With friends like Bruxy Cavey who needs enemies? Cavey is a pastor with The Meeting House, a non-denominational church in the Toronto area. He's also the author of The End of Religion: Encountering the Subversive Spirituality of Jesus. In the preface he writes, “Religion uses rules to force our steps, guilt to keep us in line, and rituals to remind us of our failure to live up to those rules. In doing this, religion adds more weight to those who are already burdened with life's hardships. But Jesus offers us the rest we're searching for.”
Cavey's message about religion isn't that far from Christopher Hitchens' whose book god is not Great is subtitled, How Religion Ruins Everything. Or for that matter, Bishop John Shelby Spong, who said in an interview, “Jesus steps beyond the boundaries of his religious systems and in one of the great quotations attributed to him, he says, that human beings were not made to fit into the Sabbath, that Sabbath was made to enrich the lives of human beings. I understand that to mean that no religious rule is a valid religious rule unless it enhances life and so long as we create religious rules that diminish human life, which most of them do, then we don't understand what it is we're talking about.” Ouch!
A pastor in Colorado Springs, Chris Jackson, has just published a book called Loving God When You Don't Love The Church. It's subtitled, Opening the Door to Healing. Double Ouch!
It is unlikely that either Cavey or Spong would care to be seen in company with Hitchens, or vice versa. But, that's the strange thing about the zeitgeist — like two movies about volcanoes or about asteroids opening in the same week. But this is the water we're drinking these days, this is the popular theme: that organized religion is evil (Hitchens) or irrelevant (Cavey) or has long lost its roots (Spong). The latter two would replace religion with theological recasting of, as Spong calls it, the Jesus Experience. (Hitchens is an atheist, though his book, unlike those by Richard Dawkins, with whom he's been unfairly twinned, is more interested in damning organized religion than in proving the non-existence of God.)
Bishop Spong has a very smart idea that Christianity lost its way early on when it turned first century Jewish customs and culture into biographical absolutes. (That there is a hint here of The Da Vinci Code and the gnostic gospels craze is interesting, and another zeitgeist coincidence.) He sees much of the Bible and particularly the Gospels as metaphor — ideas about ideas and not meant to be seen literally. I know a few people within our denomination who find this compelling — that there is a true way and it does not exist within the 2,000-year history of the religion. (Here too is a zeitgeist thing: that somehow western culture got it all wrong; if only we were as pure as eastern cultures, or aboriginal cultures. (No need to write me about the fallacy of that argument, I'm merely your reporter, and, anyways, you've heard it a thousand times.) Religion bad, Jesus good.
And it's a message repeated endlessly — one more example: The Barna Group is a pollster in the States which focuses on Christianity. Its latest book, unchristian, has scads of statistics that draw a sharp line between the institutions of Christianity and the message of Christianity. One little statistic says a lot to me: Seventy-three per cent of those polled over age 42 said they had “made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ,” but only 48 per cent of them were “absolutely committed to the Christian faith.” In the younger group, ages 18-41, the difference was much more stark: 65 per cent committed to Christ, 20 per cent committed to the faith.
One last stat to chew on: 1,620 people are polled on this statement: “Christian churches accept and love people unconditionally.” Seventy-six per cent of pastors agreed; 40 per cent of churchgoers agreed; 20 per cent of people outside the church community agreed. In other words, those who work for the institution say its fine; those who participate in the institution are guarded in their opinion; those who see it from outside are downright critical.
You can draw your own conclusions.
