Sucks to be Her

It always sucked to be Rowan County clerk Kim Davis.

She is a living example of what Bishop Shelby Spong described as people for whom, "Religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

She made the news a few years back when she refused to provide a marriage license to two same-sex couples.

Now she has been ordered to pay $100,000 to US one of those couples.

A former Kentucky county clerk is being ordered to pay $100,000 to a local couple who sued the clerk after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Kim Davis, the former clerk of Rowan county in eastern Kentucky, rose to national prominence for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses in 2015, arguing that such actions violated her religious beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman.

………

Last year, a federal judge ruled that Davis violated the constitutional rights of the two gay couples who sued her.

US district judge David Bunning said that Davis “cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official”.

This week, in a trial to determine damages Davis must pay, a federal jury ordered Davis to pay $50,000 each to David Ermold and David Moore, according to lawyers of Davis, the Associated Press reported.

I expect this to go to the Supreme Court, and there the odds are better than even that at least 5 of the 6 corrupt hacks on the court will side with the former government official refusing to do their duty.

Headline of the Day

Christians Are Sick Of Being Punished Just For Punishing Other People

—Wonkette

This is a snarkier way of asking the question that the late Bishop Shelby Spong asked many years ago, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

The answer to his question is, "In far too many cases, yes," particularly these days. 

Another Attempt to Implement Sharia Law in the United States

This is my Shocked Face!

My bad.  This isn't the Taliban, it's the Talibaptists, who are hip deep in the January 6 insurrection.

I may be the least surprised person in my zip code right now:

A team of scholars, faith leaders and advocates unveiled an exhaustive new report Wednesday (Feb. 9) that documents in painstaking detail the role Christian nationalism played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling it an unsettling preview of things to come.

Christian nationalism was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” said Amanda Tyler, head of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sponsored the report along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Tyler’s group is behind an initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism.

The organizations touted the report as “the most comprehensive account to date of Christian nationalism and its role in the January 6 insurrection,” compiled using “videos, statements, and images from the attack and its precursor events.”

………

Asked about the future of Christian nationalism — particularly its growing popularity among right-wing extremists — the authors struck a somber tone.

“Even as the movement is trying to shake faith in elections whose results they don’t like, their political allies are also doubling down on voter suppression and gerrymandering that seem intent on codifying minority rule,” Stewart said.

………

“Christian nationalism is powerfully associated — with white Americans — with anti-democratic views,” he said. “As it gets marginalized a little bit, I think we need to watch out for a reaction of anti-democratic efforts.”

This seems to flow directly from Shelby Spong's question, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

The Christian Right has increasingly defined themselves by their hate.

He Will Be Missed

On a number of occasions, I have quoted Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong.

He is probably my favorite Christian theologian, which is actually fairly faint praise, but he has consistently, and strenuously fought against the normalization of hostility and hate as religion in the United States.

My favorite quote of his is a question, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

Well, he has died at age 90:

John Shelby Spong, a charismatic Episcopal bishop who pushed his followers to accept women and L.G.B.T.Q. clergy, and who later called on them to reject sacrosanct ideas like Jesus’ virgin birth and the existence of heaven and hell, died on Sept. 12 at his home in Richmond, Va. He was 90.

His death was announced by the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, where he had served as bishop from 1976 to 2000.

Bishop Spong combined celebrity with tireless writing and speaking, perhaps more than any other liberal theologian in the late 20th century, to open up the Episcopal Church, and the global Anglican Church of which it is a part. He was one of the first American bishops to ordain a woman into the clergy, in 1977, and the first to ordain an openly gay man, in 1989.

………

Through more than 25 books, as well as speaking schedules that often included 200 events a year and regular appearances on the talk shows of Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and others, Bishop Spong urged his church to reconcile with modernity, even if that meant setting aside supernatural ideas like Jesus’ resurrection. That position drew intense support, but it also drew equally intense criticism from the church’s traditionalist wing.

“If you wanted to see a frown on a traditional Episcopalian’s face, you just had to mention John Shelby Spong,” said Mark Tooley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative think tank.

………

If Bishop Spong’s position on women and L.G.B.T.Q. clergy put him on the edge of the mainstream, his theological views put him well outside it. He taught that the Gospels should be considered artistic interpretations of Jesus’ life, not literal accounts of it, and he called on Christians to reject ideas, like original sin, that could not be explained by science.

