July 9, 2014
Stuff Fundies Like is a blog by and for people coming out of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist tradition. Recently
one former Baptist
told how his high school youth group had been divided into two groups,
assigned to play the roles of persecutors and martyrs. In 2012 a youth
pastor in Pennsylvania
made international news by staging the kidnapping of his young charges to help prepare them for the horrors to come.
The
Christian persecution complex is
absurd. Modern American Christians are not persecuted or under attack.
But for Christians who are truly concerned about hostility toward their
faith, I have a bit of advice: Don’t be evil. And don’t let your
co-religionists get away with being evil either.
No, really.
In
the book of Matthew, Jesus gives his disciples a lot of contradictory
advice. Modern day followers pick and choose, but one piece that often
gets ignored is this: Be
harmless as doves. This advice is not
only profoundly moral; it is profoundly self-protective. Far fewer
people would be entertaining themselves with fantasies about lions if
more Christians took this little nugget seriously. A huge part of the
antagonism that even moderate Christians face from outsiders is due to
the fact that too many devout believers claim a righteous mandate to say
and do things that are truly horrible.
Let me spell it out.
1. Opposing protections and rights for children is evil. Thanks to the influence of biblical Christianity, the U.S. stands alone with Somalia in failing to ratify the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Why? Because the Bible instructs parents to hit their children, among
other things. Laws that give rights to children go head to head with
biblical texts
which say in no uncertain terms that children are the property of their
fathers, to be punished or even killed in accordance with the father’s
religious beliefs and other priorities.
When a Muslim father in Tunisia recently
burned his 13 year old daughter
to death for walking home with a male classmate, Christians were
rightfully appalled. What many fail to acknowledge is that their
insistence on elevating religion above universal ethical principles,
human rights, and secular laws regularly
costs children their lives, not just children with Muslim parents governed by Muslim theocracies, but also children with
Christian parents in towns across America.
2. Denying young people accurate information about their bodies is evil. The U.S. government just spent a decade and a billion dollars on
failed
abstinence-only education programs concocted by Bible believers who
live in some delusional world where prohibition works and virginity is
next to godliness. Thanks to their influence, straight-faced educators
tell teens that a girl who has had sex is a
licked lollipop.
Instead of medically accurate information and thoughtful conversation
about intimacy and childbearing, teens get promise rings and slut shame.
The result?
Here in the U.S.,
more than one in four girls gets pregnant before she turns 20, often with heartbreaking multigenerational
consequences for women, children and whole communities.
More than half of girls who give birth during high school drop out, permanently. Only
two percent ever graduate college.
3. Demeaning and subjugating women is evil. When
it comes to dignity and equality for women, instead of acting as moral
torchbearers, Bible believers have been at the back of the pack for
generations, along with conservative factions from other Abrahamic
traditions ranging from Islam to Mormonism. The American
Quiverfull movement, “
complementarianism,” the
expulsion of Southern Baptist women who were making inroads into the clergy, the Mormon Patriarchy’s
threats to excommunicate women who seek equality, the Vatican’s decision to
crush nuns who thought poverty was a bigger problem than abortion . . .
Need I say more?
4. Obstructing humanity’s transition to more thoughtful, intentional childbearing is evil. “If
a woman dies in [child]bearing, let her die; she is there to do it.” So
spoke Martin Luther. But beyond the horrors of women dying after days
of labor or bleeding out after unwanted childbirth, lies the
incontrovertible evidence that children, families and whole communities do better when parents can plan their families. As one medical student
put it,
“The failure of any sect to support the benefits to humanity that could
be obtained through the use of contraceptive technology is blasphemy.”
If evidence-based compassion—
the intersection of truth and love—was
at the top of Christian priorities, hunger and destitution would be
vastly diminished because millions of mothers would be able to plan and
prepare for their babies. But for two generations, Christian patriarchs
have been fighting against public health advocates every step of the
way. In June alone, Christians in the U.S. congress voted to
slash family planning aid by 25 percent, and the five Catholic men on the U.S. Supreme Court
decided
that the “religious freedom” of corporations is more important than the
right of working women to care for their health and their families.
5. Undermining science is evil. Science has been called
what we know about how not to fool ourselves.The
discovery of empiricism and falsification—a method of inquiry that
forces scholars to ask the questions that could show them wrong—is what
has differentiated modernity from the Middle Ages. It’s the reason most
of our children don’t die before hitting the age of five. It’s the
reason broken legs heal straight, sky scrapers don’t collapse, and our
houses are warm in the winter. It is what alerted us to the fact that
our carbon consumption has become an existential threat.
But the
scientific method has also become an existential threat to Bible belief.
