Earlier this month, renowned author Anne Rice announced that she “quit being a Christian.” This renouncement of religion had nothing to do with renouncing faith. In the face of an unending campaign of hatred, bigotry, politics, greed, legalism, judging, and a list of other sins to make the Magnificent Seven blush, Rice found she could no longer affiliate herself with a religion baring Christ’s name that bore no resemblance to Him. In her words "In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life."
Rice is anything but alone. The teachings of Jesus fill the pages of scripture with compassion, mercy, love, kindness, and virtues that can only be described as divine. In the two millennia since he taught us to love God with all we are, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, the Gospels, the truly good news, have been corrupted, distorted, perverted into something that I can only describe as “anti-christ.”
In place of love and grace, Christianity has come to stand for bigotry, condemnation, a place that those who need to know a loving savior would never dare set foot into because they know what awaits them: scorn. The cry “love the sinner, hate the sin” has become a sine qua non of the religious right, but they ignore the fact that the heart of that statement is judgment. For those keeping score at home, judgment is forbidden for humans to touch. Only God may judge, because He is the only one who knows, who understand all that we have been through, the experiences of our lives that have shaped and formed our decisions. The bright shining sword of justice wielded by the self-righteous has replaced the unfathomable mercy and love of the cross as the true symbol of Christianity.
Like Rice, I found myself at odds, adrift, unable to find a community of faith with beliefs in line with my own. I searched and researched, realizing without a title, a name of a movement of believers, finding like-minded people would prove impossible. Fortunately, I found one.
Progressive Christianity.
What does that mean? The movement stands for many things. Social justice, or in plainer terms, care and giving to those in need, reaching out to the marginalized and forgotten, the cast-offs of society and sadly of the rest of Christendom. Progressive Christians believe in the importance of ecological conservation, and doing all we can to protect our environment. They recognize that love intimately shared between two persons, committed to each other for the duration of their lives, is beautiful and divine, regardless of gender. Above all, they recognize that Christ gave us the highest and most important commandment, and we must commit our lives to living by that standard.
My journey to define my own faith, to seek out what is true and good, led me to a place of confusion. My spiritual walk for decades existed on the idea that scripture is inerrant. The words of the bible must be taken literally. Unfortunately, I found errors. Even within the gospels, pronounced differences exist between the synoptic gospels and John, down to the day of the last supper and of Christ’s crucifixion. References Christ made to the old testament contained errors. Was Christ wrong? Was his memory flawed? Or did the author of that Gospel simply record his words incorrectly?
I found in scripture that a woman who is raped must marry her rapist. That people caught in adultery must be put to death. That slavery is a right, just and proper societal practice. These are things that few churches today would support, however, they demand that scripture be found literally inerrant.
Where do these revelations leave me? At first, confused. Now, I understand why Christ gave us the Great Commandment, a compass to guide our paths to a true north. Our world is in so many ways different from the world of Christ and his disciples, even more so from the old testament writers. But some things do not change. Compassion, mercy, and love are rare commodities, in this century and in all that came before. People are beautiful creations, that life all too often scars, damages, wounds in ways that cause them to act abhorrently. I learned that when I stand before God to give an accounting of my life, I want him to pronounce “My son, you loved too much.”
In that reckoning, to have my deeds recounted, measured and found to be less than loving, less than as close to Christ-like as I can manage, then i would be ashamed of my life. I can think of no worse punishment in the ever after than that.
Yesterday, my quest led me to an organization I feel I can proudly be a part of. The Beatitudes Society, as far as I can tell, support all of the things I value. They ascribe to a faith of tolerance, mercy, compassion, and social activism. They do not rely on eschatology to fuel emotional fervor. They seek to actively make the world a better place, not to sit idly by and condemn it.
I have hope now that even in the reactionary wastelands of the bible belt, that the true message of Christ can ring out. That others out there have found a faith that resonates with mine. A journey is always better when we don’t have to walk alone.
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