Those views, even more than his social activism, attracted millions of followers, as well as countless critics. Writing in National Review in 1988, William Murchison called Bishop Spong “the latest in a long line of right reverend goofballs,” chastising him for calling on the church to bend toward modern society rather than the other way around.

………

As a white progressive minister in the South during the civil rights era, he often found himself at odds with his community, especially when he insisted on preaching to Black congregations. He and his family faced regular threats and harassment, and he later claimed that the Ku Klux Klan of eastern North Carolina had labeled him their No. 1 enemy.

He had the right enemies.  That is a mark of a man of character.

This is Not a Surprise

So many young white evangelicals are leaving the church that for the first time, mainline protestants outnumber their fundamentalist brethren.

This is no surprise.

Over the past two decades, the Talibaptists have focused increasingly on hating people who are different, partisan politics, and sexual purity, and perceived sexual purity, which leaves little room for any real morality.

Right wing evangelical Christianity is an exercise in spiritual vacuity:

White Christian decline has slowed. Mainline Protestants now outnumber white evangelicals. New York is home to several of the most religiously diverse counties in the U.S.

These shifts and findings are among some of the notable revelations documented in a sweeping and exhaustive survey of the U.S. religious landscape by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The 2020 Census of American Religion, released on Thursday (July 8), is based on what researchers called an “unprecedented” dataset that includes hundreds of thousands of respondents surveyed between 2013 and 2019.

Clergy and other faith leaders will be perhaps most interested in PRRI’s finding that religiously unaffiliated Americans, or “nones” in religion demography parlance, have lost ground, making up just 23% of the country. The complex group — which includes atheists, agnostics and some people who say they pray daily but don’t claim a specific faith tradition — peaked at 25.5% of the population in 2018.

White Christians, meanwhile, have expanded their share of the population, particularly white mainline Protestants. That group sits at 16.4%, an increase from 13% in 2016, whereas white evangelicals — who PRRI delineated from white mainliners using a methodology researchers said is commonly utilized by major pollsters — now represent about 14.5% of the population, down from a peak of 23% in 2006. White Catholics now hover around 11.7%, up from a 2018 low of 10.9%.

………

Further complicating the political calculus are the ages of each faith community. White evangelicals are now the oldest religious group, with a median age of 56. White mainliners and Black Protestants share the same median age — 50 — with white Catholics skewing closer to evangelicals at 54.

The youngest religious Americans are Muslims, with a median age of just 33. They’re followed by Hindus and Buddhists (both 36), unaffiliated Americans (38), Hispanic Protestants (39) and Hispanic Catholics (42). Jewish Americans (48) and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (47) make up the middle of the pack alongside Jehovah’s Witnesses (49) and Orthodox Christians (42).

I am reminded, as I frequently am, of the musings of Shelby Spong, who asked, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

It appears that among younger people raised in evangelical homes, people who have friends who have come out to them and married same sex partners, this is not enough to stay with these organizations.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

In what I find some of the least surprising news of the day, the right wing Evangelical National Christian Foundation, which claims to be the largest Christian charity in the US is helping people launder donations to hate groups.

Shelby Spong has asked, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

The answer is, of course:  Fomenting hate is all the Talibaptists have left:

The nation’s eighth-largest public charity is pouring tens of millions of dollars each year into a number of mostly anti-LGBT hate groups, a Sludge investigation shows.

According to the three most recent available tax filings—which cover 2015-17—it has donated $56.1 million on behalf of its clients to 23 nonprofits identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.

“I certainly don’t know of any public disclosures of funds to hate groups at levels anywhere near this,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Sludge. “It’s pretty astounding and certainly concerning.”

The far-right evangelical National Christian Foundation (NCF), which offers Christian donors “expert guidance and creative giving solutions,” is the fourth-largest donor-advised fund by 2017 revenue in the U.S., having raised over $1.5 billion that year. Such funds offer individual accounts to their clients, allowing clients to get immediate tax breaks on donations to these accounts and to direct NCF to disperse the money to the nonprofits of their choice, mostly churches and other Christian nonprofits, at their own pace. Clients donate through donor-advised funds anonymously, so even the Internal Revenue Service won’t know their identities.