We know now that the Genesis creation story is myth, neurotransmitters
rather than demons cause mental illness,
mandrake roots and dove blood don’t improve female fertility or cure skin diseases, and the cognitive structures of the human mind
predispose us to certain kinds of religious belief.
It
may boggle moral credibility that believers intent on propping up the
Bible would sacrifice humanity’s best hope of beating the enormous
threats we face, threats like resource depletion, food and water
shortages, climate change, and
rapidly evolving superbugs. But if there’s any overarching theme to Christian history it is this: the end justifies the means.
6. Promoting holy war is evil. What
first flipped my bit, what transformed me from an agnostic into an
outspoken full-time antagonist of Bible worship was a conversation with
my Evangelical relatives about the Iraq war. From the vantage of my
relatives and my childhood church “family,” George Bush needed no
diplomatic or cultural expertise; he was Born Again. He didn’t need to
seek input from his earthly father about the invasion, because he asked
his Heavenly Father. Besides, Jesus is coming soon and war in the Middle
East is predicted in the Bible. That makes it not only inevitable,
but—in a manner of speaking—desirable.
Evangelical Christians have spent
tens of millions of dollars funding the
“return” of Jews to Israel and settlements
in the West Bank “as it is written in the scripture”—with the perverse
expectation that their presence will one day cause blood to flow in the
streets
as high as a horse’s bridle.
7. Abusing and killing queers is evil. The Bible’s
clobber verses
may be open to interpretation, but the fact that those verses have
caused centuries of suffering is not. For much of American history, the
common term for queer was the biblical “sodomite,” implying that gays
are so offensive to God that they pose a threat to society as a whole.
Thanks to Christian missionaries, African and Latin American queers also
have now lived for centuries now under the threat of violent death. As
progressive Anglican Gay Clark Jennings
observes,
“There is no getting around the Bible when searching for the origins of
the homophobia that is rampant in many African cultures. What’s more,
Europeans and North Americans bear much of the historical responsibility
for this sad state of affairs.”
It would be bad enough if we were
simply talking about history. But homophobic American Christians,
thwarted at home, have turned to
inciting oppression in Uganda and Nigeria where their hatred still finds fertile ground.
8. Destroying Earth’s web of life and impoverishing future generations is evil. The
book of Genesis may say that only man is made in the image of God and
that God gave man dominion over everything that grows or walks the
earth. The book of Matthew
may say that the return of Jesus is imminent and that his disciples shouldn’t worry about
tomorrow, which will
take care of itself. The book of Revelation may teach that this world is just a prelude to streets of gold.
But
some of us think the lives and loves of other species have moral weight
of their own. And some of us think that the intricate web that gave us
birth is both precious and precarious, and that the wellbeing of future
generations matters. And we think those verses in Genesis and Matthew
and Revelation reveal more about the hubris and flawed humanity of the
Bible writers (and of Bible believers) than they do about divinity.
9. Trying to suck vulnerable people into your poorly researched worldview is evil.
It’s one thing to latch onto the supernatural worldview you were raised
in or the one that first triggered for you some radically cool
temporal lobe micro-seizure or similar altered state. But then
failing to do your homework before using your position of adult American privilege to foist your religion
on kindergarteners, or families who live in
desperate poverty, or people who just got hit by a
natural disaster—in
other words people who trust you because you are older or richer or
more powerful or have more access to the very information that
you have failed to use—now we’re talking about a violation of ethics. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
Really.
Some
reader is bound to say that without God anything goes and so as a
nontheist I have no basis for calling anything evil. A short snarky
retort has been making its way around the internet: If you can’t tell
right from wrong without appealing to an authority or a sacred text,
what you lack is not religion but compassion. The long answer, meaning
the evidence showing we really can recognize evil and
good without gods, is available in
neuroscience,
sociology,
developmental psychology, and
in the lives of individual atheists including the Dalai Lama.
I
realize that many Christians are not Bible believers, but rather people
who glean through the Christian tradition to claim what seems timeless
and wise. I also realize that most Bible believers aren’t trying to do
harm—in fact the opposite. I know because
I’ve been there.
But, when you treat the words of our Iron Age ancestors as if they
flowed straight from the mouth of God, you end up putting your life
energy, whether you see it that way or not, into bringing back the Iron
Age.
The Iron Age was a time of incredible brutality—tribalism,
warfare, destitution, disease, murder, misogyny, sexual slavery and
superstition of biblical proportions. Most of us would rather not go
back, thank you very much. Christians who want a better future are
welcome to join in the inquiry and teamwork it will take to get there,
and many do. For the rest of you: please forgive the fact that your Iron
Age fantasies trigger some of us to experience wry Iron Age fantasies
of our own.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons.
She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old
Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles
can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
