion. Nevertheless, he seems not to understand how his
ideas strike others for instance, people with disabilities. Singer gets upset
when commentators compare his proposals to Nazism, because his family
lost people in the Holocaust. Singer’s objections don’t seem reasonable to
me. As Michael Burleigh, a leading historian of the Third Reich, has pointed
out in the context of a commentary on Singer’s work, eliminating
defectives in pre-Nazi Germany was exactly what opened the door to the
Holocaust. In his book Confronting the Nazi Past, Burleigh writes, “Singer
omits to mention that one of the essential elements of [Nazi] propaganda
was the denial of personality to their victims.” He adds that Singer is
“displaying remarkable naiveté” when he suggests that the choices that
would have to be made in evaluating a prospective defective for
elimination would be in trustworthy hands if doctors were in charge.
Burleigh notes that the Nazi euthanasia program was led by scientists and
psychiatrists, people drawn from the best-educated and most “civilized”
ranks of a sophisticated secular medical class not too different from the
academic class Singer himself belongs to.
Atheists say that morality isn’t derived only from religion. I think they’re
right. But they seem to have problems when deciding the limits of what is
permissible under the rules of their “invented vocabulary” of morality à la
Rorty and Singer. Maybe the point is that religion is derived from morality.
I’m guessing that morality predates religion. We all act as if that’s the
case. We don’t have long theological debates about, say, incest or wife
abuse as though the jury is still out on what is wrong or that our sense of
the matter depends on Bible verses. We evolved ideas that make life easier
and less chaotic, as in: I don’t want to be clubbed in my sleep so let’s all
agree that clubbing people in their sleep is wrong! Those ideas—including
parents not taking kindly to “experts” telling them what they should do
about their “defective” child—might be a reflection of the character of
God. If there is no God, or if He doesn’t care about us, then our common
morality is still the result of practical, reality-based needs, which also
“teach” that a good life depends on the “Do unto others . . . ” ethic. Either
way, morality is a lot more than an individual’s invented vocabulary. Either
way, Singer’s ethic seems monstrous to many people for the same reason
that George W. Bush’s torturing prisoners in the name of national security
was a threat to us all.
How individuals are treated affects everyone. Ideas such as Singer’s and
George W. Bush’s have consequences. There may indeed be babies born
who’d be “better off” killed or prisoners who “deserve” to be water-
boarded or punched and exposed to hunger, cold, and snarling dogs. But
the rest of us aren’t better off when morality becomes a function of
expediency, be that in the name of national security or of “sensibly”
getting rid of the need for all those expensive handicapped ramps by
getting rid of the handicapped themselves, at birth.
Who decides who’s next? Do you trust an academic ethicist like Singer
to make life-and-death judgments when he’s so far removed from reality
that he gets hurt feelings when his seminars are picketed by people in
wheelchairs (the very sorts of human beings that Singer says might have
been better off being killed at birth)? Should a Darth Vader figure like
former vice president Dick Cheney be kept handy to decide when torture is
“okay”? Is national security worth preserving if it entails turning our
country into a police state?
Do atheists really believe that morality doesn’t exist just because it can’t
be put under a microscope? Do any atheists claim that (and, far more
tellingly, live as if) moral propositions have no objective value? If Singer
finds himself on a planet where handicapped people are the norm and he
is a minority of one, will he gladly entrust himself to a panel of experts to
decide his fate as—in that context—an “abnormal” person? If Rorty had
not been paid the royalties generated by the sale of his books, would he
have failed to take his publishers to court had his editor argued that in the
“invented moral vocabulary” of publishing, they’d just changed the rules of
accounting? For that matter, when Singer gets his feelings hurt by
outraged handicapped people who compare him to the Nazis, isn’t that a
tacit admission that there is a right way and a wrong way to treat people,
including Australian ethicist/ Princeton professors who feel that their
benign intensions are being misunderstood?
And what if the New Atheist agenda succeeded beyond Dawkins and his
followers’ wildest dreams? Would everything work out perfectly? For
instance, what would happen to the environmentalist movement? The
appeal of the environmentalist movement is handily compatible with the
idea of stewardship. Maybe that appeal works because a sense of
stewardship and a sense of the sacred in Nature are intrinsic to our
natures, a part of the divine revelation we are gradually developing a
capacity to experience. Watch any TV program on the wonders of life on
earth. Even if there is no religious content the tone is reverential, and a
sense of the sacred permeates the hushed narration. Why?
A lot more motivation can be inspired by maintaining that one may do
God’s will by conserving the earth than by telling people that their lives
mean nothing in an ultimate sense, that they are slaves to their genes,
conditioning, and evolutionary quirks, but, oh, by the way, they should
sacrifice their comforts to save the planet for equally meaningless and
deluded future generations that they’ll never meet. Or, as atheist apologist
Princeton University professor and molecular biologist Lee M. Silver writes
in Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New
Frontier of Life, about the question of life having meaning and therefore a
point: “I have yet to hear a good answer, other than there is no point.”
Now that will really fire people up to make sacrifices!
It seems to me the New Atheists have it wrong. If you deprive people of
the solace of faith in a moral system of meaningful connection with
something bigger than themselves, and bigger than mere connection to
many other “meaningless” people, you aren’t just stripping away window
dressing but demolishing the supporting structure of a happy life. As I said,
I think that Harris tacitly admits this by appending his squishy ending to his
otherwise hardnosed book. Atheists too depend on some form of
spirituality for happiness. Why else do you think that Dawkins’s zeal can
only be described as religious, and his followers as disciples? Maybe it’s
because the need for meaning won’t be denied, even by people who
gather to do just that.
 Even one of the most church-hating fathers of the Enlightenment,
Voltaire, to whom Christianity was an “infamy,” found the influence of
faith, and of Christianity in particular, useful: “I want my attorney, my
tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God,” he wrote, because
“then I shall be robbed and cuckolded less often.”
If atheists visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art refused to visit any
exhibitions containing religious works or any works created by artists who
had a deep personal religious faith, they’d find their stay brief. They’d be
stuck looking at a rotting shark in a tank of formaldehyde, maybe a Picasso
or two. (Actually, I’m not sure about that. Picasso’s early communism had
religious overtones to the point where Picasso once said, “I am a
communist and my painting is communist painting.”) The rest of us would
enjoy the other 99 percent of the exhibits, not to mention just about every
concert given on any night in New York City, from Vivaldi to Duke Ellington.
In a lecture on BBC 3 in the spring of 2009, composer James McMillan
drew attention to the fact that many poets and composers of the modern
era have taken a religious stance, from T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and John
Betjeman to John Tavener, György Ligeti, and many others. This is a point
not lost on atheists. In fact, one atheist website is full of defensive
comments promoting art by atheists, as though atheist artists are a
specialneeds case whose work should be exhibited in a dedicated venue
something like the Special Olympics. “Atheists are as creative as religious
people!” proclaims the site. The site also promises to help atheists
“network and promote, sell and display our atheist work.”
My beef with the New Atheists and with religious fundamentalists is that
their ideas just don’t seem aesthetically pleasing or imbued with the
poetry that I experience in real life. Ideas about life are too small. Life
trumps description—just as what some severely handicapped people
actually grow up to do (and be) trumps sage theories on just whose life is
“worthy to be lived.” Is Dawkins correct when he says religious people
appeal to mystery as a cop-out? Are unnamed things meaningless? Do we
have to understand something in order to experience it? Is scientific
prediction of outcomes not still just prediction? Enter Lucy!
I play music to Lucy even though she doesn’t know what music is. It is a
mystery to her. I read that babies’ brains develop better, or do something
good anyway, when they hear classical music. Lucy seems to favor Italian
opera, Beethoven’s Sixth, Handel’s Messiah, and Glen Gould playing Bach’s
“Goldberg Variations.” My son Francis (whom in our family we call Fact
Boy, given his voracious reading habits and encyclopedic store of general
knowledge) told me that when children hear various languages spoken
from birth, their brains develop differently, and later they can speak those
languages or at least learn foreign languages more easily. So, just in case, I
do these “scientifically improving things” for Lucy before she understands
anything about them. What I’m really doing, though, is basking in the glow
of my beautiful little granddaughter, while feeling much the same as a
lizard lying on a warm rock in the sun.
If the love I have for Lucy is love, not just a chemical ruse, then it is
completely selfless and completely selfish—both pleasure and pain.
Selfless because I’ll do anything for Lucy: be drooled on without complaint,
develop a stiff neck carrying her for hours, change a particularly ruinous
diaper, do dishes laboriously with one hand as I hold her in my other arm
because she loves watching real activities. Selfish because being with her
makes me deliriously happy.
There are also other times of inner stillness when I’m so completely
absorbed by what I’m doing that everything else seems like a rude
intrusion. That sometimes happens when I write or paint. But when I find
stillness of spirit through the love of someone precious to me, it’s an
entirely different experience from the stillness I enjoy when concentrating
on any useful activity. It is also what I find in the stillness of prayer.
When writing novels or painting small oils (of the marsh and what grows
in my garden), I’m mining what’s inside me, and that’s a finite source
limited by what I know and have experienced and what I can see and do.
When I find I’m captivated by loving another person, say Lucy, the
experience takes on the aura of infinity. All those millions of words in the
books on so many shelves in my old dusty house can’t approach the reality
of an actual moment of loving communion.
Words may “explain” how our genes are driving Lucy and me to bond for
reasons of species propagation, tribe cohesion, and genetic survival; how
our evolutionary ancestral home, where tribes first formed, has made Lucy
and me the way we are; how altruism is just a genetic survival mechanism;
and so forth. Other books on the same shelves drone on about theology,
meaning, philosophy, and the “nature of God.” None, be they Dawkins’s
atheist sermons or religious tomes by men such as Thomas Aquinas,
capture the empathy between Lucy and me, let alone describe one second
of the actual reality.
Even after having read The Selfish Gene, and Mr. Silver’s pronouncement
that there is no point to life, and John Calvin’s “explanation” that God has
already decided everything (including whom I love), I still bring Genie a cup
of coffee in bed. I still say “I love you” to her and believe that those words
have a deeper meaning than my genes fooling my brain. I still say “I love
you” to Lucy, too, even before she can understand those words. I believe
those words represent a choice. I also believe they embody a mystery that
I’m not ashamed to enjoy rather than try to explain.
 CHAPTER 5

Dennett Says Religion Evolved the Way Folk Music

Did

One sees now how . . . extraordinarily stupid it is to defend

Christianity, how little knowledge of men this betrays, and
how truly, even though it be unconsciously, it is working in
collusion with the enemy, by making of Christianity a
miserable something or another which in the end has to be
rescued by a defense.
Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard

On the first page of Breaking the Spell—Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,

Daniel Dennett writes, “I may have missed my target.” Dennett strikes me
as somebody actually looking for answers. He is an atheist, but no
fundamentalist. One reason I find Dennett so appealing is his decency. His
humility, wit, and empathy speak volumes to me and lends a solid gravity
to his wisdom. It certainly proves you don’t need to believe in God to come
across as just the sort of person anyone would like to have for a friend.
Dennett is a philosopher whose science research is related to
evolutionary biology. He is also director of the Center for Cognitive Studies
at Tufts University. Dennett deserves better friends than his fellow
contributors to the emerging New Atheist canon. Maybe he knows this,
because he puts a little distance between Dawkins and himself. In Breaking
the Spell Dennett levels a subtle rebuke at Dawkins, even though he
doesn’t name him: “Biologists are often accused of gene-centrism—
thinking that everything in biology is explained by the action of genes. And
some biologists do indeed go overboard in their infatuation with genes.
They should be reminded that Mother Nature is not a gene centrist!”
Dennett also wrote a review of Dawkins’s The God Delusion for Free
Inquiry, saying that he and Dawkins agree about many ideas, “but on one
central issue we are not (yet) of one mind: Dawkins is quite sure that the
world would be a better place if religion were hastened to extinction and I
am still agnostic about that.”
We’ve never met but I’ve watched Dennett debate, have read him, and
have heard him interviewed. He seems fair and knowledgeable about
religion, acknowledging that all religions have a toxic component and yet
that they also have a good side. Dennett has even proposed that a course
on religions should be taught—worldwide—as a compulsory part of
education both private and public, secular and religious. He wants this
done because, as he correctly says, “All toxic parts of religion depend on
the enforced ignorance of the young.” Dennett also looks forward to the
day that the Vatican becomes “a museum of Roman Catholic religion” and
“Mecca becomes Disney’s Magic Kingdom of Allah.” He said that in a
debate (held at Tufts University in 2008) with the right-wing author Dinesh
D’Souza. It’s also a somewhat tongue-in-cheek point Dennett makes in his
book.
The essential idea put forward in Breaking the Spell is that humans are
like ants whose brains have been infected by a parasite. We’re like an ant
who climbs again and again to the top of a stalk of grass, driven to do that
by a parasite lodged in its brain. Dennett asks, “Does anything like this ever
happen with human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings
setting aside their personal interests, their health, their chances to have
children, and devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an
idea that has lodged in their brains.”
Dennett admits that “The comparison of the Word of God to lancet fluke
[parasite] is unsettling.” And he asks, “How are ideas . . . spread from mind
to mind, surviving translation between different languages, hitchhiking on
songs and icons and . . . rituals, coming together in unlikely combinations
in particular people’s heads, where they give rise to yet further new
‘creations’ bearing family resemblances to the ideas that inspired them?”
 Dennett believes that the answer is that religions evolved as a response
to our fears and as an explanation to ourselves of what we don’t
understand. These explanations became more and more sophisticated
until they emerged as religions, a few of which have survived and become
established. “Some of the features of our minds are endowments we share
with much simpler creatures, and others are specific to our lineage. . . .
These features sometimes overshoot, sometimes have curious
byproducts . . . [and] some of these patterns look rather like religions.”
Nevertheless, Dennett believes that religion can be a wonderful thing for
many people. Unlike the other New Atheists, Dennett realizes that the
consequences of his work attempting to debunk religion might damage
individuals and societies. As he puts it, breaking the spell that religion casts
over people could be something like letting your cell phone ring at a
concert. “I don’t want to be that person,” he writes. He continues, “The
problem is there are good spells and there are bad spells . . . and it may be
the best way to break these bad spells is to introduce the spellbound to a
good spell.”
Dennett is open to the idea that one possibility for breaking the spell of
bad religion is to look for a “good gospel.” He says that good intentions are
not enough. “If we learned anything in the twentieth century, we learned
that . . . we made some colossal mistakes with the best of intentions. In the
early decades of the century, communism seemed to many millions of
thoughtful, well-intentioned people to be a beautiful and even obvious
solution to the terrible unfairness that all can see, but they were wrong.”
Dennett recognizes the perils of secularism in a way that the other
leading New Atheists writers don’t, or rather won’t. He also acknowledges
the limits of his (and all) knowledge and asks, “Who is right? I don’t know.
Neither do the billions of people with their passionate religious
convictions. Neither do those atheists who are sure the world would be a
much better place if all religion went extinct.” Dennett seems to
understand that we’re all in the same situation: “Even atheists and
agnostics can have sacred values,” he writes,
“values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. . . . [M]y sacred
values are obvious and quite ecumenical: democracy, justice, life, love, and
truth.”
 Dennett is critical of the blind spot atheists discussing religion bring to
their theories: “We don’t just walk up to religious phenomena and study
them point-blank as if they were fossils . . . Researchers tend to either be
respectful [and] deferential [or] hostile, invasive, and contemptuous.”
Dennett is honest. “People who want to study religion,” he writes, “usually
have an ax to grind. . . . [T]his tends to infect their methods with bias.”
Why did he write his book? Dennett answers, “I, for one, fear that if we
don’t subject religion to . . . scrutiny now, and work together for whatever
revisions and reforms are called for, we will pass on the legacy of ever
more toxic forms of religion to our descendents.” Post 9/11, post the
impact of the Religious Right on American life and politics, who can argue
with that?
Dennett asks, “How can we [stop religion] from being used to shelter the
lunatic excesses?” The solution he says, would be to make religion less of a
“sacred cow” and more of what he calls “a ‘worthy alternative.’” Dennett
says, “Until the priests and rabbis and imams and their flocks explicitly
condemn by name the dangerous individuals and congregations within
their ranks, they are all complicit.”
Amen!
Dennett points out that religions evolve. Perhaps he means this as a
criticism of religion, but for me it’s a hopeful sign. I’m glad that religion
changes as we do. Perhaps someday it—and we—will grow up. My quibble
with Dennett’s view, that somehow religious evolution is a problem for
religion, is that individual religions aren’t the point. What is the point is the
question raised by the existence of any religion: in other words our longing
for meaning.
Because every plant, four-legged creature, and human, fish, and bird has
evolved from single-celled organisms, our evolutionary journey is clearly
toward complexity. And what religion is, is the expression of a dimension
of complex consciousness. From my point of view, that is a reason to be
hopeful about the fact that we human animals, in the course of our
evolution, were brought—and will be brought—to a better place by the
gradual understanding of a larger reality. Thus the gradual revelation by
God comes to us through us. Whom else does Dennett think it would come
through?
 And why, just because religious belief evolves in and through us—or is,
as Dennett puts it, invented by us—does that mean that what we invent is
any less true? Maybe we aren’t inventing but rather discovering. No one
invented electricity. It was discovered. It existed before we evolved
sufficiently to recognize its potential.
Dennett says, “I look around and I’m so glad to be alive!” He “gets” the
spiritual wonder of life. I just think Dennett is using a needlessly limited
vocabulary to express his spirituality. Nevertheless, Dennett comes up with
one of the best definitions of what religion is. He writes of “keeping that
awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the
demands of daily living.”
In his debate with D’Souza, Dennett said, “I wish that there was
someone I could properly express my gratitude to for all this wonderful
stuff. But there isn’t anybody to be the appropriate recipient of my
gratitude, so what I do instead is just thank goodness.” And he added,
“There is moral goodness too. There is the goodness of human morality. It
all evolved. This is a hard idea for people to understand.”
It seems to me that Dennett’s desire to express gratitude is in itself a
sort of witness to the fact that there might be a someone there to whom
gratitude is due. Why would the human animal have such a weird and
completely novel impulse to express gratitude unless it was an echo of a
greater reality, yet to be fully discovered?
Dennett believes there is an inversion of reason, where unknowing
becomes the only explanation. That’s what I believe too, and his is one of
the best articulations I’ve read of that idea. This is another point where
Dennett and Dawkins seem to disagree, in that Dennett’s “inversion of
reason” might well be dismissed as a mystery-type cop-out by Dawkins
when it is applied to faith in God.
I don’t think we need a creator to explain anything, such as design and
order. What I do believe we need, and will eventually find, is that there is
spiritual meaning that exists objectively, apart from us, and comes from
God (or from what we call “God”). And that that meaning, for now, is best
expressed by the words “Love your neighbor” and “Thank you.”
If Dennett fails, it’s where many brilliant scholars have failed: He seems
to lack imagination when it comes to what lies outside of what he studies.
It’s a sort of beautiful failure similar to the failure of the painter Georges
Seurat.
Seurat was influenced by two scientists, Chevreul and Rood, who wrote
on optical effects and perception. So Seurat invented a technique of
painting —all those lovely little dots of color in his paintings such as A
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte—that he believed was
more scientific than any previous art. His method reflected what some
nineteenthcentury scientists regarded as the way we see. Seurat’s style
conformed to their theory, but the paintings turned out to be just another
phase of impressionism, lovely and yet oddly limited by subjecting art to a
sciencebased theory of art. It was a bad fit, I think. Art has truths to offer,
but perhaps being an illustration of the science of how we see isn’t one of
them.
That is my problem with Dennett. My sense is that he’s stuck in a
moment of time that will someday look as lovely as Seurat’s pointillist
paintings, but also just as needlessly limited. Dennett’s generous spirit
would be better served transcending his self-imposed limits. The art in
what Dennett says will outlast his science, I think, because science is
always partly yesterday’s news. Whereas there are truths of the spirit that
are what they are forever. Beauty and love expressed in art, poetry, and
religion are among the things that last.
I believe that Dennett is right when he tells us that free will and
intentionality are explained by Darwinian science. It isn’t that I disagree
with Dennett (or Darwin), it’s that I feel Dennett doesn’t go far enough. To
use the Seurat metaphor again, I long for Dennett to step outside his idea
of what he must say to be a scientist/philosopher in good standing with
likeminded academics and try on another style of perception. Or put it this
way: I’d like to be a parasite (very briefly!) inhabiting Dennett’s brain and
able to experience what is beyond his ability to describe when he watches
the sky lighten at dawn from the deck of his sailboat. My sense is that he
would be experiencing the sacred.
As Dennett said in his debate at Tufts, “We’re stuck telling each other
how to live our lives and how to live morally.” And that fact that we are all
stuck doing this makes us very different from everything else we know in
nature. It also makes the “we and they” way in which some atheists and
religious people are dismissing each other childish.
The truth at the heart of why religion exists is that
moral/metaphysical /spiritual/aesthetic experiences are part of our lives.
Moral/ metaphysical/spiritual/aesthetic experiences are part of Dennett’s
life too. If they weren’t, he wouldn’t bother using an art form—writing—in
an attempt to refute the power of religion by trying to explain its biological
origins. And he writes beautifully, which takes skill and effort. Dennett’s
aesthetic qualities seem spiritual to me.
Explaining the theoretical biological origin of spirituality has no more
impact on our need for, and enjoyment of, religious experiences than
explaining that water is “only H2O” strips water of its actual meaning. We
know what water is. But it’s also fun to jump into and play in, good to
drink, beautiful to look at, exciting to sail on, capable of putting one to
sleep with the sound of lapping waves, useful for baptizing babies in,
responsible for inspiring Turner to paint, and wet—even after one knows
that there is no such thing as “wet” or “dry” because wet is merely a set of
sensations that we call “wetness” caused by a configuration of molecules
that are neither dry nor wet. So here’s one answer to the question “What
is water?” It might also be a partial answer to Dennett’s claim that he
doesn’t know whom to thank: Lucy loves her bath!
Lucy loving her bath and smiling while she kicks and splashes all the
water out of the baby tub is also “why” water exists. The pleasure we take
in a baby’s pleasure might be a hint of what our meaning is too: the
pleasure of God enjoying our pleasure at existing in the midst of, as
Dennett calls it, “all this wonderful stuff.”
While I am bathing Lucy, the gulf between my understanding of what is
going on between us as Lucy smiles at me and my heart melts, and what is
actually happening, is larger than the gulf between Lucy’s preverbal state
and my “sophistication” as a fifty-six-year-old writer. And as for the
meaning of water, molecules are the least of it; the big story is my joy at
watching Lucy’s joy.
The essence of Lucy’s and my times together depends on something
different from ideas about what it all means. It is what it is with or without
anyone’s descriptions, let alone anyone’s approval. I look into Lucy’s eyes
as she looks into mine, and there is an amazing exchange of whatever we
call it or don’t call it. I watch her seeing everything for the first time. I hold
her in the crook of my left arm as I paint on a blank canvas with my right
hand. When holding Lucy, I paint fast and sloppy so that the drama of the
spreading colors will hold her attention. Lucy has never seen a blank
canvas miraculously turn blue and green and yellow. Lucy—thank God!—
has never seen a TV either, so she is discovering the world and her
relationship to it in real time.
To Lucy, watching paint being applied is a miracle. She literally holds her
breath. And I hold mine too, because seeing the intense freshness of her
experiencing the act of painting overwhelms my jaded, seen-it-all outlook.
Lucy’s gift to me is her wonderment. I could be presented with a thousand
options, and not one activity or reward could lure me away from tasting
the sweetness of “being” five months old again and waking up to color and
form. Lucy is my Eden. And no compliment I’ve ever received matches the
sense of accomplishment I feel when Becky, Lucy’s generous mother,
hands Lucy to me and Lucy reaches out and smiles. Winning Lucy’s and my
children’s and other grandchildren’s trust and friendship is the best thing
I’ve ever done. It feels as if it has moral weight. I’m betting it does. I feel as
if it has something to do with the why and wherefore of what we’re all
doing here. I’m betting it does.
One reason why it’s so wonderful to be trusted and loved by a baby is
that unlike adult relationships, with all those ulterior motives and hidden
agendas, I know that Lucy is exactly what she appears to be. Her
spontaneous gift of love, trust, and affection is not an intellectually
calculated means to an end.
The same guilelessness reemerges at the end of some lives, too. Lucy
turned five months old at about the same time that my mother turned
ninety-four. Their situations were strangely similar.
Mom lives in Switzerland near my sister Debbie. When I call Mom, she
knows who I am and still remembers to ask after Genie. Other than that,
Mom has little conversation left these days and must be prompted by
whoever is in the room with her to remember the simplest things—it’s
snowing outside, we had scrambled eggs for lunch, this morning we drove
down to Lake Geneva to walk on the quay.
 I’ve told her all about Lucy dozens of times. She’s always surprised and
re-congratulates me—again—on having had this, my third grandchild.
These days I even have to explain to Mom again and again who her
grandchild John, Lucy’s dad, is. And she seems also to have forgotten
Amanda and Ben, my two older grandchildren, who live in Finland with my
daughter Jessica and my son-in-law Dani. I ask questions. “What did you do
today, Mother?” “What is the weather like?” Mom repeats what I say, and
I hear my sister or Mom’s other caregivers prompting her. Then Mom
relays that information to me, and I pretend I didn’t just hear someone
else tell her the answer.
Suffering from forgetfulness brought on by several small strokes, my
once-vibrant and brilliant mother is no longer able to do much more than
my baby granddaughter Lucy can do. Lucy and Mom are passing like ships
in the night. Lucy looks into my eyes earnestly as we “converse,” me
jabbering in French and Italian that she doesn’t understand, Lucy wanting
to be like the people around her and able to communicate. “I’m a person
too!” she seems to be saying with those burbling chirpy little sounds.
As my mother fades away and her great-granddaughter comes into her
own, they may never meet. Lucy is a bit young for transatlantic travel, and
Mom is too old. But they have met in another way: They are both at about
the same place when it comes to being able to speak and remember. Mom
is slowly falling asleep. Lucy is waking up.
The best moment in any conversation with my mother is the surprise
and joy in her voice at the beginning of our calls when she exclaims, “Oh
it’s Frank!” She sounds so pleased and, just like my granddaughter, Mom is
at a stage of her life when guile, pretense, and calculation are impossible.
In Lucy’s case guile has never been there, and she will have to “grow up”
in order to learn how to lie. Mom can, at this stage of life, only be herself.
She used to be very good at projecting happiness when encountering
people she was inwardly cringing at meeting. Her newfound guilelessness
means that she is sometimes rude to one or more of the ladies who help
my sister take care of her. If Mom is annoyed these days, to think it is to
say it! But it also means that when I hear that note of delight and
recognition in her voice —the only unprompted part of our phone
conversations—the joy is authentic. Mom’s joy when she hears my voice
strips away the gnawing feeling I carry with me that I’ve been less than a
good son.
Both Lucy and Mom take pleasure in the beginnings and the remains of
their ability to communicate to the people most beloved to them. As Mom
grows older, the gaps in her conversations grow longer. What remains is a
fierce love, even for a son who caused her so much heartache over the
years. As Lucy “talks” to me, what I hear is not a series of inarticulate
noises, but her desire to enter into an endless conversation, as soon as she
learns the words. Mom’s great gift to me is that first “It’s Frank!” Lucy’s
great gift is the intensity of the smile that she gives me every time our eyes
meet and the tenderness in her voice as she sometimes coos when she
sees me. She’s too young to fake gladness. Mom is too old and lost in an
ocean of diminishing capacity to fake joy.
The calls with my mother are sacred to me because I know that each
conversation could be our last. When I tell her she’s been a good mother
at the end of each call, it contradicts a lifetime of my complaining about
my mother and even my incorporating her into some of my books both
fiction and nonfiction (including this one) in a less than flattering way. It
cuts to the essential relationship that formed when I was in her arms, just
as Lucy is in my arms now. It depends on nonverbal communication and a
mysterious communion that was what it was before being defined.
Our connection now transcends our differences over religion. The
pleasure of our friendship is visceral and bypasses our ideas about each
other too. It even bypasses facts: the son who got Genie pregnant when he
was seventeen and she was eighteen, the son who has written books
presenting his parents in a way that has outraged some of their followers,
the son who moved far away (in every sense) and abandoned the
evangelical/fundamentalist faith of his youth, to which his missionary
parents devoted their lives.
Our connection also softens my unhappy memories of a mother who
was too busy with what she believed was God’s “call” on her life to care for
her children properly. This is the mother who forgot to send me to school
until I was almost eleven and who filled our house with strangers she was
“ministering” to and, in so doing, turned our home into a public space that
was both interesting and traumatizing. And since Mom also folded stories
about her children into her talks and books—without our permission—to
illustrate points about her spiritual subjects, I grew up with no personal
secret safe, all trust stolen. Home never felt safe, let alone private.
All that disappears when Mom and I both say, “I love you.” Mom’s
sincerity springs from the fact that everything else, including her memories
of my failings and perhaps of her own, has been stripped away along with
those dying brain cells, and she’s back to the raw emotion of holding her
child. My sincerity is based on the fact that when I contemplate Mom’s
death, no matter what our differences, fights, and arguments have been,
the looming darkness of not hearing her voice strips away all petty
complaints.
The sobering thought of losing my mother and the reality that it will
happen any day now wipes out everything but the most basic emotion,
which turns out not to be blame, or even facts, but simply “I love you
Mom, you’ve been a good mother.” And I mean it. She was the best
mother she could be, given who she was and her own missionary child
background.
My self-awareness seems to have a meaning that is not reflected in
Dennett’s material universe. That universe is silent, yet I speak. It does not
care, but I do. It merely is, but I contemplate it. The universe says nothing
to me, yet my mother says “I love you” and means it.
 CHAPTER 6

Hitchens Poisons Hitchens

It is now high time to explain that the real reason why man is
offended at Christianity is because it is too high, because its
goal is not man’s goal, because it would make of a man
something so extraordinary that he is unable to get it into his
head.
Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard

