What Religion Is and Is Not

A dear friend of mine -- an atheist -- asked me recently: if certain passages in the Bible are contentious, are used as platforms to substantiate bigoted worldviews or even acts of violence, might Christians not treat the Bible, then, as a living document, open to revision, excision, the paring away of behavioral codes incompatible with life as it is in 2016? It’s a good question, and it arose from a brief, itself contentious exchange we had on Facebook about a post from atheist philosopher and scientist Sam Harris, in which Harris attempted to explain what atheism is and what it is not. My friend’s question led me to the conclusion that his question cannot be addressed, let alone answered, without considering what Christianity is and what it is not -- at least, as I see it. (That qualifying phrase -- “as I see it” -- might be where a number of atheists get tripped up in considering or defining religion. Their philosophical position is, by nature, fixed: an absence of belief in a god. Whereas the religion to which I belong is malleably defined at best: it resists being pinned down, which is, on one hand, a virtue, placing it less on a footing with the cold, glassy symmetries of mathematics than with the roiling, whispered sleights of poetry; and on the other hand, a pointed disadvantage, because we rightly privilege logic, answers, progress forward built on the scaffolding of certainties.) So, then, in as concise a way as I know how to put it: Christianity is, to me, the life and example of Christ. And the life and example of Christ is an answer, or utterance in response, to the world (and its attendant codes and cruelties) that preceded it. And we should not strike from the Bible those contentious passages because those passages represent what the world was prior to Christ and what it will persist in being and becoming in lieu of Christ. The books of the Old Testament are, first and foremost, an embroidered history of a people -- and we take, and should take, such histories with their blights intact. Just as we would whitewash the Western historical record of recent centuries to our detriment -- how much easier would it be to repeat the sins of the past (be it industrial genocide or the commerce of slavery) without insisting on, and learning from, their having transpired? We cannot strike passages condoning the stoning of people to death from the Bible, because to do so robs the teachings of Christ in Matthew 5:38-39 and the example of Christ in John 8:1-11 of their revolutionary vision. We cannot strike passages that seem to indict homosexuality because to do so would discourage the discipline of close reading for meaning and the discipline of looking beyond the Bible itself for cultural context: the account in Genesis 19 of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is not a judgment on homosexuality, but on rape (countless people get this wrong, true, but without the text before them, those people will never have a chance to get it right); and what seem to be Paul’s judgments on homosexuality (as we understand it in the 21st century) are revealed to be judgments on the sexual enslavement of adolescent and prepubescent boys when one takes the time to follow in the footsteps of the scholars (e.g. Sarah Ruden) who’ve done the legwork. We need the contentious passages to remind us of whom our ancestors were and to -- in some cases -- remind us who we must never again be. That some people don’t understand this is unfortunate; but the people who use religious texts as blunt instruments to persecute and abuse others (the Kim Davises of the world) are never going to have the epiphanies waiting for them (on homosexuality, on capital punishment, et cetera) if atheists and thoughtful Christians continue to let those people position themselves as the faces and voices of modern Christianity. I’d wager that most contemporary pharisaical believers have met Christ -- but still do not see Christ. And in failing to recognize Christ as the final, radical, liberating word on how human beings must conduct themselves, fail to see the Church and their own lives as manifestations and extensions of His. And that is tragic. Because when we do recognize Christ, our lives and the communities we build and the relationships we nurture become those very edits my friend was wondering why we, as believers, don’t make to the actual biblical text itself. In short, Christians whose sense of their religion is rich with contextual awareness, intellectual rigor and deep focus on Christ as the cornerstone of the whole enterprise -- these Christians do, indeed, regard and present the Bible as a living, changing, growing document. It is not static; it is not calcified; it is not a command that we conceive of our modern world along premodern lines. The Bible is an historical portrait in which Christ sits, from which Christ emerges. It is both a long shadow cast and a transfiguring light revealing not answers so much as the value in asking questions. And perhaps this is part of the rub, too, for atheists: that religion doesn’t provide answers in the way that science does or in the way that misguided believers assert that it does. Christianity, at its best and most vibrant, understands that conclusions take a back seat to wonder, possibility and the ceaseless crafting of self, climate and culture. And when the world (including the atheists whose hackles go up over the Christians out there pounding the drum against LGBT rights, citing what they imagine to be scriptural precedent) finally sees that people like poet Christian Wiman, novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, activist John Dear and preacher Frederick Buechner are the contemporary faces and voices of actual Christianity -- not spotlight-addicts like Kim Davis, not bigots like the late Fred Phelps, not people whose faith hinges on Creationism -- the better off we’ll all be.        

E.L. Doctorow: Appreciating the Appreciations

Ever since his passing last week, I've been wanting to write something about E.L. Doctorow. Not a commemoration of his life or appreciation of his career, but rather a commentary on how heartening I have found the depth of warmth and precision of memories in those tributes to him written by others. Great writers are rarely paid due attention, and while it's unfortunate that their deaths precede such attention more often than does their work, we should be grateful when we see writers of Doctorow's caliber trending on social media.

Ours is an impoverished culture -- enamored of buffoonery, accepting of chicanery -- and books like Ragtime (which I haven't read) and City of God (which I have) are beacons or compass points in line with which our culture might be righted. Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has written that "civilization can trivialize itself to death," and I believe she is correct. So much of the art we imbibe, the gossip we condone, the lip service we pay the ridiculous has a poisoning effect on who we are and what we expect of our lives in that it elbows the truly valuable to the margins, uses its bombast to make footnotes of discretion, wisdom and beauty. So to have seen the wealth of coverage on, the column inches devoted to Doctorow's legacy -- especially given how minor key the discussion of his work always seemed to be during his life, however many prizes he bagged -- has consumed me this last week. City of God (the one novel of his I've read) is a favorite of mine -- a lightning strike of a book, an engine roaring forward on intellect and risk -- and while I've long suspected that The Book of Daniel and The March, for example, must be at least as accomplished, I've never once had a discussion of his work with a friend, a professor, a book club member. So to read that Michael Chabon regards Doctorow's work as the quickening impetus behind his own oeuvre, that he still remembers the buzzing dinner conversations his parents had about Ragtime four decades ago -- leaves me a little awestruck at what awaits me in that book. And to read that Amy Bloom considers Doctorow the finest American novelist of the last century (remembering, of course, that that century also included the likes of Steinbeck and Faulkner, to say nothing of contemporaries like Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth) -- this is praise that would seem like hyperbole if it didn't, instead, hum with sincerity and humility. Or to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak about reading Ragtime: "from the first page, you know, my head almost exploded." Or to read Doctorow's obituary in The New York Times and to then spend 30 minutes with the comments on it -- from his readers, his peers, his former students. I can't ever remember reading such a number of lucid, loving, indebted memories of encounters with a writer and/or his work on the occasion of his passing. And it is this abundance of treasuring up this masterful writer's life, gentleness and blazing body of work on which I wanted to comment.

We've lost a genius. But this loss seems also to have reminded us that complex art, rigorous thought and delicacy of carriage are more important to us than perhaps we'd realized. May we carry that epiphany forward and let it inform what we read, how we treat others, and how we treat ourselves.     

Last week, Kelly and I saw Wim Wenders's new documentary Pina at our local arthouse cinema. I went in as a relative virgin to dance as an art form, having seen a bizarre production of The Nutcracker at the University of Montana in 2009 (featuring the visiting Moscow Ballet, true, but also featuring, inexplicably, a GIGANTIC dancing unicorn), while Kelly had some dance training as a teen and worked as an intern at Dance Magazine in New York City one summer long before we met. (Apparently, the Bausch piece "Cafe Mueller" -- seen in Pina -- was also showcased in Pedro Almodovar's masterpiece Talk to Her, but the eight-foot-tall vagina has edged "Cafe Mueller" out of my memory of the film.) I went in with faith in Wenders (whose Wings of Desire is among the very best films I've ever seen) and his longing to honor the art of his friend, the late choreographer Pina Bausch.

However, as this was modern dance we'd be seeing, what would I -- whose suspicion of and distaste for modernism (Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, in particular) elsewhere in the arts is quite thoroughgoing, whatever my admiration of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings, H.D.'s Trilogy and George Oppen's poems -- think? Well, from the beginning (i.e. from Stravinsky in the dirt), I was rapt. It was not the dancing alone that was magnificent, but the sense I had of the creative engine behind these visions and their execution. And watching the Wenders film -- struck as I was by the trust between the dancers, by the staggering physical demands of the performances, by the symmetries and spatial relationships -- I found my mind jumping artistic tracks and articulating something of the precise reason behind my definition and love of great writing. In short: rigorous intellect, prose either muscular or pellucid or attentive to poetic device, elaborate architectural exposition, characterization that is honest even when disconcerting and empathetic even when exploring the monstrous, and a writer's faith in his or her readers to extend their reach as readers -- these are the earmarks of great literature that I came to more clearly understand as such while seeing their parallels exhibited in the work of Pina Bausch.

The world would be diminished without Pina -- valentine that it is to these attributes in dance as a medium, and to the confidence issuing from them -- just as it would be diminished without Marilynne Robinson's diamond-edge intellect, without Peter Carey's luxuriant image-making, without the matryoshka sentences of Howard Jacobson, without Sigrid Undset's love for even those characters of hers whom she would have us (in some degree) despise, and without Charles Dickens's faith in our trusting his lead into the rabbit warrens that are his plots.

To name just a few examples...