Create the problem, then solve it
Norm Allen on the Black Church:
Henry Louis Gates’ two-part, 4-hour documentary on the Black Church was featured on PBS February 16–17, 2021. It focused on the Black Church’s role in combating racism. While it is clear that churches (or rather, church people) have always had some positive aspects, the bottom line is that theistic churches have at their center the belief in a perfect God.
So the question that instantly comes to my mind – as it did every time I saw a teaser for Gates’s doc on PBS – is why this perfect God allowed slavery, or any kind of race-based hierarchy, or any kind of hierarchy period.
For all of the talk of the role of the Black Church in the struggle for civil rights, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I never attended a single church in which modern slavery or racism was even mentioned, let alone discussed in sermons…I have conducted no scholarly research to confirm or dismiss my personal observation. However, I have spoken with many other African Americans that attended church back then, and all of them have agreed with my observation. There are many Black scholars who have said that most Black churches either were not involved with the civil rights movement, or actually distrusted it. I suspect that this is true.
From what I’ve read a lot of Black churches looked very askance at King and the SCLC at first (and had no time for SNCC at all). That may have been more to do with fear and the realities of life in the south than with moral or religious “principles,” but it does hint that it wasn’t all a story of rights and freedom and rising up.
[M]ost Black churches have promoted the idea that only Christians can make it into Heaven. Obviously, religion evolves before our very eyes, and many, if not most, Black Christians have abandoned this bigoted religious belief. However, many still embrace it, and it is a part of history. A good historian should examine the belief and see how it has influenced people for better or worse.
Similarly, Black churches defend a belief in Hell and demons. The great 19th Century freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll once stated that “all the meanness of which the human heart is capable is summed up in that one word: Hell.” The belief in Hell and demons has led to botched “exorcisms,” false accusations against and ostracization of alleged sinners, literal witch hunts and much worse.
And it also leads to starkly binary views of people – saved or not saved, good or evil, one of us or cast out. None of that leads to a good place.
Finally, the documentary focused on the idea that without the Black Church, there would have been no real fight against slavery and racism. This is a case to be argued and not assumed. In any case, if not for White Christianity and the racism and slave system that it created, there would have been no need for the Black Church. As Gore Vidal noted, Christianity is a great religion for solving the problems that it creates.
It’s what con artists do – dump something on your carpet and then make a big show of cleaning it up with this miraculous device only $99.99 if you buy now.
Yeah, I hear a lot from people about how religion might not be true, but it helps people feel better, takes their fears away. I noticed as a kid that it tended more to instill fear. Hell…sheep and goats…fire…if I die before I sleep…and it did a damn poor job of taking those fears away. It was used to keep me afraid, so I would behave. It was a whip, not a gentle guiding hand. Most of the people I know who find comfort in religion are often comforted about the things that religion causes fear…the real life fears, not so much. Those are hard to solve with pretense and praying.
And that’s the other thing – some fears shouldn’t be taken away, because we need them to spur us to action. We need to be afraid of that tiger in the bushes because God isn’t going to zap it away. We need to plan for tomorrow, because God will not keep his promise to take care of us as he does the sparrow in the field (and the sparrow does it’s own thing, collects food and so forth, in spite of the Bible turning it into the first welfare mother). We need to solve problems ourselves because no one else is going to do it. Nothing burns me more than trying to work on a problem and some of the people I need to get the job done shrug and say “God’s got it”.
One of my favourite memes uses a traditional, pious painting of Jesus at a big, solid, woden door. Jesus is saying “Let me in so I can save you.”
“Save me from what?” asks someone through the door.
“WHAT I’M GOING TO DO TO YOU IF YOU DON’T LET ME IN!”
Wooden door, not woden.
Mustn’t mix our religious franchises or we’ll get a scolding from Legal.
Prudent of you Bruce, Big Viking have a pretty savage legal team.
“[M]ost Black churches have promoted the idea that only Christians can make it into Heaven. Obviously, religion evolves before our very eyes, and many, if not most, Black Christians have abandoned this bigoted religious belief.”
Is that bigoted?
If someone believes that only people who believe in fairies can come to the magical fairy kingdom, is that bigoted too?
Maybe it’s a bad analogy because Christians are a real identifiable social group?