According to a 2017 Inside Philanthropy article, NCF “is probably the single biggest source of money fueling the pro-life and anti-LGBT movements over the past 15 years.” In 2017, NCF’s donation to anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant hate groups rose to over $19 million.

By far the biggest recipient of NCF donations is Alliance Defending Freedom, a large network of Christian extremist lawyers who have supported criminalizing homosexuality, sterilizing transgender people, and claimed that gay men are pedophiles. The group recently came out against congressional Democrats’ Equality Act, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ Americans.

………

Anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council, which has attempted to tie gay men to pedophilia for many years, accepted over $5.3 million from NCF from 2015-17.

As Lisa Gilbert at Public Citizen notes, "It’s interesting to me that big donors have a mechanism to give money to causes that would be unpopular, like going after gay rights ……… It’s not always so much about the total amount as it is about the mechanisms for funneling money into politics ……… This is like a shell-game funnel of corporate money. So it might be an organization that has an innocent name, that sounds like a good, upstanding, innocent group" but is being backed by wealthy donors."

It really is remarkable just how much hate trumps any other considerations with the Christofascists.

Quote of the Day

The point is to stop pretending that religion (and in the US we mean good Christian religion) necessarily steers people away from horrible moral and political beliefs, because all that does it give people a magical cloak to hide how horrible they are. Religion might be wonderful for individuals but it doesn't elevate the morals of one group over another. I think this should be somewhat obvious by now.

—Duncan "Atrios" Black

The point that Black is trying to make is that the religious right is right first, and religious second, and that the suggestions by some that appealing to God/Jesus/Allah/Vishnu/The Flying Spaghetti Monster/Etc. is a lost cause.

The religious right's answer to "What would God/Jesus/Allah/Vishnu/The Flying Spaghetti Monster/Etc. do?" is that he/they/his noodley goodness would kick the crap out of those hippies who want to keep lazy black and brown children from starving.

This is how they worship, and it is what it is.

To suggest, as the liberal religious pundits suggest, that we can dictate how they worship is patronizing and wrong.

More particularly, I need to go back to the noted theologian The Right Reverend Shelby Spong, who asked, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

I would add bigotry and hatred to the retired Bishop's list.

More Evidence That Conservative Christianity Has Degenerated Into a Vehicle for Hate

This is beyond contemptible

Once Again I need to invoke Shelby Spong's question, "I have quoted the controversial theologian's question, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

In Tennessee, a Talibaptist cleric has equated equal rights to Satan:

A Tennessee pastor said this week that his church was “not trying to offend anyone” when it put up a sign linking “equal rights” to Satan.

Members of the community expressed outrage over the weekend after photos of marquee outside the Knoxville Baptist Tabernacle Church were circulated online. The sign read, “Remember, Satan was the first to demand equal rights.”

“Who was your target audience? Who were you speaking to when you put it up there?” Knoxville resident Rick Staples, asked, according to WBIR. “And when you say you’re asking for your equal rights, who’s asking for their equal rights and who are you comparing to Satan? That was very strong language.”

Andy Henry said that the church was trying to make a statement about gay rights.

“It’s clearly a sign that was meant to offend a particular community – the LGBT community. Because of (the church’s) lack of foresight, they ended up offending everybody who had ever fought for equality or civil rights in general,” Henry observed.

But Pastor Tony Greene insisted that everyone misunderstood the message.

“Our sign referencing Satan demanding his equal rights to ascend into the heavens and be God was simply ‘I’ and all about that individual,” Greene told WATE. “It was not a statement against any one group in particular, you know what about the rights of the unborn babies, the rights of children, the rights of everyone?”

He added: “My heart breaks in the dividedness of our country.”

No, Rev. Greene is not calling for unity, he is expressing a world view for which faith is indistinguishable from hate.

At its core, this is the same spirituality that we see from Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban.

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I Guess I Need to Invoke Bishop Shelby Spong Again

I have quoted the controversial theologian's question, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?" repeatedly.

Well, a poster child for using religion as a justification for hate and bigotry, one Jennifer LeClaire, is now wondering why Christians are turning away from the faith, but studiously ignores just how offensive she and her coreligionists can be.

Well over at Patheos, Hemant Mehta is having none of that:

Sometimes, Christian journalists miss the elephant in the room with their stories. Like this one in Charisma Magazine asking “Why Are So Many Christians Turning Into Atheists?”

………

Ah, yes… the End Times are near and we’re all just fulfilling biblical prophecy. Makes perfect sense.

