Or, SUMMA CONTRA BUMPTIOSI

AN OLD FRIEND—a man I have known casually for more than fifty years, one to whom I am kindly disposed because he once did me a great service—recently posted this verbal meme:

Thought for the Day: It kills me that Christians insist everyone else honor their religious sensitivities while they stomp all over others!

A thought leapt to my mind, a mirror of the meme itself: “Atheists demand we honor their religious sensitivities, which seem to require the indiscriminate slander of Christians!”

Striving to resist a knee-jerk reaction to my old friend’s provocation, I read on. Some of his Facebook followers had added comments, most of which echoed the anti-Christian meme. 

One commenter let loose a 12-gauge blast in five extended paragraphs. Pared down to its essentials: “. . . Lutheran, Baptist, ‘evangelical’, and ‘non-denominational’ were all about the same: hypocritical. . . . I believe people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion. . . . As I saw once on a bumper sticker, ‘Religion is the Problem’.”

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Whew. 

Time to take a deep breath.

This blog generally avoids religion and politics, for good reasons. But Your New Favorite Writer is always concerned with the past and how it echoes in the present. My old friend’s bumptious meme fetches up undead beasts from the past that continue to haunt us today—to our great common detriment.

So, now: To the barricades!

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First, people have a right to cast aspersions on Christianity. That right I do not contest. It is guaranteed, in our land, by the First Amendment—whether such sentiments are spurred by generous or spiteful impulses.

So, the critics have the right to criticize.

But where do they get the moral standing, the breadth of outlook, and the depth of knowledge to swing their clubs with such casual malice?

These are questions of import, which I do not ask lightly. Thus, Kind Reader, I beg your indulgence as we explore the topic in some depth, at a leisurely pace.

We may as well begin with the grey squirrel, a shining emblem of moral deficiency.

The Grey Squirrel

Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not

all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.

The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and

loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.

-- Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940)

It is mistaken, of course, to state that grey squirrels eat red-brown squirrels; in fact they do not. But Humbert Wolfe, a Christian poet with Jewish roots, wants us to understand that the grey squirrel, in any case, cannot measure up to a Christian standard of morality. He also points out, with wit, that a Christian may not measure up to his own standard of morality. 

This goes to the question of moral hypocrisy implied by my old friend’s meme and posed explicitly by the agitated commenter.

But, wait. Why are we all today, Christians and anti-Christians alike, so obsessed with morality? 

It seems to me we did not talk so urgently about morality before this fellow Jesus of Nazareth came along and made such a point of it in his teachings.

But I am digressing, I fear, into religious talk.

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Far be it from me, Dear Reader, to dwell on the theological basis of all those moral laws we have come to consider purely secular because they seem so dazzlingly self-evident. I merely mention this in passing, in case it is of any interest; for many things that are self-evident now only became so after long firing in the crucible of humanity’s tortured experience.

Rather than dwell on that, let us examine our propensity to evade morality whenever convenient.

Let me ask my old friend and his Facebook choristers: Do you suppose that in the whole sad parade of human inadequacy, it is Christians alone who have cornered the market on hypocrisy? 

Must we assume that pagans, animists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Shintoists, Stoics, Epicureans, pragmatists, utilitarians, agnostics, or atheists always live up to their stated ideals? 

Of course not. 

Hypocrisy is a human failing, not a Christian one.

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What can we take from this? That high ideals are pointless?

That’s absurd. Without moral aspirations, what will become of us?

Fair Reader, what we are left with is the fallible human animal: Someone who needs to hope to be good, yet who always falls short.

So when you fall short, do you give up? 

Winston Churchill—a man well-acquainted with failure, with repeated and spectacular failure—once advised young boys as follows:

“. . .  never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”  

Churchill at Harrow, 1941

Most of us, however, lack Churchill’s iron resolve. 

Where shall we find the sheer chutzpah to keep going in the face of our own shortcomings?

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We need to draw from internal wells of humility. 

In pursuit of that thought, I must beg to differ with the commenter who said, “people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion.” 

People may be worsened by religion, indeed. But then, we are not intrinsically good to start with. 

Life is not that simple. People are not wholly good nor wholly bad. Abundant experience shows that we are both good and bad: At the same time. 

We are mixed beings, angels and devils at once. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

Good and evil so commonly appear bound together in one person that it baffles me how anyone of mature years can have failed to notice that duality. 

We have various names for it. We call it inconsistency, perversity, or sheer cussedness. But by any name, its existence is undeniable.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

—James Truslow Adams

We desperately need to recognize this fact about our neighbors, and also about ourselves. It is not only the other guy who is a mixed being. As Pogo, Walt Kelly’s famous Okefenokee possum, said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

What has that to do with humility, and what has humility to do with anything?

One of the best and worst persons I ever knew was a colleague, back in the days when I exerted myself to make a living. Tim, raised a Catholic, had become a theoretical agnostic and a practical atheist. He projected the Self-Made Man, relying entirely on his own talents and exertions. This happened to be a good strategy for Tim, because he was intelligent, capable, and hard-working. 

He was also curious about many topics, including American history. But it shocked him to learn that U.S. presidents, including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, have called for national days of prayer and humiliation. 

“How,” Tim asked me, “how can any president call for national humiliation?”

To him, “humiliation” suggested ignominy, disgrace, and something akin to unworthiness. 

I’m afraid I let him down in this hour of crisis. 

Given enough time, I might have stumbled through an explanation that America has always been steeped in Reform Christianity—or, in one word, Puritanism. The Founding Fathers, even those who were not Puritans, grew up in a Christian world that assumed a universal need to repent of our transgressions; to recant any claims to pride; to be brought low by prayerful introspection. And this process of becoming appropriately humble—since we all have a bit of the Devil in us—was called “humiliation.” 

Given enough time, I might have explained all that. But Tim’s question was posed in passing, on a typically busy day. So he went to his grave without ever hearing my (possibly tedious and long-winded) explanation. In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, the God I know would not hold this  human lack of information against him. 

And suddenly, with no warning, we have arrived at the central point.

If we think we understand everything, we are grossly mistaken. We need more humility than that. 

It’s true that Christians have often fallen short of our ideals. One of the ways we fall short of our ideals is by trying to force our views on others. 

It is wrong to suggest, as the meme does, that all Christians always do this. But some of us do, sometimes.

Some non-Christians, and some anti-Christians, also do this sometimes. 

Even when we are at our worst, Christians are no worse than other people when they are at their worst. 

A terrible frailty is part of the human condition. Puritans called it “original sin.”

If you think it does not apply to you—whatever you may like to call it—I invite you to think again.

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At the beginning of this essay I said the man who posted the bumptious anti-Christian meme on Facebook was an old friend. And so he is. 

How I can treasure my old friendship with one who blithely flaunts such a clouded and limited vision of the world? 

Let me tell you, Fair Reader: Many years ago, this same man taught me how to ward off airsickness—a terrible occupational hazard to a young airman. That teaching was the act of an angel. Without it, I would have been condemned to great misery in the course of military duty.

I also happen to be conscious that I have made my own share of foolish declarations.

We ought to try, as best we can, to show the world our clarity and our charity, not our presumptuous hobgoblins of prejudice. 

Yet we can’t always manage that. 

The Season of Lent approaches, and we require humiliation, in the old sense of the word.

Unless we cultivate enough humility to cut one another a bit of slack, how shall we ever find our way to the light?

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer