Why I can’t be on the fence about God.

The limits of Live and Let Live.  Reflections on three years in UU.

I joined a UU church three years ago.  I jumped in, knowing I couldn’t assess it fairly from the outside. I needed to experience it.  There have been many bright spots, like this one from last week’s sermon:

“A Vermonter bought an old run-down farm and worked hard to get it back in good running condition. The local minister stopped by to say hello. Looking over the refurbished acreage, he commented that it was wonderful what God and man could achieve together. “Yup,” allowed the farmer, “p’raps it is. But you should have seen this place when God was running it alone.”

But there are dark spots, too, places where the minister and the members seem to avert their eyes.  When this happens, our church plummets from a place of shared searching to one of avoiding conflict through willful ignorance.

In last week’s sermon, our minister cited the viral video where Wolf Blitzer interviewed an atheist mom after the Moore, OK tornadoes.  He put it this way:

“After what she and her neighbors had been through, the terror and the devastation of nature’s fury, some would say God’s fury, this young mother didn’t shy away from her truth, and yet, she left room for the truth of others.”

‘Making room’ is a favorite of UUs at my church.  They keep big shakers of it handy and apply it, well, liberally.  It’s a cure-all.  But of course it makes no sense.  If we value anything, we can’t make room for its opposite.  But you’re not supposed to notice that.  Nothing is worth having a conflict over.  That seems to be the real foundation of UU.  I found this on the UUA website:

“Where no one’s idea of God is better than another’s”.

They can’t mean this.  Since they’re Universalists, they explicitly say they don’t mean this.  They would vigorously reject the idea that God would condemn homosexuals or atheists, for example.  Why then did they position this on their Welcome page so prominently?  Politics, apparently.

But UUs do have spines.  Our minister shared how he would have responded to Blitzer:

“Well, Wolf, that’s a very interesting question. When you ask it, are you implying that I should be thanking a God who destroyed much of my town and oversaw the deaths of my neighbors, because he or she decided to save me, and my family? I don’t think that kind of God should be thanked right now.

And yet, I am not without a sense of faith in things beyond myself, a sense of faith,…I sometimes call this force “spirit of life” or “that which is greater than all but present in each”.  This kind of God, or “spirit of life”, I can thank in a metaphorical way.”

So far, so good.  But he concludes by agreeing with the young, atheist mother:  “But I’m a reverent agnostic, so of course I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.”

Did you see that?  He wants things both ways.  He acknowledges that God plays favorites, but wants to make room for people to thank the Lord.  He does that by equivocating on ‘God’, saying it can be metaphorical.  Foul.  He can’t have God be worthy of thanks and metaphorical at the same time!  ‘Thanking the Lord’ entails the kind of God he just rejected, the one he must reject in order to live with himself.  Here’s why:

Our minister admitted he rejected the God who plays favorites, then said he makes room for a Spirit of Life, so that’s why he has no problem with people thanking God.  There it is again.  Our minister is genuine but has a political talent that leaks out from time to time.  Here it is in slow motion:

1. The Christian God is a son of a gun.  I reject him.
2. The word God can also be benign.
3. So, I have no problem with people thanking God.

This is sleight of hand.  He switches gods mid-argument.  The key is the meaning of ‘thank’.  Any God who deserves thanking JUST IS the cruel God he rejected.  Again, here’s why:

You can thank a Spirit of Life, but it is not really deserving of it.  It’s either an abstraction, an emotional teddy bear, or an actual thing, like a set of unconscious processes.  In the last case, it simply acts according to its nature, like ice melting.  In the spring, we’re grateful that ice melts, but that doesn’t mean it did us any favors.  Ice just does that.  In all three cases, ‘God’ could not have done otherwise.  There is no occasion for thanks.  We can offer it, but it can’t be received.

So, ‘thank’ carries with it the thick, red-meat God who can help us.  And who obviously doesn’t help everyone.  The one we must reject if we value equality.

He seemed to know something’s wrong:

“Now the cynical among us might say that an atheist or agnostic answering the question by throwing in a comment about not blaming others for thanking the Lord is a self-preservation tactic, and they may be right.”

Ministers have to be politicians.  I don’t blame them for that, but let’s be frank about it.  He then switches to a pragmatic argument for ‘making room’:

“If you are an atheist, or lean that way, you have probably been approached, if not accosted, by folks who think they are doing you a favor by pointing out the errors of your lack of traditional belief. How

much have these folks, no matter how well-meaning or kind in their approach, altered your thinking? Not much, I’ll bet. It goes the other way, too, of course, in that triumphal atheists rarely convert the more traditionally faithful among us.”

The problem here, of course, is that he puts all beliefs on a par.  If we value anything, then all beliefs can not be on a par.  But like any good illusion, he has made sure we’re not looking at that at this point in the trick.

Then he ventures into a critical area:  ‘what we can be sure of’.

“As I see it, conversations about theological concepts over which none of us can be certain, can be so burdened with definitive assertions of “right” and “wrong” that they quickly devolve into tedious, self-righteous, and counterproductive attempts at conversion.”

