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Religion Scorned

MARCH 14, 1989

 

Religion has been receiving a bad press these days, calling to mind Picasso’s famous disparagement of his own work twenty years ago—is God taunting us by putting the spotlight on Jimmy Swaggart, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and John Bird Singer?

The last, for irresponsible nonwatchers of 60 Minutes, was a Mormon fanatic who got himself excommunicated from his own church, drew his family reclusively to his cabin where he stowed his wives and several thousand rounds of ammunition and more guns than General Custer had—but was killed in an exchange with federal and state troopers. His family lives on, uncorrected by experience.

Is Swaggart’s deviant lechery characteristic of evangelical Protestantism? Is Khomeini’s genocidal search for schismatics and blasphemers a correct transcription of the word of Allah? Is an excommunicated Mormon paradoxically an example of the practicing Mormon?

On the one hand there are the aberrational representatives of religion who do the damage, but there are also, of course, the nominal Christians, and they do as much damage, however little they are noticed, in part because they have become so humdrum.

A few weeks ago I was seated next to a European figure so august that ladies curtsy when they are presented to him, and he was telling the table at which he sat about the great mischief being done by the missionaries in Venezuela who move in on native tribes and totally break down their cultural order, resulting in deracination and chaos. I cleared my throat and asked which of the Ten Commandments was responsible for bringing pandemonium to the poor Venezuelan savages.

The speaker hesitated for a moment, and said that, well, he was talking, so to speak, about the techniques used, to which the answer is of course that bad techniques are bad techniques, whether used by teachers, missionaries, lovers, or musicians, but one oughtn’t to regret teaching, or evangelizing, or sex, or music because they are here and there sometimes practiced badly. But he seemed to be saying that it is inherent in the cultures of alien people that they should be left alone; to which one can only reply, as one would have done a generation ago when Margaret Mead discovered the unfettered joys of unfettered love in Samoa, that Christianity is the hallmark of civilization, and it is an injunction of Christianity to go out in the world and teach the word of the Lord. Yes, even in the jungles of Venezuela and on the beaches of Samoa and, for that matter, the pastures of Qom.

Granted that the Ten Commandments can convulse not only Venezuelan savages, but Park Avenue socialites. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”—imagine if that were to become a Zero Toleration law in Washington. One would come away with the impression that a nerve gas had frozen the vocal cords of the entire town. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” ... Thou shalt not what?! People for the American Way would descend upon you and insist that you were violating the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address if you held any such view. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods” would put the Democratic Party out of business.

So there is the sense in which Christianity is a continuing revolution against the ways of man, beginning when he fled paradise. But Christianity speaks also about forgiveness, yea, even to the sinner who has sinned seventy times seven times. And that is a great deal more than the ayatollah is inclined to do, and very much more than the Incas or the Aztecs were inclined to do—or, for that matter, the fathers of the Inquisition. But the Christian religion is about how people ought to act, not how they do act, and European aristocrats ought to worry about savages who have been deprived of the knowledge of how they should act, rather than about nonsavages who know how they should act but do not do so.

Christianity has never been tried, the cliché runs. And of course it’s true, but so is it true that Christianity has checked the movements of millions of men and women who but for the pull of dogma would know no vital brake upon their behavior. Sometimes the brake is effective, sometimes it is not. But that it should be there outweighs any concern over the excesses of Jimmy Swaggart or the ayatollah or the Mormon extremist or the Venezuelan savage—or the European relativist.