Yeah, I thought the position of many denominations of many religions is that only members of our denomination, never mind even other denominations and forget about other religions, will go to heaven. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe even more strictly that only 144,000 Witnesses will be in heaven, not anyone else.
I have a hard time with dictating theological positions. The point is to treat people with respect and without discrimination EVEN IF you think they are committing sins or they won’t go to heaven. Not to “help” them avoid your religion’s version of sin, nor to revise that definition.
I started telling one of my favorite jokes when I was in middle school. It made me many friends. It goes like this:
—–
An atheist dies, and instead of his consciousness flicking off like a switch, he is surprised to find himself on a fluffy cloud in front of a great, pearly pair of gates. A bearded old fellow is leaning over a book. “Your name?” the old man asks.
The atheist informs his name, and the old man searches, but can’t find it in a book. He asks the atheist which faith he followed. The man says he didn’t follow any, and is very surprised to be there. St. Peter closes the book and says “Well, you must have lived an extraordinarily virtuous life, but we can’t have you running around by yourself up here. So you’ll have to pick a group now. Let’s give you a tour.”
St. Peter takes the atheist down a long cloudy hallway, opening a series of doors. Here are the Buddhists, here the Muslims, here are the Episcopalians, here the Presbyterians. The man takes note of the Unitarians, who seem to be running around naked in a forest, and continues his tour. St. Peter passes one door without opening it, and the man says “Who is behind that door?”
“Oh, I can’t show you that. That’s the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones up here.”
—–
I’ve always been alternately fascinated and horrified by religion. I attended Catholic school for about a year and a half, and did not have a nice time of it. I would ask impertinent questions like whether Adam had a bellybutton, whether you can really tell you’re having a nice time in Heaven if there is no pain, and my favorite: If God is perfect, and Man is imperfect, and God created man in his image… did He mess up?
I understand now that some Jesuits like this sort of question, but I didn’t go to school with that sort of teacher, just a bunch of mean, wizened-up old nuns who would beat you at the slightest provocation. After a year and half, a nun with sharp fingernails slapped me in the face so hard that it drew blood, and I punched her back. That was the end of my mother’s experiment with Catholic school.
I understand now that the more sophisticated religionists explain the existence of evil in the world, despite an all-powerful God, as a result of fun game God is playing with his creations: He has given us free will, because he wants us to be good and worship him, but it doesn’t count if we don’t choose it. That means that many of us choose to be bad instead. But don’t worry, those bad people all get punished later.
Yeah, that’s some racket. It’s exactly what bad people would say to the people they’re exploiting, isn’t it?
I still hear non-religious people mumbling that they admire faith, even envy the faithful. But one should always ask: ‘faith in what?’ When religion is utterly integrated into culture, it participates in ALL of that culture, including slavery and violence. Black churches were successfully recruited into anti-gay hate campaigns right here in California.
Which makes a mockery of the idea that the Bible is the perfect word of God, not to be changed by one jot or tittle on pain of eternal punishment. Seems a pretty glaring contradiction, yet one that’s missed by the allegedly faithful.
So do I. I think it’s one of those lazy, un-thought-through, Pascal’s-wagery things people say because they think it makes them seem nice without effort. It’s so wildly non-specific that references to religious and religiously-inspired atrocities can be waved away, even though it is exactly faith or the performance of faith that’s to blame.
I’ve never been tempted to envy belief or believers but I have to admit that it’s a bit annoying that we can’t be smug about being skeptics and atheists any more.
I’m not sure exactly what there is to admire about people who believe something despite a wealth of evidence that points to the belief being false. Do the admirers of faith in religion also admire those who believe that Area 51 holds a crashed spaceship and the bodies of its alien crew? Do they envy flat- earthers? JFK/CIA fantasists? Illuminati ranters?
A mark of conspiracy theorists is that the more evidence there is against their pet theories the more they believe them. Why is religion not seen as the greatest conspiracy theory of them all, and its adherents mocked as we mock all other conspiracy theorists?
I’m not missing it all that much. It was fun for a time, but then…you know.
Yeah, but it was all I had to be smug about. Then they took it all away by being giant arseholes!
And then, more importantly, I finally realised it was nothing to be smug about in the first place. I suppose I could be smug about that…