To rephrase Kierkegaard’s apt quote, it is (also) now high time to

attempt to explain the black sheep of the New Atheist family, the sexually
obsessed, sibling-rival, left-wing radical turned right-wing Jihadist, and one
of the least pleasant commentators on the current scene, Christopher
Hitchens, author of the bestseller God Is Not Great. As best as I can figure
him, Christopher Hitchens hates God for two reasons. First, because
(judging on the basis of what he’s written and is quoted as having said) he
likes sex and thinks religious people don’t. Second, because (judging on
that same basis), he loathes his younger brother Peter Hitchens, also a
well-known writer and a rival political commentator, with whom
Christopher Hitchens has had a long and bitter feud over theology and
politics. Peter Hitchens is a practicing and devout Anglican and a convert
from the far, far loony Trotskyite British left that both he and Christopher
Hitchens once embraced.
The fact is, I “get” Christopher Hitchens’s obsessions and his bizarre
rationales for his aggressive atheism and anti-clericalism. I get his split with
his religious brother Peter Hitchens too. I understand this chemistry all too
well, because my leaving the evangelical /fundamentalist fold was—for a
time—a break with my siblings too, one that infuriated my parents’
rightwing fundamentalist followers. I get the sex bit too. Sex is all over my
novels; in fact it’s all over this chapter. So I get Hitchens.
God Is Not Great is an entertaining book. On the other hand it’s so
skewed that, unlike Daniel Dennett’s serious and beautiful Breaking the
Spell, Hitchens’s God Is Not Great adds little to the discussion of religion
besides a kind of furiously demented anti-God entertainment, an odd mix
of philosophizing combined with working out the author’s very particular
psychological problems. The book is entertaining in the same way that
professional wrestling and airplane crashes are entertaining. One feels
sorry for Hitchens’s suffering but sort of glad it happened because his
anguished hate of the “other” is riveting.
Hitchens describes how he converted to religion in order to marry. He
joined the Greek Orthodox Church to please the family of his first wife.
Then he divorced and abandoned that faith. But apparently Orthodoxy
meant something more to him than mere convenience, because he writes
about how wonderful it felt to shout out “Christ is risen!” at the Easter
services, and how he was swept up in that experience. Hitchens also says,
“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an
amputated limb.” Maybe he’s talking about those Easter services, or
perhaps he’s talking about his old Trotskyite certainties.
As Hitchens summarizes his book’s argument, it comes to this: “The first
[problem] is that religion and churches are manufactured. . . . The second
is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith. The third is that
religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices
and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.” What, according to Hitchens,
are religion’s sins? Religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to
racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free
inquiry, contemptuous of women and . . . children: organized religion
ought to have a great deal on its conscience.” Hitchens also got sick of
expressing gratitude. “Why if god [he uses the lowercase ‘g’ to make a
point] was the creator of all things, were we supposed to ‘praise’ him so
incessantly for doing what came to him naturally? This seemed servile,
apart from anything else.”
 Why thank God when “Religion,” Hitchens writes, “spoke its last
intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.” And what should
Hitchens’s readers make of religious people who have been seduced by
those “inspiring words” and then been mistaken for heroes? Consider
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his
refusal to collude with them. Well, it turns out that Bonhoeffer’s religious
heroism was actually a type of humanism, if properly understood.
A couple of pages after Bonhoeffer is dealt with, Hitchens pens a line
that could serve as Hitchens’s epitaph: “The person who is certain, and
claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our
species.” In which case, what about Hitchens’s certainties, or, more to the
point, what about Martin Luther King Jr.? He seemed to be in possession of
a “divine warrant” or thought he was.
“Anybody,” writes Hitchens, “who uses the King legacy to justify the role
of religion in public life must accept all the corollaries. . . . Even a glance at
the whole record will show, first, that person for person, American free
thinkers and agnostics and atheists come out best. The chance that
someone’s secular [thinking] or freethinking . . . would cause him or her to
denounce the whole injustice was extremely high. The chance that
someone’s religious beliefs would cause him or her to take a stand against
slavery and racism was statistically quite small.” So Martin Luther King Jr.
really must have been some sort of secularist too, because it’s just so
abnormal for anyone to be both religious and good.
When it comes to the sins of atheism, Hitchens turns to George Orwell
for reassurance that somehow, no matter what it looks like, atheism is not
true to itself when being bad but, rather is authentically atheist only when
it’s good. The rest of the time it may appear that atheism fails from time to
time, but that’s not so. “George Orwell . . . whose novels gave us [a]
picture of what life in a totalitarian state might truly feel like, was in no
doubt about [the fact that] ‘a totalitarian state is in its effect a theocracy.’”
(emphasis in the original)
In other words, to Hitchens, Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot and
their ilk were more to be understood as bad popes than as bad atheists.
Evil atheists are not real atheists. Real atheists are by definition free
thinkers who do wonderful things, much like Dawkins’s real scientists, who
are, also by definition, all atheists, or wish they had been, or would have
been if only they could have had a chat with Dawkins.
In case we miss the point—about all bad atheists actually being religious
people, or at least acting like religious people—Hitchens says that even if
totalitarian secularism was bad, religion is still to blame because of the
answer to this loaded question: “Given its own record of succumbing to,
and promulgating, dictatorship on earth and absolute control in the life to
come, how did religion confront the secular totalitarians of our time?” The
answer? Consider “the case of the churches [surrendering] to German
National Socialism.” As for those dependably evil popes, “Despite sharing
two important principles with Hitler’s movement—those of anti-Semitism
and anti-Communism—the Vatican could see [that Nazism] represented a
challenge to itself as well.” So even if sometimes the Vatican (or a local
priest or nun layperson) resisted the Nazis, it was not for any humanitarian
reason but simply to maintain the Church’s power. The rest of the time
popes colluded, and anyway, from Hitchens’s point of view, Nazism was
just another religion carried on under a secular name.
He may call himself an atheist but Christopher, like his brother Peter, is
also a perennial convert. In Christopher Hitchens’s case, though,
conversion was not to an ancient religion (except briefly to curry favor with
his inlaws) but, early in life, to the political religious cult of extreme
Marxism and then, late in mid life, to neo-conservatism and jingoistic
American exceptionalism. He made this last conversion to the far right
after 9/11, when, after a career as a left-wing anti-imperialist, Christopher
became a leading advocate and supporter of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
This angered his old friends on the left. So Christopher threw them a
sop, his Johnny-come-lately jump onto the New Atheist bandwagon. His
peace offering was God Is Not Great. He got to kill two birds with one
stone: attempted reconciliation with the (often) atheist American left, and
another way to stick it to his brother Peter.
Hitchens’s shot at lefty redemption didn’t work. With a “friend” like
Hitchens, smart lefties feel they need no enemies. What to do with a man
who in a May 2008 Slate article on Michelle Obama (in the wake of
L’Affaire Reverend Wright), alleged that her view of America was the same
as that of Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan?!
 Here is how Alexander Cockburn, Hitchens’s former, pre-Iraq War
colleague at the lefty Nation magazine (from which Hitchens dramatically
departed in 2005 after he became a shill for Bush on Iraq), has described
how people on the left feel about Hitchens:
What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who
called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried
to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who
waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed
before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who
knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but
who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan [a mother who
turned peace activist after her soldier son was killed in Iraq]
as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared
mention the word Israel. She lost a son? Hitchens (who
[given Hitchens’s support for Bush’s war] should perhaps be
careful on the topic of sending children off to die) says
that’s of scant account, and no reason why we should take
her seriously. Then he brays about the horrors let loose in
Iraq if the troops come home, with no mention of how the
invasion he worked for has already unleashed them.
Besides having converted to the war-solves-everything far, far jingoistic
neoconservative right, Hitchens seems to have some weird hang-ups,
including ones about Israel, maybe related to his basic God phobia and/or
his late-in-life claim that he is a Jew via his mother’s side of the family—
whatever. According to Cockburn, “In 1999 Edward Jay Epstein publicly
recalled a dinner in the Royalton Hotel in New York where Epstein said
Hitchens had doubted the Holocaust was quite what it’s cracked up to be.”
Here’s a guy that may or may not be a closet Holocaust denier but who
publicly proclaimed that he’d refuse to care for his brother’s children,
should his brother Peter die. As quoted in the Guardian in 2005,
Christopher said, “The real difference between Peter and myself is the
belief in the supernatural. I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence
here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who
invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith.”
 James Macintyre, who has known both Hitchens brothers for years,
dissected their ugly relationship in the June, 11, 2007, issue of The
Independent: “Christopher revealed that after he discovered his mother
died in mysterious circumstances—apparently a suicide pact with a
boyfriend in Athens—he found a note his mother had addressed only to
‘Christopher.’ He has since been quoted as saying, ‘If you were the mother
of Christopher and Peter, who would be your secret favorite?’”
Although it’s hard to imagine a less appealing way of expressing sibling
rivalry than citing one’s mother’s suicide note, apparently the two brothers
have had a recent reconciliation. But lest anyone accuse him of being
generous, Christopher clarified this “reconciliation” in a 2006 interview in
the Guardian: “There is no longer any official froideur,” he says of their
relationship. “But there’s no official—what’s the word?—chaleur, either.”
In God Is Not Great, Hitchens seems to be impugning his brother’s faith
without naming him:
Our [New Atheist] belief is not a belief. Our principles are
not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason,
because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors,
but we distrust anything that contradicts science or
outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what
we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit
of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions
dogmatically. . . . We are not immune to the lure of wonder
and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature,
and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better
handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and
Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality
tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains
the mind and— since there is no other metaphor—also the
soul. There is no need for us to gather every day, or every
seven days, or on any high or auspicious day. . . .
ceremonies are abhorrent to us . . .
This would come as news to the faculties at Harvard, Cambridge, or
Princeton, given the secular academic community’s jealously guarded
rituals on graduation day when they do indeed gather to recognize their
quasi-religious hierarchies. And the professors of literature at those same
schools would be surprised to learn that Hitchens has impressed
Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Schiller, Dostoyevsky, and George Eliot into the
service of his atheist cause. None of their writings (or lives) are remotely
decipherable outside of the religious/ biblical literary tradition (and social
context) that permeates the work of every writer he named. Hitchens’s
misappropriation of their names reminds me of the Mormons’ arrogant
practice of baptizing dead non-Mormons into their church.
The Washington Post reviewer of Hitchens’s book pegged Hitchens’s
ignorance about religion. In his May 6, 2008, review, Stephen Prothero
(chair of Boston University’s Religion Department) wrote,
What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself. . . . [he] assumes
a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious
people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is
the naïf. . . . Readers with any sense of irony—and here I do
not exclude believers—will be surprised to see how little
inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is
his own ill-prepared reduction of religion. . . . I have never
encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally
unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly
dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of
Hitchens’s pet themes—the ability of dogma to put reason
to sleep.
The question: Why is Hitchens so “maddeningly dogmatic”? The answer,
again: sex.
What I don’t get is why Hitchens believes that the freedom to have sex is
tied to freedom from religion. Who in his circle (or, for that matter, who
anywhere) is not having sex these days because of the anything the Pope
says? What does Hitchens think all those Muslim sheiks are doing to their
twelve-year-old brides in Riyadh? And given the high statistical rates of
adultery and divorce in North American evangelical/fundamentalist circles,
and (according to studies) the higher-than-average numbers of church-
going porn addicts in the Bible belt, who today does Hitchens think is
suffering dangerous sexual repression because of a belief in God?
 Hitchens’s preoccupation with sex is woven throughout his book and
articles. As he pushes into old age, Hitchens’s writing tends to circle back
to sex, the wanting and the getting of sex in a schoolboy wanker-style.
When asked by an interviewer from the Village Voice (March 18, 2008) to
speculate on why New York’s (then governor) Elliott Spitzer risked his
career by going to whores, Hitchen’s answer unintentionally revealed his
own bottom line (no pun) concerning men given to acting the part of the
alpha male. The interviewer asked,
So what in the wide world was Eliot Spitzer thinking? “Oh,
that’s easy,” Christopher Hitchens said from his Washington
apartment . . . “You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of
the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that
was available to you. That is what you do. . . . You don’t do
it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor, for fuck’s
sake.” During the 1992 presidential primary season,
Hitchens pointed out, the day that Clinton won the
endorsement was the very day he hit on Paula Jones. “He
said, ‘Wait—I could be the next president. . . . Now, where’s
the next cutie? Because I need that now, much more than I
did 10 minutes ago,’” Hitchens speculated. And likewise
with JFK: “With Kennedy, it’s really all over the guy for
everyone to see,” Hitchens said. “From dawn till dusk, from
soup to nuts, from everything he does to the last day he
dies: ‘I do this to get laid.’ What’s the point of all this if I
don’t get an orgasm now? What’s the point of being an
alpha male? Anyone who doesn’t get this,” [Hitchens]
concluded, “doesn’t know.”
Besides obsessing over his brother Peter, why does Hitchens bother
writing? Take a wild guess. Here’s Hitchens’s answer as offered in his
article on “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in Vanity Fair of January 2007. “The
chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the
opposite sex.” Hitchens explains that his method to get into bed with
women is to make them laugh “with their mouths wide open.” That, he
claims, is his best shot. He concludes, “If I am correct about this, which I
am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the
same as for the inferior funniness of women.” In other words, men are
funny in order to impress humorless women into having sex with them.
According to Hitchens, women are humorless because they make babies,
and he notes that that’s why “episiotomy jokes” fall flat with women and
advises would be seducers to avoid dead child jokes too.
In another Vanity Fair piece, this time on the history of the blow job,
“American As Apple Pie,” July 2006, Hitchens bemoans the state of his
teeth as one reason why it’s been such a slog for him to seduce women at
least until he discovered ways of making those humorless baby machines
laugh—and found a decent American dentist.
As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British
“National Health” practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs,
its steely-wire braces . . . I can remember barely daring to
smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when
any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once
bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth,
lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums
and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent
tongue. The illusion of the tonsilized clitoris will probably
never die (and gay men like to keep their tonsils for a
reason that I would not dream of mentioning), but while the
G-spot and other fantasies have dissipated, the iconic U.S.
Prime blowjob is still on a throne.
Welcome to the brave new world of the New Atheist aesthetic. In the
first chapter of God Is Not Great, Hitchens grouses about his brief
encounter with religion, back in his schoolboy days. “Why,” he laments,
“was the subject of sex considered so toxic?” A few pages later he lays out
his basic quarrel with religion. It too is all about sex, though he pads his
God-hatessex bit with another reason (emphasis added):
There still remain four irreducible objections to religious
faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and
the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to
combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of
solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of
dangerous sexual repression. . . . I do not think it is arrogant
 of me to claim that I had already discovered these four
objections before my boyish voice had broken.
Hitchens describes the problem of Islam as producing “mobs of sexually
repressed young men.” He is particularly interested by a Roman Catholic
cardinal saying, “I’ve never seen a little dog using a condom during sexual
intercourse with another dog.” A few pages later we read, “And there may
be someone who can explain the sexual and other cruelties of the religious
without any reference to the obsession with celibacy, but that someone
will not be me. . . .” And then, “Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in
paradise . . . but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting
punishment for sexual backsliders.” And a little later, “We have no way to
quantify the damage done by telling tens of millions of children that
masturbation will make them blind.”
Hitchens gets to the nub of his grudge against God when he lashes out
against what he calls “the three great monotheisms.” Hitchens says that
the concept of God is a “totalitarian belief.” He ends his book with this
statement on the all-important last page (emphasis added):
Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment. . . .
The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the
availability of new findings to masses of people by
electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of
research and development. Very importantly, the divorce
between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and
disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be
attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions
from the discourse.
Hitchens is also fascinated by the temporary marriages offered by
religious leaders in Iran and then tells us that
The relationship between physical health and mental health
is well understood to have a strong connection to the sexual
function, or dysfunction. Can it be a coincidence, then, that
all religions claim the right to litigate in matters of sex? To
survey the history of sexual dread and proscription, as
codified by religion, is to be met with a very disturbing . . .
 extreme repression. Almost every sexual impulse has been
made the occasion for prohibition, guilt, and shame . . . oral
sex, anal sex, non-missionary-position sex. . . . Clearly, the
human species is designed to experiment with sex.
All Hitchens needs to do to take us that final step into the realm of
Doctor Strangelove is to add a few comments to his capacious sex writing
about maintaining his precious bodily fluids. I can almost hear a plaintive
Peter Sellers as Captain Lionel Mandrake begging Hitchens, reincarnated as
the deranged base commander General Jack D. Ripper, to put down his
machine gun and to
“Just please, do be a good chap and turn on the radio Sir!”
“No Mandrake! The relationship between physical health and mental
health is well understood to have a strong connection to the sexual
function!”
Hitchens is an odd chap but not original. British intellectuals have been
worrying about sex for quite some time. The Blooms-bury Group did the
Viagra shuffle before, and did it better. The group grew from student
friendships at Cambridge in the early twentieth century and included E. M.
Forster (author), John Maynard Keynes (economist), Virginia Woolf
(author), Vanessa Bell (artist), Duncan Grant (artist), and Clive Bell (art
critic), to name a few very accomplished people. They practiced—and
wrote about—the free sexuality Hitchens advocates as a grand new idea
decades before he was born. They were braver too; penicillin had yet to be
discovered.
Hitchens’s take on sex is also a mere retread of Bertrand Russell’s
lifetime anti-God/pro-sex crusade. Russell also fits the stereo-typical image
of a British sexually disappointed intellectual brooding over other people’s
genitalia. In Marriage and Morals (1929), Russell suggested “trial
marriages” that he called “companionate marriage.” And even though
Russell was a supporter of women’s rights, he denounced feminists’
“puritanical attitude” toward pornography. He proclaims, “Pioneers of
women’s rights . . . were for the most part very rigid moralists, whose hope
was to impose upon men the moral fetters which hitherto had only been
endured by women.”
 Russell also used a sarcastic tone when addressing anything he thought
smacked of “traditional attitudes” about sex. In Marriage and Morals he
sums up what he regards as the British and American prudish attitude
toward sex (circa 1929): “A boy should be taught that in no circumstances
is conversation on sexual subjects permissible, not even in marriage. This
increases the likelihood that when he marries he will give his wife a disgust
of sex and thus preserve her from the risk of adultery.” And foreshadowing
Dawkins in his suspicion of those Yanks, Russell laments, “Sex relations as a
dignified, rational, wholehearted activity in which the complete personality
co-operates, do not often, I think, occur in America outside marriage. To
this extent the moralists have been successful.”
My evangelical/fundamentalist missionary mother’s life overlapped
Russell’s generation, but apparently Russell (and Hitchens) never met
people like Edith Schaeffer. If they’d met Mom, perhaps they would have
converted! Mom was always talking about sex and what a “gift from God”
sexual pleasure was. The idea that Mom needed liberating by the likes of
Hitchens is ludicrous. Other evangelical women could have taught Hitchens
and Russell a thing or two as well. Take Marabel Morgan.
Morgan wrote her multimillion-selling evangelical/fundamentalist
antifeminist sex manual The Total Woman in the early 1970s. She
advocated— among other aphrodisiacs—that evangelical/fundamentalist
housewives wrap themselves in Saran Wrap and/or smear themselves with
whipped cream and do it on the kitchen floor. This seemed to go a step or
two beyond barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. One wag who reviewed
the book called it The Totaled Woman, given that Morgan’s Jesus-loving,
oralsex-giving, born-again, Saran-Wrapped,
stay-at-home-mom/concubines would be worn to exhaustion, if they put
out with the frequency and energy Morgan recommended.
But Morgan was nothing compared to my mom! By the time I was
seven, I knew that sex was good. When I was eleven or so, Mom told me
how her father (a nineteenth-century missionary to China no less) had
given her a book on sexual pleasure so she could get the “right ideas”
about enjoying sex and “how to achieve simultaneous orgasms.” I mean,
did Hitchens ever worry about someday achieving simultaneous orgasm
when he was eleven?
 When I was twelve Mom, in her never-ending sharing of red-hot sex
information, told me about how Dad took her to a cabaret in Paris while
they were on one of their many trips to conduct Bible studies. At the time,
I was home from my British boarding school, and Mom regaled me (and, it
turns out my sisters, given that in later life we compared notes) with this
story while I was back in Switzerland during the holidays. I was at school
with a bunch of Hitchens’s contemporaries, some of whom didn’t know
that boys and girls are different “down there.” The contrast between their
prudish English lack of knowledge and my overabundance of sex
information was something of a shocker. Hadn’t all their mothers
obsessively been telling them the “facts of life” again and again and again?
But just to make it clear that there were peculiarities to the mixture of
sex and evangelicalism, I should say that Mom did not let the trip to the
cabaret be in vain; she turned the episode into a bedtime story sex lesson
that got in a jab at Dad at the same time. Mom told me about her chagrin
when she and Dad met a “non-Christian” American couple in that Paris
nightclub:
“We were unable to share the Lord,” Mom said with a sigh.
“Why?” I asked.
“You see, dear, they had a floor show.”
“What’s that?”
“A form of very worldly entertainment, where girls dance in an
inappropriate way.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Men go there to be aroused. You see, dear, it was your father’s idea. He
insisted! There were women there taking off almost all their clothes.”
“What did they take off?”
“Everything dear, except for the merest covering over their most private
places.”
“Why did you go?”
“Your father was already in a Very Bad Mood. What choice did I have?
Your father said he wanted to see the ‘real Paris.’ The night club was
French of course. But the Lord had a real rebuke waiting for him! As soon
as we sat down at the table—and by the way we both ordered ginger ale
not anything alcoholic—another couple sat down at the little round table
next to ours. And at first when they spoke to us, your father pretended he
couldn’t understand English. The man persisted, so your father had to say
something, and he just pretended we were tourists. Of course I was
longing to share the gospel, but how could I? They were a New York Jewish
couple. And clearly they had a deep spiritual need; I mean they were in
that place, weren’t they?”
The way Mom explained it, the first part of her sin was to “give in to
Fran’s weakness” by allowing herself to be “dragged to that place.” The
second part was having to deny the Lord, not by commission but by
omission.
You see, if Mom had told the couple from New York that she and Dad
were Christians, let alone missionaries, it would have been a terrible
witness and would have hurt Jesus’s reputation. You can’t lead
nonChristians, let alone New York Jews, to the Lord while some woman is
making the tassels on her breasts whirl over your husband’s head. How can
you quote John 3:16 in that situation? So Mom lamented that Dad’s sin led
to a failed contact with a couple who “will now never hear the gospel.”
Of course, the logic may give aid and comfort to the anti-clericals. I
mean, what was I supposed to conclude? Sin and then repent and witness
anyway? Or don’t sin and the lost “Jews” you never meet don’t ever get
the chance to be saved? If my dad had not sinned and dragged Mom to
that den of iniquity, she never would have met the lost Jews in the first
place. If you did witness to those people, while they and you were
watching an almostnaked woman dance, did that make almost naked
dancing okay? How could it not be okay if the Lord used it to bring you into
contact with those hardto-reach New York Jews who would not otherwise
hear the gospel?
But back to Hitchens: What no one knows, including (I suspect) Hitchens,
is whether Hitchens is serious, or just a Brit former-lefty version of Ann
Coulter, cashing in on the American market and dedicated to entertaining
(and making a great living off) those of the godless middlebrow of the
American left who will still tolerate him, instead of entertaining (and
making a good living off) the God-fearing even-lowerNeanderthal-brow
Americans of the right who mistake Coulter for a serious (or even decent)
person.
Whereas Dennett, Harris, and company write sober books and articles,
Hitchens uses his writings (in such august intellectual outlets as Vanity Fair
magazine) for less lofty purposes. He writes to explain how he hits on
women (by telling them dirty jokes); to explain his wandering around in
Lebanon and getting in fist fights with Arabs (in press reports early in 2009,
he was quoted as saying that some toughs who roughed him up on a
Beirut street were fascist thugs attacking him because he was defending
democracy by defacing political posters outside a bar); and to defend (in
essay form) President Bush’s misbegotten Iraq war. Along the way, he
penned what he calls a “mildly pro-life” article against abortion one day
and, on another day, reminisced about accompanying one of his girlfriends
to an abortion clinic to help her dump his baby. And he worked all of this in
when he was not writing his book on the Clintons, whom he accused of
murder.
Sex and brother Peter aside, Hitchens’s views strike me as a version of
the no-elephant pebble story. A man says that carrying a particular magic
pebble in his pocket keeps elephants out of the room. He always carries
the pebble, and there never are any elephants in any rooms he walks into!
Hitchens treats religion as his pet “pebble”: People are bad, and religion is
always lurking about, so therefore, religion is making people bad.
But does religion make people worse than they would be without
religion? Twenty-first-century Britain is more atheistic than ever, yet crime
has gone up. Iran became a theocracy and more religious than ever, and
crime went up there as well (not to mention state-sponsored terror). What
do the atheist Britons and religious Iranians have in common? They’re
human. Whatever they say they believe, they evolved from the same tribe
of marauding murdering monkeys we all descended from.
Hitchens’s ideas remind me of the “intelligent design” theologian
William Paley and his nineteenth-century theories. (Natural theology
looked to nature as displaying the beneficence of God. In the scheme of
William Paley, who was archdeacon of Carlisle, the seemingly perfect
adaptation of creatures to “their station” in life was “due to divine
design.”) Paley posited the divine design of nature because it looks
designed. Hitchens seems to buy this theory as it applies to religion. He
sees evil all around him. He sees religion all around him. So religion must
have designed the evil.
Hitchens goes further: This is no mere design, it’s a conspiracy! It
appears that Hitchens believes that religion, like Ernst Blofeld and all those
other great old James Bond villains and organizations, is leading a
worldwide plot to destroy humanity. Perhaps the pope is now working for
SMERSH or even the dreaded SPECTRE! At the end of Chapter 1 of God Is
Not Great Hitchens seems to channel not just Paley but also Ian Fleming
when Hitchens writes, “People of faith are in their different ways planning
your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hardwon human
attainments.”
Whatever the merits of his arguments, to put it mildly, Hitchens ideas
don’t seem to have worked out too well for him personally. If Hitchens
being Hitchens is an example of those “hardwon human attainments,” the
rest of us would do well to avoid them.
 CHAPTER 7

The Only Thing Evangelicals Will Never Forgive Is

Not Hating the “Other”

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is
the self?
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

