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March 28, 2006

Maybe Something Good Can Come Out of Texas After All

Pastor Jim Rigby of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX has just allowed a proclaimed atheist to join his church. Rigby, as an outspoken liberal, is used to taking flak from his constituents for what he does, but the reaction of his congregation this time has, predictably, been intense. As he describes it:

this wave of mail feels different, more desperate, like people have been backed against a wall.

Rigby and his new atheist fellow church member, Robert Jensen, however, see this as an effort to “build connections.”

Such efforts are crucial in a world where there seems not to be a lot of wood to build the bridges we need. And the shame is, while we fight among ourselves, the world is burning.

Jensen describes his own reasoning thus:

Christianity could do its part to help usher in a period of human history in which people stopped obsessing about how to mark the boundaries of a faith group and instead committed to living those values more fully.

I couldn’t agree more.

Rigby’s article is fascinating to me in that here is a Christian minister who really seems to get it. He sees that too many Christians are too busy defining their faith and meanwhile, the world is burning.

The Book of James argues that merely believing in the existence of God means nothing; he jokes that even the demons believe that. Some of the meanest people I have ever met believed in God. The Nazis marched across Europe with belts reading "God is with us," singing some of the same hymns and reciting some of the same creeds that the church uses today. With a few notable exceptions, the German church hid in liturgy and theology while their brothers and sisters burned. Surely, the holocaust is a permanent rebuttal of that kind of detached creedal Christianity.

Rigby then discusses evolution and the human brain, offering what I see as a plausible explanation for the evil we witness in the world every day (see, for example, this tragic story, The Shooting of Little Akaber):

Our upper brain functions are built on top of a marshy swamp of animal instincts, and we are rational only in spurts. Much of our most important processes are irrational, even more are unconscious altogether. To say we will be purely scientific and objective is an act of imaginary dissociation from the liquid core of our own being. In Sartre's words it is "bad faith".

Advertisers know this swampy core and sell to it. Televangelists know this swampy core and manipulate it. Politicians know this swampy core and appeal to it. While progressives are trying to be purely logical, propagandists are playing that irrational core like a drum.

If there's hope of saving the world from the clutches of propaganda it will not be because we refute it rationally. If we save our world it will be because we learned how to speak about personal meaning in a way that is adaptive to natural processes and compatible with universal human rights. Nothing else will do.

Rigby has much more to share in this lengthy piece, which is an excellent read.

Posted by Becky at March 28, 2006 06:35 AM