The key here is ‘over which none of us can be certain’.  Our ignorance is great, and most UUs have been conditioned by postmodernism to see knowledge as a shifting web of opinion and belief, with no solid ground, and no perch from which to pronounce right and wrong.  If this was the case, he would be right.  He’d have to smile and nod even at a God who plays favorites.

But this isn’t the case, and here’s why.  We know some things.  Here’s one:  If we care about our values at all, we must reject their opposites.  UUs say they care about equality.  He acknowledged he rejects any God who allows some to expire slowly under the rubble and others to escape only losing an eye, a kid, a pet or a house.  Good.

So here’s the pinch.  If we care about equality, we must reject inequality.  If we don’t, then it means little to say we value equality.  Any God worthy of the name could treat us more equally.  He fails spectacularly, in fact, so he is not compatible with our 2^nd Principle.

Perhaps realizing this, our minister continued with the pragmatic angle:

“The question I offer to any of us who are working to “change the religious belief system” of others is how is that working out for you? … I suggest that trying to convince people that their theology is wrong is not a very good strategy. How many times has it worked when someone has tried it on you?”

I’m very sympathetic to pragmatism.  It might be smart to avoid a frontal assault on latent inequality.  But it’s often based on the false idea that we can’t avoid conflict while being authentic.  And there are reasons besides persuading people to point out problems with religious positions.  To be credible in our own positions, we have to reject their opposites.  This is so obvious, I’m embarrassed to keep repeating it.  We might even be able to remain silent if our values allow it or strategy requires it.  But we can’t explicitly make room for values that oppose our own.  If we do, we embrace contradiction and thus undermine our own positions.

But pragmatism is compelling:

“I’m reminded of a story I like that shows the folly of such attempts.  In a town not all that different from ours, there is an elderly woman who every morning for years has gone out onto her porch, raised her arms to the sky and shouted “Praise God!”

One day an atheist moves in next door to the woman, sees her morning ritual, and is irritated. So every morning he waits for the woman to shout her praises, so that he can shout back at her “There is no God!” This daily exchange goes on for years.

One winter, though, the woman experiences some hardships and this time goes out onto her porch to holler “Praise God! I spent the food money on heat and now I am going hungry. Provide for me, God!”

The next morning she steps out onto her porch and discovers two full bags of groceries have been left by the door.  “Praise God!” she proclaims. “God has provided me with groceries!”

Just then the atheist neighbor jumps out and shouts back “There is no God! I bought those groceries!”

The woman throws her arms into the air and shouts “Praise God! Who provided me with groceries and made the devil pay for them!”

Here he got his biggest laugh yet, but not from me.  I was aghast.  Ready to cancel my pledge aghast.  Ready to write an article aghast.  Do you see it?

The woman had a belief system that fit any facts, so of course she couldn’t be talked out of it.  But it doesn’t follow that we should be silent!  We tell the truth to countless people who won’t be persuaded:  the mentally ill, the addicted, the ignorant.  We try with them because it follows from our values, it is the loving thing to do, and there are some successes.  People like the woman in the joke are often socially conditioned to think that their faith is the best or only way to get through life.  Surely, one of UU’s purposes is to provide alternatives to the unworthy religious and social conditioning that most people have been subject to.  This woman may have no idea there are other ways to live, other tribes that can sustain her without faith.

If we really value what we say we do, we can’t just Live and Let Live.  Saying that all beliefs are legitimate is equal to saying they don’t matter at all!  This is another behind the back maneuver UUs are trained not to notice.  A fight is avoided, but only because we give up our other values in a back-room deal. 

UUs love making room, not because they hate being right, but because they hate it when others say they are right.  But if someone is right, it’s not their fault!  We can’t avoid being right about many things.  We tell people to wash their hands.  We tell them to get vaccinated.  We don’t make room for the unhygienic or unvaccinated.  Once we care about anything, there are better and worse, right and wrong, ways to act.

Concerning God, we know life is not fair, so we know that any God who is a moral agent plays favorites, at least insofar as he determined how much we can suffer.  So the grown-up thing to do is to face that fact.  Once we face it, we can’t make room anymore, but it’s not because we’re arrogant.  It’s because we hold a value.

UUs are often very courageous activists who bite the bullet and take a stand.  But when it comes to God, it seems many or most are under the same spell most humans are, that a good God is a live possibility.  It’s not.  It’s ruled out.  Any God either can’t or won’t reduce human suffering further.  There are no other options.  And switching to a hollowed-out God doesn’t solve the problem.  It’s a trick that fools only those who want to be fooled, the ones who don’t care about defrauding themselves and others, at least in this arena.

He told this story about how wrong it is to admit you’re right:

“The other night, I was getting hard-hearted, closed-minded, andfundamentalist about somebody else, and I remembered this expression that you can never hate somebody if you stand in that person’s shoes…and I realized, “I’m just as riled up and self-righteous and closed-minded about this as he is. We’re in exactly the same place!

If you could have a bird’s-eye perspective on the earth and could look down at all the conflicts that are happening, all you’d see are two sides to a story where both sides think they’re right. So the solutions have to come from a change of heart,from softening what is rigid in our hearts and minds.”