Rick Warren is the celebrity founder of an evangelical/fundamentalist

“megachurch.” He’s also the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has
sold 30 million copies. Warren is the icon of success that every ambitious
evangelical/fundamentalist pastor strives to become, in much the same
way that a wedding singer grinding out tunes in some godforsaken Holiday
Inn lounge would rather be Bono.
Warren’s book is divided into sections: Purpose 1: You Were Planned for
God’s Pleasure. Purpose 2: You Were Formed for God’s Family. Purpose 3:
You Were Created to Become Like Christ. Purpose 4: You Were Shaped for
Serving God. Purpose 5: You Were Made for a Mission. “It’s not about
you,” Warren writes. But his church is very much about him. He’s the star
in a cult of personality that fits the celebrity-worshipping temper of our
times.
Ask yourself: What will happen to his church when Warren dies, leaves,
or is thrown out? Will it remain as successful? Are people there for each
other and their community? Are they there for Jesus? Or are they there for
Rick Warren?
 Fulfillment, satisfaction, and meaning can be found only in
“understanding and doing what God placed you on Earth to do,” writes
Warren. But Warren’s message turns out to be less about God than it is
about trying to convince his readers to become American-style
evangelicals. In other words, to find purpose they have to join the North
American individualistic cult of one-stop born-again “salvation” to which
Warren belongs. Warren’s Christianity (the leftover residue of the
simplistic frontier Protestantism we call “evangelicalism” that broke most
connections theological, aesthetic, and liturgical to the historic Christian
churches of both the East and West) is not to be confused with what
Christians through most of the 2,000-year history of their religion would
have recognized as even remotely familiar.
According to traditional Christianity, a person was not “saved” or “lost”
in a one-stop magical affirmation of “correct” doctrine, but, rather, the
process of salvation was lived out in a community. Salvation was a path
toward God, not a you’re-in-or-out event, as in “At two thirty last
Wednesday I accepted Jesus.” Just as Hillary Clinton said about child
rearing, the process of redemption took a village. Pastors were part of that
“village” tradition and were inducted into existing communities of faith.
They were not self-made and reinventing the faith according to whim. The
heart of worship was sacramental continuity and an unbroken connection
to generations that came before.
Bishops and priests came and went, but the Church remained. What the
Church provided was a set of tools—liturgical sacramental exercises, things
to do to train one to receive God’s love by learning to love others as
oneself.
Some members of the Church—East and West—did some very, very
nasty things. They oppressed women, killed heretics, started wars,
buggered choir boys, persecuted Jews, molested pilgrims, and aided and
abetted the institution of slavery. But they usually did get one thing right:
Spirituality wasn’t a matter of celebrity leaders who sprang up then faded
away. Some terrible celebrity Christian leaders existed, such as the
fifteenth century’s nasty, odd, and painting-burning Savonarola of
Florence. But celebrities were the exception to an otherwise virtually
anonymous pastorate.
 Communities built cathedrals over generations. Usually no one who
worked on laying the building’s foundation was around when it was
completed. The name of the cathedral was that of the town where it stood
(for instance, Chartres Cathedral) or that of a biblical figure (Notre-Dame
for instance). A few egomaniacal popes (or bishops) aside, churches were
not about their leaders but about the people who worshipped in them.
There were religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church that bore the
names of their founders, such as the Franciscans, but when those orders
survived their founders, it was because they were folded into a hierarchical
orderly structure. There were egomaniacal “saints” who drew attention to
their “holiness” by public displays of self-mortification (the so-called
Stylites, or “Pillar-Saints,” ascetics in the Byzantine Empire who stood on
pillars preaching, exposed to the elements, while followers gathered
around), but they performed their antics outside of churches. Such
individualistic displays didn’t penetrate the liturgical practices led by
largely anonymous priests.
The North American evangelical/fundamentalist brand of Christianity is
the religious version of the American civil religion: consumerist
individualism. Today’s “Stylites” are more often found in private jets, but
they still have followers who conflate holiness with success American style
—in other words, as measured by money, possessions, numbers, and
(above all) celebrity status. The consumer picks a pastor based on where
the action seems to be: “Wow, you ought to hear our pastor!” Such
“churches” are often founded by a man or woman who started them the
way other men and women start a restaurant or a movie company. In
Warren’s case, he is pastor of a church called Saddleback, but it’s more
properly known as “Rick Warren’s church,” just as the Crystal Cathedral
came to be known as “Robert Schuller’s church,” and the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association has its founder’s name in the same way as the
Ford Motor Company bears the name of its founder.
Warren isn’t the first hero-author to capture the imagination of the
consumers of American religion. Before Warren there were many other
celebrity leaders, including authors C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, and my father,
to name a few of countless stars. As a child I was a C. S. Lewis fan, a
member of his far-flung fan base, his “church” of
evangelical/fundamentalist fans. I enjoyed his creative riffs on the Bible;
they were better than the Bible stories being riffed on. For one thing, Lewis
was more compassionate than the severe biblical writers. I liked Lewis’s
stories that humanized God, books such as The Great Divorce about
Heaven, salvation, and second chances, where Lewis put forward the
comforting “heretical” (to evangelical/fundamentalists) idea you can be
saved after death. According to my parents, Lewis’s ideas about salvation
weren’t biblical. “We all have to accept Jesus before we die. The Bible is
very clear! Lewis has some fuzzy ideas,” Mom would say.
My parents tolerated Lewis anyway. Mom read and reread C. S. Lewis’s
Narnia stories to me. We evangelical/fundamentalists had so few
contemporary celebrities to admire. We needed stars to follow but were
frustrated by the dearth of a tradition to belong to. With apologies to
Gertrude Stein, there was no there there. Having no saints, we made up
our own. Our “tradition” was all about correct theology—our correct
theology, that is. Our “saints” were personalities that gave us a high-profile
sense of identity. We embraced what amounted to self-appointed popes
and bishops the same way Americans need their presidents to become
“kings,” even though officially we have no royalty. We weren’t about to
quibble over a couple of heresies expressed by our one and only
bestselling, “sainted” author of the moment—and bestselling into the
hated, yet envied, “secular world” that we so feared but also longed to
have recognize us as legitimate.
Never mind that Lewis had had several weird sexual relationships,
including one with a married woman, or that he was a drunk. How many
evangelicals got to teach at Oxford or give lectures on the BBC? Lewis
played for our team!
Only he didn’t. Lewis was no American-style evangelical/fundamentalist
but a high-church (in other words formal, liturgically inclined, and
oldfashioned) Anglican with a strong bias in favor of the pre-Reformation
Orthodox liturgy and Roman mass. He also had Hitchenesque appetites—
lots of smoking and drinking that would have gotten him instantly
dismissed from any American evangelical /fundamentalist institution. For
instance, Wheaton College made faculty sign pledges to never, but never,
smoke, drink, dance, or play cards, and it would never have allowed Lewis
to work there. This makes the fact that The Marion E. Wade Center at
Wheaton College sells itself as a “a tribute to the importance of the
literary, historical, and Christian heritage” of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton,
and other assorted authors rather ironic. None of these smoking, drinking,
and distinctly non-evangelical authors could ever have taught there.
Lewis was apt to work characters from Greek mythology, even Father
Christmas, weird Christ figures, and English nationalistic sensibility (he
described Heaven as a nicer version of England in his book The Last Battle),
not to mention Norse myths, into his “evangelical /fundamentalist” books.
Never mind! We’ll take what we can get when it comes to stand-ins for
bishops, tradition, actual writers and an identity. Otherwise whom can we
identify with in order to identify ourselves now that we have cut our link to
the historic churches?
Which brings up an interesting point: The curious parasitic habit of
evangelicals borrowing intellectual (or artistic) respectability from
Christians who never were and never would have been American-style
evangelicals—for instance, from Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S.
Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles
Williams. These authors (all of whom are studied at Wheaton and some of
whose papers are enshrined there) would have shot themselves rather
than be condemned to attend, let alone teach at, Wheaton College or any
other evangelical/fundamentalist backwater institution like it.
Because in the Protestant world the word Christian can mean anything,
Protestants need to discover and then hang on to some sort of
distinctiveness. One person might be a “C. S. Lewis-type Christian,”
another might describe herself as a “Francis Schaeffer- type,” and so forth.
And given Americans’ love of material success, there are plenty of people
who look at Rick Warren’s 50,000-member church and say, “Hey, now
that’s what I call a church! I’m a Rick Warren-type Christian!”
Today the American evangelical/fundamentalist consumer of religion is
even more prone to the truism that nothing succeeds like success. Talk
about unregulated banks and hedge funds, the biggest unregulated
American market is big-time religion (and it’s tax-free!). Its success isn’t
measured in spiritual gain that changes anything for the better. As big-time
as religion is in the United States compared to highly secular Europe,
nevertheless America’s teen sex statistics, abortion rates, spread of STDs,
divorce statistics, and rates of child rape are higher than those in
nonchurch-going Europe. So the “success” of Warren’s type of born-again
entrepreneurship is a failure when measured against actual results in
terms of what used to be called the fruits of the Spirit.
Evangelical/fundamentalist leaders don’t see it that way. Their faith
entertains. It makes money. It nurtures a celebrity culture of its own, with
its own TV stations, radio stations, book publishers, author tours, rock
concerts, schools, home school programs and colleges. What’s not to love?
It is no coincidence that other entrepreneurs who aren’t believers have
gotten in on the act. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch now owns the largest
“Christian” publishing company, having bought it out and then folded it
into his stable of publishing giants, one of which publishes—that’s right—
Rick Warren.
One can’t picture any scenario in which Warren would be thrown off the
evangelical/fundamentalist team, other than if he started to officiate at
gay weddings. He answers to no one, let alone to a tradition of liturgical
practice, or, God forbid, a bishop, that might diminish the go-it-alone
individualism (otherwise known as “God’s leading”) of market capitalism
with a Jesus twist that works so well for Warren. Warren makes past
evangelical/fundamentalist superstars such as Lewis, Falwell, Schuller, or
my dad seem insignificant. Warren’s is star power on an Oprah level.
Warren gave the invocation at a president’s inauguration. Warren’s church
is huge. He’s the author of the all-time bestselling book ever published in
the history of American publishing. God is blessing! Right?
Maybe not. A Rick Warren, a C. S. Lewis, and a Francis Schaeffer are the
essence of evangelical/fundamentalist success, but they also represent the
Achilles heel of American evangelicalism. Personality cults with no
accountability and no tradition and no structure to fall back on when the
“Dear Leader” dies, or is found to have “fallen”—whatever—are no better
than the men and women they’re built on. The “something bigger” you
thought you joined just turns out to just be some smooth-talking guy
named Rick, or maybe Franklin Graham.
Only in the strange—dare I say obscene—world of big-time American
consumer religion could the following story be possible, combining as it
does the ego, commercialism, betrayal, nepotism, and personality cult
aspects of American “Christianity.” According to newspaper reports (“A
Family at Cross-Purposes: Billy Graham’s Sons Argue Over a Final Resting
Place,” Washington Post, December 13, 2006), a family feud erupted in
Billy Graham’s family over where he and his wife, Ruth, were to be buried.
Was it to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the Billy Graham “museum”
erected in the vicinity of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
headquarters? Or should their remains go to a small private site near their
home in Montreat? Franklin Graham, the 56-year-old “heir” to Billy’s
ministry, insisted that the burial spot be at the $28-$30 million,
40,000square-foot museum. It creates a “farm setting” to look like the
place where Billy grew up outside of Charlotte. Other family members—
including Ruth Graham—wanted to have a quieter final resting place.
The Washington Post called the family “debate” a struggle worthy of the
Old Testament, pitting brother against brother, son against mother. After
Ruth’s death, Billy was trapped in the middle pondering what to do with
her remains. The Post said Ruth had signed a notarized document with six
witnesses, saying she wanted to be buried near her home. After her death
her wishes were ignored, and Billy was talked into doing what Franklin
wanted.
Ruth (whom I knew and liked and who was close to my mother) was laid
to “rest,” against her wishes, in what amounts to an amusement park for
the greater glory of—what? Consultants had worked with the Walt Disney
Company to create a large “barn” and “silo” as a reminder of Billy
Graham’s early childhood on a dairy farm near Charlotte. Today, visitors
wishing to visit Ruth’s tomb pass through a 40-foot-tall glass entry cut in
the shape of a cross and are greeted by a mechanical talking cow. From
there, they walk on paths of straw through rooms of exhibits. At the end, a
stone walkway shaped like a cross takes them to a garden where Ruth lies
(as will Billy Graham when he dies). The Post also reported that tourists
have more than one chance to get their names on a mailing list and later,
therefore, to be solicited for funds.
The evangelical/fundamentalist religion is no different in its core
“values” from the celebrity-worshipping, entertainment-oriented society it
claims to be a prophetic witness to. In this vein it’s no coincidence that
Billy Graham’s alma mater, the aforementioned Wheaton College, also has
a “museum” attached to its campus in which Disneyland-like experiences
are offered. This attraction is described on the school’s website as a
“journey through the Museum [that] takes you on a Walk Through The
Gospel, with a stirring three-dimensional presentation of the Christian
message.” But that is only after you have experienced an “encounter [with]
one of the loveliest and most fascinating presentations of the basic
Christian message in The Cross of The Millennium. From here, you’ll enter
a major section of the Museum which highlights the Life and Ministry of
Billy Graham.”
Since it turns out that Franklin Graham has cornered the market on his
parent’s remains for his amusement/fund-raising/empire-maintaining
park, perhaps Wheaton can cut a deal for at least a lock of hair, toenail, or
some other Billy relic, to be placed in a suitable jewel-encrusted reliquary,
or, given today’s fashions, incorporated into a giant cross-shaped roller
coaster ride.
Star power is seductive. For instance, and to put this on my turf,
evangelicals aspiring to be writers want to become “the next C. S. Lewis,”
just as lesser pastors want to become “the next Warren.” But being a
writer means that your loyalty must be to your reader and to the truth, or,
as I put it when pressed, a writer’s loyalty must be to the page.
The problem is that evangelical/fundamentalist faith revolves around
two directives: Be successful and evangelize. That leads to bad choices. For
instance, if you are trying to get people “saved” through your writing
instead of writing the best and truest books you can write, you are nothing
more than a propagandist. Combine this with commercial interests, and
not only are you just a propagandist, you are a gutless wonder who
doesn’t want to offend your market. Translation: no F-word in the dialogue
please, because the Christian Booksellers Association bookstores won’t
stock your book. Oh, and no expressions of doubt either, or embarrassing
questions about God, let alone the truth about evangelical leaders. So if
you’re writing a story about, say, a Marine brigade in combat, you’ll have
to lie when it comes to dialogue. And if you are writing a memoir, please
leave out anything about the flaws of the believers you’ve known (or your
saintly parents) and skip the truth about yourself too, if it’s embarrassing.
And if you are burying your mother, well, too bad about her wishes, what
use is a quiet grave in an out-of-the-way place? Why rest in peace when
you can help build the mailing list?
 Pastors aren’t pastors in the evangelical/fundamentalist culture any
more than evangelical/fundamentalist “writers” are writers, or
intellectuals are actual intellectuals. (How can an intellectual already have
made up his or her mind about what the truth is?) Rather, “pastors” are
the inventors of their own product line sold as religion, offering themselves
as just another consumer choice to a culture that picks ministers the way
they pick sweaters. Picture how this consumer/market approach would
work out for the United States Marine Corps.
If the USMC caved to the consumer culture the way the evangelicals
have, each drill instructor would be individually picked by each recruit,
some choosing DIs based on looks, others on charm, yet others because
this or that DI wore a cool uniform or was “nicer than those other guys.”
The process might be fun, but the idea that the Marines are identifiable
because each Marine knows that all other Marines share the same
experience of boot camp, values, and discipline would be lost. The word
Marine would lose its meaning if all recruits went to boot camps that
suited them personally. The Marine Corps would become just another part
of the entertainment industry/consumer culture, which is exactly what the
evangelical/ fundamentalist churches are today, with a therapeutic twist
that adds feeling good to the product list.
Empire builders are empire builders, and entertainers are entertainers,
regardless of what they call themselves. The Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association and the Walt Disney Company are a perfect match. Mea culpa!
I only understood the reality of the symbiotic relationship between the
consumer/entertainment culture and our star religious-empire builders
after I quit being one myself. Judging by the many emails I’m getting from
pastors who have read my Calvin Becker Trilogy of novels (which are
humorous stories about a preacher’s family, seen from the inside), it
seems that many a preacher is in the position of Groucho Marx. Groucho
said he’d never want to belong to a club that would let someone like him
join. The doubt and self-loathing expressed to me by so many pastors is
amazing. Of course, they all beg me never to tell anyone what they are
telling me.
If I have heard this once, I have heard it (or rather read it in emails)
literally hundreds of times. “I can’t say this in public, but . . .” has been the
start of so many emails from many evangelical and Roman Catholic and (to
be truthful) several Orthodox leaders too, as well as ordinary folks living
what amount to intellectual/spiritual double lives. Perhaps it’s because
they are being presented with bad alternatives that they believe they must
choose between.
Frank: After leaving the strait jacket of evangelicalism, I can breathe. . . . I
was out of step as an evangelical pastor [with] my quotes of Bob Dylan,
celebration of sexuality when the [biblical] passage called for it and a
demand for truth though it was only when I was out from the oppression
of the movement that I realized how much compromise had been
interwoven into my life as pastor and leader.
Cordially, D.
I can’t prove this, but I think that any person who remains a
“professional Christian” in the evangelical/fundamentalist world for a
lifetime, especially any pastor, risks becoming an atheists and/or a liar.
Such individuals put on an act of certainty. Sooner or later they become
flakes faking it, or quit. Worse yet, some just stop asking questions. The
very fact that a preacher can fool others when he or she has so many
doubts makes the selfappointed mediator of faith the deepest cynic of all
if, that is, he or she doesn’t embrace paradox.
If you have to be correct all the time, while knowing that you are wrong
most of the time, you become an actor. Been there, done that. If you think
that to “be a Christian” means you have to identify with a club you loathe,
you’ll have to choose to redefine your faith or lose it—even if it costs you a
paycheck and your “good” life.
Making my final break with my evangelical/fundamentalist past was like
turning on some sort of creative tap. As my dad’s sidekick I’d been a
miniature flash-in-the-pan Rick Warren in the making, with a growing
following. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, I was used to huge audiences
turning out to hear me speak in places such as the annual Southern Baptist
pastors convention; the annual meeting of the National Religious
Broadcasters; Dr. Kennedy’s church in Coral Gables, Florida; Jerry Falwell’s
church and college in Lynch-burg, Virginia; and on several nationwide
seminar tours where Dad and I packed auditoriums. My evangelical
“books” sold by the pallet load, whereas my secular books (since) have
sold as individual copies. But as an artist and writer, I also knew that even
if I could have kept putting up with the “theology”—which I couldn’t—let
alone tolerated the insane hate-filled, gun-toting, moronmaking right-wing
politics, the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture is death to artistic
creativity. That is because art depends on at least attempted honesty and
unconditional questioning.
Since there is no there, there—no tradition—all that governs the
evangelical/fundamentalist empire-builders is the self-appointed Church
Lady Brigade. You always have moralizing busybodies sniffing around your
butt to see if you’re pure enough. Good for dogs, maybe; bad for writers.
When I left the evangelical/fundamentalist world, I found that I was no
longer looking over my shoulder wondering what people—in other words,
the Church Ladies—would think.
You see, a Rick Warren looks powerful, but he makes a bad trade, sort of
like Prince Charles. You get the life and the palace, but being Prince
Charles is all you’ll ever do. You are your job. You are all wrapper and no
candy. It’s a gilded cage and you are STUCK! It’s the worst type-casting
imaginable.
Warren can’t do more than act the part of Rick Warren being Rick
Warren. He also has to be “into” whatever the Church Ladies are into at
the moment. And woe betide Warren if he expresses any truths about his
doubts and failings or, worse yet, casually mentions that he’d rather be,
say, a secular Jew free to do or say what he wants without a gaggle of low-
IQ evangelicals parsing his every move.
The freedom I found in my local Orthodox Church was surprising. And
no, I’m not making a pitch, because there are plenty of Orthodox who
leave the Orthodox Church and are liberated by doing that. And as we’ve
seen with the Father Xs of this world, the Orthodox too have their share of
Church Ladies ready to form their own little right-wing posses and
buttsniffing Inquisitions.
That said, the Orthodox come from the Byzantine culture, and when it
gets down to what I really care about in addition to my faith and my family
—art and writing—the Byzantine tradition opened a door to creative
freedom for me. The Byzantine/Orthodox emphasis on mystery rather
than theology, its long history of encouraging art since the time of the late
Roman Empire, and its support for the secular arts inclusive of nudity and
sex in art freed me to write what I wanted. Check out the nude reclining
“Sleeping Eros” on a silver box in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Byzantine collection (and much more) if you doubt my generalization
about the easygoing sexuality in Byzantine art.
Moreover, the Byzantines treasured pagan Roman and Greek art from
the pre-Christian era. Unlike today’s more militant Muslims or prudish
evangelicals (or the “Orthodox” who know nothing about their own
Byzantine tradition and are thus thoroughly protestantized), the
Byzantines didn’t have a problem with the human body. For instance, in
the fifthcentury Byzantine mosaic of Jesus’s baptism found in the
baptistery in Ravenna, Italy, Jesus is nude, his penis visible. Even though
the so-called Arian Baptistery was erected (in 565), after the condemnation
of the Arian cult, the structure was converted into a Catholic oratory
named Santa Maria. Greek monks added a monastery during the period of
the Orthodox Exarchate of Ravenna. And no one—not the Greeks, the
Roman Catholics, or the Byzantines—was affronted by Christ’s nudity.
In fact, through most of Byzantine history and Roman Catholic history as
well, when, from time-to-time, some monk or other person of an anti-
sexual strict bent (following the gloomy restrictive thread of faith that co-
mingles with the more enlightened thread running throughout church
history) would rage against “pagan art,” he was largely ignored. And when,
in a preProtestant anti-image, Islamic-style purge, certain Byzantine
leaders (sometime between 726 and 730) tried to do away with the use of
icons in worship, the whole Church rose up and rebelled and eventually (by
the end of the eighth century) restored images to worship.
The Byzantines also preserved Roman and Greek philosophy, including
that of Plato and Aristotle, which the Byzantines (and some Muslims) kept
alive when much of Western Europe was mostly an illiterate cow town.
The Western European Renaissance was possible only because the Medici
family (and a few others) imported Byzantine scholars, Byzantine libraries,
and the Roman and Greek learning and art that the Byzantines had
preserved, which then spread from Florence to the rest of Western
Europe. And the Byzantines’ love of learning for its own sake not only
informs the present-day temper of the Orthodox Church but also
happened to inspire the people—such as the Florentines who produced
the humanist art and culture (and everything else that proceeded from it)
—that make my life (and maybe yours) seem worth living.
Most liberating of all, for me, was discovering that the people in my local
church community were religious and yet didn’t interpret every
relationship, whether that with a stranger sitting next to them on an
airplane or that with a writer who happened to go to church with them as
an opportunity to evangelize, let alone judge. In other words, I can write
the most truthful books I can write and also go to church, and the two
activities aren’t mutually exclusive.
Thus it’s no coincidence that I started to write novels only after I left the
evangelical/fundamentalist world. It’s also no coincidence that C. S. Lewis
ruined what could have been a decent literary career by slavishly working
Christian propaganda into his “novels,” especially once he began to cater
to the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture after he became a star.
Perhaps this is one reason why Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy will stand
the test of time better than anything Lewis wrote.
Tolkien—a friend of C. S. Lewis—was also a practicing Christian, and his
books have a spiritual tone that seems to have sprung from his beliefs. But
Tolkien refused to become a mere theological repackager masquerading as
a writer of fantasy literature. He let his imagination rip. The only place I
sense that Tolkien censored himself is in the area of sex. I still don’t know
how or when elves do it!
The perception these days is that being religious, especially Christian,
and being a real artist are incompatible. Some of the best writers of the
last century who were devout Christians, such as Walker Percy, John
Updike, and Flannery O’Conner, are presented in university courses by
secular professors so used to the idea that all writing by Christians is
propaganda, that when they teach the writing of some of the best
contemporary writers who were devout non-evangelical Christians they
don’t even mention (and in some cases don’t seem to know) that many
modern celebrated writers were (or are) believers.
So far has the evangelical/fundamentalist rot gone in culture trashing
that the fact that people such as O’Conner, Updike, and Percy were good
contemporary writers seems to exclude them from being identified as
Christians. And the evangelical/fundamentalist community wouldn’t
recognize their writing as writing by Christians, either because it contains
too much truth about reality or because it is not Jesus propaganda. In a
way in the United States, actual writers (or those working seriously in any
of the other arts) who are also Christians are men and women without a
home.
Warren, like C. S. Lewis before him, and like many an evangelical/
fundamentalist leader or “writer” today, knows that he must park his
conscience at the door of his golden cage, or his empire will melt away
under the intolerable weight of the gossip of the Church Ladies. Warren
got a whiff of this when he was foolish enough to go on Larry King Live, in
the spring of 2009, and mention that maybe he wasn’t as firmly against gay
marriage as he was said to have been in the wake of the battle over gay
marriage in California during the 2008 election season. As the Washington
Times reported on April 11, 2009, “I was extremely troubled,” said Al
Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Louisville, Kentucky. “Absolutely baffling,” huffed Wendy Wright, president
of the far-right Concerned Women of America organization. Warren
learned, if he didn’t already know, that the only thing evangelicals will
never forgive is any letting up on hating the “other.”
That’s what my friend Richard Cizik, former vice president of the
National Association of Evangelicals, learned. He was being interviewed by
Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2009 and mentioned that maybe he wasn’t
against gay civil unions. He didn’t even mention gay marriage. He was fired
within days. Rich told me that he was never even asked by the board what
he’d meant by his remarks and was never given a chance to respond.
Cizik had almost been forced out several years before when James
Dobson, of “Focus on the Family” fame, wrote to the NAE board
demanding Cizik’s dismissal for saying that he thought global warming was
real. Cizik got away with that apostasy against the Republican Party, which
had long since come to be a stand-in for the “true church” for power-
hungry evangelical/fundamentalist leaders such as Dobson. But when Cizik
didn’t hate gays enough, game over!
Maybe escaping the culture of hate of the “other” was one reason why,
as soon as I left the evangelical fold, I began to write fiction and stopped
editing my less than attractive feelings and failings out of my nonfiction.
When you are no longer defined by what you are not, you can begin to be
for something—say, trying to write a real book and let the chips fall where
they may. This may not seem like a very big deal to someone raised in a
secular home, but believe me, for me it was.
There was one exception to this newfound freedom. Soon after my
joining the Orthodox Church in 1990, and displaying all the embarrassing
enthusiasm of a new convert, I did quite a bit of speaking and writing that
had a lot more to do with my former fundamentalist attitudes than with
anything remotely Orthodox. In that sense I was a mirror image of the
Father Xs of this world. But I got over my knee-jerk reactionary illness (at
least somewhat), along with getting over my right-wing politics. And by the
early 1990s I was well on my way out of the grip not just of fundamentalist
“faith” but also of the fundamentalist emotions that lead to the right-wing
politics of fear and exclusion.
This is a continuing process, and I’m not there yet, nor can I tell you
where “there” is. As someone raised on the idea that my loyalty wasn’t to
the truth but to “our faith,” writing the simple truth (as I understand it) still
feels revolutionary. With my first novels it was such a relief to be writing
whatever I wanted to write, where the point was to let the story’s needs,
rather than the needs of “Christian” propaganda, let alone the rules of the
Church Ladies (or even Orthodox propaganda), dictate the direction of my
work. Looking back now, it strikes me as passing strange that to live as a
successful evangelical/fundamentalist activist (or even as an Orthodox
activist) demanded a sophisticated degree of habitual lying, if not by
commission than by omission. One always had to feign a degree of
certainty about the Big Questions that no sane person ever feels.
As I said before, when salvation is understood as a journey, there is no
pressure to make snap decisions and “get right with God.” And because
everyone is on the same path—even atheists—those at different stages on
that path are not judged as “lost.” In that sense what many Fathers of the
Church said is understandable and boils down to this: The Church can only
say how some people may find the path of salvation, but never who is lost.
That means one can try to live as a Christian and be free of the
guiltinduced need to proselytize. But even more important, one is freed
from the illusion of certainty. Since no one is out because of wrong
intellectual ideas, no one—including oneself—is ever completely in
because the journey never ends. So you can answer “I don’t know” to
many a question without feeling you are letting yourself, others, or God
down.
I understand the impulse to convert others because I kept converting!
So I understood what another recovering evangelical/fundamentalist
meant when she wrote to me this in an email, “To be honest, I miss the
sense of belonging, purpose and vision my life had then [as a former
evangelical]. I miss the hope I had and the drive to save souls because at
least then I believed in something and it gave me reason to get up in the
morning. Now I’m rudderless.”
That’s the longing Warren tapped into when he wrote his book.
Converting is habit-forming. Even in my post-evangelical/fundamentalist
reincarnation I’ve been looking for that quick fix, that one agent or editor
who is my shining knight, a one-stop road to literary recognition, or (back
in the day) that one donor who would underwrite my zealous
evangelical/fundamentalist outreach efforts or (more recently) my political
fixation on President Obama. You can take the evangelical/fundamentalist
out of the evangelical/fundamentalist world, but the harder habit to break
— speaking for myself—is the evangelical/fundamentalist addiction to
silverbullet, instant, born-again sorts of “solutions.”
When I convert to whatever the next silver bullet is, I’m sincere. Later
there comes a stage when I’m less sincere. That’s because I’ve started to
depend on my newfound belief for a sense of purpose, and for a while, I
don’t want to rock the boat by asking questions. At that stage I hold on to
my new “faith” a bit longer than I’d do otherwise with no psychological
vested interest. Jesus will save me! Being a movie director will save me!
The Orthodox Church will save me! Being a Republican will save me!
Obama will save me! Being a progressive Huffington Post blogger will save
me!
I’m too afraid to abandon what seemed so true and was such a comfort
as each new “church” heaves into sight and I do the American consumer
shuffle and reinvent myself—again. I love to belong to a tribe! Why doesn’t
everyone believe in Jesus? Hollywood is great! Obama is so smart! Why
don’t all young men join the Marines like my son did?! Isn’t this a
wonderful church!
 Atheists do the same thing when they put their trust in authors such as
Harris or Dennett to explain it all, or invest their faith in Reason, science,
politics, or sexual liberation—whatever. But at least atheists aren’t
claiming that people who disagree with them are going to suffer eternal
damnation.
Then I start asking questions. This slick outfit seems to run like a big
business. Is this the entertainment industry or spirituality? Can Obama
walk on water? My cooling off to my new faith goes like this: I discover
that lots of born-again people are just too dumb for words. That there will
always be the next “Rick Warren” with all the “answers.” That Hollywood
sucks! That even in the Greek Orthodox community there are a few very
nasty wingnuts lurking. That those “tolerant” left-wing supporters of
Obama are just as intolerant as my old right-wing friends and just as into
their own closedminded orthodoxies. That I’ve joined another this-will-
solve-everything cult—again. Most of all, I discover that my real problem
never was about belonging to the “right” group but about what is wrong
with me.
 CHAPTER 8

Spaceship Jesus Will Come Back and Whisk Us Away

But what is this unknown something with which the Reason

collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion, with the
result of unsettling even man’s knowledge of himself? It is the
Unknown. It is not a human being, in so far as we know what
man is; nor is it any other known thing. So let us call this
unknown something: the God. It is nothing more than a name
we assign to it.
Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!)
represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to
choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice
boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens,
I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so
that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of
wine.
The Left Behind novels have sold tens of millions of copies while
spawning an “End Times” cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left
Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books, and video games have
become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous
symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition,
adopting “Christ-centered” home school curricula, fearing higher
education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the
“other,” as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of
doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum.
No, I am not blaming Jenkins and LaHaye’s product line for murder or
racism or any other evil intent or result. What I am saying is that feeding
the paranoid delusions of people on the fringe of the fringe contributes to
a dangerous climate that may provoke violence in a few individuals. And
convincing folks that Armageddon is on the way, and all we can do is wait,
pray, and protect our families from the chaos that will be the “prelude” to
the “Return of Christ,” is perhaps not the best recipe for political,
economic, or personal stability, let alone social cohesion. It may also not
be the best philosophy on which to build American foreign policy! The
momentum toward what amounts to a whole subculture seceding from
the union (in order to await “The End”) is irrevocably prying loose a chunk
of the American population from both sanity and their fellow citizens.
A time-out for disclosure is in order. I knew Jerry Jenkins quite well many
years ago, and we worked on a baseball book project together, with me
trying—and failing—to get his book made into a movie. I liked Jerry and he
was kind and decent. I also have known Tim LaHaye for years, and some
thirty years ago we shared the platform at several fundamentalist events.
Both men always treated me well. This may come across as maudlin BS to
some people, but I mean it when I say that if I weren’t convinced that their
hugely “successful” work is about as innocuous as tossing gasoline and
lighted matches into a nursery school, I’d never say a word about them.
I’m betting that they mean well. It seems to me that they also have no idea
what they have helped unleash. You can be very decent and very blind.
That said . . . the evangelical/fundamentalists—and hence, from the
early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious
Right as it informed U.S. policy through the then dominant Republican
Party—are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge
and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist
interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Too bad.
This weird book was the last to be included in the New Testament. It
was included as canonical only relatively late in the process after a heated
dispute. The historic Churches East and West remain so suspicious of
Revelation that to this day it has never been included as part of the cyclical
public readings of scripture in Orthodox services. The book of Revelation is
read in Roman and Anglican Churches only during Advent. But both Rome
and the East were highly suspicious of the book. The West included it in
the lectionary late and sparingly. In other words, the book of the Bible that
the historical Church found most problematic is the one that American
evangelicals latched on to like flies on you know what.
Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal—even desired—
roadmap to Armageddon, it’s worth pausing to note that it’s nothing more
than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches
in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe
not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case,
the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to
mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.
The evangelical/fundamentalist literalistic “interpretation” of Revelation
is symptomatic of a larger problem: make-it-up-as-you-go-along biblical
interpretation suited to hyping whatever the evangelical/fundamentalist
flavor of the moment is, in a desperate effort to keep religion relevant. But
taken out of the context of being part of a worship cycle, the Bible became
something like an extremely sharp butcher knife in the hands of children
running around a garden. There’s nothing wrong with the knife per se, but
context is everything. Enter semiliterate American
evangelical/fundamentalist rubes armed with multiple “kitchen knives”
and imbued with a frontier “no bishops or kings!” suspicion of any
tradition, scholarship, or hierarchy that might moderate their wild-eyed
personal “interpretations” of scripture and their burning desire to make a
buck.
The Left Behind series is really just recycled evangelical/fundamentalist
profit taking from scraps of “prophecy” left over from an earlier
commercial effort to mine the vein of fearsome End Times gold. A book
called The Late Great Planet Earth was the 1970s incarnation of this
nonsense. It was written by Hal Lindsey, a “writer” who dropped by my
parents’ ministry of L’Abri several times.
Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted Revelation for a
generation of paranoid evangelicals who were terrified of the Soviet Union
and communism and were convinced that the existence of the modern
State of Israel was the sign that Jesus was on the way in our lifetimes, as
Lindsey claimed. According to Lindsey, Revelation was “speaking” about
the Soviet Union and imminent nuclear attacks between the Soviet Union
and the United States. When Mikhail Gorbachev became president of the
U.S.S.R., Planet Earth groupies claimed Gorbachev was the Antichrist,
citing the references in Revelation to the “mark of the beast” as proof
because Gorbachev had a birthmark on his forehead!
After everything predicted in the book came to nothing, Lindsey rewrote
and “updated” his “interpretations” in many sequels, in what must have
been some sort of record for practicing George Orwell’s idea of
“doublethink” via editorial revision of ever-changing “facts.” Trying to
follow the prophecy party line eventually got confusing, even for the
Lindsey followers, and Lindsey faded into well-deserved obscurity.
This would be amusing, if not for the lives touched by this crazy
nonsense. For instance, a good friend of mine was dragged—at age five—
to Alaska, where his parents huddled in an “End Times” commune, a place
chosen to be out of the way of major cities so that when the bombs fell, his
family (and some fellow “pilgrims”) could await the Lord’s return in safety.
My friend’s life was almost destroyed by suffering through years of a cruel
and bizarre lifestyle in which his family was reduced to eating their goats
and bear meat hunted (with the many guns kept by the members of this
particular cult) on the “mission’s” garbage dump. Of course, school was
not a big concern since Jesus was on the way! Discipline was harsh so that
everyone could be found “pure of heart” at the Lord’s imminent return.
After five or six years of this, my friend’s miserably duped parents dragged
themselves back to a neighborhood near ours where it happened that
Genie and I got to know their utterly dislocated and severely damaged
children, one of whom grew to become a close friend of ours.
According to Jenkins and LaHaye, who have taken over the Hal Lindsey
franchise of apocalypse-for-fun-and-profit and expanded it into a vast
industry, the “chosen” will soon be airlifted to safety. The focus on the
“signs” leading up to this hoped-for aeronautical excursion is
understandably no longer the defunct U.S.S.R. but the ripped-from-
theheadlines gift that keeps on giving: the Middle East.
 The key to understanding the popularity of this series (and the whole
host of other End Times “ministries” from the ever weirder Jack-the-
Rapture-iscoming!-Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of
Christianity Today magazine) isn’t some new or sudden interest in
prophecy, but the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the
evangelical/fundamentalist community.
The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in
the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from
their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college
campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left
behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science,
antieducation, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep
grievance against “the world.” This has led to a profound fear of the
“other.”
Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the
culturally left behind against the “elite.” The Left Behind franchise holds
out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last soon everyone will know
“we” were right and “they” were wrong. They’ll know because Spaceship
Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder
just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, “I
accept Jesus as my personal savior” and join our side while there was still
time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass Democrat-voting,
overeducated fags who have been mocking us!
Nietzsche talked about “everyday being oneself” and not belonging to
“the herd,” but we want to belong. We have to belong! We want to find
the purpose, be it Jesus, or the study of the biological/ evolutionary origins
of religion, or blogging on left-wing sites and reading all those responses
from people just like us. We can’t change that desire to belong to the
winning side. But some evangelical/ fundamentalists not only wish to be
proved right; they also want revenge.
The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike
Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical
/fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy
killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high. They want revenge
on all people not like them—forever.
 Knowingly or unknowingly, Jenkins and LaHaye cashed in on years of
evangelical/fundamentalists’ imagined victimhood. I say imagined,
because the born-agains had one of their very own, George W. Bush, in the
White House for eight long, ruinous years and also dominated American
politics for the better part of thirty years before that. Nevertheless, their
sense of being a victimized minority is still very real—and very marketable.
Whether they were winning politically or not, they nurtured a mythology
of persecution by the “other.” Evangelical/fundamentalists believed that
even though they were winning, somehow they had actually lost.
Most of that sense of lost battles is related to the so-called culture wars
issues in which evangelical/fundamentalists did not fare so well, from the
legalization of abortion to gay rights. But rather than admitting that they
were often losing the arguments, or had come across as so mean (or plain
dumb) that few outsiders wanted to be like them, they blamed everyone
else, from the courts to organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the
ACLU, the New York Times, and the “left-wing media.” Just about any
scapegoat would do to deny or disguise the simple fact that fewer
Americans wanted to follow the evangelical/fundamentalist Church Ladies
into their gloomy cave (and/or the never-never land of the Rapture) and
park their brains there.
I used to be part of the self-pitying, whining, evangelical/fundamentalist
chorus. I remember going on the Today Show with host Jane Pauley back in
the late 1970s (or early 1980s). I debated with the head of the American
Library Association about my claim that our evangelical/fundamentalist
books weren’t getting a fair shake from the “cultural elites.” We Schaeffers
were selling millions of books, but the New York Times never reviewed
them. I made the point that we were being ignored by the “media elite,”
which was somewhat ironic, given that I had been invited to appear on
Today to make that claim.
I dropped out of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture soon after
that Today appearance (years later I was back on Today in my secular
writer incarnation, being interviewed about a book of mine on the
military/civilian divide, but I decided not to mention that I’d been on the
show about thirty years before in what seemed like either another lifetime
or an out-of-body experience).
 Others carried on where I left off, pushing the victimhood mythology to
the next generation of evangelical/fundamentalists, and they have
cultivated a following among the terminally aggrieved based on ceaselessly
warning them about “the world.” For instance “An Evangelical Manifesto,”
a document put together by yet another self-appointed
evangelical/fundamentalist “leadership group” (in 2008), was widely
circulated in evangelical/fundamentalists circles. It put forward the idea of
the evangelical/fundamentalist battle with the dangerous forces of
secularism, claiming that “Nothing is more illiberal than to invite people
into the public square but insist that they be stripped of the faith that
makes them who they are. . . . If this hardens into something like the
European animosity toward religion in public life the result would be
disastrous for the American republic. . . . [The] striking intolerance shown
by the new atheists is a warning sign.”
The evangelical/fundamentalist authors of this document were claiming
that fundamentalists were being stripped of their political power. Worse,
we’d soon find that America would be just like—heavens!—France! They
made this case during the Bush presidency!
A host of evangelical/fundamentalist Cassandras tour college campuses
reinforcing their followers’ perennial chip-on-the-shoulder attitude by
telling fearful evangelical/fundamentalist students to hold fast against the
secular onslaught. They tell their student listeners (and those students’
even more worried parents) to not let “those people”—professors,
members of the Democratic Party, moderates, progressives, and such
ordinary American men and women as Jews, gays, and members of the
educated “elite”—strip them of their faith. Hundreds of books by many
evangelical/fundamentalist authors could be consolidated into one called
How to Get Through College with Your Fundamentalist Faith Intact So You
Won’t Wind Up Becoming One of Them.
Sometimes right-wing paranoia takes an ugly twist. A website
maintained by James Von Brunn, an avowed racist and anti-Semite well
known to the netherworld of white supremacy—and the assassin who
killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in June of 2009—said that
Brunn tried to carry out a “citizen’s arrest” in 1981 on the Federal Reserve
Board of Governors, whom he accused of “treason.” When he was
arrested outside the room where the board was meeting, he was carrying
a sawed-off shotgun, a revolver, and a knife. Police said he planned to take
members of the Fed hostage.
“Mainstream” (in other words, slightly less nutty and less violent)
religious-right Republicans have been saying the same thing as Brunn
about the Fed for years, particularly the so-called “dominionists” who
believe it’s their job to reestablish God’s dominion on earth. They preach
Old Testament-style vengeance and loony gold-standard “economics” from
many “respectable” pulpits. They also hate America (as it is), want a
revolution in the name of God, and espouse “pro-life” beliefs, anti-gay
hate, racism, and far-right Republican politics. They take the Republican
antigovernment propaganda to the next step and say that even paying
taxes is “unconstitutional.” I know them well.
I knew the founders of the dominionist movement—people like the late
Reverend Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of “Christian
Reconstructionism” and the modern evangelical/fundamentalist home
school movement. Rushdoony (whom I met and talked with several times)
believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as “unequal
yoking,” should be made illegal. He also opposed integration, referred to
Southern slavery as “benevolent,” and said that “some people are by
nature slaves.” Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier. And yet his home
school materials are a mainstay of the right-wing evangelical home school
movement to this day. In Rushdoony’s 1973 book, The Institutes of Biblical
Law, he says that fundamentalist Christians must “take control of
governments and impose strict biblical law” on America and then the
world. That would mean the death penalty for “practicing homosexuals.”
Many evangelical leaders deny holding Reconstructionist beliefs, but
Beverly and Tim LaHaye (of Concerned Women for America and the
coauthor of the novels we’re talking about in this chapter), Donald
Wildmon (of the American Family Association), and the late D. James
Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Ministries and a friend of mine before I left the
movement) served alongside Rushdoony on the secretive Coalition for
Revival, a group formed in 1981 to “reclaim America for Christ.” I went to
some of the early meetings.
The New Atheists have played into the evangelical/fundamentalist’s
hands. Each side fans the flames of victimhood. “An atheist can never be
president!” says one side. “A Christian never gets a fair shake in the New
York Times!” claims the other. Each side is led by opportunists claiming to
speak for a beleaguered minority.
Indeed, Dawkins needs the evangelicals and they need him. As the
authors of An Evangelical Manifesto wrote, “striking intolerance shown by
the new atheists is a warning sign.” Conversely, how would Dawkins’s
followers use their Scarlet A pins to open their conversations if America
weren’t full of evangelical/fundamentalists? The fundamentalists in both
camps need to claim they are hated. The leaders push their followers to
fear each other to maintain their identity—and lecture fees.
But getting back to the Apocalypse—since all the good God-fearing folks
are going to be forced to be Europeans anyway, why not end it all now?
Jenkins and LaHaye’s “I told you so” to all those “elites” who aren’t like
“us” comes packaged as ultra-violence. The promotional copy for one of
the books in the Left Behind series—Shadowed—promises plenty of killing:
“After God intervenes with a miracle of global proportions, the tide is
turned on international atheism!” Those Europeans the
evangelical/fundamentalist leaders warned all “Real Americans” about are
about to get theirs!
If you want to know what it means to turn the tide on “international
atheism,” here’s an example from Glorious Appearing, in which Jesus
slaughters unbelievers.
The riders not thrown leaped from their horses and tried to
control them with the reins, but even as they struggled,
their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their
tongues disintegrated. . . . [T]he soldiers stood briefly as
skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of
bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant
and rave. Seconds later the same plague afflicted the
horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away,
leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too
rattled to the pavement.
Many evangelical/fundamentalist’s can’t get enough of this garbage.
They’ve been sucking it up since the early 1970s, and now, in the Left
Behind books, the message has gone viral. The video game Left Behind:
Eternal Forces was developed by a publicly traded company, Left Behind
Games. The player controls a “Tribulation Forces” team and is invited to
“use the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield
modern military weaponry throughout the game world.” The game blesses
religious violence. It’s the Americanized version of some Islamic sheik
drumming hate of the infidel into young minds in some dusty Pakistani
madrassa. It’s legal evangelical Jihad training, a fantasy foreshadowing of
the all-too-real killings of abortion doctors and others hated as “anti-
Christ.”
The expanding Left Behind entertainment empire also feeds the
dangerous delusions of Christian Zionists, who are convinced that the
world is heading to a final Battle of Armageddon and who see this as a
good thing! Christian Zionists, led by many “respectable” mega-pastors—
including Reverend John Hagee—believe that war in the Middle East is
God’s will. In his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World,
Hagee maintains that Russia and the Arabs will invade Israel and then will
be destroyed by God. This will cause the Antichrist—the head of the
European Union—to stir up a confrontation over Israel between China and
the West.
Perhaps, in the era of Obama, Hagee will do a fast rewrite and say that
President Obama is the Antichrist, because the same folks who are into
Christian Zionism are also into the far, far loony right of the Republican
Party represented by oddities like Sarah Palin. These are the same people
who insist that President Obama is a “secret Muslim,” “not an American,”
and/or “a communist,” “more European than American,” or whichever one
of those contradictory things is worse—not like us anyway, that’s for sure.
Christian Zionists support any violent action by the State of Israel against
Arabs and Palestinians because the increasingly brutal State of Israel is, in
the fevered evangelical/fundamentalist mind, the nation presently
standing in for Jesus as avenger on evildoers everywhere, by which they
mean Arabs and others not like us. Christian Zionists are yet another
reason why I and countless other Christians, including many of the more
moderate evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and
Orthodox are hesitant to be labeled “Christian.” Who wants to be confused
with some of the most dangerous and stupid people in the world: nuclear-
armed, paranoid evangelical/fundamentalist Bible thumpers rooting for
Armageddon and worrying in paranoid “official” documents about being
forced to become like “the Europeans”? (Just a thought: does that make
high-speed rail service a tool of the Devil?)
Perhaps I’m not alone when I say that it would be tempting to walk away
from trying to follow Jesus, if for no other reason than to avoid the
constant hassle of having to explain what I’m not. Fortunately, I have role
models who are far from today’s right-wing evangelical/fundamentalists.
It seems to me that a lot of us non-evangelical, non-fundamentalist
followers of Jesus find ourselves where Marc Chagall found himself vis-àvis
his faith in God and the public perception of what that faith means. Chagall
is proof that not all people who identify with Christianity and Judaism (or
religion in general) are of the Hagee, LaHaye, Rushdoony, and Jenkins ilk.
Chagall was an ambassador for a Judaism of peace and redemption, not
a pusher of the eternal war of ethnic-religion-based Christian and/or
Jewish Zionism, let alone a purveyor of fear of the “other” say, Europeans,
Arabs, or gays. Chagall extends an olive branch to humanity and envisions
an inclusive Judaism, not the clenched fist of race-based Zionist otherness
and exclusion that the far-right hardliners in the modern State of Israel
have become.
Chagall painted faith subjects infused with the Jewish and Christian
symbolism that had been part of his formative years in prerevolutionary
Russia. Chagall was one of the twentieth century’s great painters, but he
paid a price for being out of step with the critics of his day, most of whom
were preoccupied with “brave” mid-twentieth-century angst and nihilism.
Chagall refused to remove biblical themes from his visual vocabulary long
after all such “sentiment” (indeed, any figurative representation at all) was
supposed to have been rejected by thinking artists. Chagall—much like
Pierre Bonnard, Georges Rouault, and several other outcasts from the
inner circle of early to mid-twentieth-century critical acclaim—has since
transcended his critics.
Standing outside the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center at
night and looking through the glass front of the building at Chagall’s huge
paintings The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music, the viewer is
transported into a mind within which a loving humane vision of the God of
Judaism and Christianity finds a home. Chagall didn’t paint theological or
political “statements” but cut to the heart of the redemptive message of
all faiths.
Chagall didn’t claim he had the truth but saw himself as a servant of
beauty and a practitioner of grace-filled thanksgiving. His art was a
doorway to reconciliation among three bloody and often inhumane faith
traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Secularism.
Chagall gave us a spiritual way of seeing that is the opposite of paranoid
victimology and evangelical/fundamentalist and/or Zionist rage. Where
Jenkins and LaHaye offer a blood-soaked, angry God as video game
“entertainment,” Chagall gave us brides and angels floating in an eternal
sky of hope and love, where tragedy is a prelude to joy. In Chagall’s
mercydrenched vision all are saved; Jew, “pagan,” and gentile alike are
redeemed. Only hatred and exclusion have no place in his paradise.
In a 1979 interview Chagall said, “I went back to the great universal
book, the Bible. Since my childhood, it has filled me with vision about the
fate of the world and inspired me in my work. In moments of doubt, its
highly poetic grandeur and wisdom comforted me. For me it is like second
nature. . . . Since in my inner life the spirit and world of the Bible occupy a
large place, I have tried to express it. It is essential to show the elements of
the world that are not visible and not just to reproduce nature in all its
aspects.”
As Jonathan Wilson writes in his book Marc Chagall,
Chagall’s relationship to the figure of Jesus Christ is
ultimately mysterious . . . unclassifiable, and contradictory.
It is the Jesus of a Jewish child who grew up in an
environment of churches and Russian Orthodox icons; of a
Jewish painter both attuned to and rebelling against a two-
thousand-year tradition of Christian iconography in art; of a
Jew in love with the stories of the Hebrew Bible and yet
well-versed in the parables of the New Testament, drawn to
the poetry of that book and excited by its gaunt philosophy.
I happen to empathize with Chagall. As a person of faith—both chosen
and inherited—where do I fit as a writer? Where did Chagall “fit”? Where
do love and mystery and mercy fit in the literalist-minded armed camp of
atheist against believer, when the whole debate is tinged with a deadly
fear of the other?
How can one be a Christian when those such as Rushdoony, Jenkins, and
LaHaye describe themselves as such? How can one be an atheist when a
Tshirt vendor such as Dawkins has foisted himself on thoughtful and
humane non-believers? Chagall shows the way for all of us, whatever we
believe. His life and art demonstrate that it is possible to buck the trend of
cynicism and to believe in each other more than in the rightness of our
particular ideas.
 PART II