Here’s another thought.

People are taking a look at certain brands of Christianity and realizing they want nothing whatsoever to do with it. And when they back away from one form of Christianity, they realize there’s no reason to stick with the other forms of it, either.

For example, just look at a sampling of what LeClaire herself has written in the past couple of years:

• Gay NFL Players Should Stay in the Closet.
• What if NBA’s First Gay Player Jason Collins Renounced Homosexuality?
• She claimed that there was some wacky Atheist Agenda to “woo born-again Bible believers to the dark side.” (To which I say: How did you know?)
• She wrote that prayer in public schools would have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre.
• She thinks atheists are “trying to stir up witches against” her.

Like I said, that’s just a sampling.

There’s this anti-gay, anti-reality, anti-science, conspiratorial mindset that plagues conservative Christianity. Even progressive Christians are ashamed to share a label with that group, pushing some of them to shed the “Christian” label despite believing in Christ’s divinity.

………

Really, we all owe Jennifer LeClaire a thank you for answering her own question.

Why are so many Christians turning into atheists?

Because of people like her.

To quote Abraham Lincoln, "I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."

Ms. LeClaire, perhaps if you stopped proclaiming your Christianity, and started demonstrating your Christianity through good acts, people would stop being horrified what comes from your poison pen.

Linkage

• Good Grief and Great Tits (The Stranger) Dan Savage's takedown of Sarah Palin's is epic.
• Crushing Christmas: How to Win Every Argument (The Daily Beast) How to deal with that crazy uncle at family get togethers by out crazying them all.
• But I'd like, just once, for someone to have the balls to admit their bigotry without trying to blame it on Jesus (Squatlo Rant) Not bishop Shelby Spong, but pretty good
• Scientists Link Spike in Thyroid Disease to Fukushima Disaster (Real News Media) Be afraid, be very, very, afraid.
• Stanford Researcher Proves NSA Can Probably Identify Individuals From Phone Records (TechCrunch) Seriously, this sh%$ is data mining 101. Your phone records reveal who you are.

H/T Distractify

Religion as an Excuse for Mindless Hate

A South Carolina soup kitchen has refused to allow atheists to volunteer:

A group called the Upstate Atheists in Spartanburg, South Carolina were rebuffed in their efforts to volunteer at the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen.

“I told [the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen] we wouldn’t wear our T-shirts. We wouldn’t tell anyone who we are with. We just want to help out,” Upstate Atheist president Eve Brannon told the Spartanburg Herald-Jounal. “And they told us that we were not allowed.”

Lou Landrum, the Soup Kitchen’s executive director, told the same paper that allowing the atheists to work at the facility would be a “disservice to this community.”

“We stand on the principles of God,” she said. “Do [atheists] think that our guests are so ignorant that they don’t know what an atheist is? Why are they targeting us? They don’t give any money. I wouldn’t want their money.”

I have repeatedly quoted Bishop Shelby Spong saying too many people use religion as a, "Veil under which anger can be legitimatized."

Ms. Landrum who cannot see beyond religion as a club to justify her hate while maintaining her thoroughly undeserved sense of moral superiority.

My Favorite Christian Theologian

Retired Bishop Shelby Spong.



I've been posting about him for a while, and I really like this interview.

I would note that what he is describing is rather close to the concept of Tikkun Olam (mending the world).

H/t Hedgie at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Is Right…

He asks the question, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?" (See here)

My answer is "yes", and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) Alabama, who, while declaring that he was colorblind, said that, "So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister," though to be fair, he Robert Bentley has since apologized, though with the classic, "I'm sorry if I offended anyone," apology, which actually puts the onus on those who object.

There are people who use religion to fulfill a basic spiritual need, but I think that there are a lot more people who find it useful way to feel better than other people.

God is Beyond Our Comprehension, So Many Use Him to Justify Hate

So at best, we only see bits and pieces of the totality that is called in Kabbalistic thought the Ein Sof, and what see reflects far more on us than it does on the nature of the divine.

For conservative Anglicans, it appears that when they look for God, all they find is hate, because that is all that they look for:

Conservative evangelicals representing half of the world's Anglicans launched a new global church yesterday, challenging the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and vowing to rescue people from the forces of "militant secularism and pluralism" created by a "spiritual decline" in developing economies.

