Here’s an interesting response to the video I blogged about earlier.
Priest Responds, “Jesus <3 Religion”
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Why I Hate Evangelicals, But Love Jesus
If you haven’t seen Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus I’ve included the video above. Have a look.
First of all, I’ll be honest: I don’t hate evangelicals, not anymore than our poet friend actually hates religion. I am an evangelical. The title is ironic and, yes, divisive. It’s intentionally so, as far as a title like Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus is intentionally divisive. Divisive and completely counter-productive to level-headed ecumenical movements around the globe.
What’s clear to me from the video is that here’s a very honest young man with an axe to grind. I agree with my friend Paul who says that he can fully appreciate the “confessional” nature of the guy’s poem. It’s heart-felt and a lot of the material in there is pretty decent but a lot, unfortunately, is way off the mark.
The problem is, at the core of the quickly spreading wildfire that is this spoken word poem is an incredible misunderstanding of some rather critical pieces of information: Religion and hypocrisy are not synonymous.
What our young poet is actually railing about is hypocrisy. He doesn’t like when people call themselves a Christian but don’t put their faith into practice. He doesn’t like faith communities that build great big churches but don’t feed the poor and hungry. He doesn’t like hypocrites, that’s what he doesn’t like.
He equates religion with hypocrisy and that’s an unfortunate mistake because the two are hardly bed fellows. Despite utilizing the well-worn cliche of “not coming to judge” he proceeds to proclaim sweeping judgement over all manner of people of different faiths.
His real shot in the dark, in my opinion, comes when he makes the bold claim that Jesus hated religion and so we should hate it too. Again, Jesus spoke out about hypocrisy amongst the religious Jews of his time, not against the Jewish religion as a whole. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was God who established the Jewish religion. In fact, Jesus himself was a Jew.
What irks me the most, I guess, is how fast this video has spread around Facebook and Twitter. How I’m sure it’ll be played all across North America at churches on Sunday morning and how masses of pretty reasonable and kind people will sit there and think in their head, “Yeah, religion is awful, I hate it,” because instead of being critical, we believe a lot of what we see.
This was evident in my Facebook feed this week.
Jesus established religious rituals like baptism and communion. Jesus asked that we preserve these traditions until he came back to earth again. Religion is the vehicle through which we search for God, and that’s OK. Even something as ubiquitous as prayer is a religious rite; even if you call it a “conversation” it still follows certain parameters set out by the participants just like a conversation in real life. Those parameters are religion, in society we call them cultural norms.
Religion is also the vehicle which helps us to preserve biblical traditions some of which, like baptism and communion, were set out by Jesus Christ himself! So how can we hate religion? How is that something we’re supposed to do?
I do, I see our poet friend’s point, but it’s buried in the rest of his rhetoric and he certainly isn’t saying what he really means to say.
I don’t hate evangelicals, but do you see why I picked that title? The poet in the video doesn’t actually hate religion either, he just doesn’t understand and that lack of understanding has just gone and done poisoned the well. This video does very little to help bolster the faith of Christians, there are no suggestions on how to be less of a hypocrite, how to put your faith into action, how to love and serve your fellow man. It divides, and that’s not cool.
What builds us up is ecumenical endeavors, bridging the gap between different faith groups. What is productive and graceful is encouraging each other, sharing new ideas and information. Jesus came onto the scene and shook everything up and I understand the tradition that this poet is trying to follow in, unfortunately, he does not.
Questions to Begin With…
Reports of this blog being abandoned have been greatly exaggerated.
That is to say, although I’ve been incredibly remiss in keeping up with this, my second blog, I’m not finished, by any means, with the blog or the journey.
I’m on a quest to understand more deeply a lot of aspects of both my faith and faiths very close to my own. I’ve written about the early parts of my own faith journey and plan to continue that particular narrative. I’ve written about some people and writings from other sides of the Christian coin that have interested me—faith expressions that, at times, both intrigue and confound me. Now I think it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty.
I have questions, a lot of questions, that I’ve been working through. Some big questions, some small questions. Some recent, brand new questions and some questions I’ve had from very early on in my faith life. I’ll try, below, to present some of these questions as well as synthesize some of the answers I’ve managed to find so far. By no means are these easy questions to ask.
I should mention, for the record, that my perspective is exceptionally narrow—a fault of my own!—and that my understanding of a lot of these subjects is, so far, very limited.
Describing the Pull…
I wrote earlier about the spiritual or non-cognitive element of faith, and the pull towards the traditional. I think all thinking Christians—and perhaps all thinking religious people—recognize that theology and discrete analysis and critical reasoning can only take you so far in the journey of faith; there is something else that must bring you the rest of the way.
With that in mind, a friend and Protestant disturber, sent me a link to this video which I think sums up a lot of some of my thinking lately:
Catholic from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.
Why Catholics are Right
I have had an interesting relationship with Michael Coren.
In early University I came across Coren on CFRB, the conservative talk radio station out of Toronto. He was a firebrand, to put it mildly. His topics and his approach to most everything was controversial and he was always—always—incredibly outspoken. At the same time, he was a Christian, and evangelical Christian when I met him, and his opinions and ideas were generally in line with mine—what I’d been taught and come to understand about the world at that point in my life.