Patience With Each Other, Patience With God

 CHAPTER 9

So Naked Before a Just and Angry God

They like to give it this turn: the human race has outgrown
Christianity.
Journals, Søren Kierkegaard

In the second part of this book I’ll shift from essay-laced-with-memoir, to

memoir-and-memory with a touch of essay. Beliefs and lives are shaped by
good (or bad) examples set by others. So I’ll be looking at some of the lives
that have touched mine. I’ll also be approaching the answers offered here
having learned one thing: I am my only insurmountable problem.
There are no silver bullets, born-again, political, atheist, or religious, to
slay what ails me. The solution is not a one-time born-again experience or
correct ideas, but an incremental chipping away at those things I, and
those closest to me, like least about me.
That said, I can’t explain why I said, “Thank you, Jesus,” as I did the other
night when I happened to open the front door to fetch firewood and saw a
new crescent moon perfectly lined up in a small triangle with Venus and
Mars. All three were shimmering through a fogbank in the cold December
sky. Of course, they weren’t really “lined up.” All that was happening was
an optical illusion from my earthbound perspective.
I don’t have the capacity or time to learn everything about the workings
of the solar system. I don’t understand the universe beyond it, how all this
got here, what I’m doing here, or whether my life has a meaning in some
transcendent sense. I have no final explanation for why picking up that
load of firewood and knowing that I could not only heat my home but also
care for my little granddaughter, asleep up on the middle floor, was so
deeply satisfying.
My reaction to that extraterrestrial vision was not to try and answer all
of the questions related to the planets, firewood, my knee-jerk thank you
to Jesus, or the workings of the universe; it was to fetch Genie so we could
exclaim, “Isn’t that amazing?” Those words didn’t come close to expressing
what I was feeling. Nor were they scientific explanations of why the rather
rare alignment of those planets and our moon was occurring that night.
Nevertheless, “Isn’t that amazing?” was just as valid an expression of
one aspect of what I experienced as any words ever spoken about planets,
gravity, and dark matter would have been, and it was just as accurate and
precise as talking about how light was entering my eyes and how my brain
was “seeing” that light, filling in the gaps and presenting a “picture” to me
that I recognized as planets and a moon.
The reason why all these ways of thinking about the moon and the
planets—scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual—are equally valid is that all
words—lyrical, spiritual, or scientific—are metaphors. That’s why Warren
is so wrong. That’s why Dawkins is so wrong. There is not one approach to
purpose, let alone to truth. There are many. Descriptions of those
approaches are only approximations of the illusive reality that Einstein
described as “something that our mind cannot grasp and this beauty and
sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection.”
We can’t live in each other’s brains, let alone in the heads of the people
on some church council a thousand years ago who wrote whatever creed
we’re repeating, or in the minds of the Bible’s authors, or, for that matter,
in the minds of scientists like such as Einstein. When they used the word
God or universe or truth, what were they actually picturing? We’ll never
know what their perception was for the same reason that the Supreme
Court justices rarely agree unanimously on the original intent of the
authors of the Constitution.
When it comes to trying to sort out the competing threads in
Christianity, the idea of “right belief” goes back to the gospel-writing
period but was maximized by the scholastics who were part of the thread
of nit-picking, rules-orientated, literalistic fundamentalist Christianity. The
idea of correct theology as a rationalistic proposition needed for salvation
was rooted primarily in the Aristotelian Roman Catholic Scholastic
movement—in other words, those theologians who longed for academic
certainty about the most nonacademic of subjects: God. They harked back
to pre-Christian philosophy to look for some method through which to
view religion in a more “scientific” way. They discovered their “method” in
Aristotle’s systematic approach to philosophy.
Thomas Aquinas was the leading scholastic. He believed that truth is
known through reason, or what he called “natural revelation,” and through
faith, which he called “supernatural revelation.” Aquinas viewed theology
as a science. (Scholasticism was dominant in the medieval Christian
universities from the eleventh century to the fifteenth century.) But how
can we discover spiritual truth by parsing terms? This way lies the madness
that drove Aquinas to pen such gems as these: “As regards the individual
nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the
male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine
sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active
power.” Or this: “If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular
power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting
to death one convicted of heresy.”
Aquinas’s rationalism was just a foretaste of the theology of the Calvinist
Protestants. Jonathan Edwards was the epitome of this Reformed “logic.”
Edwards was the leading evangelical/fundamentalist evangelist in the
eighteenth century’s Great Awakening. Here’s a bit of a sermon he
preached called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (delivered in
Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1741).
There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell,
but the mere pleasure of God. By “the mere pleasure of God,” I mean his
sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered
by no manner of difficulty. . . . The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the
arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart,
and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and
that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps
the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. . . . If you
cry to God to pity you, He will be so far from pitying you in your doleful
case, or showing you the least regard or favor, that instead of that he’ll
only tread you under foot.
If Chagall is at one end of the religious spectrum, Edwards is at the
other. On the other hand, the struggle between the merciful side and the
harsh side of religion—the two threads—was also evident even in
Edwards’s personality. His essay “Nature of the True Virtue” seems to be
by a different person than the man who preached “Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God.” (In “Nature of the True Virtue, Edwards says that true
virtue is based on benevolence and love).
Whatever Edwards’s personal struggles between the light and dark sides
of the Protestant religion, he has come to symbolize the ugly side of
Christianity. Fortunately, the view of some of the earliest Fathers of the
historic Church could not be further from Aquinas’s and Edward’s rougher
statements. Those Fathers would “get” Chagall and would have been
shocked by Aquinas and Edwards.
In the context of our necessarily subjective perception, an atheist telling
religious people that they the atheists have the facts and that the rest of us
are deluded is a sign of hubris. It’s just as arrogantly insane as an otherwise
genial fellow like Rick Warren telling atheists that the Creator wants to
keep them alive for eternity in order to burn them, just because the
atheists believed the “wrong” words or didn’t pray the so-called sinner’s
prayer. Warren wouldn’t put it that way, but however one dances around
it, that is the heart of the demented evangelical/fundamentalist message.
The cure for hubris (Protestant or otherwise) is, I think, to experience
God through failure, beauty, tragedy, community, and love. Sometimes our
learning curve away from self is forced on us, if not by God then by God’s
angels say, by Mr. and Mrs. Parke.
Certain experiences changed my life. Being sent to Great Walstead
School (a boarding school for boys in Lindfield, Sussex, England) just before
I turned eleven was one such experience. Mr. Parke was the headmaster,
and Mrs. Parke was both a teacher and his eagle-eyed helpmeet. She (like
her husband) gave “her” boys opportunities that I came to fully appreciate
only years later.
The school turned my “island” (as I think of my weird childhood) into a
peninsula. It almost made me feel normal. Eventually, when Genie showed
up (more in the role of a terrific-looking archangel than a mere angel!) my
peninsula gradually drifted into a continent of shared human experience.
But without GW, I’d never have believed that it was possible for me to
function at all in the wide world outside my parents’ inward-looking
mission.
Great Walstead School sat at the end of a long, oak-lined driveway. The
grounds covered 294 acres of fields, woods, ponds, a small river, playing
fields, and lawns nestled in a gently hilly landscape midway between
London and Brighton. GW was “a short train journey from Victoria
Station,” according to the school brochure that Mom read aloud to me
several times. (Why my parents sent me there is another story I’ve told
elsewhere.)
When Mom and I arrived by taxi from the Hayward’s Heath station, we
passed the school’s small farm. Next to the farm—it consisted of two
tumble-down cow barns—sat Walstead House, the Elizabethan
halftimbered cottage that the older boys lived in and that at first I mistook
for the main building, until the taxi drove around the corner and the view
of a large Victorian manor house appeared.
Mom and I took a quick tour, along with several other new boys and
their parents, while following one of the Sixth Form (senior) boys. The two
other new boys on our tour were much younger than I, the ages you were
supposed to be when you started school. Our guide seemed scarily old.
Boys came to GW at age six and then, between thirteen and fourteen,
went on to a public school, which is what they called the private boys or
girls boarding high schools in England. (After GW I was sent to one, but
hated it and at age fifteen ran away, also another story.)
Our thirteen-year-old guide had the beginnings of whiskers, was a head
taller than I, and never looked at me or the other two little boys in our
party. He addressed his somewhat formal remarks to Mom and the other
parents as though he were reading from a travel brochure.
“The main house has fifteen-to twenty-foot ceilings. Notice the wide
staircase descending to the entrance hall. Boys are not allowed to use the
main stairs! Here’s the common room, library, the headmaster’s study.”
Behind the main house was a series of decaying huts linked by rickety,
half-covered passages.
 “We built these ourselves,” the boy said. “Great Walstead is a DIY sort of
place.”
“DIY?” asked Mom.
“That’s short for do it yourself,” said the boy.
He said that the huts had been bought from a nearby Royal Air Force
base at the end of World War II. These served as our classrooms, “as cold
in winter as they are jolly hot in summer. In winter the huts are heated by
portable kerosene stoves, and the bloody windows have to be opened.”
Mom gave him a look the boy didn’t seem to notice. She hadn’t liked
that he had said, “bloody.” It wasn’t taking the Lord’s name in vain, but it
didn’t sound right to her.
“The huts are almost impossible to sweep no matter how hard the boys
assigned to sweeping duty work. The good news is that most of the huts
are propped on blocks and have loose floorboards. We pry one up and
sweep everything through the hole!”
The other parents laughed. Mom didn’t.
I was afraid of Mr. and Mrs. Parke—at first. I was not a great student. I
spent all three years at the school desperately trying to catch up after a
failed “home schooling” effort by my parents. The fact that I was also
dyslexic—something no one knew about at the time—was no help.
GW was simple to the point of being Spartan. Our staff ranged from
eccentric and doddering old men and women, who seemed to have just
always been there lurking in the narrow passages, to several youthful and
inexperienced teachers. But somehow the school was more than the sum
of its parts. As Mr. Parke explained to me many years later, “My idea about
which teachers I’d employ or keep on as masters was that they should be
interesting. That’s a lot more important than all this ‘teacher-training’
nonsense. Teachers needed to be able to hold the boys’ attention.”
Bubble held our attention all right! Bubble—also known as Mr. Albon
was a teacher who would have been fired anywhere else. He had been at
the school since around 1920 when it was founded. He was short and had
colorless strands of hair plastered above a pale, bitter face that was
dwarfed by his red-veined, bulbous nose. He was slope-shouldered, wore
filthy gray trousers (victim to years of tea spills) that made his lap look like
some sort of milky Jackson Pollock, a blue fraying-at-the-elbows cardigan
he never changed, a wool burgundy tie, and a “white” shirt that had many
years ago turned into a stained yellowing excrescence below a collar so
grimy that it looked as if it were made of gray material, a bit like fungus.
Having Bubble for a master was something like having Gollum for a
teacher. Only Bubble didn’t disgust us by gnawing raw fish. Rather, he
revolted and riveted us by snorting huge quantities of filthy, face-staining
snuff, he never bathed, and he smelled oddly of pepper and was clearly
drunk at times, although he did know a lot about music and made science
interesting. No one liked Bubble, but we loved being taught by him. Who
else would send a boy to detention for saying he believed in the Genesis
story? Who else would sit reading the scores of Wagner operas, while
silently mouthing the music, as if listening to a performance that only he
could hear, when he was supposed to be leading a chapel service? What
other teacher would help us remember the periodic tables by setting them
to filthy limericks?
The first term I was at GW, Bubble wouldn’t direct that year’s end-
ofterm production, now that it was settled that it had to be Gilbert and
Sullivan and that no rewriting of the lyrics would be allowed. So Bubble
was angry because Mr. Parke had just banned him from directing yet
another Wagner-derived opera.
I didn’t know why at the time, but more than forty years later I found
out that this ban was imposed because Bubble was a former wartime
“Germanlover” and fascist-sympathizer, so having to sit through Wagner-
morebloody-Wagner got the parents reminiscing over Bubble’s best-
forgotten wartime sympathies. Most of the parents hated Wagner anyway.
They favored English operettas followed by cucumber sandwiches and
afternoon tea. Besides, Bubble had once set bits of the Ring to
“questionable limericks.” The headmaster before Mr. Parke had made a
point of never attending Bubble’s rehearsals so that later he could
truthfully tell irate parents that “I had no idea of what was in the play!”
Anyway, one afternoon there was plenty of smirking going on. We knew
Bubble was sloshed—again. Ross and Weeks had found him on the drive
sitting in a puddle actually holding a bottle! Wonderful! Splendid! Topping!
Ripping! They pulled him out and fetched Matron (the school nurse)
because his condition seemed to fall into a medical category. A bit later
Bubble wasn’t propped against the rhododendrons next to the driveway
any longer, so we assumed that he’d been bundled back into the squalid
room he lived in next to the barn.
Bubble (I later learned) was a former Anglo-Catholic, but by the time I
got to GW he’d lost his faith and become our resident atheist. The
interesting thing was that Mr. Parke kept Bubble on after Bubble lost his
faith, even though their views differed sharply and GW was an evangelical
school in that casual, breezy, laid-back and tolerant way of doing religion
that the English are especially good at. This was a powerful object lesson to
me about how attractive faith is when it’s tolerant. We also had several
declared agnostics on the staff and one other strident atheist, my favorite
teacher Mr. Mellor, who also was a fine jazz pianist. Mr. Parke’s
forbearance was a long way from L’Abri’s style where, if workers didn’t toe
the theological line, my parents asked them to leave.
Bubble’s hatred of God made even the most pagan among us feign a
deep love of religion just to goad him into some outrageous statement
—“You Christians are a bloody nuisance and should be shot! I agree with
Stalin!”— that would then be gleefully repeated. And what could the other
teachers do about little boys shouting, “I agree with Stalin! Christians must
be shot!” when they could truthfully answer rebukes with “But I was just
repeating what Mr. Albon said, sir.”
During the opening stages of World War II, Bubble had volunteered for
the local Home Guard regiment, probably as a way to repair his reputation.
Using his flair for making explosives, he had trained local volunteers to
defend Britain with homemade weapons that, in a last ditch effort if all
else failed, might stop the Germans. Bubble kept up his interest in anything
that went bang! And he would march us out to the old tennis court to play
Home Guard as a “science project” and have us make and throw flaming
Molotov cocktails concocted in the empty scotch, rum, and gin bottles he
always seemed to have handy. Our bombs sent mushrooms of fire and
billowing smoke high into the air as Matron stood on the sidelines
imploring, “Mind out!” and “Don’t blow yourselves to bits!”
Building bombs, to say nothing of setting them off and surviving, is a
confidence builder! But no one built confidence like Mrs. Parke.
 The first time I saw Mrs. Parke was about an hour after Mom left me at
the school. Mrs. Parke walked into the school’s front hall. (I’d been hiding
in some rhododendron bushes for over an hour trying to pull myself
together.) Mrs. Parke was wearing a white apron over a gray, knee-length
skirt and briskly drying her hands on a dish-towel. Maybe it was the
disconcertingly steady way she met my eyes, but diminutive or not, she
exuded a no-nonsense cast iron will, and I felt a twinge of fear. Mrs. Parke
must have been working in the kitchen with “cook” on a parents’ tea,
which was about to be served to the hoard of mothers and fathers
dropping off their boys. She briefly looked me up and down, taking me in
the way a chef might dispassionately gauge the freshness of a crate of fish
of dubious provenance. “Go see Matron, and put your things away,” she
said in an allbusiness voice and bustled away.
I wanted to ask whom or what Matron was, and where he, she, or it
might be found, and how to get there. But I didn’t dare.
About five minutes later Mrs. Parke bustled back through the hall. This
time she was helping a very little boy drag a full-sized steamer trunk
through the front door, on which several cricket bats were piled, along
with an air rifle and a gleaming new hatchet. She noticed I hadn’t budged
and barked, “Spink Two, will you please collect this new boy and do
something about him! You’ve been assigned to be Schaeffer’s shadow,
haven’t you?”
I was surprised that Mrs. Parke knew my name. A tall thin lad wearing
wire-rimmed glasses ran in from another room. He came to a full stop in
front of Mrs. Parke and put his hands by his sides before he answered her.
“Yes, Mrs. Parke.”
“For goodness’s sake, Spink Two, will you do some shadowing! Why are
you just standing there? Do something useful!”
I was swept into a whirlwind of unpacking, finding the place in the “boot
room” to put my boots, where the dormitory was that I’d been assigned
to, how to get from the classrooms back to the main school through a
labyrinth of halls, as my shadow mumbled a dizzying explanation of each
new mystery. Everyone else seemed to be speaking in a private code
designed to exclude a newcomer. The boys, the staff, the parents dropping
off their sons all seemed to have been born and raised in the school and
moved effortlessly through what looked to me to like a series of complex
ritual dances that I’d never get the hang of.
The strangeness of boarding school, how far from home I was, and how
lonely I felt after Mom abandoned me in the rhododendron thicket was
driven home by the smell of Peg’s cleaning. On my first day at GW, I didn’t
know that the smell catching in my throat and making me want to gag was
Peg’s cleaning smell. Later I discovered that the stench of tar and ammonia
—as if the stink of urine in some French train station bathroom had been
mixed with hot tar used to patch potholes—came from the pale brown,
oozy liquid Peg poured out of a big industrial-sized container into her
galvanized bucket.
Peg was fierce. She was also drab-looking as the brown-gray water and
bits of hair and grime slopping around in the pail into which she dipped her
mildewed mops. Woe betide the boy who was rude to Peg or to Fred, our
cockney cleaning staff of two—our “domestics.” They of the deeply sallow,
yellowy-gray chain-smoker complexions, and the small, stunted, years-
ofbad-lower-class-English-wartime-and-postwar-diet bodies, lived together
in a room deep in the bowels of the oldest and most decrepit part of the
school, somewhere off past the kitchen. Were they fifty, sixty, eighty?
Were Peg and Fred brother and sister? Married? No one knew, or, if they
did, they weren’t saying.
Fred followed Peg ten steps behind, even on their weekly walk down the
school drive to go to Lindfield and catch the bus to Brighton and their “day
out at the seaside.” It was the only day Peg didn’t wear her ill-fitting maid’s
uniform with a Victorian white cap and snap-on starched cuffs.
There was more than a little irony in the fact that Peg and Fred were our
cleaning staff, because they were the dirtiest people in the school. Fred
never took off his filthy brown mechanic’s overalls. And Peg and Fred
moved around the school in a haze of evil-smelling smoke, their own
personal rancid atmosphere created by the filter-less cigarettes clenched
in their thin, liver-colored lips. Their “fags” always seemed to be just about
to burn down to a revolting saliva-soaked line and go out. Peg’s eyes were
set in a permanent smoke-induced squint through which she glared angrily
at the world.
 Peg and Fred were objects of curiosity but not mockery, in spite of Peg’s
rapid-fire cockney speech, made almost unintelligible by a cleft palette that
transformed her head into a sounding board wherein words seemed to
squirt from her nose, echoing as if they’d been shouted down a long empty
water pipe. Stare at her for too long—for instance, when she was blowing
gushing columns of smoke from blackened nostrils that gaped on either
side of her enormous beaky nose—or smile in a way she mistook for a
smile about her rather than to her, and there would follow the shrill
scream “I’ll tell Mr. Parkes of you!” and sometimes a wild slap. And that
boy’s smile would evaporate. Because if there was one thing our
headmaster Mr. Parke—why Peg added the “s” at the end of his name I
never learned—would not tolerate, it was rudeness to or bulling of people
who were “less advantaged than you lucky boys.”
A few months into my first term at the school, Mrs. Parke stopped me in
the narrow, musty-smelling back hall that led down to our dining area.
“Schaeffer!” she called, after she popped her head out of the staff sitting
room door while I’d been walking past.
“Yes, Mrs. Parke,” I said, nervously wondering what I’d done now, and
also wondering how on earth she knew I was passing.
“Why haven’t you tried out for Pinafore yet?”
“I can’t do that sort of thing, Mrs. Parke.”
“And jolly well why not?”
“I can’t learn words,” I blurted.
“Reading and spelling have nothing to do with opera, Schaeffer. How do
you know you’re no good at opera?”
“But, Mrs. Parke, I’m no good at anything.”
“A play isn’t ‘learning,’ it’s acting. All you have to do is pretend.”
“But—”
“Can you remember music?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if I hum this, Da, Da, Ta, Tah, what is it?”
“Beethoven’s Fifth, I think.”
 “Brilliant! You see!? You can remember anything as well as anyone else
once it’s set to music, so you jolly well come to the rehearsal today.”
“But—”
“I shall read the words out loud to you, and then we’ll sing them
together! It will be rather jolly!”
“Yes, Mrs. Parke.”
It always was “Yes, Mrs. Parke.” So a few weeks later I found myself in
the school play and rehearsing madly in our dining room/ theater and
finding out that I could do things I’d never thought possible. Mrs. Parke
was thumping away on the tuneless old upright piano with one hand and
directing with the other. Mrs. Macdonald was up on a ladder with all the
boys who didn’t have a part in the play clustered around her. They were
painting the scenery: a vast seascape backdrop nailed to the wall of the
dining room.
It wasn’t all plays. During my second term at GW, Nichol and I ganged up
on Higgins.
We called him “Higginbottom,” and it drove him mad. Higgins was about
my age and had something wrong with him. He flew into sudden and
uncontrollable rages over the most petty provocations. The rest of the
time he kept to himself. He had no friends.
Higgins was short and stocky and moved like a clumsy bear cub. He had
a rather dark complexion, ruddy as if he had spent most of his days
outdoors. Higgins would glance up from under a shock of thick, wiry hair
falling over deep-set, dark, and brooding eyes just a bit too close together,
giving his face a pinched look. When he was upset, his cheeks suddenly
flushed crimson, as if Higgins had had a splash of vermilion paint dashed
onto his face. Tease him a bit more, and he would put his head down and
charge in such a blind, incoherent, roaring fury that his aggression was
totally ineffectual, reducing Nichol and me to fits of laughter—and Higgins
to tears.
One night Nichol and I were asleep in our dorm, which happened, that
term, to be way up near the water tank in the top of the school, almost in
the attic. Mr. Parke woke us up. He told us to follow him.
 The other four or five boys in the dorm room watched us put on our
dressing gowns and follow the Head. I didn’t bother with my slippers. Mr.
Parke had already stalked out and I didn’t dare delay following him. The
others seemed to shrink back into their pillows and stare through eyes
wide with curiosity, and not a little morbid pleasure, at someone else’s
dramatic and highly unusual misfortune.
Mr. Parke was young for a headmaster, handsome, tall, and thin, his
thick, wiry salt-and-pepper hair divided by an uneven part into a shaggy
mop that bounced as he walked. He had dark eyes that—from the point of
view of a terrified little boy—seemed piercing. Mr. Parke was wearing a
dark green plaid tie, a white shirt, rumpled gray flannel trousers, and a
shabby tweed jacket. His golden Labrador retriever Bret pressed against
his legs as Mr. Parke walked and always left hair on his trousers.
What on earth could merit this abrupt hauling away in the middle of the
night? From time to time during summer term, the Head was known to
roust us all out for rollicking midnight swims, but whoever heard of two
boys being summoned at this hour? It was winter term. The pool was
frozen. And no one could have mistaken Mr. Parke’s equally frozen
“Schaeffer, Nichol, come to my study—at once” as an invitation to
anything pleasant.
We walked in near darkness, finding our way by the occasional glow
from some single low-wattage bulb far down a hallway. We followed Mr.
Parke down three flights of narrow, rickety back stairs, out to a landing,
then down the wide, grand staircase to the main hall. That was a shock.
What could this breach of protocol mean? Expelled? A firing squad?
Striding on legs twice as long as ours, Mr. Parke was far ahead of us. We
began to run after him and then remembered the “no running indoors”
rule. No point compounding the trouble we were in. We slowed to a
panicked fast trot.
We found ourselves in the Head’s study staring at the usual clutter and
trying to avoid Mr. Parke’s eyes while we stood at attention in front of his
big Victorian mahogany desk. It was piled high with papers, open books,
letters, and assorted lost and found items: a cricket bat or two, several air
rifles, pens and watches, and two swords Mr. Parke had recently
confiscated from a boy who had wanted to carry naval cutlasses to class.
 “Do you know why you two are here?” Mr. Parke asked.
“No, sir,” we replied.
“It came to my attention that you’ve been bullying Higgins. He didn’t
sneak on you. You know I have my sources?” “Yes, sir.”
Indeed we did know. There was no point trying to deny anything—ever.
We believed Parke when he said Higgins hadn’t told on us. No one ever
sneaked, and also we knew that Mr. Parke knew everything!
Adam and Eve were never so naked before a just and angry God as
Nichol and I were before Mr. Parke. We stood there praying for the floor to
swallow us. He’d used the word bullying. We knew that we stood accused
of the worst crime. We were dead men.
“My sources tell me you two have been winding him up. Is this true?”
“Yes, sir,” we whispered.
“Very well,” Parke said quietly. He looked down at a book, opened it,
and began to read.
Mr. Parke didn’t look up. Nichol and I shifted uneasily. Then, almost as
an afterthought: “Stand outside the study door while I decide your fate.”
We stepped into the darkened hall. The only illumination came from Mr.
Parke’s desk lamp. It cast a long square of dim light through the open door
and across the black and white marble floor. The rest of the hall was a
black void, something that went nicely with the feeling in the pit of my
stomach.
We stood silently facing the wall next to the study door—it was always
open—shivering in our pajamas and dressing gowns, which provided
inadequate protection from the frigid air. The floor felt like ice below my
bare feet. The stale, sour mayonnaise smell of the ubiquitous “salad
cream” (all-purpose and awful salad dressing) wafted out of the open door
of the staff dining room nearby. The hall clock chimed. We didn’t speak but
exchanged frozen, despairing glances as the doom-laden minutes dragged
past. The half hours came and went as the bell on the school clock struck
10:30, then 11:00, then midnight, then 1:00, then 1:30. Legs were numb.
Heartbeats slowed. Then he spoke.
“You may come in now.”
 Blood pumping, heart pounding, we were sure that after so long a wait
we’d each get six of the best, trousers—or in this case, pajamas—down.
“Well?” asked Parke, looking up from his book, “How did you enjoy
that?”
“Not very much, sir,” we mumbled.
Mr. Parke closed his book with a snap and sat back in his chair. He
sighed then nodded slowly before he spoke.
“Now you know how Higgins spends his days. You see, you chaps are
happy boys. When you get up in the morning, it isn’t with a sense of dread.
You’re expecting a pleasant day. When Higgins gets up, he’s expecting
unpleasantness. He knows that chaps like you think it’s funny to wind him
up, to take advantage of the fact that he loses self-control. Well, for him
that is a sort of hell. Would you make fun of him if he were a cripple,
Schaeffer?”
“No, sir.”
His words hit home. No one at the school had ever so much as
mentioned my polio and my thin atrophied left leg. This had been a great
relief to me, and the shame of my hypocrisy welled up.
“And you, Nichol? Would you fight a boy smaller than yourself, some
little chap in First Form?”
“No, sir,” Nichol said, and his face flushed. He was powerfully built and
tall for his age, a great athlete and one of our best cricket bowlers. The
idea of being labeled a big chap who picked on the little chaps was
intolerable.
“Well, here’s the thing, lads, now you know how Higgins feels not
knowing what will happen to him. You’ve been waiting for several hours
not knowing. Not much fun, eh?”
“No, sir.”
“What do you think I should do to you chaps?”
“Give us a whacking?” Nichol suggested in a shaky voice.
I cast an involuntary glance in the direction of the school safe. Yes, there
it was, the dreaded gym shoe surrounded by dust balls and nestled under
the old safe. Mr. Parke almost never actually used it, but the idea of that
shoeof-death hovered in all our brains, the final guarantee of order among
183 boys. Any teacher could get our attention by casually saying, “Would
you like to explain this to Mr. Parke?” There was ultimate justice waiting
for anyone who pushed his luck.
We expected the fateful, “Fetch the gym shoe.” But Mr. Parke was
saying something else. “You certainly deserve it, but no, I think that wait
was enough.”
Heartfelt stunned relief: “Thank you, sir!”
Mr. Parke held out a biscuit tin. We each took one of the slightly stale
cookies with trembling fingers. We ate them in silence, solemnly.
Then, brightly smiling, his usual friendly self: “I have a job for you two!
From now on I want you to provide Higgins with just as many pleasant
surprises as you’ve given him nasty ones. Mercy, gentlemen! Mercy! Take
him along. Change his life! I’m holding you two personally accountable.
You are to become his secret guardian angels. And he mustn’t know. I
don’t want to find him alone in the library again. I want to see him coming
back from the woods with the whole gang, muddy, happy, and bedraggled
as you lot!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Words are dreadful weapons, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Never bully anyone again.”
“We won’t, sir.”
Mr. Parke smiled. He held out his hand. We shook. A handshake was a
sacred bond between gentlemen, between men like our Head, men we
wanted to be like someday, and be liked by. Higgins’s life was about to
change for the better.
The wisdom and mercy of our headmaster was what I followed, not a
theory. He did not try to convert me to a better way. He was the better
way. His teaching me didn’t depend on my believing what he believed. It
depended on his setting an example for me to follow—an example that
cost him a night’s sleep. Mr. Parke spoke no grand words. He traveled with
two scared little boys a few steps down a path to greater kindness, to
empathy, to learning to walk in another’s shoes. That is the purpose driven
life.
 CHAPTER 10