The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Foca, will sever ties with the main churches in the US and Canada, whose leaders they accuse of betraying biblical teaching. Foca architects will tomorrow go to the conservative evangelical church of All Souls, in central London, to discuss global Anglicanism and English orthodoxy.

Hundreds of disgruntled clergy, representing many Church of England parishes, will be in the audience and the speakers will include the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi.

So much training in theology, and all they can think to do is to search scriptures for reasons to hate.

Retired Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong asks more generally, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

The answer is, "yes", and for these people, this is all that religion is for them.

Understanding Religious Anger

I found this quote courtesy of the Group News Blog, and it bears repeating in as many places as possible. Bishop Spong is a very wise man, and he explains in some very profound ways the politics of rage, and religion as an excuse for rudeness and rage.

Understanding Religious Anger

One of the things that always surprises me is the level of anger, often expressed in acts of overt rudeness, which seems to mark religious people. It appears so often that I have almost come to expect it, or at the very least not to be surprised by it. A recent episode simply made the connection between religion and anger newly indelible in my consciousness.

It occurred last spring when I attended, at their invitation, the graduation ceremonies of a well-known university. Indeed, I was to receive an honorary degree. There was much conviviality connected with this event. We were entertained royally by the president of the university and his wife. We saw former classmates. Families gathered to share this transitional moment with a graduating son or daughter. It seemed to be a very pleasant occasion.

When the procession formed to begin the ceremonial walk into the arena, there was a panoply of color marking the assembly. The black caps and gowns of academia were bedecked with bright and varied hoods, representing the doctorates earned by the members of the faculty and reflecting the school colors of the awarding universities. Harvard's crimson was immediately identifiable, as well as the unique form of the doctoral hoods from the storied universities of Cambridge and Oxford. My place in this lineup was in the company of some of the university's deans. While we waited for the signal to begin the procession, I introduced myself to my nearest companions. They were all cordial until I introduced myself to the Dean of the Medical School. It was not a time for small talk for this man. He could not have possibly known that he and I would be together in the procession, so what followed was clearly spontaneous and unplanned. He obviously had strong feelings about me and could not miss this exquisite opportunity to give expression to them. I had never met this man before this moment, but my expectation was that one whose career in medicine had been so successful that he had become the dean of a major medical school would have a broad perspective on life. I was wrong. He was bitter and small-minded, caught more in his narrow religious agenda than in his academic excellence. We had barely unlocked hands in our introductory handshake when he said, "I wish I did not feel this way but I think what you have done to the Church is both reprehensible and destructive. I regret that this university has decided to honor you today." I was taken aback not by the content of his remarks, since I have dealt with threatened religious people many times before, but by the inappropriateness of his comments. This was neither the time nor the place for this tirade. I was after all an invited guest in his world. Yet, he simply could not contain his feelings. I tried to parry his comments by saying something like: "I'm sorry we don't have time to discuss this here, but you must realize that the world has undergone a vast intellectual revolution in the last 500-600 years and if the Church is to stay in dialogue with that world then the Church must also change. However, this Dean was in no mood to let go; he had the bit between his teeth. "You totally ignore the truth of those first 1,300 years of Christian history," he retorted, his anger still rising. "Would you want to practice medicine in today's world equipped only with the medical knowledge available in the first 1300 years of Christian history?" I enquired. At that moment the conversation ended because the music started, the stately procession began its journey into the stadium where literally thousands were gathered. As we walked in silence I could not help but wonder at the rudeness of this Dean, who had so great a need to express his anger that he violated the good manners of his university. I learned later that this doctor was part of a conservative Christian congregation. Somehow, religious convictions seem to give people permission to be rude.

A similar incident occurred in the summer of 2005, when I was the guest lecturer at the Highlands Institute for American and Philosophical Thought in Western North Carolina. I had been there for the past three summers, and had always met with a warm and positive reception. However, on this particular night, a local fundamentalist decided to achieve his fifteen minutes of fame. About midway in the lecture, this man stood up and drew sufficient attention to himself that I stopped speaking and enquired if there was something wrong. "I'm feeling sick," this gentleman replied. So I responded, "There is nothing I'm saying tonight that is more important than your health, so let me pause until you get whatever help you need." "You don't understand," he retorted, "I'm sick of you." Somehow this man felt that his religious convictions justified his interruption of a lecture attended by more than 250 people. It never occurred to him that this behavior was rude to me, rude to the audience and that it reflected little more than his own anger. I learned later that he was a member of the Community Bible Church and that he had been encouraged to take this action by fellow members of his fundamentalist church. Once again if one is acting 'in the name of God,' both anger and rudeness are apparently justified.