When I liked Michael Coren best, however, was when he played substitute host on The Jim Richards Show, the eight or nine o’clock time slot that followed Coren’s regular show. The Jim Richards Show was a bit of a gag, mostly tongue-in-cheek, and Coren was allowed some breathing room in the later timeslot. He could be funny, and he was.
And he was always accessible. I e-mailed him, several times, about all kinds of different things and he always wrote back. I saw him speak once on the University of Waterloo campus and once in a tiny little evangelical church in Newmarket, my hometown. He was always kind and took questions afterwards, spoke plainly, and appreciated being listened to.
Pray Without Ceasing
Along with a copy of Crossing the Threshold of Hope by the Blessed Pope John Paul II, I was recently lent a copy of The Way of the Pilgrim. As it was explained to me, The Way of the Pilgrim is a staple in the Eastern Orthodox church. Authored anoymously in the 19th century it’s the account of a pilgrim—a poor traveler—as he seeks to better understand his own faith and, more specifically, how he can “pray without ceasing” as the Scriptures implore us to.
I feel in love with the book, first of all, for its simple poetry. Perhaps its my ignorance of Russian literature but the rhythm of the language (despite being an English translation) is incredible interesting. I’ve since queued up some Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky on my iPod for later consumption, by the way.
Obviously, it is the message of the story that’s of importance though, and the message is simple: How to pray without ceasing. The pilgrim, over the course of his journey, recounts his understanding and study of the Jesus Prayer, something I hadn’t heard about before reading this book, but to which I’m now deeply drawn.
Here it is: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
In the story, our pilgrim learns to repeat this prayer, over and over again, until he has internalized it, until he speaks it, from his heart, even while sleeping. It’s a pretty interesting concept, but something that needs to be practiced to be understood. While I’m not there, and don’t know if the intention even makes sense, it’s certainly a practice that I’m quickly beginning to see value, and find great joy in.
The beauty is in its simplicity. A simple cry for mercy, a petition for some grace. A prayer that covers a multitude of sins, and a plethora of circumstances. It’s poignant, and beautiful.
And, for me, it’s just perfect. I feel like a sinner, condemned by my own hand for falling short of even the goals that I set for myself, nevermind anyone else’s standards. A prayer like this is perfect for me, fits so well, and feels like such a comfort. And is often used.
One Part Holy Spirit
I was talking to a friend the other day. I was talking about the fact that I used to blog a lot about my faith. My other blog used to be, primarily, a blog about spiritual things. I used to be very inspired to write about spiritual things, and then I wasn’t anymore.
It just kind of turned out like a light and I became disinterested in my faith. A Christian, yes, in actions and in deeds and, truly, in my heart of hearts but not interested in writing about it anymore or exploring it in earnest.
Before that I did a lot of things that Protestants would consider fundamental to being a Christian. I regularly read my Bible, I prayed, I went to church on a Sunday, often on a Wednesday as well. I checked off this mental checklist of things that qualified me as a spiritual person. And I did them all passionately, and then I felt tired, bored.
I read somewhere—and maybe this is common knowledge—that Mother Theresa, of all people, said she didn’t experience a closeness with God for much of her public ministry. She didn’t feel the closeness of the Holy Spirit, despite all the hard work she was doing for the Kingdom of God.
My point is, whatever clicked back then, whatever it was that slowly sapped the energy I had been putting into my faith, it feels as though it’s lifted. This journey that I’ve begun, this quest to understand my faith more deeply, is driven in one part by an academic desire to know and one part Holy Spirit. There’s a pull to want to know more, a pull to go deeper and to ask difficult questions about what I believe and why I believe it. It’s energizing but it’s also perplexing. In one sense it’s anti-intellectual: to feel a pull towards exploring more traditional interpretations and practices; to asking questions of the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. But, at the same time, isn’t that a pull, a spiritual pull, that we need to heed?
Protestantism and Authority
This was passed along to me by a friend who suggested that I throw it up here for our consideration; these are questions, important questions, that I wrestle with.
And, on this subject, I’m far more Catholic than not.
Start at the Beginning, Part 3
I think it’s a common thing, for converts to Christianity at least, to experience a nostalgia for the way you felt when you first became a Christian. It’s that way for me sometimes.
Those early days of my faith, as I remember very clearly, were highly charged. I felt like I could do anything, accomplish anything, and the world was just spinning so quickly.
I some how managed to get my hands on a Bible, because I knew that that was crucial. I don’t remember how I found out where to get one, or anything beyond that, but I remember getting it. An Extreme Teen Bible, a New King James translation which took out the bits about the unicorns from the old King James. The teen aspect of the Bible, meant it had all kinds of notes and stories in the margins, things that would apply to teens, and I drank it all down like water passing through very dry lips.
Tradition!
It was, actually, an evangelical pastor who first got me thinking about it. It was around the same time that I met James, the summer after I first started listening to Fr. Roderick’s podcast, and I was interning in the office of a local student church. The pastor was, by all accounts, an evangelical. He was working at an evangelical church, he was pentecostal, but he was raised Catholic, he was well-educated, and his theology was—and I appreciate this more now—complex.
We were talking one day about Catholicism and he posed the question, “Why do Protestants believe in the ‘Bible alone’?” He raised his hands and did air quotes. I replied with what was then the stock answer, “Because it’s God-given, it’s divinely-inspired, it’s authoritative.”
“But who put the Bible together?” He asked.