There Is More in Man Than the Mere Breath of His

Body

But he who in self-love shrinks from the touch of love can

neither understand it nor summon the courage to venture it,
since it means his downfall. Such is then the passion of love;
self-love is indeed submerged but not annihilated; it is taken
captive.
Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard

We Schaeffers believed in The Book! We believed in the Bible more than

we believed in God. And our interpretation of the Bible wasn’t as benign as
Chagall’s. My parents were kind and compassionate people, but according
to their literal interpretation of our official theology, we Schaeffers were
part of that mean-spirited vengeful Reformed thread within the Christian
tradition that takes every last word of the Bible as a directive from God.
Or, even more than that, I think we believed—though we never said—that
somehow God lived in the Bible and was thus constrained and described
by it. We believed that the Bible explained God’s character through
revelation.
Luckily for us Schaeffer children and for all who came in contact with my
parents, Mom and Dad were much better people than their theology; in
fact, they were nicer than the “God of the Bible” they paid lip service to.
Had they lived consistently according to the Bible’s harsher teachings
(harsh when they’re taken literally, or as revelation, that is), they would
have become monsters serving a god about whom some very disturbing
and highly unlikely stories had been written.
As regards our official Reformed theology, we knew God was angry with
humankind and always had been. He was so angry that he wrestled with
the decision whether to kill all of us in a flood or to save just one family—
Noah’s—so that later God could sacrifice his only son to save everyone
descended from the one family he didn’t kill or send them to Hell for
eternity.
God did this because Adam and Eve, not to mention Noah’s great, great
grandchildren—that’s you and me—wouldn’t live up to God’s pre-creation
expectations. We were a big disappointment to God, and the “just
penalty” was to torture us for eternity. So say the holders to the demented
thread found in both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology, a form of
voyeuristic sadism also found in other religions, and, I’m sorry to say, in
some persons within the past and present Orthodox Church too. This
retributive sadism is based on a dreary fear of the Lord, not fear in the
sense of respect for but literally “fear of” as in scared of, and this provides
more ammunition for the atheists than they could ever dream up.
When I was two, my parents were kicked out of Champéry, a small
village high up in the Swiss Alps located in the Roman Catholic canton
(state) of Valais. They were expelled because they “led a local man to
Christ.” In other words, Mom and Dad convinced him to trust our angry
Calvinist Protestant getting-ready-to-burn-you Jesus as his “savior” rather
than to trust his angry Roman Catholic will-send-unbaptized-babies-
tobaby-Hell-bleeding-on-a-cross-forever Jesus.
The local bishop pulled strings with the cantonal authorities and had our
family’s residency permits revoked. In 1954 we moved across the valley to
another little village, called Huémoz, located in the Protestant—and
therefore more accommodating to American evangelical/fundamentalist
missionaries—canton of Vaud. The Swiss Protestants there were the
“wrong sort” Dad said, “theological liberals,” but at least they let us stay.
That’s where my parents started their ministry of L’Abri Fellowship.
Mom and Dad assumed that folding their children into the ministry,
volunteering us to share our chalet with strangers who had come to seek
the Lord, was fine with us. It wasn’t. We Schaeffer children grew up feeling
guilty if we didn’t use every opportunity to talk about Jesus to the
strangers who were invading our house.
I don’t think our experience was unique. After she read my memoir, Billy
Graham’s daughter Ruth wrote to me and said that she had enjoyed the
book. She mentioned her childhood memory of visiting our family along
with her dad when she and I were both nine. But the line that stuck with
me was when Ruth described herself (and the other Graham children) as
“sacrificial lambs.” I understood her just as she’d understood my book in a
special “inside” way.
Children of ministers, and especially those of high-powered celebrity
religious leaders, are members of a small and rather strange little club.
Faith is complicated enough even if it isn’t the family business. Loving God
while you are selling Him is close to impossible. God is no longer your
friend but a job. You are always left feeling guilty, because there is no way
to tell when you’ve done enough witnessing to the “lost.” And of course
your parents’ “call” to serve God trumps their family obligations. The
whole family is a “witness” and therefore a showcase for God. And
showcases are by nature false. Lifetimes are spent not mentioning (and
even covering up) your family’s faults as a matter of “duty to God” in the
same way that the military will try to cover up friendly fire deaths as an
extension of some sort of face-saving idea that conflates patriotism with
keeping the military’s reputation unblemished. The result is that when it
comes to families involved in “full time ministry,” inevitably you live a lie.
And even the lies are lied about because instead of being admitted they
are dressed up like some sort of state secret needed to protect God via
protecting His very fallen—and sometimes downright mad and/or corrupt
representatives—here on earth. After that anything and everything can be
justified, say from burying one’s mother in a place she’s begged not to be
buried “for the good of the Lord’s work,” to the sort of double standard we
maintained in my family wherein we covered up my father’s abuse of my
mother, or in my case the several years I spent profiting off “God’s work”
after I’d stopped believing in right wing Christianity because I liked those
right wing speaking fees and book royalties.
You have no honest conversations either. You are in the same fix that
Dawkins’s atheist missionaries will find themselves in: always waiting to
have that meaningful (and manipulative) talk with the apostates in order
to convert them. Like the wearers of Dawkins’s disingenuous A pin, what
we Schaeffers were after was not what we pretended. Conversations had
to be steered to the desired result.
In other words, our faith made us into well-intentioned two-faced liars.
We weren’t really interested in what anyone was saying, just in what
“door” their conversation might “open” through which we could enter to
convert them. If they were already converted, then we steered the
conversation to whatever subject we needed to get to in order to convince
them to adopt a theology closer to ours than to that of whatever other
evangelical/fundamentalist group they were associated with. We did this
to other believers because we just knew that our brand of Christianity was
best. Anyway, if you can’t get other believers to join your church or group,
how do you “grow”? It wasn’t good enough to believe in Jesus; you had to
do it our way.
The only reason why I still place my hope in God is that I had the good
fortune to abandon a position of leadership in the evangelical
/fundamentalist world when I was still young enough to make a new life.
Genie and I lost about two-thirds of our income, which no amount of my
secular writing (even though I’ve been moderately successful, including a
stint on Oprah) or my movie-directing career in Hollywood (albeit on
lowbudget movies) ever replaced. I gained something, though: the ability
to look in a mirror without cringing. I started to treat Genie and my
children better too. Unhappy men serving a weird, angry God make bad
husbands, especially if “serving God” provides an excuse for covering up
(and thus never dealing with) one’s faults in the name of protecting one’s
ministry. And conversations became conversations rather than evangelistic
ploys, as I discovered that other people—even though they might not be
like me and might have ideas opposite to mine—sometimes actually have
something to say, when you’re not just waiting to pounce and deliver a
“spiritual” coup de grâce.
Evangelical/fundamentalists who stick with the program are forced to
try to reconcile the irreconcilable. They either go nuts—that would be
those theologians spending lifetimes writing things like “An Evangelical
Manifesto,” talking to themselves and to the like-minded about how their
impossible (and paranoid) ideas are actually relevant—or they secretly quit
believing but don’t say so. Given that faith is also their paycheck, and given
that nothing terrifies a “professional Christian” like the prospect of having
to get a real job, they just keep going through the motions, not only
wasting their lives but perhaps also losing their souls if, that is, you buy
into their own boilerplate claim that sincere faith is needed in order to be
saved.
How does one have faith in God after surviving an evangelical/
fundamentalist background? One place to start discovering faith after the
craziness is to try and unpack the misbegotten “foundation” of what
amounts to the evangelical madness.
Evangelical/fundamentalists have bought into an idea that my mother
used to phrase as a dire warning: “If you pick and choose between verses
in the Bible, the whole thing will unravel! If it’s not all true, none of it is!”
Because picking and choosing is what thinking is, thinking becomes a
threat. Who knows where asking questions might lead? And that is why all
so-called evangelical/fundamentalist intellectual activity has such a hollow
ring to it. It begins with its “answer” and then twists itself into knots trying
to justify the conclusion.
It’s as if you were reading a novel and the printer had bound the book
wrong and put the last chapter first. All pretense of open inquiry is just
that: a pretense. There are no evangelical/fundamentalist intellectuals by
definition, because no matter how they dress their work up or spend
lifetimes hanging around universities or think tanks, feverishly working to
garner a little secular respect, it’s all playacting. The “last chapter”—God
exists, and Jesus saves and I’ll go to Heaven—is already written. Of course,
fundamentalist atheists face the same problem. Is there anything that
could change their minds?
What the evangelical/fundamentalists won’t admit is that all
fundamentalists do pick and choose, by necessity. So even their claim of
consistent belief in the Bible is two-faced. If they didn’t pick and choose by
omission if not by commission, they’d all be in jail—literally. Seen any
adulterers stoned to death in a church? Somewhat less dramatically, but
just as tellingly, if you are an evangelical/ fundamentalist churchgoer, have
you recently heard that Bible verse in Genesis about how “the sons of God
saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives”
preached on? What about Sunday school lessons on the following story
from Genesis? “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after
that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they
bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old,
men of renown”? Or have you heard pro-lifers using the example of God
killing King David’s innocent baby—conceived during David’s affair—as an
example of God’s unconditional love for innocent babies? And why isn’t
this verse on bumper stickers? “If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed
unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her: Then ye
shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone
them with stones that they may die.”
Having elevated the Bible (or at least the nicer bits that they like) to the
status of a magic book in which God is trapped and kept somewhat like a
tame pet, evangelical/fundamentalists can’t admit that the Bible has flaws
and is just plain crazy in places. Like a child idealizing an all-too-human
father, their world comes crashing down if they admit the truth. Of course,
it crashes only because their basic premise was wrong. The point never
was to worship a book but to experience God’s love.
Why Bible idolatry is a particularly evangelical/fundamentalist blind spot
is that, unlike the earlier Christianity (in the more enlightened thread
anyway), evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants have forgotten and/or
banished the idea that an oral tradition coexisted with the Bible within the
life of the Church. They also have forgotten that some of the earliest
Christians wrote that God is not to be defined or hedged in by theology,
even by descriptions about Him in the Bible.
As I noted before, Evagrius Ponticus summed up this view, exhorting us,
“Do not define the Deity: for it is only of things which are made or are
composite that there can be definitions.” In fact, a whole anti-theology
following this train of thought came to be called apophatic theology, or the
theology of not knowing, or negative theology. It speaks only about what
may not be said about God. And this way of perceiving God is found not
just in Christianity but in other religions too.
This theology takes a mystical approach related to individual
experiences of the Divine beyond ordinary perception. It teaches that the
Divine is ineffable, something that can be recognized only when it is felt,
then remembered. And therefore all descriptions of this sense will be false,
because by definition the experience of God eludes description.
Apophatic descriptions of God acknowledge (1) that neither the
existence of God nor nonexistence, as we understand these words in the
material world, applies to God, (2) that God is divinely simple and that one
should never claim God is “one” or “three” or any “type” of being, (3) that
we can’t say that God is “wise,” because that implies knowledge of what
wisdom is on a divine scale, and (4) that to say that God is “good” also
limits God to what that word means in the context of human behavior.
Some of the earliest Church Fathers believed that portions of scripture
pointed to this apophatic approach. God is said to reveal Himself in a “still
small voice.” Paul speaks of an “unknown God.” Tertullian said, “That
which is infinite is known only to itself.” St. Cyril of Jerusalem says, “For we
may not explain what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact
knowledge concerning Him.” Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa,
John Chrysostom, and Basil the Great all spoke of God in apophatic terms.
And of course the Hindu scriptures also reflect an apophatic view, as do
some traditions within Islam.
This might be called the humble thread that runs through many religions
parallel to the deadly we-know-it-all thread of theological hubris. And yes,
this is very different from the idea of the “revelation of God’s character”
through an “inspired” scripture, where God, as if writing a memoir dictated
to scribes, “reveals” Himself. The apophatic thread has existed in Christian
and Jewish thinking side-by-side with the literal and fundamentalist
thread. The point isn’t to say which is correct (though I have my druthers!)
but to note that even people who want to stick by original or ancient ways
of Jewish and/or Christian beliefs have choices.
One reason why the evangelical/fundamentalists are so defensive about
the Bible is that they know all too well that the Bible can be used to say
anything once you begin using it to try to define the Deity as revealed
therein. They know this because of the thousands of splits in their
denominations that shatter again and again into ever-smaller fragments.
They know this because they have grown up hearing the Bible used to
justify as “God’s will” things that are wrong, crazy or even evil in the
personal context of believers using the Bible to justify their actions. “But
the Bible says that we need to put the Lord first, and what could be a
greater witness to future generations than this theme park and a visit to
Ruth and Billy’s grave? Just think how many will be saved . . . ” or, “But the
Bible says women are to submit to men. That is why Daddy has to hit
Mommy sometimes.”
Nearly all evangelical groups have split at one time or another because
one person decided he or she had a better, truer interpretation of some
Bible passage regarding God’s revelation of Himself through the Bible.
These fights are often incredibly petty. For instance, my parents split from
one group over the burning issue of the timing of the return of Christ.
Would Jesus snatch away all believers in the Rapture before or after the
“Tribulation?” I can’t remember which side they were on, because this
happened in my early childhood. But I know the conflict left bitter scars.
Sometimes the differences between evangelical/fundamentalists are
less of a joke. Not so very long ago, one set of American preachers used
the proslavery verses in the Bible to uphold slavery. Another group used
the verses on love and compassion to fight slavery. They were reading the
same Bible. They all believed that their Bible, including what it said about
slavery, was their sole means to understand God. Many had been to the
same seminaries. And there is no reason to believe that both sets of
preachers weren’t intelligent and sincere. In other words, religion
embodies the paradox of human existence: Good and evil duke it out in
the arena of religion too, just as they do in the rest of life, and the Bible is
often nothing but the handy pretext.
Recognizing that paradox is the way things are is about more than
theological conflicts. Science (grudgingly) embraces paradox too. Take, for
example, what seems to be the contradiction between Einstein’s proven
Theory of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The first theory
holds that if you know the initial conditions of a physical system with
absolute certainty, then you can know the future outcome of the system
you are modeling. Theoretically, then, everything in the universe is as
predictable as the speed of light—if you have enough information. The
second theory (Quantum Mechanics) says that you can never know the
initial conditions exactly and also that you can’t know what will happen in
the future of any physical system. You can only know, to a greater or lesser
extent, the probability of something happening because, for instance,
some particles can be in two places at once. Quantum Mechanics might be
described as the apophatic science of uncertainty.
Although this apophatic paradox is recognized in science, it nevertheless
makes physicists nervous in the same way that apophatic theology makes
some Christians nervous. “If we can’t know,” they all seem to say, “then
how can we KNOW?!” I picture Charlie Brown screaming “Arrrrg!” yet
again, as Lucy snatches away the football and he falls on his back. Another
placekick foiled! Another certainty undone!
There is a lot work going on to try to marry the theories of General
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in some grand unified theory. But for
now, either we don’t know enough to find one “theory of everything,” or
such a theory can’t ever be found. Maybe randomness and predictability
exist side by side in a way our minds can’t reconcile without suffering the
fate of Homer Simpson when Bart triumphantly exclaimed, “Cool, I broke
his brain!”
But if we embrace paradox as the actual way of life and embrace the
paradox of apophatic theology as the essence of faith in God, then hope in
God comes into focus. Maybe we can even learn, grow, change our minds,
and evolve without worrying about everything unraveling. Maybe the
point is that if we can stop relying on our trust in a system to hold that
“ball” of certainty steady and just stop trying so hard, we will be more
likely to succeed in making our peace with paradox.
Embracing paradox—in other words, admitting the truth of our limits—is
not good enough for many people, though, especially for pastors, religious
leaders, and/or the New Atheists earning a living by selling certainty. They
feed a public who crave lifetime warranties. Churches, seminaries,
Dawkins’s website, and other bastions of fundamentalism will not keep the
pay checks coming if you stand up and say, “I could be, and, given the
odds, probably am, wrong,” let alone “I can only know what I don’t know!”
The public that evangelical/fundamentalist religion and the New
Atheists cater to want to believe that there really are knives that will never
need sharpening! They want that “lifetime warranty,” never mind that
deep down they know that there is nothing that can hold an edge without
sharpening, no matter what the theological or philosophical or scientific
equivalent of the “amazing knife set offer” for “just three easy payments of
only $19.95” claims. But as Darwin discovered, claims of absolute truth,
without a nod to inconsistency, are made to be abandoned.
“There is more in man than the mere breath of his body,” Darwin said.
Later, he renounced that mystical spiritual idea after he lost his religious
faith. He abandoned faith in God after the death of his beloved daughter,
and because he had come to distrust a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Like many Victorians, he came to distrust the Bible as a book that
condoned “the dreaded doctrine of eternal Hell,” as he put it.
In History, Humanity and Evolution (a collection of essays he edited in
1989), James R. Moore writes,
The circumstances under which Darwin came at last to
reject Christianity were full of pain. . . . Intellectual
considerations weighed heavily with him, but his decisive
objection was moral. Rewards and penalties took place in
the present life, not another. The loss of [his daughter]
Annie in 1851 was the point of no return. . . . The perfect
child, a vengeful God Christianity broke on the back of a
conundrum.
The reason why Darwin believed that his theory of evolution negated
Christian belief also had a lot to do with the Anglican so-called natural
theology (that I mentioned in Chapter 6). In Natural Theology Evidences of
the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, William Paley wrote,
“Does one man in a million know how oval frames are turned? Ignorance
of this kind exalts our opinion of the unseen and unknown artist’s skill, if
he be unseen and unknown, but raises no doubt in our minds of the
existence and agency of such an artist.” Darwin came up with an
alternative explanation even while at first drawing on the same tradition—
when he still had some idea of a design—to explain his new biology of
adaptation by natural selection.
Although he lost faith in Christian doctrine per se, Darwin was
nevertheless a theist at the time he wrote On the Origin of Species,
evincing a belief in some sort of design visible in creation. Eventually he
came to doubt design and purpose altogether and wound up as an
agnostic. Given the choices Darwin was presented with, a literalistic, angry,
vengeful, religion on the one hand and a flawed design theory or faith in
reason on the other, he made the only sane choice. But I think there is a
better alternative: Take the sum total of human experience, discount it by
a wide margin because we know we’ll never know, take the one
overarching lesson from reality—humility—to heart, and move forward
together.
I believe Darwin was right: We are animals. I believe Jesus was right: We
are animals plus. “Man does not live by bread alone.”
Where it seems to me that Darwin was mistaken was in thinking he had
to make a choice between these two ways of seeing what we humans are
and, more importantly, can become if we choose to. I think that,
unfortunately, Darwin was looking at Christian teaching only in the past
tense and as “history,” rather than as a moral lesson about moral
evolution that is timeless.
The best way to understand Darwin and Jesus, I believe, is to look to the
example Jesus set in the context of the reality of evolution. Jesus
demonstrated by example that selflessness is the door to redemption.
Darwin gave us the tools to understand that existence is not static,
predestined, or fixed. Can we take Darwin’s liberating truth and Jesus’s
selfless example and choose to shape our next step of moral evolution
accordingly? I hope so.
If we are to survive as a species, it will take faith in evolution, and faith
in our ability to change and adapt, and a willingness to sacrifice for each
other to overcome the destruction we have wrought on our planet and
against one another. If religion is to help rather than hinder that process,
then it must grasp the apophatic tradition available within itself and reject
the false and cruel “certainties” that coexist with it.
The point is not to argue over how we got here but to agree on a better
vision of where we want to evolve to now, not just physically but also
ethically. That is a project that we believers, and we agnostics and we
atheists, can and should agree on. We don’t have to “fit” our ideas about
how we perceive things together in order to work together. We can be the
same “particle” but exist in two places at once.
St. Maximos’s teaching about the Church and the Eucharist expresses
the idea of accepting paradox that I’m trying to get at. Maximos lived in
the sixth and seventh centuries and was a monk, a theologian, and a
scholar. Maximos says that “lovers of God” are granted to see with inner
eyes “the Word and God Himself.” Maximos might be describing many an
African American church service, or the Orthodox liturgy, or even a
meeting of young mothers at a breast-feeding group. Maximos teaches
that the soul is granted to “see the Word,” who leads it to the spiritual
understanding that is “immaterial, simple, immutable, divine, free of all
form and shape.” In other words, authentic spiritual apophatic experience
is the exact opposite of intellectually organized theology, and of “fact” and
“history.” And biblical “revelation”—just as is mother love—isn’t about
books on the subject but is expressed in those moments of tenderness that
transcend description and are seen with inner eyes. (That is one reason
that many of the Fathers of the early monastic tradition put forth the idea
that true theology is prayer, rather than intellectual ideas.)
Through “the spiritual kiss,” Maximos says, the soul comes to the Word
of God, because it gathers to itself the words of salvation. The declaration
in the Liturgy “One is holy, one is Lord,” chanted by all the people,
represents the gathering beyond understanding.
What are examples of seeing with our inner eyes? To me it’s losing
myself within an African American congregation where all are singing as
one in the Spirit. It’s found in the instant recognition between young
mothers as they pass each other holding their children, when each mother
is so filled with love for her child that both mothers instantly empathize
with the other. It’s the “Ranger Creed” shouted by young Rangers at their
graduation ceremony after the month-long “indoctrination” training as
these young warriors prepare to become members of the fabled 75th
Ranger Regiment, ready to lay down their lives for our country. In one
mighty voice they shout their creed, one line of which is “I will never leave
a fallen comrade!”
According to Maximos, the distribution of the sacrament is participation
in the divine life, “and in this way men and women also may be called gods
by grace.” The call by the priest as he summons believers to partake of
communion, “With fear of God, faith and love draw near,” indicates that
salvation is a journey dependent not on “right thinking” but on love, which
is what the fear of the God, who cannot be described, is. The Rangers do
not say that they will rescue only a fallen comrade who has the right ideas,
whose skin is the right color, whom they personally like, or who goes to
their church. The promise of faithfulness is unconditional, based only on
faith and love.
As the congregants in African American churches clap, sing, or solemnly
process, or as new Rangers put on their hard-won tan berets for the first
time at their graduation ceremony, or as mothers push a stroller through
the park and wave to other mothers, we are liturgy. We are “faith and love
drawing near.” We are all vowing to “fight on . . . though I be the lone
survivor,” along with those Rangers. We have love, as Maximos says, and
love is God’s gift. We see this not with our eyes but with inner eyes. It is
revealed to us not in a book, but through our experience. It is the
revelation we have been waiting for and evolving toward. It is the reason
we are here. It is our destiny. It is our purpose. It is our hope. That’s my
hope, anyway.
The God of love is in that rolling thunder pouring from a Hammond B-3
electric organ, providing the heart-stopping link that holds together so
much luminous black gospel music. The God of love is in the perfume of
clouds of incense at the Orthodox midnight Easter service as we shout
“Christ is risen!” The God of love is in those first imperishable notes on
Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue. The God of love is in the tender way Lucy
lays her cheek on mine and we cling to each other for dear life as this
speck of a spaceship we call Earth hurtles into the vast unknown.
A certain sort of note, musical phrase, facial expression, or whiff of
perfume can convey emotion and insight even if that feeling can’t be
described. Is it any less real or true because it is seen only with our inner
eyes?
Why does Suk’s Serenade for Strings evoke such pangs of loving tragedy?
Why did it evoke that feeling in me before I read that the music was
composed as a tribute to Suk’s beloved wife Otilka, who died so young?
How did I know what the music meant before I “knew”? Why did it make
me think of Genie and of my love for her? Why did it make me feel
mournful even before I read Suk’s biography? Why did the sound of those
young voices shouting the Ranger Creed bring tears of gratitude to my
eyes?
Yes, I know, there are studies on music and emotion, brain waves and
responses. For instance, using magnetic resonance technology, researchers
at Dartmouth College mapped the area of the brain that processes
melodies; it is known as the rostromedial prefrontal cortex. But those
studies probe the how, not the why, of the deep satisfaction we have
when experiencing emotional empathy in nonverbal or even preverbal
communication with a composer through his or her music. The scientists
tell us how brains work, but not what we are when we become one with
Mahalia Jackson as she lifts up her gorgeous voice and sings “Every Time I
Feel the Spirit.”
The smell of incense, the sound of Byzantine chant in Greek—in a
language I don’t speak—the glitter of an old icon in a darkened church, the
voices of a gospel choir, the heartfelt cry of young warriors “speak” to me
in nonverbal, nonintellectual ways. At those moments I’m not visiting a
black church as a white man, I’m not visiting Fort Benning and the Rangers,
nor am I trying to figure out what the Greek chant “means.” I am not doing
anything at all. I am being human. And I believe I am experiencing God.
Lucy will not remember my bonding with her in terms of “On
Wednesday, May 3, 2009, at 4:23 P.M., my grandfather put a blanket on
the kitchen table, and while I lay there, he rubbed my hands and feet and
made me smile and I felt dreamy, happy, and secure and Suk was playing
in the background.” Nonetheless Lucy’s memories will be retained in some
part of her brain that makes her feel closer to me than to strangers.
The liturgical ritual of bonding with her grandfather will not be lost.
Memory is not shaped by a series of born-again moments, let alone correct
intellectual beliefs. Rather, it’s built on thousands of small, repeated steps
in a seamless journey to infinity. If you want to understand the power of
repeated actions—the learning curve implied by the doing of liturgy, of
doing and being, rather than merely saying and thinking—then watch (or
watch again) the film Groundhog Day. It’s one of the most powerful
statements of what spirituality is.
A stranger coming into an unfamiliar church sees only what is happening
that day: The old priest shuffles along, maybe a few people straggle in, a
sketchy choir feebly sings. The person who grew up in that tradition and
that community, repeating the process again and again (à la Bill Murray in
Groundhog Day), “sees” and “hears” with inner eyes and ears. He or she
sees every service he or she attended, his or her grandfather’s funeral, the
many midnight services, the friends no longer present, the sons and
daughters who were blessed by pastor and people before they left for war,
and who were mourned when they did not return. That liturgy is not just
one particular Sunday service to that person, and it is not happening in one
time or place. Rather, it’s a lifetime made sacred and remembered as it is
lived in the eternal present.
Love doesn’t depend on remembering facts. I can still love my mother
and be loved by her, even if both of us would fail a written test with
questions such as “When was the first time you understood a story you
were reading about love?” or “Explain the principal psychological
attributes of maternal love.” The connections of love can be rekindled too.
Sometimes angels visit one last time.
On a bright morning in the fall of 2007, Mrs. Parke walked into Genie’s
and my sunroom. The Parkes had arrived the evening before for their visit
to Genie and me—also their first visit to America.
In her crisp, upper-crust British accent—its tone of authority
undiminished—Mrs. Parke pronounced the view of our lawn, the marsh
with its dense carpet of shimmering marsh grasses, and the swiftly flowing
Merrimack River “magnificent.” This wasn’t just a polite guest-to-host
comment. It was also a “Well done!” offered to one of Mrs. Parke’s old
boys for succeeding well enough—in spite of many dire predictions—to
own a house at all, let alone one with a view.
In October, daylight fades early north of Boston. By the time Mr. and
Mrs. Parke got to my house the evening before, it was already dark. The
morning dawned clear. The maples outside the kitchen windows were at
their peak of autumn color, a vivid, fiery red. The river sparkled. The sky
was gold on the horizon, changing to a dark cobalt blue above.
Mrs. Parke was ensconced among the hibiscus, two rosemary bushes,
and the bay tree in our sunroom. She was drinking the tea I’d prepared. I
was fervently hoping that years of American shortcuts with tea wouldn’t
betray me. Had I correctly remembered the steps she taught us when I was
on kitchen duty? “Warm the pot, pour out the warming water, add the tea,
pour in the boiling water, let it steep. That is how it’s done!”
That first morning of her visit, the eighty-year-old Mrs. Parke was
perched on the edge of her chair looking like some fierce little bird, bright
brown eyes shining, her thick steel gray hair swept back into the tight bun
that I remembered so well crowning her diminutive wiry figure. Maybe it
was the disconcertingly steady way Mrs. Parke met my glance, but
diminutive or not, over forty years later, she still exuded the no-nonsense,
cast-iron will that I so clearly remembered. I felt a twinge of the old awe.
Eunice—“Mrs. Parke” to me, no matter how old I’ve grown or how many
times she has told me to call her Eunice—was as pretty as ever. If elves had
wives that got older but never faded, Mrs. Parke looked the way I imagine
they would look. She also still seemed restless, as if she didn’t like to sit in
one place too long. And she still didn’t hesitate to make slightly judgmental
observations: “There really is no need to fuss so! One sort of marmalade
would have done splendidly!” She had kept her ascetic habits too.
The first morning of the visit when Mrs. Parke took her shower, I noticed
that it lasted under two minutes. It seemed to me that she emerged from
the bathroom just seconds after I heard the water turn off, dressed and
ready for the day. She strode into the kitchen wearing a tweed skirt, a
white blouse, and a gray cardigan that could have been the same outfit I
last saw, through tears, when I was saying goodbye to her (I was thirteen)
at the end of my last day at her school. I apologized for still being in my
pajamas. “Nonsense, I used to bathe you!” Mrs. Parke answered.
So she had, while presiding over our Wednesday and Saturday bath-
night ritual. She kept order while we—the thirty or so boys assigned to the
big middle-floor bathroom—hopped in and out of the four ancient, cast-
iron claw-foot tubs that sat in a row on the cracked linoleum. We, the
shivering throng, shared the lukewarm two-inch-deep murky water. It was
changed only after three of us had bathed, one after the other. Being first
to bathe was coveted. We didn’t mind the filth left by others, but we did
dread how fast the water went from tepid to cold. Complaints (“It’s gone
cold, Mrs. Parke!”) were swiftly countered. (“Hot water costs money!”)
In the spring of 2007 I’d visited the Parkes in England. That’s when I
reconnected with them. There had been a note or two, and I’d kept track
of the Parkes through friends. All along I thought that sooner or later I’d
run into them again. Then it hit me: I wasn’t going to just “run into them.” I
booked a flight to London. I didn’t tell the Parkes that the only reason I was
coming to England was that I wanted to see them and make sure I had a
chance to thank them. I said that I’d be “in the area.” Might I “drop by”?
They invited me to stay. For three days we took walks accompanied by
their rescued greyhound “Lady,” made a memorable Sunday visit to their
small Anglican church overlooking the East Sussex downs, and spent hours
sitting together in their cozy living room in the cottage they’d retired to.
Mrs. Parke told me a tellingly funny story about how, when my father
went to Great Walstead to look it over before I was sent there, the only
question he asked the Parkes was on their “view of Karl Barth.” Barth was
a liberal Swiss Protestant Reformed theologian with whom my dad was
obsessed. To Dad he represented everything terrible about the “direction
of liberalism.” (Barth had embraced a non-literal view of the Bible.) So
there Dad was, about to drop off a practically illiterate ten-year-old son at
a real school at last—a son that he’d managed to somehow not bother
with educating because he’d been so busy with the “Lord’s work”—and all
Dad was interested in was the headmaster’s theological correctness and
his view of Barth!
“I really couldn’t quite believe it,” Mrs. Parke said and began to laugh.
“He asked nothing about the teachers, just asked that odd question, and I
had the distinct feeling that had I said I liked Barth who, by the way, I
hadn’t the foggiest idea about—he’d have been on the next train to
London and we’d never have seen you at the school. At the time I
remember thinking that his son had rather more urgent concerns. Given
the fact that you could barely write your name, I didn’t think it likely that
you’d be reading much Barth!”
In the evenings we watched Mrs. Parke’s favorite DVDs of Mozart
operas. I’d forgotten how much she knew about, and loved, Mozart.
Before I left I invited them to visit us in the States. To my surprise they
accepted.
Almost fifty years before I served Mrs. Parke breakfast in my sunroom,
as a new boy at GW, my problem was simple: How to act normal in
boarding school? It would have to be an act, because normal boys didn’t
think about being normal. They didn’t think about anything. They just
were. I just wasn’t.
 Other boys were boys. I was a country of one. They were waiting for the
next holiday and making plans about what to do on Saturday afternoon. I
was waiting for the return of Christ and making plans about surviving the
Last Judgment. They could all read well and knew Latin. I sounded out
words and couldn’t spell anything.
I didn’t know that Mrs. Parke would conspire with God (and opera) to
save me. She put me in three operas and, during my last term, gave me the
role of the evil Count in The Marriage of Figaro. She made me a star! She
made me count! Because of her vote of confidence, I decided that maybe I
could learn to read better, maybe even do math. Who knew, perhaps I
could even become like the other chaps.
We sat watching a fabulous production of Figaro that had been recorded
in Covent Garden at the Royal Opera House the year before “the best
ever,” Mrs. Parke declared it. Almost half a century after I had unsteadily
warbled my lines in the school dining room, while marching around the
tiny stage dressed in the costume designed and sewn by Matron and her
assistants, Mrs. Parke reached out and took my hand and said, “You were
really quite good in that production.”
“Thank you for giving me a chance,” I said.
She must have known what I really meant, because she gave my hand an
extra tight squeeze and answered, “Don’t worry, you’ve done splendidly.”
You can go home again.

I have no argument, vocabulary, or intellectual system with which to prove

that love exists. I don’t need an argument. Mrs. Parke saw me with inner
eyes, and even decades later she could answer my thoughts. My atheist
friends will win every argument with me about how they believe that love
is just one more chemical reaction taking place in the brain and how
researchers have found that oxytocin is involved in the bonding of male
and the female prairie voles. Like humans, voles form bonds with each
other that last. End of argument; we, like the voles, are nothing! Fine! But
why was one boy with a lousy voice, to whom it took twice as long as the
other boys to teach anything, given a chance to sing?
 If love is “just a chemical,” so is whatever motivates the researchers who
declared this a fact. Does that invalidate the results of their research? I
don’t think so. Rather, it puts their science in perspective. Paradoxes
should not be resolved but celebrated. Love will still be something real
when I am dust and—God willing—Lucy is ninety-four years old, forgetting
everything she knew, including that I existed. Even if she doesn’t
remember me, she will be a different person because I loved her.
I will love the Parkes when they are gone. They may never meet Lucy,
but each book I read her aloud is my tribute to them. This book is a tribute
to them too, as are the novels by this grown-up boy who could barely read
so he was taught to sing instead. And once he did that, he gained the
confidence to learn other skills that, years later, led “the worst speller this
school has ever seen, my lad” to become a writer.
Lucy’s children may never know the Parkes’ names. But if my great,
great grandchildren remember what was passed down to my children by
me, and then on to them, they will live in homes where people are given
second chances for reasons that can’t be explained.
 CHAPTER 11

That “Truth Button” Should Humble Everyone

So also with the Paradox in its relation to the Reason, only

that the passion in this case has another name; or rather, we
must seek to find a name for it.
Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard

Our thirty-eighth anniversary was golden. We were in New York City. Genie
and I took the M-4 bus to the Cloisters and then ended our day in Central
Park watching Shakespeare’s Cymbeline performed in the open air. The
Cloisters is an extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s perched
at the top end of Manhattan, literally at the top of the island (if north is
“up” and south is “down”). The Cloisters sits on a high, rocky promontory
and overlooks the Hudson River. The museum was built from various bits
and pieces of medieval monasteries and churches that were carted back to
America from all over Europe, rebuilt, and then filled with art.
Genie and I visited our favorites: the garden with “our” four quince trees
surrounded by beautifully kept little plots of herbs; “our” fifteenth-century
boxwood “Standing Virgin and Child” carved by Gerheart von Leiden, and
Robert Campin’s fifteenth-century Annunciation triptych, where Joseph sits
at his workbench making mousetraps. These art objects are ours because
we’ve been going to the Cloisters for years. That has been possible
because there has been a continuity to our relationship. That continuity
was not planned. It isn’t reasonable. It’s an unreasonable paradoxical
mistake.
 If being rational is the key to success and to truth, then somehow Genie
and I missed the lesson. Our marriage is one of those sorts of “mistakes”
that Robert Altman said he depended on to make good movies.
Only a few weeks after Genie got to L’Abri—she was traveling in Europe
as a high school graduation gift from her parents in 1969—we were
practically living together. Yes, I know, that’s strange considering that the
context of our fornication was an evangelical /fundamentalist mission, but
this was “the sixties,” and the place was overrun with long-haired
backpackers. Besides, in spite of their theology, my parents were not
prudes, and on top of that they seemed to have forgotten I existed.
Because all the dorms at L’Abri were full, Genie was staying in a rented
room half a mile down the road in the village. When Genie walked to our
chalet, if it had been snowing in the night, she sometimes passed the
words “I Love Genie” stomped out in giant letters on the fresh snow. I
made these passionate hillside billboards by moonlight during my walks
home, after spending most of the night in Genie’s room.
All those talks by Mom about ovaries and the seed and the egg did no
good. The only part I’d retained was the part about how good sex is. Mom
was right about that. I got Genie pregnant, but not for a while, not until
almost a year later.
Early in 1970 I was in New York having my first art show (at the now
closed Frisch gallery). Genie attended the opening. Then she called a friend
and asked her to sneak into her parent’s bedroom back in San Mateo and
get her passport and send it to New York. You see, Genie had gone home
at last, after having disobeyed her parents by staying in Europe with me for
the better part of a year, instead of going to college. (Her original trip was
supposed to last only a few weeks. Genie had stopped at L’Abri by chance
when her older sister Pam, who was traveling with her, wanted to visit a
friend.) Then Genie had gone home, briefly, and then flown to New York to
visit me only ten days later. She decided—after I begged her to never leave
me again—that she’d made a mistake going home at all and would stay
with me. Ten days later, and against the wishes of her parents, Genie,
aided and abetted by my parents, got aboard the Leonardo Da Vinci of the
Italia Line.
 We sailed out of New York harbor after my show’s opening and headed
back to Europe. My parents accommodated Genie because they liked her.
Of course, they also helped her because she’d become born-again. She was
now “saved” and no longer like her “heathen” Roman Catholic parents,
who, from our evangelical/fundamentalist point of view, weren’t “real
Christians.”
Thus Mom and Dad helped eighteen-year-old Genie disobey her parents,
skip college, and break her parents’ hearts—all because my parents didn’t
approve of Catholics, and Genie was now “one of us.” So my parents’
loyalty to Genie as a “fellow believer” trumped whatever common sense
they had, much less courtesy to her parents, who might tempt Genie away
from her newfound faith. Best of all—in the juicy details department—my
dad (bless him!) used his first royalty check from his first bestselling
evangelical book Escape from Reason to pay for Genie’s ticket!
During the voyage Genie discovered her period was late. So actually I
must have gotten her pregnant about a month before in Europe. All
mistakes. All bad. All things I do not want my children or grandchildren to
do—ever! And nuts too, given that my parents’ rationale for helping Genie
more or less elope with their seventeen-year-old (!) son was a theological
“reason” that was in direct moral conflict with their theological beliefs
about sex before marriage.
And yet, this happy combination of fornication, nutty theology, teenage
lust, a stolen passport, and art shows ended up just the way these things
are supposed to not to end up: with a couple in their fifties, in love and
wandering around New York some thirty-nine years later with their third
grandchild waiting back at home, and with Genie and me long since
reconciled with her sweet and forgiving parents. Go figure.
If my children did what we did to Genie’s parents, I’d go ballistic. I think
we were wrong. That said, what would I change about our sexual activities,
my parents’ bizarre complicity, Genie lying to her mother and father, and
an unplanned pregnancy at the worse time imaginable?
Nothing!
Any other egg in Genie’s ovary and any other sperm carelessly
contributed by me would not have become Jessica. The world would be
unthinkable without my daughter in it. And the world would be
unthinkable without her children, Amanda and Benjamin, in it. And the
world would be empty and gray without my sons Francis and John. And the
world would be poorer if I hadn’t known Jessica’s husband Dani
Stromback, a kind and talented composer, great father, and terrific
musician whose inspired piano compositions I am enjoying on his latest CD
(For Sleepless Nights) at this moment as I write. And then there are Lucy
and her mother Becky, who knocks on my office door every morning and
carries her baby to me in what amounts to a second sunrise. Change
anything—the sex, the lies, the crazy theology, the timing, the betrayal of
two sets of parents, the betrayal of one set of parents by another set of
parents, anything—and my life evaporates.
How can this paradoxical, contradictory, amoral way of looking at life be
okay? From the evangelical/fundamentalist point of view, what Genie and I
did was sinful. From the rationalistic point of view of modern psychology,
science, or just your average high school councilor, what we did was
wrong. What advice do you think Planned Parenthood would have given
us?
Science? Reason? Planning? Rationality? Moral behavior? Smart
behavior? Good choices? No. Grace, mystery, love, and (above all)
embracing paradox are what count. And that paradox, that truth button,
that grace, should humble everyone who thinks she or he has correct ideas
about the way things should be, must be, ought to be, have to be—either
“according to the latest scientific studies” or according to “what the Bible
says.” With all due respect to Dawkins, mystery trumps everything. With
all due respect to the theologians, every true story begins with the words
“In spite of what I thought at the time. . . . ”
Why do I love Genie now? Because I do.
Of course, I can come up with “reasons” for our love after having been
together for almost forty years. She’s beautiful, she makes sex sweet, she’s
familiar, she’s reassuring and kind, generous, forgiving, a force to be
reckoned with when stirred to anger, the mother of our children, the
grandmother of our grandchildren, my best friend, smart, well read, and
humble and we both love the same art. Did I know any of that when I had
sex with her when we were teens? Of course not. She wasn’t that person
then, either. I don’t know who she was. I don’t even know who that young
man was who got her pregnant.
And that is the way real life is. And that is how we “decide” all the
important questions in our lives: We never know anything. Life happens.
We learn as we experience living and learn from living. My son Francis was
headed into a foreign policy career after a stellar performance at the
Georgetown School of Foreign Service. He took a temporary job at his old
high school. One year slipped into the next. Francis didn’t know it at the
time, but he’d just stumbled into his beloved vocation as a teacher. He’s a
great teacher, now in his twelfth year at that school, and can’t imagine
another life. A chance temporary job led to a wonderful and purpose-filled
career.
It’s only regarding unimportant stuff, such as buying major appliances,
that we can go online and find out the “facts.” When it comes to the
person we spend our lives with, or having babies, or careers we end up
killing ourselves for, or life-altering snap judgments like volunteering for
military service, let alone the friends we meet and make and keep, we
shoot the rapids, take our chances, and improvise. We learn as we do, not
as we think about doing.
And that is how faith in God is too. Sure, we who believe (or try to) have
“reasons,” mostly made up after the fact, like my reasons for falling in love
that I’ve discovered in hindsight. But the truth is that Genie was there, I
was there, and it happened. The truth is also that we either experience
God or we don’t. And just as in a marriage, once we have experienced God,
we either choose to work to maintain that relationship or let it fade. In
that sense we can choose to believe, just as on days when I’d rather be
sleeping with another woman, I choose to stay married.
What does this prove? Nothing, except that people who tell you that
you must choose between rational intellectual systems and faith in God
are lying.
Visiting the Cloisters makes a point about the way things are, as opposed
to all our ideas about the way they should be. It makes a point about
choosing to believe once we have experienced God based on the sort of
life we want and the sort of world we want to create for ourselves and
others.
 Robert Campin’s painting is displayed in a room decorated with pieces of
furniture and pottery reminiscent of the Flemish rooms in which Campin
placed Mary, the angel, and Joseph. Joseph’s shop shutters are in the up
position in Campin’s painting, and if you look closely, you can see the rust
marks below the nails from all the many years they’ve been exposed to the
weather on the town square of the oddly Flemish Nazareth. Mary receives
word from the angel. The ubiquitous lily stirs in the breeze as the Holy
Spirit wafts into the room, while the painting’s patrons kneel outside,
anticipating their eternal reward for having had the good sense to pay
Campin for this fine triple-panel devotional work.
The Hudson flows far below the museum’s ramparts and shimmers as
seen through the leaded windows set in the thick stone walls. Across the
wide river there is nothing visible but trees. The view is unspoiled, almost
as the Native Americans would have seen it before the Dutch (and then
the British) colonists killed them. There is no hint that you are in a huge
city.
Nelson Rockefeller bought the land visible from the Cloisters on the
opposite bank. Thus visitors can lose themselves in another time and
place, with no reminders of the modern world. The only fly in the ointment
is one Roman Catholic convent that would not sell to Rockefeller.
(Rockefeller wanted to have it pulled down.) The Catholics held out, so the
pristine view is very slightly adulterated by the sight of this one neo-
Victorian building about a mile away.
Faith in God, hope of an afterlife, belief in a balancing of the books of
justice—the scent of Heaven is thick and sweet in the Cloisters, exuded
from the spirit of monasticism and prayer and of the contemplative art on
display. The monks who walked on these bits and pieces of transplanted
stone, past these columns, and under these arches would be pleased. Their
spirit, disjointed and reassembled in the Cloisters as it may be, lives.
Score one for the Middle Ages!
Science may have proved the monks’ fondest beliefs about the cosmos
to be wrong, but the monks win aesthetically, hands down. Children
behave well in the Cloisters. People talk quietly. The Met’s handpicked
scholars who lead tours of incredible quality, especially when hosting
school groups, can’t avoid giving a lesson about Christianity and Judaism in
order to explain the art. They become the long-dead monks’ evangelistic
accomplices because of the power of the worldview pervading every inch
of the space, from Campin’s painting to the Unicorn tapestries (the
Unicorn represents Christ) to the tombs where each carved object has a
symbolic spiritual meaning. Turning the sacred architecture and art into
mere artifacts has not stripped them of the ghosts of faith.
A New Atheist who believes in a linear progress of history from lesser to
greater enlightenment has a lot of explaining to do in the Cloisters. Why is
the “logical” architecture of so many American high schools able to do no
more than produce buildings that look and feel like prisons? Why did these
monks, with all their “dumb” ideas, make buildings wherein one feels
peaceful? Clean water, street lights, and MRIs are wonderful, but not all
movement has been in a forward direction. Present most people with the
courtyards at the Cloisters, then show them a Bauhaus-derived,
midtwentieth-century “logical” apartment labyrinth in London, New York,
or Berlin, and ask them where they feel more comfortable. Standing under
the Cloisters’ arches is a good place to argue that some things were done
better in the religion-steeped past.
That evening in Central Park, Genie and I joined a happy crowd of about
three hundred people, including many delighted children, sitting or
standing or lying on lawns and rock outcrop-pings or propped against tree
trunks. We were watching that outstanding performance of Cymbeline that
we had stumbled on. The actors had to shout their lines to be heard by the
widely scattered throng, but they managed to give subtle performances
nonetheless, reflecting the depth of talent available in New York and the
skill of Stephen Burdman, the New York Classical Theatre’s director and his
remarkable talent for staging outdoor productions. For the last half-hour of
the play, fireflies twinkled and flitted in the twilight. Children were chasing
them on the edges of the crowd. Woody Allen in his most romantic
Manhattan-isHeaven mood could not have portrayed the park as more
iconic.
Genie’s face lights up with childlike expectation whenever she sees
fireflies. To her they are more than luminous little insects; they spark
luminous memories of her childhood visits to a beloved grandmother in
Arkansas. She also loves Central Park, and she’ll walk there on any pretext.
Genie loves Shakespeare’s comedies too. It was the best anniversary we’ve
ever had.
Genie never looked lovelier than she did watching that play. Of course,
she looks different from the eighteen-year-old I first met. I’ve tired her out,
and some wrinkles (and lots of sweet laugh lines) are there to prove it. But
Genie is my best friend, and she loves fireflies. She still chases them in our
garden. She is funny too. I’m not saying that Genie has removed death’s
sting, but Genie has made me less afraid of getting old.
Cliché or not, she’s shown me that some things do get better with time
— love, for one thing. That’s because these days we really know each
other. So our love is founded on the many times we’ve forgiven each other
or, to be honest, the few times I’ve forgiven Genie’s rare stumbles and the
many, many, many times she’s forgiven me.
 CHAPTER 12

How Do Spiritual Catalysts Work?

The ethical is the universal, and as such it is again the divine.

Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard

We all need someone to focus our minds on what matters. For me that
someone has been Genie. Call her my catalyst, something like the obelisk
in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The apes (that would be
me) discover, gingerly approach, and finally touch and gather around the
obelisk that has mysteriously appeared in their midst. This foreign object
stirs them into a frenzy of curiosity and creativity. It changes their
behavior. Outside intervention is the essential missing ingredient for the
apes’ next evolutionary step, both biological and spiritual. It sparks a new
level of consciousness that they could not have arrived at alone. (Okay, I
know they then club each other senseless, but I’m editing that out of my
metaphor!)
What was the obelisk-like intervention that began life on earth? Let’s
assume that a meteor strike generated the heat, gases, and molecular
changes that set the stage for life. One hypothesis is that life began in
another part of the universe and arrived on Earth as, say, a single-celled
organism embedded in a frozen meteor. Another, more widely credited
idea is that life began about 3.5 billion years ago as the result of a
sequence of chemical reactions that took place spontaneously. Whatever.
 What equivalent conditions or events might have initiated the process of
ethical evolution required to take the human race to a better place than
killor-be-killed? How did we go from rapacious apes to the monks who
produced the art, culture, life, and spirituality that pervade the Cloisters,
not to mention the Met’s wonderful curators? Let’s call it legal, religious,
and tribal taboos—Ten Commandment- type, Thou-Shall-Not
proclamations— that prohibited revenge, rape, and pillage and replaced
the selfish interests of the individual with the rule of law for a common
good. The New Atheists are correct that all these things could have
happened without religion. But they did-n’t. They happened in all cultures
through religion.
What if we’re actually at the beginning of our evolution as an animal
species, and not nearly so advanced as our word modern implies? What if,
in the sphere of moral evolution, instead of an obelisk to catalyze the next
step, it took the person of Jesus to lead the way? What if the process of
human development will eventually be measured in millions of years from
the time we stood up, walked around, and started to talk and/or kill each
other, rather than in the short 100,000 years from our ancestral
evolutionary home to the present, let alone our eye-blink 10,000 years of
“civilization,” made possible by a mere fluke: a break in the earth’s
normally harsher climate?
What if, in another 100,000 years, the intellectual distance between
Einstein and a fruit fly is less than the moral and spiritual gap that has
evolved between Einstein and the descendents of today’s human race?
What if (in the unlikely event that anyone cares or remembers us) both
Hitchens’s ideas and mine will someday be so far out of whack with what is
then known to be true that we’ll be lumped together as just two more
“Dark Age” ignoramuses floundering in unenlightened obscurity scratching
crude marks on a cave wall?
So how do our spiritual catalysts work? The Marine Corps provides a
good allegory.
I had the privilege of living on Parris Island when writing my novel Baby
Jack—about service and sacrifice and the class war that is the great divide
between those who volunteer and those who don’t. What I observed living
on Recruit Training Depot, Parris Island, stunned me in many ways, not
least of which was the powerful parallels to spirituality evident in the
methods of recruit training. I hadn’t been expecting to see what turned out
to the best illustration of the process of spiritual growth I’ve ever
encountered.
The Marines break recruits down and then build them up again as new
creatures. On Parris Island (and at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San
Diego) drill instructors (DIs) say one thing but mean another. Yelling and
“brutal” training produce some of the calmest, most polite and free-
spirited men and women I’ve ever met: United States Marines. The
training involves well-disguised love in action. It offers Marines their best
chance at staying alive in combat, not to mention a chance to become
better human beings. (Yes, I know, not all Marines are great. Once in a
while they wind up in clock towers shooting people, and they are trained
to kill. But then, not all hedge fund managers turn out so great either. And
I’ve met some really obnoxious vegans too. Hold the emails.)
A DI cajoles and screams his or her recruits into obedience to produce a
team that doesn’t need to scream to get things done. Above all, the DIs
lead from the front—showing, not just saying; doing, not just describing.
The Marines achieve the spectacular change that takes place in their
recruits through a means that, to secular observers—I use the word
secular because the Marine Corps is as much a religion as a military force—
looks as if the DIs are trying to strip the recruits of their ability to make
choices. In fact the opposite is the true. By breaking down the recruit and
destroying his or her selfishness—the usual American hyper-individualism
and consumerist “me first” mindset—the drill instructor is, in fact, creating
a future Marine who will put the good of his or her fellow Marines first and
will thereby be able to make creative decisions that entail sacrifice.
When they are learning drill maneuvers, such as how to carry a rifle on a
parade deck and do a port arms, Marine recruits appear to be wasting
time. However, these “useless” lessons are actually about survival. This is
true even though the ability to march in step and snap a rifle prettily to
one’s chest is meaningless, in and of itself, in combat. But the discipline,
pride of accomplishment, and unit cohesion learned through the art of drill
is not meaningless. It’s one reason Marines win battles.
 By breaking recruits down and rebuilding them as stronger versions of
themselves, the DIs liberate their recruits to a life of freedom that comes
only with competence combined with a willingness to sacrifice for others.
The essence of the liberation experienced in Marine recruit training is the
ability to walk in another’s shoes, to first lose one’s life in order to regain
it, to die to self and then to be resurrected as a member of a team with a
higher purpose.
To emphasize the most essential lesson of boot camp—teamwork—the
recruit is never allowed to refer to himself or herself in the first person.
From the moment they step onto the fabled yellow footprints of Parris
Island—when recruits arrive they step onto footprints stenciled on the
pavement and thus are automatically formed up—until they receive the
eagle, globe, and anchor emblem at graduation, recruits must always refer
to themselves as “this recruit” never as “I” or “me.” Recruits earn the right
to become a Marine, and with that high honor they reclaim the right to use
the first person again.
The process of moral evolution shaped in all of our “boot camps” is long.
It’s uneven. The journey is made in fits and starts. The enlightened coexist
with the unenlightened. It’s a messy and ugly process. Our species’ boot
camp is on a cosmic timeline absurdly out of sync with our oh-so-short
individual lives. And as a species, we are only on Training Day One, as far as
I can tell.
When it comes to our individual metaphorical boot camps, the new
recruit caught up in the details of “recruit training” is really learning an
altogether different lesson from what it seems is being taught. What the
Marine Corps cares about is that the recruits leave behind the selfish “me”
civilian culture. What the Marine Corps wants is Marines who have
replaced “me” with “we.” What the Marine Corps is doing is using its own
form of hyperbole, similar to Jesus’s exaggeration when (as recorded in
Luke) Jesus said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father
and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even
his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
Jesus required that obedience to the higher call take precedence over
human concerns. The Marine Corps demands that the recruit also leave
behind father, mother, brother, sister, and all familiar habits and become a
new man or woman: a Marine. And in order to do that, the recruit
volunteers to give up everything he or she takes for granted as normal and
be plunged into an alternative reality wherein he or she learns to relate to
the world all over again as part of a community rather than as a solitary
individual.
Marines do not need to remember how to do port arms after they learn
that the Marine next to them is more important than they are. And by the
same token, no one needs the Ten Commandments if she or he actually
practices the full meaning of “Love thy neighbor.”
The process of growing up as an individual and as a species never stops.
The lessons implicit in our “recruit training” lead to us to question the
religion that was part of our earlier “boot camp.” If this unprovable idea of
mine has a nugget of sense, it suggests that perhaps God leads His children
to and through atheism as a stage on their journey. Maybe He does this for
the same reason as any parents who want their children to grow up and
think for themselves.
I believe that we’ll get to a point in our evolution when atheists and
religious people move beyond our respective “boot camps” and abandon
the habit of taking things so literally. Liberated from that narrow
perspective, we will perceive the overarching truth: The sum of our parts
adds up to something altogether unexpected, a spiritual animal whose
existence doesn’t make sense but—nevertheless—here we are! There are
two ways to see this contradiction. We can regard it as an urgent problem
to be solved or as a paradox to be celebrated. I choose the latter.
I think that atheism and fundamentalist religion as we know them will
last barely a geological eye-blink just a few hundred or a few thousand
years more. Then we will begin to understand that we are spiritual beings
and animals; that the universe is impersonal and love preceded it; that we
believe and we doubt; that a particle may be in one place and in another
place at the same time; and that love is a chemical reaction and a
revelation. Above all, I hope that we will someday understand that
apophatic paradox is the blessed, creative, and freeing nature of reality,
not a “problem.”
It strikes me that the monastic tradition of silence and inner stillness
holds clues to the understanding that paradox must not be resolved. We’ll
never know the end of this movie. We are the movie, and this movie is
being shot in subtle tones, not in stark black and white or vivid color. And
our director is an Bob Altman type. He uses the mistakes as “truth
buttons,” and changes plans creatively. Like Altman, He also works with
the actors and will listen to—and enjoy—their ideas, even change the
script to accommodate them allowing for improvisation.
I believe that someday the celebration of the spiritual/material paradox
will break down what now seems to be a “Berlin Wall” between secularism
and religion in a way that transcends the boundaries of the world’s
monastic communities and science labs and explodes into the realm of
general knowledge, just as the once far-fetched idea of a round earth
revolving around the sun exploded from the theory of one or two
scientists, eventually to become general knowledge. Meanwhile, speaking
as a father, I know that my concern for my children was not what they
believed about me, but how they behaved and how they treated their
mother, their siblings, their home, and their schools. My concern was not
whether my children believed the right things about school but whether
they did their homework. My concern was not whether they believed the
correct things about families but whether they were polite to their mother.
Concentrating on belief rather than on character leads some people—be
they atheist or religious—to get stuck on the training rules and miss the
whole point of “boot camp.” They never get their “eagle, globe, and
anchor” emblem and graduate. It’s as if there were platoons of recruits
stuck on Parris Island who had never graduated and who, now as crazy old
men, are still marching around yelling cadence, having mistaken the
training phase for being Marines. Rifle drill and doing a perfect port arms
are seen by this lost platoon of fundamentalist recruits as the end point,
not a step along the road.
That is exactly what all fundamentalism is: people mistaking the steps of
training—the rules, myths, and “ditties”—for the goal. And because the
mistake is a massive one, all sorts of cruelties and fictions are used to
reinforce this false and endless recruit training. The permanent recruit
from our “lost platoon” codifies the preliminary stage of shouting and
breaking down, makes it permanent, and calls it doctrine. The permanent
recruit (as it were) also tries to go into battle using port arms to fight the
enemy, not knowing that what happened on the parade deck wasn’t to be
taken literally, but was a step to build the character needed to fight messy,
always improvised, battles.
Three months of boot camp is enough for anyone! If you spend a
lifetime there, you’ll go crazy and take a lot of people with you. Enter
“Christians” stalking the grieving families of soldiers killed in our wars,
desecrating the solemnity of their funerals with screams of “God hates
fags!” and “God hates America!” Why? Because the young man or woman
being laid to rest volunteered to defend our country, and our country has
laws defending the rights of gay men and women and permits abortion.
I kept notes when I was on Parris Island writing Baby Jack. I had, as they
say, carte blanche, because the general in charge had read my son John’s
and my book Keeping Faith and liked it. So I was able to observe the
nuances of training night and day, with no escort and no part of training off
limits. I was able to learn that even in the midst of boot camp, as training
moves into the last weeks, the DIs and recruits begin to turn a corner. That
is when the spirit behind the training becomes apparent. That is when the
DIs loosen up and start to let the recruits share some personal information
the Marine way, of course.
Parris Island:
19:30—SDI (Senior Drill Instructor) time in the 1077 squad bay—SDI
Baker passes out letters, some of the recruits have to do push-ups to earn
their mail, either because they get so much or because someone has
written something on an envelope such as “Go Army!” that SDI Baker
considers an insult.
The SDI perches on a locker, and the recruits sit cross-legged around him
on the floor, God among his angels. The SDI sits still for a moment, looking
at his recruits. No one dares to move so much as a finger. Then he slowly
spits his tobacco juice into his ubiquitous Dr Pepper can.
“Who hasn’t told his story?” asks Baker.
Hands go up. Baker barks out a name.
A recruit stands.
“This recruit was bouncing around in confusion. His MOS [military
specialty] is infantry. And he joined the Marines because of the war.” “Aye,
recruit,” murmur the other recruits.
 Another recruit stands.
“This recruit is from Guatemala and moved to New Jersey with his mom
when he was twelve, and this recruit is 0-300 [infantry]—he joined
because his friend was killed in Iraq and this recruit went down to the
recruiting station the day of his friend’s funeral. This recruit hopes to soon
become an American citizen.”
“Aye, recruit,” from all the other recruits.
“This recruit joined to see the world.”
“Aye, recruit.”
“This recruit joined to show my friends I had bigger balls than they do.”
“Aye, recruit!”
“This recruit joined because his dad’s a Marine.”
“Aye, recruit.”
“This recruit joined because he wanted to be proud of something.”
“Aye, recruit.”
“This recruit joined because he loves America.”
“Aye, recruit.”
“This recruit wants to get all his bad habits out.”
“Aye, recruit.”
“This recruit wants to protect his family.”
“Aye, recruit.”
“This recruit will be the happiest person alive in just one week, because
he will be a Marine!”
Thunderous: “AYE, RECRUIT!”
By the last weeks of training, the DIs let the recruits in on the secret:
Training was training, but being a good Marine is not the same thing as
being a good recruit. The recruits begin to understand that the purpose of
training was not to succeed in boot camp but to become “the happiest
person alive . . . because he will be a Marine” and to leave boot camp
connected to the larger (and timeless) truth that serving others is a joyful
experience.
 CHAPTER 13

“Shedding over Every Daily Task the Light of Love”

How does the learner then become a believer or disciple?

When the Reason is set aside and he receives the condition.
When does he receive the condition? In the Moment.
What does this condition condition? The understanding of
the Eternal.
Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard

Frank: My folks were Catholics converted to Evangelicals, I was saved in

the 2nd grade, baptized by immersion at 12, grew up in an evangelical
denomination where we didn’t smoke or dance. . . . But in recent years, I
confess, not much of this makes sense to me any more. I try to keep my
doubts to myself. . . . I need things to make sense. I believe in the message
of the Bible, but not in its literal interpretation. . . . I really don’t have
anyone to talk to about this. . . . My husband becomes upset and can’t
believe what he’s hearing. I don’t want to give up my faith; I just need it to
make sense . . . I would love to know your opinion. Have you ever felt this
way?
J.

Dear J: Have I felt this way? Only forever.

Very Best, Frank
I’ve been so fortunate. So has my son John: wife, baby, home, family,
college after wartime service in the Marines. He not only survived but
prospered. A young man I’ll call Martin was not so fortunate.
 When I returned from a trip to England in the summer of 2008, Genie
told me that Martin’s mother had called to say he had just committed
suicide. He was a godson of mine. I’d sponsored Martin at his baptism at
our Orthodox church ten years before. (Converts need a sponsor.) He was
about twenty years old then. At age thirty-one, Martin stabbed himself in
the heart with a kitchen knife while lying alone on his bed.
Martin had walked out of the residential psychiatric center in
Minneapolis where he was living, after they lowered the dose of his
medication. He was suffering from a severe case of schizophrenia. While in
his apartment he killed himself.
Martin was trying to enjoy life and meet a women who could
understand his situation and yet love him, studying French, Greek, and
theology, and struggling to find the correct combination of medications.
When he was in Newburyport visiting his mother, sometimes Martin would
come to our door distraught and hearing voices, barely coherent and
angry. Most of the time Martin was sweet, kind, gentle, funny, smart, and
interested in everything. His illness got the better of him.
I talked to Martin’s mother on the phone for a long time after Genie told
me what had happened. “He had an accident,” I said, grasping for some
sort of a summing up of our conversation. “He collided with his illness.”
“Yes, an accident,” said Martin’s mom.
I wish I had called him more often. Martin used to send me sweet
postcards. Did I answer them all?
You know you didn’t!
I was in England the week before Martin died. I was there to go to my
very dear old friend John Bazlinton’s funeral. I saw Sandra, John’s wife, and
their daughter Chloe, my goddaughter. We had not seen each other for
about ten years, although we’d often talked on the phone. Still, it was a
shock. Sandra, Chloe, and I had all grown older. Chloe had just had her first
baby. Jacob was born while Chloe and her husband were living in China.
Chloe leaned over her father’s coffin to say goodbye while holding baby
Jacob. That’s as close as John Bazlinton got to meeting his grandson. The
timing of his death was so cruel. John collapsed with an aneurysm. Six
weeks later he was dead. Chloe was in China and eight months pregnant
unable to travel to say farewell to her dad. Grandfather and grandson
missed meeting by mere days.
John Bazlinton was a true friend. He gave me my first art show at his
gallery in London when I was twenty. John and Sandra remained close to
Genie and me. Sandra is one of the most beautiful human beings I have
ever known. Chloe grew up into a lovely, sensitive, and creative woman;
just who I would have expected Sandra and John’s child to become. Seeing
Sandra and Chloe suffer was devastating.
John and Sandra always called Genie and me, no matter how long it had
been since we’d seen each other, and no matter how far away Genie and I
moved. John and Sandra also happened to convert to the Orthodox Church
about ten years before he died. John had wandered as a spiritual refugee
for a lifetime that began in a family of nine children, all of whom were (at
one time) caught up in a group known as the Closed Brethren, an
evangelical/fundamentalist cultic offshoot of an offshoot so weird that
they could have no fellowship with anyone outside their small
denomination.
The Closed Brethren followed the typical evangelical/fundamentalist
pattern of splits, only they wound up more splintered and extreme than
most. Their roots were in the Plymouth Brethren denomination that split
into the Open Brethren and the Closed, or Exclusive, Brethren. Yet another
group that formed, the Taylor/ Symington/Hales group, embraced a
“separatist” doctrine that became more and more extreme as time passed.
And—of course—there was an ultimate split based on one of the leaders
allegedly having an affair with a married woman, and a further schism took
place.
My aunt Janet—my mother’s older sister—joined the U.S. branch of this
outfit in the late 1950s. Aunt Janet was ordered to leave her husband and
two young sons, because they didn’t join the group and she could have no
fellowship with them, including even eating in the same room. She moved
out, once my aunt was forbidden to sleep in the same house as
“unbelievers.”
Soon after she left her family and moved into a group home run by the
cult, my aunt had a devastating accident. What the leaders of her group
did was to send one of my cousins the bloodied post-card she’d been on
the way to the post office to mail to him when a car hit her. The pastor of
the group enclosed a note with the post-card telling my cousin that his
mother’s blood showed that God was punishing him for not joining the
group and was also punishing his mother for trying to send him the card.
The leaders of the group took all the money settled on my aunt by the
insurance company. Her children were never allowed to visit during her
lifetime. Aunt Janet never saw her family again, except once, over forty
years later, when my cousin briefly forced his way past her “protectors”
posted at a hospital door by the cult’s local chapter leaders as my aunt lay
dying in a Massachusetts hospital.
That gap, which all evangelical/fundamentalists say they believe is
established between the “saved” and “lost”—now and for eternity—was
enforced here in this life by the Closed Brethren. In the midst of the Closed
Brethren’s ever-shrinking world, followers like my aunt were totally walled
off from their families. The few times my mother called her sister (and
Aunt Janet answered the phone), Mom said she could hear my aunt
breathing into the phone, but because my aunt could have no fellowship
with unbelievers, she wouldn’t speak, no matter how much Mom implored
her to.
It must have been a nightmare of self-revelation for Mom because my
aunt Janet was doing nothing more than practicing an exaggerated version
of what Mom believed herself. My parents believed that the lost were to
be eternally separated from the saved. And my parents always said that
here in this life, no one could be complete as a person without accepting
Jesus, so the separation began right here on earth. (This concept of a
chasm between people is paralleled by the gap that today’s excruciatingly
self-aware New Atheists and their followers impose when they divide the
human race into their version of the “enlightened” and the “deluded.”)
To be a worker in L’Abri, you had not only to be saved, but the right kind
of saved. Mom and Dad would talk about this or that person being “our
kind of person” or “real L’Abri material.” My parents just never took their
version of exclusion to the ultimate dead end that Aunt Janet’s group did.
In a way the Closed Brethren were to the evangelical/fundamentalists
what Richard Rorty, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Singer are to the New
Atheist movement: the more extreme (and therefore embarrassing)
version of what more mainstream atheists in essence are. In fact, what
Janet did to her family was similar in spirit to what my parents and I did to
Genie’s mother and father when we Schaeffers stole Genie away. We
acted not for love’s sake alone but also because our family was “saved”
and the Walsh clan (Genie’s family) was “lost.” We were so “correct,” so
“right with God,” that in our eyes this justified practically anything we
wanted to do.
My parents based their whole lives on the difference they felt between
themselves and the rest of the world, even the Christian world, even the
evangelical/fundamentalist world. That’s why they had to start all those
“conversations” with strangers in order to save them. That’s why they
always urged their children to “only marry a Christian” and not just any
evangelical believer either, but “our kind.” Genie being pregnant was a
problem, but not the end of the world. The end of the world would have
been if I’d married an “unbeliever.”
I have, or had, four friends more or less my age, who go way back: John
Bazlinton, Francis Ackerman, Steve Hawley, and Frank Gruber. John B. is
dead; Francis A. is my oldest friend. We have lots in common. Francis grew
up on my mountainside in Switzerland and was also the son of expatriate
Americans. Francis also went to British boarding schools and moved back
to America as a grownup, just as I did. (He became an assistant attorney
general in Maine.) We first met when we were both nine years old. Now
Francis has Parkinson’s disease, and he has recently been diagnosed with
leukemia.
Steve Hawley is a successful neo-realist painter, and we’ve known each
other since 1980. Genie modeled for him for many years. Steve suffered a
career-changing accident when someone plowed their car into him when
Steve was riding his bike. Steve almost died. He spent several years
convalescing, and of course his art career was damaged. It took him years
just to get back to where he’d been on the day he was hurled to the
ground and lay in a spreading pool of blood.
John Bazlinton is lying in the old rambling graveyard in London where I
left him after tossing a little dirt on his simple pine coffin. Frank Gruber
(whom I first met in the 1980s) is well, but some members of his family
struggle with serious health issues. John Bazlinton died at sixty-five when a
vein in his brain betrayed him. Francis A.’s body freezes up, and he has to
gobble medication just to hold a fork steady. Steve is still wondering how
things could have been if several years of one of his most productive
creative periods hadn’t been stolen from him by a careless driver.
Of my four best friends, then, one is dead and one is seriously ill. One
has a head that is held together by titanium plates. One worries about
health problems among his family members. Who are our cosmic parents?
Where are they when we need them? Is life just? Francis A. is the kindest,
brightest, and most charitable person I know, but apparently that is not
good enough. Is the God who—according to evangelical/fundamentalist
theology —did all these bad things to all my friends our father? I hope not!
My mother never did get over her sister’s betrayal of her family. It must
have been shocking for my mother to see the logic of the sort of
Christianity my parents believed in lived out to a radical extreme. I think
that was one reason why, as the years passed, my parents became more
moderate in terms of the way L’Abri was run. By the mid-1960s everyone
was welcome. Dad talked more and more about art and culture, and less
and less about theology. And all the taboos I grew up with regarding
drinking, smoking, dancing and even sex were just not mentioned
anymore. I think that my aunt Janet provided a kind of shock therapy to
Mom and Dad, a case in point illustrating where the logic of becoming ever
purer, ever more “correct,” and ever more exclusive in one’s theology
leads. I think it was the same sort of experience that old leftists had in the
Stalin era, when they finally confronted what their ideas had wrought.
The search for our cosmic parents, for God, for truth, for the “right”
group to belong to—which is all that religion, politics, cosmology, and
evolutionary biology are—reminds me of the stories I’ve read about
adopted children growing up and starting legal battles to get their files
opened. They, and we, ask, “Who are my real parents? Where do I belong?
Did they dump us, or do they love us? And what’s this legacy of suicide,
aneurisms, religion-gone-mad, cancer, and Parkinson’s they left us mired
in?”
A meteor may have been our parent, providing the catalyst for that first
molecular change on the path to life. It’s a nice story anyway, more
comforting than the stories about an angry, exclusivist God creating us in
the Garden of Eden in order to torture us with suicide-inducing voices or
aneurisms or accidents or Parkinson’s or sisters who do to you what you
yourself would never have done unto another. Did the meteor love us?
There doesn’t seem to be much comfort in discovering who our “biological
parents”—hot gasses and some lucky molecules, and/or a mean God—
might be.
I throw a jacket over my bathrobe and pajamas, shuffle on my
brokendown lambskin slippers, and jump into the car with my son John at
5:18 A.M. I take him to the station, a seven-minute car ride away, where
he boards the early train to go to work in Boston. Usually Genie plays taxi
driver, but this morning she is away visiting her mother in California. Becky
is with the baby. It’s dark; John leaves in the dark and will come home in
the dark at around 7:20 P.M.
During the day I’ll work on this book, write emails, do some blogging,
and miss Genie. I’ll also be helping Becky with Lucy while John is at work.
Each time I pick Lucy up or hold her while I walk around the kitchen with
her napping in my arms, I’m thinking about John working in Boston,
working to support his child, working so Lucy has health insurance, a car
seat, money saved for her in case of emergencies, a future. I’m also
thinking about what my friend John Bazlinton missed.
The connection between Lucy’s biological, cosmic, and human parents
and herself is not just a series of facts learned about a meteor and
evolution, or a body of myths devised to help us grasp God’s creation. It’s
my son John leaving early every morning so he can provide for her. It’s
Becky up in the night breast-feeding her baby and sliding into a sleep-
deprived dream world where everything becomes obsessing about naps,
sleep patterns, the relative merits of breast-feeding and bottle-feeding,
and which baby book to read and trust. Whichever she chooses, it will
conflict with other baby books by equally impressive experts: To let the
baby cry or not? To start solid foods at three months or five? And an
infinity of other dilemmas—a microcosm of life revolving around one tiny
creature.
It is a shock to realize that my aunt believed it was God’s will for her to
walk away from two young sons that, by all accounts, she loved. She must
have once held them as I hold Lucy. She sacrificed her sons to God the
same way Isaac was almost sacrificed by Abraham in the most demented
of all Bible stories. God sent an angel to stop the killing. In Aunt Janet’s
case, the angel never arrived.
There is no theological answer as to “why God allows” suffering, some of
the worst of which is caused by God’s followers and done in God’s name.
There is no answer as to why God seems to be such a lousy parent. All the
nonsense about how God permits suffering because of our free will —blah,
blah, blah—is just scared religious people making excuses for their mean
and/or grossly incompetent God.
What is the source of comfort, if any? It’s not found by making excuses
for God or for Nature. It’s found in the reality of living by the light of the
gift of love.
For today, it’s enough to hold Lucy close and to help Becky so she can
take a shower and run errands while John works. When Genie is home, we
take turns pitching in to give this grandchild the most affection we can
provide. That joy balances the horror of life’s woes. It also opens the door
to suffering, because love invites loss. There would be no horror at death
without the loss that comes from loved ones being wrenched from us.
Without love, death loses its sting. What a terrible price to pay for the
sweetest gift.
Love raises the stakes of loss to infinity. When Steve’s wife Barbara sat
next to his bed at Massachusetts General Hospital week after week, she
was imprisoned there because of love. When my mother called her sister
and said “I love you,” only to be greeted by silence, her sister was rejecting
the love that my mother had embraced, the love that enabled my mother
to transcend the theology of exclusion that her sister practiced in its
bitterest form.
When Chloe mourns her father, it is in the context of her love. When she
was a very young child, Chloe used to take baths with her beloved daddy.
John served them tea, toast, and marmalade in the bath, and father and
daughter took their afternoon tea on a special tray that he had made to fit
over the tub. Later in life, Chloe learned to draw birds when John took her
to bird reserves and shared his expert ornithological knowledge with his
little girl. Later still they collected discarded furniture from rubbish tips on
the streets of London, and John would rebuild it. Chloe loved her eccentric
father and he loved her.
That is all we’ll get in the way of the answer to suffering.
Some of the biblical writers are honest on this score. “For who knoweth
what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he
spendeth as a shadow?” writes the author of Ecclesiastes. Atheists say that
those of us who “cling to religion” are victims of our needy emotions and
that we hide behind words like mystery to leave an escape hatch open to
immortality. I reject that idea. I don’t care whether I live forever or not.
Nor do I have an answer for the apparent meanness of God and/or Nature,
other than to note that love and loss go hand in hand.
Had Barbara lost Steve, I don’t think that she would have wished she
had never known him. Sandra misses John but is glad they had so many
years together. Chloe is fatherless, but her love remains. Francis A. is
facing the unknown, but he has a loving family and loyal friends by his side.
My mother loved her sister, and to this day she sometimes weeps when
Janet’s name is mentioned. So my aunt’s extreme error was (in a way)
trumped by Mom’s love. It was a privilege to know Martin, even if in the
end his illness killed him.
There is no good, let alone final answer about suffering and loss. This is a
question of embracing the paradox. What I care about is that my life not
be stripped of meaning and beauty in the here and now by overeager
busybodies bent on converting me to their atheist cult or by religious
zealots who soft-peddle lies about a God who solves everything. He
doesn’t. Ask Martin’s mother. Ask my mother about her sister Janet.
There must be a better way than navigating between an indifferent
universe and a Disney “god” of canned, happy evangelical endings or the
angry hate-filled god whom my aunt followed and who “told” her to trash
her family in favor of a simplistic purity that no one can or should ever
attain. Rigid purity is the ultimate denial of paradox. And that denial is the
only blasphemy there is. It’s the blasphemy committed against God by all
fundamentalists with every false certainty they mouth about Him.
Bertrand Russell longed for some way to sum all this up but avoided the
false comfort of false certainty. In his lyrical A Free Man’s Worship, written
in 1903, Russell described the problem of mortality so well:
 But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality
which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and
everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the
endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of
a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering
awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible
mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage
of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of
sorrow. . . . Victory, in this struggle with the powers of
darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of
heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of
human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul
with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are
born; and with their birth a new life begins. . . . To abandon
the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of
temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—
this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. . . .
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the
tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision
is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light
of love.
It seems to me that Russell the atheist best articulates the message of
faith in God regarding suffering: “shedding over every daily task the light of
love.” Amen.
With or without my questions answered, I’m glad that my friend John
Bazlinton had a religious funeral where we could shed our tears in the light
of love. It is comforting to have a means to lift such devastating moments
out of the ordinary. As Russell wrote, “in the endurance of intolerable pain,
and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness.”
John Bazlinton’s funeral—held in a lovely Russian Orthodox cathedral in
London—was the place where Chloe, Sandra, and his other family
members and friends could mourn, where dignity if not logic, was provided
by the ancient rituals. I think we all, Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike,
found comfort standing on the solid ground of settled custom that
afternoon.
 When I send my son John off to work on a frigid winter morning, I make
the sign of the cross over him three times. I’m glad I have a way of
expressing my blessing beyond mere words or a hug. Making that sign of
the cross expresses all the longing I have to arm my son against a future I
have no way to intervene in. It is also an act of humility, a way to say that I
am not all-powerful but share the vulnerable predicament we all find
ourselves in. And when I hold Lucy, I’m thinking that—whoever those
cosmic parents of ours were, those first molecules, that first squiggle—I’m
thankful to be here. I express that gratitude each day when Lucy and I
stand before the icons Genie and I keep in our hall and I light a candle.
Lucy and I say thank you to God or rather I do, and she stares at the flame.
I am saying thank you in the same way that my son John is thanking me
by being a good father to his daughter, by sacrificing for her as I have
sacrificed for him and as my parents sacrificed for me. In that continuity—
that continuing story about love—we hand on the one real gift we can give
and the hope that the cumulative total of our knowledge, someday, as
more fully realized beings, may open the family file and that we may find
the real answer to the question “Who are we?” For now, my answer is “We
are givers of thanks.”
Bertrand Russell put it so well in the prologue to his autobiography:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have
governed my life: the longing for love, the search for
knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of
mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me
hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean
of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have
sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so
great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for
a few hours of this joy.
I pass the wood-burning stove, and the glow it casts through its Pyrex
glass door illuminates the darkened kitchen on this winter day. I’m holding
Lucy. Her bare feet are cupped in my hand; my head is bent at an awkward
angle that, if witnessed by a Red Cross worker visiting a prison camp,
would rate as a “stress position” and torture! But if I move she’ll wake up.
 For weeks I’ve spent most days with a stiff neck and cramped shoulders.
I’ve learned to enjoy this “torture” because it’s the result of holding Lucy
as I walk around that kitchen table (again!) with her feet in my hand, her
bottom perched on my forearm and the back of her head cupped in the
other hand. I hum along with Beethoven’s Sixth. As long as my humming
continues, and I don’t shift the positions of my arms, she stays asleep.
My communion with my granddaughter is complete. And through her,
my communion with my son away at work is complete as well. He would
so much rather be where I am.
Does love predate brain chemistry? Does love predate the planet I’m
standing on? Does love predate the universe? I think it does. I’ll take the
tears in exchange for a chance to hold Lucy.
Love hurts. I kept a diary when John went to war.
February 26, 2003
Marine Barracks Ft. Meade
It was snowing hard. I sat at the base visitor center waiting for my boy
for an hour. When John strode in we hugged, then walked over to the desk
to get my visitor pass.
“I have some news for you,” John said. “But I’ll wait till later to tell you.”
The security officer filling in the information on my visitor pass piped up:
“Is it news of a deployment?” “Maybe,” growled John.
We stepped out into the snow.
“It looks like I could be sent to the sandbox in two weeks,” said John.
I knew something like this might happen, what with all that is going on
with our wars. I’m feeling ill, empty; trying to be cheerful for John’s sake.
John’s room in the barracks is strewn with all his new gear. I will sleep in
the extra bed.
John tries on his new bulletproof vest and a desert cammie jacket. I take
pictures with my old film camera. I only have five shots left on the roll. As
the camera winds back after the last shot, I think of all the thousands of
photographs I’ve taken of my son. I have to push back thoughts such as:
Will these be the last pictures of John I take?
February 27, 2003
I said my goodbyes to John this morning. I woke up in the dark a little
before he did and listened to him breathing. Before I went to sleep I kept
surreptitiously raising my head to watch him. I didn’t want to sleep while I
still had the chance to look at my boy.
When John woke up I borrowed his prayer book and sat on the edge of
his bed, and we said our prayers. As I made the sign of the cross over his
chest, I could not help but think of the bulletproof vest and pray that if he
got shot the bullet would hit the thick ceramic plate.
The words of the ancient prayers comforted me. I held his hand as we
prayed. At first his grip was tight; I think he was remembering all he had to
do that day. But as we prayed his grip relaxed.
“Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present
and fills all things . . . ” I pray for another minute or so and conclude with
“Hear me, O Lord. Lord, I have cried unto Thee, hear me.”
We were standing in a snowy parking lot opposite the base. I shook his
hand, then kissed him goodbye.
“God bless you, John. Come home safe,” I said.
“I’ll work on it,” John answered.
“I love you, John. You are a good son. I’m proud of you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
John walked away.
I called after him, “I love you!”
John turned and kissed the air. I got back in the rented car but did not
drive away until he was out of sight because I was so hungry for the sight
of him and I could not get the tears out of my eyes.
I hold Lucy tighter when I remember her father going to war and all the
nights I prayed for John. Love radiates out and infects our beginning,
present and future. It is Russell’s “ecstasy so great that I would often have
sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.” Love is not the
product of human emotion, but I believe that human emotion is the
product of love and that love predates our existence. The parent becomes
the child. The child becomes the parent. John went to war while his father
—I the protector—stayed home safe and in agony. I will die, but Lucy will
hold her child against the cheek that was pressed against mine. Chloe has
lost her father. She has not lost his love.
Love abides.
CHAPTER 14

He Never Left a Trace That He’d Been There

Consciousness of being an individual is the primary

consciousness in a man, which is his eternal consciousness.
But that man is slow to pass judgment who bears in mind,
that he is an individual, and that the final and highest
responsibility for the judgment rests solely upon him.
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Søren Kierkegaard

If you want to know what God will perhaps be like—if you ever meet—get
to know Mr. Bratchi. I first met Mr. Bratchi when I was five years old. He
died when I was forty-seven. Monsieur Bratchi was the village
stonemason. He was just “Bratchi” to my family. Before you built anything
you called Bratchi, even if it was going to be a carpentry job. Mason or not,
he knew everything about building. If you were smart you took his advice,
especially if you were a family of American missionaries living in
Switzerland and were not much liked by the local villagers because we
were foreign, some sort of “religious nutcases.”
 We were totally dependent on the few villagers who would talk to us in
a civil way. Mom would say things like “Bratchi says we shouldn’t put the
window there, he says it faces the weather and won’t last,” or “Bratchi
says to use mélèzes wood for the rail. So it won’t rot.” “Well, if Bratchi says
. . . ,” Dad would answer and then instruct Mom or “the girls” (my three big
sisters, who spoke French better than my mother) to tell Bratchi that we
would be doing whatever he recommended.
When I was five years old Mr. Bratchi came to build us a new fireplace.
We lived about half a mile up the road from the village center in a big old
chalet, where my parents founded their ministry. Because I spoke French,
grew up near the village, and knew everyone, I gained entrance to the
villagers’ homes and lives, including Bratchi’s, in a way that my parents and
older sisters never did.
Bratchi was short and wiry. He had a somewhat dour, lined face and a
workman’s thick, stubby fingernails. I rarely saw him laugh. But this wasn’t
because he was unfriendly. It was because I saw him mostly at work. He
would whistle, tunelessly but happily, but only during the cleanup after
work. When he worked it was in silence. Bratchi engaged in his work as if it
were a sacred trust and much too weighty a matter for him to make small
talk when performing what he called mon métier (my profession).
By mid-afternoon Bratchi’s fast-growing whiskers began to give him a
Homer Simpson five o’clock shadow. But Bratchi had a personality the
opposite of Homer’s. Bratchi would have found nothing amusing about
watching even a cartoon character doing anything badly.
In the village of Huémoz, everyone besides our family lived huddled
together in the cluster of chalets that, from the mountainside above,
looked like forty or fifty big square brown puzzle pieces jammed together.
The peasants’ chalets were so close to each other that the old roofs almost
touched. Cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, and chickens outnumbered people
about ten to one.
Everyone knew everything about everyone—from our village whore’s
latest outrage (she introduced her skimpily clad, illegitimate daughter into
the family business at the village café when her girl was about fourteen) to
a local wife-abuser’s latest drunken mayhem. We knew who was born a
few months early (if you did the math from the wedding day) and just why
the old lady who never spoke had hanged herself when she was eighty-
three. (She once told a neighbor that because no one ever visited her, she
was afraid of falling and dying in pain alone.)
Village gossip notwithstanding, Bratchi kept his thoughts to himself. As
my parents’ ministry expanded, I grew up watching him build additions on
our chalet and the other L’Abri properties. Because I was “home
schooled”—in other words, forgotten by my distracted parents—I could
watch Bratchi from morning until evening whenever I wanted to.
Bratchi never asked why I wasn’t in school. I was an American, and
therefore from another planet, so what business was it of his? If I broke
the silence, I felt as if I were talking in church. We’d spend whole days
where the only words I heard him speak were “C’est l’heure de mes dix
heures” (“It’s time for my ten o’clock snack”) and “C’est midi” (“It’s noon”),
when he went home for lunch.
Bratchi always began work at 6:30, took his bread and cheese break at
10:00, and walked home at noon accompanied by the sound of the
clanging village church bell announcing midday. Bratchi came back to work
at 1:30, worked until 5:00, and then carefully packed up his tools after
cleaning everything meticulously. Next he would clean the spot he’d used
to clean the tools, hosing all traces of cement and sand away. He never left
a trace that he’d been there, not a splotch of cement, no empty bags—
nothing. Local carpenters could confidently leave blond, untreated pine
exposed right next to where Bratchi worked. No need to treat or varnish.
No need to wait until all the masonry work was complete. He never
carelessly splashed cement on naked wood, the way some masons did.
Bratchi was kind to me the way a good old dog is kind: He didn’t say
much but let me sit next to him. And if Bratchi didn’t answer my questions
—when I was still young enough not to notice what an intrusion they were
—it was because he knew the only real answer to my many versions of
“Tell me how to do that” was to watch and then to learn by doing, failing,
then trying again.
What Bratchi built stayed built. And anyone he recommended with his
highest praise, “Il travaille comme il faut” (“He works the way he should”),
could be trusted to do a perfect job, be it plumbing or carpentry. Bratchi’s
philosophy of work—and therefore of life, because what besides work
counted?—seemed to be that any building or wall he put up should be
able to double as a bunker in time of war. His buildings were to our village
what the Alps are to Switzerland and what Switzerland (before plastic
Swatch watches, drugs, and graffiti) once was to Europe: unsentimental
and defined by non-negotiable solidity.
Our village was a tight-knit community, with the exception of us
Schaeffers, of course. There were many grudges, many cliques. Grudges
can be bonds of a sort too. However, the village could not have functioned
if people had let their differences, even their hatreds, keep them from
cooperating. They might not have been on speaking terms, but when, for
instance, it was someone’s turn to use the tractor to power the band saw
and cut firewood, one enemy would hand off the village saw to his
neighbor, even if they exchanged no greeting.
Disputes were unavoidable in a village of about two hundred
strongwilled, terminally gossipy peasants. There was a small but
determined antiBratchi group. Mentioning his name to some people
provoked a sneer, even a spit of cigar-soaked phlegm. This sneer came
only from the village’s losers. The villagers who took the best care of their
livestock and their families liked Bratchi.
I think the resentment of Bratchi in some quarters arose because he was
a bit different from the other villagers, all of whom were farmers. As a
mason, he drove a small VW flatbed truck to work. Almost no one else
owned a vehicle in those days. And he kept to himself. Maybe Bratchi’s
success was also resented, especially by the farmers who sold watered
milk, or hadn’t had their cows properly vaccinated, or could be found in
the café from noon until evening drinking white wine. Bratchi’s very
existence was a rebuke to failure.
One of the few times I ever saw Bratchi flush in anger was when my
mother wanted him to hurry a job. He firmly said, “Non, il faut faire ça
comme il faut” (“No, this has to be done the right way.”) A better
translation might be “It has to be done the way it has to be done.” There
was a right way to do things, an I-have-to-do-it-this-way-because-that-
isthe-law-of-the-universe way. The most ignorant or gullible client got the
same high quality of work, and at the same fair price, as the most astute.
The mortar between bricks was as precise and finished inside the walls as
on the visible outside. To Bratchi there wasn’t a visible part of a job and an
invisible part. It all was his work.
What a client saw, and got, was what God saw, not that Bratchi ever said
whether he believed in God. He never argued when, in outrageously
incorrect pigeon French, my mother would ask him to invite Jesus into his
heart. But later he’d act as if it had never happened, as if he’d seen
something untoward, like an inadvertent glimpse of my mother naked, and
it would be uncouth to bring up the subject again—ever.
Some villagers just wouldn’t speak to Bratchi. It was nothing personal,
just business as usual where fitting in was a given. I knew about not fitting
in. A few of the village boys sometimes mocked me because of my
atrophied leg. They were just anti-anything out of the ordinary. I was an
outsider. And they were equally hard on each other.
No special favors were owed anyone. Someone with a polio-stricken leg
was just lucky to be alive. Life was hard. Everyone knew that. Runt piglets
were dispatched as soon as they were born. So were calves that didn’t
thrive. A polio leg wasn’t something to be celebrated or coddled; it was
just another fact like age, like death, like women’s waters breaking while
they were in a field working just before they gave birth. Life was hard
enough without trying to see anything from someone else’s point of view.
What would be the point of that? There was no feel-good fakery about
everyone being a winner.
Even in the 1950s, the higher up the mountainside one lived, the more
old-fashioned—some might say backward—everything was, including
attitudes toward infirmity. And our village was fairly high up our mountain.
Huémoz nestled midway up the steep foothills rising from the Rhône
Valley. We lived below dark forests that ended abruptly, about 2,000
vertical feet above us, under the rocky peaks. Little had changed in our
village since the 1800s, or for that matter since the 1500s. So even though I
was born into the mid-twentieth century and lived just barely thirty miles
from the bustling city of Lausanne, in my childhood I lived next to and
observed what amounted to medieval peasant life.
Brueghel the Elder’s bucolic and slightly sinister paintings of peasants
working, sleeping, defecating, and/or frantically making merry could have
been drawn from the lives I saw as a child: lives lived as they had been in
every farming village in Europe since the Middle Ages, a type of life that
was, unbeknownst to me, about to disappear.
Who knew that we were all about to become mindless consumers and
forgo all prudence, when it came to living in sustainable harmony with our
environment, as the villagers and their ancestors had lived on our
mountainside for centuries? But there were a few signs of the changes to
come. When I was about eight, the village store owner installed a small
freezer and began to sell ice cream. And one or two of the more
prosperous villagers had recently acquired secondhand Jeeps. They were
battered, olive green American army Jeeps that had made their way onto
the local market.
In the summertime, those Jeeps were used to ferry the huge fifty-liter
milk cans back from the high alpine communal pastures. It would never
have occurred to the farmers to use their Jeeps for anything as frivolous as
a shopping trip. Why go anywhere besides the village store? Aside from
replacement parts for the more complicated farmer’s tools, such as the
village’s communally owned band saw, no one bought anything anyway.
Women made their own clothes. Everything was locally grown, except for
sugar, pepper, and flour. Even our salt came from the local mine in Bex,
which had been there at the base of our mountain since Roman times.
Everything had its place and season. If it was spring, the cows were led
to the high pastures a full day’s walk away, just above the tree line, to
graze on the wide flower-strewn meadows below the looming peaks. It
was a big event when the cows were led to the high pasture. The dawn’s
quiet gave way to the sweetly sonorous cow bells, and I’d leap from my
bed and race down to the road to watch the huge brown and white cows
trudge past and to see which farm boy was assigned the job of living with
the cows all summer in the farmer’s haut pâturage (high pasture) barn.
If it was winter, pigs were killed and turned into tangy smoked sausages,
while their recently spilled blood froze in bright puddles on the narrow dirt
roads next to the farms. Things didn’t need much explaining. Things were
what they were and what they always had been.
No one needed the so-called facts of life explained. Work let you live.
Sex led to pregnancy for rabbits, pigs, dogs, cats, cows, village girls, your
mother, your sister—whomever. If the cows ate the wild onions that grew
on the side of the road near the cemetery, their milk tasted oniony for a
few days, and you knew just where the farmer had let them wander. Wine
made you drunk. Pine was for building. Beech was for burning.
When a family raked hay in the hot summer sun (and how else could hay
get made other than as a family activity?) the fact that the matrons of the
family worked stripped down to their huge lacy white bras was no more
sexually provocative than the men working in their undershirts. Farm
women were the farmer’s partners first and their wives and daughters
second. Families were teams.
Families did whatever it took to cultivate a small plot of vegetables, raise
ten cows or so, milk them, slaughter the pig, and keep chickens. And
together they cut hay, turned it with pitchforks and rakes, loaded it on the
cart, tossed it into the hayloft, and then fed it through the winter months
to the cows, which patiently chomped on the dried grass and field flowers
forked down into their warm, fusty-smelling stalls. The stalls were mucked
out once a day and the steaming manure added to the pile that would, in
the spring, be spread on the fields to nourish the grass that turned into hay
that turned into milk, meat, and manure. The cycle always started over, as
it had for your father and grandfather and mother and grandmother since
time immemorial.
There was no room for luxury or sentiment, let alone bathing suits or
Tshirts to wear while turning the hay, any more than there was time for a
“personal relationship with Jesus.” He belonged in the village church
where you went at Christmas and Easter, or if someone died, was
baptized, or married. Who wanted to get dressed up every Sunday
anyway? There was your good outfit and your work clothes. Good clothes
were a nuisance. They required heating tubs of water and bathing. The
men wore smelly, dark wool trousers held up by wide suspenders, nail-
studded boots, and collarless old shirts. The women wore heavy stockings,
knee-length shapeless skirts, and longsleeved cotton blouses. When it was
cold, the men wore vests and the women put on a shawl or lumpy
homemade cardigan.
As she worked, the peasant wife never looked up, let alone gazed at the
peaks, let alone ever said how beautiful they were. All she would have
seen if she had looked up was the fact that the early snow was already
dusting the spiky teeth of Les Dents du Midi, an unwelcome reminder that
the short summer was already waning, that more work lay ahead, that the
rain the week before had set the haying back several days, that her
husband still needed to pile up a lot more wood for the stove by the back
door. Anyway, she was in a reverie of the kind that comes to those who do
the same job well again and again, until thoughts disappear and only the
rhythm of the work exists.
When I watched Bratchi I’d be lost in a reverie too, mesmerized by
shovel strokes, trowel strokes, or slow-motion unfolding of a wall as it
seemed to rise from nowhere by magic. And since Bratchi performed every
action the same way for each task, again and again, watching him was like
watching a lovely and perfected machine, a “machine” that did its work
with a dignity that lent the process the air of a liturgical rite.
Bratchi was reverent in the way he treated his tools and materials.
Nothing got tossed or dropped. Shovels, hammers, trowels, and mixing
buckets were gently picked up and carefully laid aside, to be maintained
for decades. Even the nail he kept handy in the pocket of his overalls, from
which to hang his plumb line, was always the same nail. His shovel was
worn the way a chef’s old and favorite knife gets worn by sharpening.
Bratchi’s tools seemed to fit his hands, much as a prosthetic limb fits an
amputee. To watch Bratchi measure out three wheelbarrows of sand for
mortar and mix it with one bag of Portland cement, mix it dry, then add
the water and combine it into a damp mound, then add more water until it
reached the perfect consistency, was to see something inevitable and
right, as if what he did had always been done that way, maybe by God
Himself.
Bratchi would let me help him when I wanted to, grabbing a shovel I
could barely wield and mixing the dry sand and cement before he added
the water. He was very patient when he redid my work, as he almost
always did. He never said things like “You idiot” or “Good job.” So the few
times he expressed an opinion about my work by not redoing it, I felt as if
I’d been awarded a medal.
Over the years when I’d help out, I did my best to imitate exactly what
I’d seen Bratchi do. But no matter how many times I mixed cement or tried
to lay a few bricks, my efforts felt embarrassingly awkward. From the way I
held a shovel—it didn’t nestle in my hands—to the way the mortar would
splash when I mixed it in his big, battered square mason’s trough, I wasn’t
even within striking distance of his finesse.
Bratchi’s masonry work was so practiced that he never needed to touch
the mortar with his hands. I did. When helping him repoint, I just couldn’t
work it between tight bricks or stones without using my fingers. It would
slip off the trowel. I’d try and try and then give up and grab a handful.
Cement will eventually melt skin. By the end of an hour handling the
mortar, fingerprints will be gone. Bratchi let me find out the hard way.
He worked a trowel with perfect dexterity, dipping it into his bucket
without even looking and bringing it out with just the right amount of
cement, which he would then flick onto a wall when applying stucco, or lay
between bricks, or insert into the narrowest seam (a quarter-inch or less)
between stone or brick while re-pointing a wall—just the right amount, no
more and no less, with no smear stuck to the wall’s face and all the mortar
wedged at the same depth between the bricks. And Bratchi took his trash
with him. It would have bothered him mightily to think there was any taint
inside one of his walls. Even abandoning a candy wrapper tucked into
some hidden spot that wouldn’t be seen again for a hundred years, or a
thousand, would have been unthinkable.

The clean, claylike smell of fresh cement always brings Bratchi back. He
hovers near if my work gets messy when I’m repairing my old brick house. I
see him frown. I’ll tear down a bit of wall and start again for him or add a
little extra rebar or dig another foot or two below the frost line when
pouring a bit of foundation wall. When I rewrite a chapter, I think of
Bratchi too. If I could ever write as cleanly as Bratchi built, that would be
something.
CHAPTER 15
 Much More Miraculous Than a Good Cup of Coffee

If the fact spoken of were a simple historical fact, the accuracy

of the historical sources would be of great importance. Here
this is not the case, for Faith cannot be distilled from even the
nicest accuracy of detail.
Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard

I was talking on the phone to Sandra Bazlinton about her husband John.
This was a few weeks before he died. John needed prayer. Or maybe he
didn’t need prayer, but Sandra was comforted by knowing people were
praying for him.
I like to think the best of God. When people are dying, I talk to Him as if
God too is an innocent bystander and not—as the
evangelical/fundamentalists would have it—the author of death just
itching to liquidate “non-believers” at Armageddon. My reasonable God is
a decent chap, and more like Bratchi than like the tyrannical monster
portrayed in the grimmer bits of scripture and “explained” in the
classrooms of “civilized” evangelical/fundamentalist seminaries.
“Please help John Bazlinton!” I begged. But I didn’t question God too
closely about why I was begging for scraps, such as a successful operation
for John when, presumably, if the Creator of the universe could give me
that wish, He could have just pinched off that ballooning blood vessel or
been more like Bratchi—and less like some American “builders” I got to
know after Genie and I moved to America—and done a better job building
our brains to begin with.
According to the Bible, God has regrets and often repents of the harm
he causes. In Genesis we read, “It repented the Lord that he had made
man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart,” and in Exodus, “The
Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” In fact,
according to the Bible, God is apologetic so often he gets sick of admitting
His faults. “I am weary of repenting,” Jeremiah reports the Lord saying.
There are many, many more verses about God repenting, regretting
what He does, or changing his mind. Yet other verses say God has no
regrets. “The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man
that he should repent,” says Samuel. God contradicts Himself, or rather the
Bible’s authors contradict themselves, when trying and failing to describe
God.
Of course, evangelical/fundamentalists can’t stand the Bible’s obvious
flaws because they worship the Bible, not God. So they try to fix their
“inerrant” Bible’s reputation by torturous justifications. They even make
rules for God as if they understand God as some sort of creature trapped in
the pages of the Bible, something like a fly caught on flypaper. This also
seems to be a problem that plagues Muslims, who say their holy book was
actually dictated, so it records the actual words of God. This may explain
the apparent paralysis of much Islamic civilization. If the literal last word
has been pronounced, what’s left to do, say, discover, or invent? How do
you change?
Here is one of the leading evangelical/fundamentalist/creationist/
intelligent-design gurus, Henry Morris (of the Institute for Creation
Research), telling God what to do. In his 1996 essay “When God Repents,”
Morris writes,
There is no contradiction, of course. The words translated
“repent” in both Old and New Testaments, are used of
actions which indicate outwardly that a “change of mind”
has occurred inwardly. It is precisely because God does not
repent concerning evil, that His actions will change toward
man when man truly repents (this human “repentance” can
go either way; changing from good to evil, or vice versa),
and God will respond accordingly, since He cannot change
His own mind toward evil.
I’m sure God sat up and took notice! “He cannot change His own mind.”
Got that God? Now behave!
 Even my mother tacitly admitted that the evangelical/fundamentalist
God was trapped in her inerrant Bible. According to this view, God is not
the God of the Bible but really the God in the Bible. God is stuck between a
rock and a hard place. The “rock”?—human words by flawed authors. The
“hard place”?—the Bible as interpreted by self-interested parties.
My mother seemed to know this was the case, although she never
would have said so. But Mom used to work every angle for her hen-pecked
“god” in her prayers. Mom would pray prayers like this: “We pray that You
will heal [fill in the name] and that You will also give [his or her] doctor
wisdom.” Which was it: wisdom for the doctor or healing? If it was only
wisdom and the doctor would do the healing, that let God off the hook.
And if all God could do was sharpen up the doctor’s wit, that wasn’t much
of a miracle, not much more miraculous than a good cup of coffee. Also,
since the basic idea was that healing happened only if the person praying
had enough faith, then that always gave God an out, not to mention the
clause in fine print: God might be allowing this “tribulation” for his own
mysterious purposes to do the person who wasn’t getting healed (or the
people praying for that person) some “spiritual good” that couldn’t be
achieved any other way than by not getting their prayers answered or,
rather, by God answering “no.”
The illness, accident, bankruptcy, divorce, stock loss, missed train, or
whatever could then be understood as a “timely chastisement,” because of
that verse in the Bible that says, “He whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth.”
That was the silver lining to suffering; it proved God loved you because the
trouble He inflicted on you, by either commission or omission, which was
the only way to make you into the person you needed to be in order that
God would find your character to his liking. A bit circular, but tidy.
The evangelical/fundamentalist “god” trapped in the Bible was covered
by more outs than a studio in a movie contract with an unknown director;
if you count every “wherefore” and “whereas,” it amounts to the studio
saying, “Whatever this contract says, here’s the bottom line, pal—you have
no rights, and we can do anything to you we damn well please!”
Oh, how we Schaeffers used to cling to any scrap of supernatural proof
of God’s power! Oh, how Mom clung to and endlessly repeated the stories
of “miracles” that had occurred in China, back in her parents’ years there
as missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the
reputed sighting of angels by stranded missionaries or packages of food or
money “inexplicably” left on doorsteps just in the nick of time! Oh, how
thrilled we were by the signs and wonders of God’s provision that made
the work of L’Abri possible. Never mind that they could have been
mistaken—by the less spiritually “discerning”—as mere coincidences.
Oh, how Mom and Dad abased themselves, and begged God to take all
the credit for their hard work! Each gift of money to L’Abri was a miracle
and had nothing to do with Mom’s wonderful newsletters or Dad’s tireless
efforts. All the credit must go to the Lord, and details suggesting that we
humans might just be the agents of our own destiny were minimized so
that nothing might water down a supernatural explanation for any event—
from a 100-franc note left on the kitchen table (just when L’Abri had run
out of grocery money!)—to my getting Genie pregnant. It was a sin, but,
“the Lord used this” so that we might be a witness to many other young
people! We did the “right thing”! We got married!
Anything would do as a miracle: an unexpected parking space, a cold
that one got over sooner than expected, thus freeing one up to take that
allimportant exam, a conversation on a train with a “seeking” and
“spiritually needy” person who then accepted Christ. That wouldn’t have
happened if it hadn’t been for the fact that “the Lord arranged a traffic jam
so that we missed the train we’d originally intended to take,” and so on.
What strikes me is that this way of praying and hoping for “signs and
wonders” misses the point. We tell God our needs, but if we even glance at
the reality of human evolution in progress, let alone at the universe, we
know that God operates on a different timeline than we do. Bratchi will
not be rushed.
My prayers for John Bazlinton didn’t work. Sandra called and said he’d
died. We talked about John’s death. She was calm, stoic, and not bitter,
only deeply wounded, empty, and sad beyond description. “So many
people were praying for John,” she said.
Sandra is a strong woman. There was no self-pity in her voice. There was
a healthy skepticism within Sandra too. During a later conversation, she
told me that an evangelical friend had called her while John was in a coma
and nearing death; he had advised that Sandra call a Pentecostal American
healer he had some connection with.
“He wanted me to ring this chap up,” Sandra said. “He’d heard that this
man had healed someone over the phone. The person he’d healed was
about to have some sort of surgery on his ear. This healer prayed for the
chap and he ‘heard a pop’ and was instantly well.” Sandra paused and then
added dryly, “I explained that John’s situation, having been in a coma for
six weeks and with three shunts in his head, was a bit more serious.”
“The crazies came out of the woodwork when my dad was dying of
cancer,” I told her. “But if all this healing stuff works, why don’t the
actuarial tables show that members of Spirit-filled Pentecostal and other
‘charismatic’ denominations live longer, on average, than, say, Unitarians
or United Methodists?”
Sandra laughed. So did I.
Does God suffer because His timetable causes so much human suffering?
I don’t know, but in the book of Hebrews we read of Jesus, “Who for a little
while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor
because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might
taste death for every one.” Take it or leave it.
Evagrius captures something of the rule of love trumping theology and
“correct” thinking. For instance, in his Commentary on the Book of
Proverbs, he writes, “There was a time when evil did not exist, and there
will be a time when it no longer exists; but there was never a time when
virtue did not exist and there will never be a time when it does not exist.
For the seeds of virtue are indestructible. And I am convinced by the rich
man almost but not completely given over to every evil who was
condemned to hell because of his evil, and who felt compassion for his
brothers, for to have pity is a very beautiful seed of virtue.”
Evagrius is referring to the rich man in Jesus’s parable (in Luke) about
the man who dies and finds himself in hell because he never helped the
poor.
Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine
linen, living in luxury every day. A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was laid
at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell
from the rich man’s table. . . . It happened that the beggar died, and that
he was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also
died, and was buried. In Hades, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and
saw Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his bosom. He cried and said, “Father
Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of
his finger in water, and cool my tongue! For I am in anguish in this flame.”
But Abraham said, “Son, remember that you, in your lifetime, received
your good things, and Lazarus, in like manner, bad things. But now here he
is comforted and you are in anguish. Besides all this, between us and you
there is a great gulf fixed, that those who want to pass from here to you
are not able, and that none may cross over from there to us.” He said, “I
ask you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house;
for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, so they won’t also
come into this place of torment.”
Evagrius discovers a seed of virtue in the rich man’s compassion for his
brothers. According to Evagrius, the rich man’s situation is not as dire as it
might seem. He’s dead; he’s in Hell, but wait, that’s not the end of it.
Evagrius writes a postscript. Since the rich man showed pity for his
brothers —in other words, he felt and expressed love—there is a way out.
Virtue, says Evagrius, will outlast evil. The Law of Love prevails.
Even the rich man who lived his life mired in injustice will find salvation.
His hell will turn to paradise because there will come a time when evil “no
longer exists,” which, given Evagrius’s thinking, means that someday Hell
will turn into Heaven for the rich man, because if there is suffering
anywhere, then evil will still exist and will have outlasted virtue.
The rich man’s perception that he is in Hell derives from the gulf
between him and God. This gulf was placed there by the rich man’s lack of
charity, which turned him into someone who cut himself off from love.
I have experienced “Hell” becoming “Heaven.” My house was a type of
hell when John was at war. It became a type of heaven in an instant. The
place didn’t change, but the separation from love was ended. It was all a
matter of perception. I expressed this in my diary entry about the first time
John came home from his first (of several) deployments to war.
July 4, 2003 4:31 A.M. The phone rang. “I’m about a half an hour out,”
said John. “Check the lawn for mines, Dad! Better yet, pave the garden
over!” He laughed. “And while you’re at it buy me some body armor and a
sidearm! I feel naked!”
5:00 A.M. A tall thin figure slowly unfolds from our old car. I give Genie a
head start. Mother embraces son.
“I was so worried,” said Genie.
John holds her and she sobs. Her face presses on his olive green T-shirt
and leaves a tear stain imprinted as she pulls away to look up. Then it’s my
turn. He smells like cigarettes and is warm from the car, stretching now
from sitting for eight hours. Hard arms hug me. The sharp stones on the
driveway cut into my bare feet, reassuring me that I’m awake.

Later . . .

Genie gave me a great gift by allowing me time alone with John. He was
bone weary and kept stretching out, then sitting up again to say
something. I lay next to him and made sure I was gripping him the whole
time, an arm, foot, hand; it didn’t matter, I just wanted to be certain that
the nightmares were lies. John’s eyelids were drooping. He’d speak, fall
silent, doze off, rouse himself and then add something else.
“Once we were in a convoy driving through Kabul,” said John sleepily. “I
was lookout, and I spot this taxi getting between me and our following
vehicle, and we don’t like it when anyone gets between us. Then I see
these tubes on the front seat that look just like RPGs, so I draw a bead on
the driver and if he had so much as touched those tubes I would have put
one right between the eyes.”
John dozed a little and then roused himself and continued.
“We shoot right through the glass in situations like that because at close
range the bullets won’t deflect. Anyway it turned out those were just
cardboard tubes and he was on the way to the post office. I came within a
hair of killing him because of cardboard tubes. . . . ”
With relief flooding over, under, and around me came an incredible
exhaustion. I dozed, soothed into dreamless peace by his beloved voice. I
woke and John was asleep next to me, his warm shoulder pressing mine.
Later . . .

John went out for a walk. I offered to go with him but he said he wanted
to stroll around the neighborhood alone. “You know, Pop, just to try and
get my head in gear.”
As the door shut I was overwhelmed by gratitude and also a crushing
weight of unexpected sadness. A moment later I was kneeling by my bed. I
was praying for Staff Sergeant Shane Kimmett’s father Dan, for Corporal
Matthew Commons’ mother, dad, and stepmother, for Lt. Childers and his
parents, and for all the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, and
wives I knew of those who were not coming home. Before my son went to
war, I never would have thought of tears as a sacred duty.
I ask myself why I persist in believing in God when so many smart and
decent people tell me I’m crazy for doing so. There are times when I am an
atheist. There are times when I am an agnostic. But those moments are
always on a theoretical level. I can be in the middle of a period of atheism,
but when I wake up at four A.M. to write, I find myself praying, “Lord I
offer you this day.” I find myself experiencing a presence that I commune
with before I think about it. I sense that presence quietly working on His
projects just as I’m working on my books and just as Bratchi worked on his
walls, getting on with the job at His own pace and doing it His own way.
CHAPTER 16

“First and Last Alike Receive Your Reward”

Even in these relations which we men so beautifully style the

most intimate of all, do you remember that you have a still
more intimate relation, namely, that in which you as an
individual are related to yourself before God?
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Søren Kierkegaard
The idea that faith consists of signing on to a series of statements, such as
“I believe in the Trinity” or “I believe that Jesus died for my sins” or “I
believe that selfish genes rule!” and that somehow, by saying these things
as sincerely as possible, I get “saved” or “enlightened” (the secular version
of redemption) is crazy. Saying words is not the same thing as
understanding what they mean, let alone living by them.
Because we can never be sure what our motivation for anything is, we
don’t ever know whether we’re sincere enough for those words to count,
even if we do happen to be correct in our understanding of what the
words mean. Am I saved enough? Am I atheist enough? I may say I believe
this or that, but do I believe enough? Do I know enough so that I can pass
the correct-belief exam? What if I was slightly distracted when I prayed the
“sinner’s prayer”? Maybe I got distracted by the nubile breasts of a young,
pretty atheist while reading the latest “wisdom” from Dawkins on her
Tshirt. Now I can’t remember. Was it “The God of the Old Testament is
arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of
it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak . . . ”? Or is the correct greatest,
“most famous” Dawkins line “The God of the New Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant? . . . Oh crap! Now I’ll get tossed out of atheist Sunday
school—again!
This is why Pascal’s wager, wherein one bets in favor of God rather than
risking damnation, is one of the stupidest ideas ever articulated. If there is
a God, He knows you were just a good betting man splitting the odds—
insincere but scared. Besides, you’ll forget the Most Important Seven
Things you must always remember, do, or something—and be lost! So
belief is not the point. Who is sincere enough? And who has a good
enough memory?
The point isn’t belief, but who we are, how we learn to treat the
“Higginses” we run across in our lives. The point was to learn from Mr.
Parke not to bully, rather than to learn how to say, “I’m not a bully”
convincingly. The point is to watch Bratchi work and try our best to imitate
him.
Some of the earliest writings of the Church’s leaders seem to side firmly
with the view of an all-redeeming mercy being at the heart of the message
of the gospel. In the liturgical tradition, this is expressed at the beginning
of Lent (the period of time leading up to Easter). One pre-Lenten service is
dedicated to the recollection of the story Jesus told about the Prodigal
Son.
The returned Prodigal finds his father’s forgiveness and love heavenly,
whereas his stay-at-home “good” brother resents the lavish welcome his
father is giving to his wayward, undeserving brother, who has all those
wrong and bad ideas and who has screwed up his life. The older brother’s
focus is on himself and his good standing with his father. The good son
finds his father’s non-judgmental forgiveness of his fallen brother hellish.
The wayward son didn’t even have good motives for coming home! He was
just hungry! He wasn’t even repenting in some spiritual way! He just
wanted lunch!
After the Prodigal’s return, both brothers are with the father. Both
brothers are in the same location, sharing the same reality: their father’s
love. But because of the difference in the content of their characters, one
finds the father’s love to be Heaven, and the other finds it to be Hell. Hell is
a condition of loss. It’s not a place. “Hell” and “Heaven” are both
experienced as the presence of God: the merciful experience joy, the
merciless sorrow.
One of the great sermons of the ancient Church sums up this view
beautifully. The fifth-century Easter Sermon of St. John Chrysostom is read
aloud in every Orthodox Church at midnight Easter service. To understand
the sermon, you must remember that many Christians prepare for Easter
by fasting, or at least we’re supposed to. Yet Chrysostom declares that
those who have not kept the fast—in other words, people like me—are
equally welcome.
How we receive God’s love is the issue, not correct ideas, let alone
correct rule-keeping. Here’s part of Chrysostom’s proclamation of hope:
Are there any weary with fasting?
 Let them now receive their wages!
If any have toiled from the first
hour, let them receive their due
reward;
. . . First and last alike receive your reward; rich
and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!
You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!
. . . Let no one go away hungry.
Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness . . .
Chrysostom is not alone in his view of hope for all. For instance, St. Isaac
the Syrian writes, “Paradise is the love of God . . . [and] . . . those who are
punished in Gehenna [fire] are scourged by the scourge of love.” According
to this mercy-laden thread of Christian tradition, fire—in other words, Hell
—is the love of God, and we experience God’s love either as heavenly or as
a painful scourge, depending on how we receive it. Basil the Great points
out that the “Three Children”—as the three young men in the book of
Daniel (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) who were thrown into the
fiery furnace are called—were unharmed by the fire, yet the same fire
burned and killed the servants at the entrance to the furnace. Basil
understood this story as an allegory of Heaven and Hell. Those with loving
hearts and forgiveness for all will feel the “fire” as love. And according to
St. Gregory the Theologian, God is paradise and punishment, because each
person tastes God’s “energies,”—as God’s presence is sometimes called—
according to the condition of his or her soul. Gregory says the next life will
be “light for those whose mind is purified . . . in proportion to their degree
of purity” and darkness “to those who have blinded their minds . . . in
proportion to their blindness.”
Bratchi was the same person to everyone. He built everything well, no
matter who his clients were. Fools, good people, and scoundrels alike got
the same perfect quality of work. The only people who didn’t like Bratchi
were the villagers who knew that his honesty and the quality of his work
put them to shame. His very existence was a rebuke to them; “Heaven”
(and affirmation) for some, and “Hell,” a cause of shame, in others.
We make our own destiny. Nichol and I were in Hell standing outside
Mr. Parke’s door. When we changed from a spirit of fear to relief, from
bullying to repentance, Hell became Paradise. What creates gratitude in
one person is nursed as jealousy in another. Both receive the same love.
According to Jesus’s parable, those most convinced that they are saved are
the most lost.
I look at my life: marriage, children, grandchildren, my garden, the
pictures I paint, the words I write, my dear friends both living and dead,
debts, fears, failures, sins, illness, and disappointments, and I remember
the whole journey as an experience of God’s love. My belief in what Bill
Maher would call my “imaginary friend” contains all the superstition
and/or faith and/or insanity accumulated over my lifetime. It has nothing
to do with any guarantee that things will work out to my liking. It, like
Bratchi, is what it is. It is also inscrutable. Bratchi never did say much. If
you wanted to know anything about him, you could learn it only from what
he’d built or by remembering the experience of sitting quietly with him.
At its best, faith in God is about thanksgiving, shared suffering, loss,
pain, generosity, and love. The best religious people and best secular
people learn to ignore their chosen (or inherited) religions’ nastier
teachings in order to preserve the spirit of their faith, be that faith in
secular humanism, science, or in God. It’s the tediously consistent
fundamentalists—religious or atheist—who become monsters. They are so
sure they have the truth that they dare claim that only the members of
“my” religion will be saved. This is the road to my aunt Janet’s madness,
and her clutching a phone while speaking not one word to her sister, alone
in her “purity” and utterly cut off from those who loved her.
Because holy books—this includes books on science or political theory
that are regarded as holy by so many atheists—are written by people just
like you and me, they contain all facets of the human experience: love,
compassion, and calls for the murder of the “infidel,” or perhaps, as in the
case of people like Singer, calls for “defective” children to be killed. They
are also, inevitably, full of mistakes. The question is what to follow and
what to ignore, in the same way one ignores a village idiot but knows the
value of the village where both the idiot and the rest of us all live.
Every religious and every scientific/secular tradition has a “village idiot”
or two lurking in its scriptures, be they in the Bible, the Koran, or scientific
texts. The good news is that most of the scriptures of the world also
provide a reason to override our village idiots: the Law of Love.
Groups and individuals who are at various stages of “recruit training”
coexist. In one part of the globe, a thirteen-year-old child is buried up to
her neck in sand and then stoned to death because she was raped. In
another part of the world, a thirteen-year-old is punched by her stepfather
and is then removed from the stepfather’s home, under the protection of
the law, and put in foster care. In yet another household, a stepfather who
feels like punching his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter sits down and reads
her a story instead, because he has evolved to a place of greater spiritual
enlightenment.
Atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Eastern Orthodox, Hindus, Mormons,
Roman Catholics, Protestants, et al. we are all on a journey. That journey is
happening to us with or without our approval. It’s called evolution. Some
of us say we believe “every word of the Bible” or “every word of the
Koran” or “what science says” or whatever other scripture we hold dear,
but we’re all slowly learning discernment because we are evolving in
spiritual sensibilities as well as physically. This is why today, there are
fewer religions that demand blood sacrifices than there used to be. This is
why Christianity is less anti-Semitic than it used to be. This is why I believe
that in the contest between extremism and moderation, enlightened
Muslims will eventually win the hearts and minds of most Muslims, who,
like almost everyone, want to love their families in peace.
I think that most people are better than their official theology and/or
ideology. There are wars aplenty in the world and hatred abounds, but
there is also peace aplenty and love abounds as well. There are extremists
in all our camps—religious and secular—who’d kill the rest of us just to
prove a point. They have the anger, or worse yet the blind certainty of
their correctness, but the rest of us have the numbers. The future belongs
to the peacemakers.
 In the Gospel of John, Jesus showed us the way to get beyond “boot
camp” to the deeper meaning of faith in God:
Jesus went unto the Mount of Olives. . . . And the scribes
and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;
and when they had set her in the midst, they said unto him,
“Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be
stoned: but what sayest thou?” [Jesus answered] “He that is
without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” . . .
And they which heard it, being convicted by their own
conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest,
even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman
standing in the midst. When Jesus . . . saw none but the
woman, he said unto her, “Woman, where are those thine
accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?” She said, “No
man, Lord.” And Jesus said unto her, “Neither do I condemn
thee: go, and sin no more.” Then spake Jesus again unto
them, saying, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth
me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of
life.”
What is the light? How do we follow it? Jesus demonstrated the essence
of this light to the woman taken in adultery. He put the Law of Love above
the rules of “boot camp.” She had been faithless, but Jesus didn’t rebuke
her. Rather he set a better example of what faithfulness is. Jesus broke the
Old Testament law by not condemning her to death. He demonstrated
loyalty to a higher call; “Neither do I condemn thee,” Jesus said. He
returned faithfulness to a faithless stranger.
The divine catalyst of love makes trying to follow “the Lord, the Creator
of life”—as God is called in the Nicene Creed—a worthwhile if quixotic
quest. I am privileged to stand up in my chosen community of faith and say
that creed, even with complete incomprehension. I thus identify with
others on my little part of the path to God who (like me) are struggling to
find the words to express the paradoxical longing we all have to connect
with something greater than ourselves.
 Some days I know that life has no ultimate meaning. Other days I know
that every breath I take has eternal meaning. I also know that I’m crazy to
believe these two opposites simultaneously. I’d feel even crazier denying
them. I believe that both statements are true. Like that particle in a physics
experiment, I am in two places at once.
So I continue to “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the
age to come,” as the Creed beautifully describes the ultimate human
quest. Since I believe that God’s revelation is the gift of love, the gift of
eternal life seems possible too. Because if I had the power to do so, that’s
exactly what I’d give to my darling Lucy.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Family members and friends read this book at various stages and made
helpful suggestions. I thank my wife Genie, my son Francis, my daughterin-
law Becky, my old friend Frank Gruber, professor of the history of science
at Princeton University Angela Creager, and professor of philosophy and
theology at Harvard Divinity School David Lamberth. Father Antony
Hughes, of St. Mary’s Antiochian Orthodox Church in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, also read the book and commented. I thank them all for
their wonderful generosity. (I let my son John off the hook on this book! He
was at his new job and enduring very long days, not to mention needing
every moment with Lucy.)
I want to thank my friend, my editor, and the publisher of this book,
John Radziewicz. His editorial suggestions inspired me. John nurtured this
project from the beginning and guided me patiently. Thanks to Lissa
Warren, my indefatigable publicist, for her efforts on behalf of all my
books. Others at Da Capo Press also go to bat for my work. Sean Maher
and Jonathan Crowe are among them. Connie Day did a lovely job
copyediting this book, and Collin Tracy was kind as she took the book
through the production process. Thank you all.
My agent Jennifer Lyons is my dear friend and champion, and I thank her
as always. My brother-in-law Jim Walsh showed up on the right day at the
right time to fix a menacing computer problem when the deadline crunch
was on and saved my peace of mind. Thank you! And I want thank the
several thousand people whose emails (whether kind or rude) prompted
me to write this book as they reacted to my memoir Crazy For God with
questions such as “Well, what do you believe now?”
I found Wikipedia helped refresh my memory regarding certain facts. I
borrowed some wording for their page on apophatic theology.
 My wife Genie is the bedrock upon which every project of mine rests.
My children Jessica, Francis, and John are my light. My grandchildren
Amanda, Benjamin, and Lucy make life sweet. My son-in-law Dani and my
daughter-in-law Becky are so patient and kind. Thank you all for providing
me with a good life and thus making writing about that life seem
worthwhile.
 Copyright © 2009 by Frank Schaeffer

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Set in 11 point Sabon by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaeffer,

Frank.
Patience with God : faith for people who don’t like religion (or
atheism) / by Frank Schaeffer.—1st Da Capo Press ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-786-74654-5
1. Faith. 2. Schaeffer, Frank. 3. Christianity and atheism.
4. Fundamentalism. I. Title.
BV4637.S3263 2009
261.2’1—dc22
2009026242

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