Those two experiences set me to thinking about the relationship between religion and anger. It is far closer than most people seem to realize. Sometimes the sweet piety of religion serves to hide anger even from the awareness of the angry one, though it is obvious to everyone else. Is it anything but anger when religious people describe what is in store for those who do not believe their way? Is the threat of hell, which is spoken so freely in religious circles, not a projection onto God of the anger inside the one consigning another to a place of eternal torment? Is there much difference between a person saying in hostility: "Go to hell!" and a preacher threatening a congregation with that same destiny? When one looks at the history of religious persecution, which has included such things as excommunication, torture, and the burning of heretics at the stake, there is ample evidence of hostility associated with Christianity. When one adds to that the Crusades designed 'to kill the infidels,' a history of anti-Semitism, and the wars between Catholics and Protestants, the picture of religion as a source of anger in human society, victimizing people in every generation, becomes clear.

In moments of social upheaval, religious anger becomes very apparent. Most of the anger that was displayed during the movement to emancipate women came from the Christian Church. Most of the anger displayed in the current struggle over justice for gay and lesbian people emanates from the Christian Church. It is very hard to deny that underneath the sounds of religious conviction, there is a boiling cauldron of anger that seems to be an unrecognized part of the religious experience. Step one, therefore, is to recognize it. Step two is to understand it.

Religious anger seems to manifest itself first and most stridently in those religious traditions that claim to possess absolute certainty. It is only when one believes that one possesses the whole truth of God that one finds the need to persecute those who do not accept your version of truth. What that behavior reveals is that the frightened human psyche needs the certainty of religion, no matter how narrowly defined, in order to feel secure. Christianity has developed many security-giving idols inside its traditional formulations, infallible popes and inerrant scriptures being two of them. How rational, for example, is it for anyone to say: "Since my God is the true God and your God is, therefore, a false God, I have the right to hate you, to persecute you or even to kill you?" Yet all of these expressions of anger are found inside the Christian Church.

The second thing that religious anger reveals to me is that organized religion feeds the expression of self-hatred in its people. There is certainly much self-negativity in traditional Christianity with its doctrines of 'the Fall,' its emphasis on the depravity of human life, the need to be rescued, and the guilt-producing idea that "Jesus died for my sins." The liturgies of Christian churches are constantly calling their worshipers such things as 'a wretch,' 'a worm,' 'one unworthy to gather up the crumbs under the divine table,' all interspersed with the plea to God to 'have mercy, have mercy, have mercy.' Are these not expressions of self-directed religious anger?

If one absorbs negativity from any source long enough, one cannot help but become negative. When one is denigrated in worship over a sustained period of time, one inevitably projects this denigration onto others as anger. It is necessary for survival. Does this not help us to understand why prejudice is greater among religious people than among non-religious people; why slavery, segregation and other overt forms of racism have been the pattern of that region of our country that we call 'the Bible Belt;' and why the 'Religious Right' even today is more supportive of war as an instrument of national policy than any other segment of our national population? Each of these attitudes reflects religiously justified violence.

Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized? What happened to that biblical proclamation that the disciples of Jesus are to be known by their love? How does religious anger fit in with the Fourth Gospel's interpretation of Jesus' purpose to be that of bringing life more abundantly?

Perhaps the time has come to recognize that Christianity was never meant to be about religion; it is to be about life. The achievement of personal security is the goal of religion. The ability to live with integrity in the midst of the insecurity of life is the goal of Christianity. Religion seeks to control life with guilt. Christianity seeks to free people to be all that they can be. There is a vast difference. Perhaps it will take the death of religion to open us once again to the meaning of Christianity, even 'Religionless Christianity.' For the purpose of Jesus was not to make us religious but to make us fully human.

John Shelby Spong

All emphasis mine, and it's not limited to Christianity.

FWIW, piety does not make this sort of anger and rudeness necessary, as evidenced by the tremendously welcoming and joyous nature of Chabad-Lubovich, but by the same token, you find this present in many strains of Jewish Orthodox practice.

Link to his site.