Softening.  That’s all you need.  Just soften.  Well, that does resolve the conflict, which feels great, but it dissolves our other values, too.  It’s the krokodil of feel-good liberalism.  A corrosive painkiller.

We can’t have it both ways.  If we care about anything, we can’t make room for its opposite.  UUs accept this around marriage equality, sexism and racism.  They even go after the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, because they know silence is complicity, and their values won’t let them sit on the fence.  They cultivate a healthy liberal guilt by raising awareness about white privilege.  They just can’t seem to reject God because of political constraints, the myth that God can be good, and their well-meaning desire to avoid conflict.

The most charitable way I can put it is this:  UUs are smart, caring, grown-up people who understand everything I’m pointing out.  They just make a different cost/benefit calculation than I do.  They hold that letting more mainstream religious believers have a face-saving way forward is better than pushing logical or ethical points.  If a believer’s behavior is good, if their politics are liberal, then leave them alone.  It’s not worth it!”

I think this is short-sighted.  The world is waking up from a long religious nightmare.  The status quo always has the advantage, enabled by our natural desire to be nice.  In every social change, there are people who are afraid of going too fast for fear of a regressive backlash.  That fear is legitimate.  But at this time in our culture, I read the risks differently.  I think the time is right to speak plainly and stop all this disingenuous deference to the religious supremacy that pervades our culture.  We’ve banished some bad ideas.  The iconic ignorant racists of the American South are mostly gone.  They have gotten the message that racism will not be tolerated.  But any creator God would be far worse than any racist!  It is time to say it out loud.  If not in a UU church, then where? 

One canard I hear, even from atheists, is this:  If you don’t believe in God, why do you care?  Please notice that this is another way to dismiss belief!  The whole project of smoothing over religious differences relies on saying they don’t matter.  But here’s why I care.  Suppose the person next to me in the lifeboat endorses a plan that leaves me in the water, so they get more food, for instance.  That person is not an ally.  Suppose this plan is a hoax.  Would it make a difference?  No, I have gotten a peek into my neighbor’s mind, and that holds even if there is no Plan.  People with such attitudes are carriers, and they spread their ideas when they vote and raise children.

Toward the end, we hear a quote from UU minister, Marilyn Sewell:

“It’s grown-up time now. We no longer prioritize how ‘religious’ our language should be… The mission of the church is to not meet our needs; the mission of the church is to heal our world. It is to give ourselves to something larger than ourselves.”

Then, concluding:  “I contend our something larger as UUs doesn’t have to require God.  But I think it should be hospitable to those who find meaning in notions of the divine.”

Fine, but that’s a fine line.  And don’t go switching gods on us when we’re not looking.

“It has to leave space for difference. “

That depends on the difference.  We can’t leave space for the opposite of what we say we value.  We just can’t, not if our own values are to mean anything.

I agree with Sewell that we have to grow up.  Growing up sometimes means biting the bullet and living in accordance with our values even when it is unpopular.  In UU, it is unpopular to reject God outright, so I am taking a risk.  UUs seem to think the moral drawbacks of their excessive liberalism are outweighed by the unity they preserve.  The worry is that it is a bogus unity, the result of humoring believers, rather than honestly engaging their beliefs.  I suspect that Sam Harris got it right when he said that liberal believers are dangerously out of touch because they are unable to comprehend that anyone would really believe what fundamentalists believe.  This disconnect may account for the glib tolerance UUs hand out so freely.  “Oh, there’s no real conflict.  No one really believes in a God who helps some and not others, anyway”.

UUs get a lot right, but undermine their own positions because they think ‘tolerance’ is a value in and of itself.  It’s not.  It really matters what we are asked to be tolerant of.  If we’re tolerant of everything, we are weathervanes.  We become amoral.

Now, the UUs I know are anything but amoral.   But they seem to maintain private and public faces.  Inwardly, they hold firm convictions.  But when they meet a soft, vulnerable fellow human who happens to hold the opposite view, they naturally soften, as we all do.  They make a calculation that arguing over a mere belief is not worth the risk.  Please notice that this way of avoiding conflict involves degrading belief to the status of opinion or fashion:  it’s hardly worth discussing.  And certainly not worth any risk.

The service closed with the following bizarre spectacle, “There might be a God somewhere”.  Aghast again.  Most people in the room know that if God exists, he’s no friend of ours.  But they went out of their way to endorse him anyway.  I doubt that its purpose was to make nice with anyone present.  I worry it was more to burnish their own self-image as radically tolerant.

Closing song, “There might be a God somewhere”.

If we value anything, we must reject many things.  We can’t harmonize a value with its opposite.  Pretending we can denigrates both values and harmony.  I’ve accepted that I can’t make room for UU’s have-it-both-ways culture, at least not without giving up value itself.  I’m like the guy at the magic show telling people how it’s done, and they don’t appreciate it.  Whether I stay in UU depends on how central this maneuver is.  Last Sunday morning, it was front and center.

The full sermon is here.