[Dialogue] 10/14/2021, Progressing Spirit, Rev Dr. Robin R. Meyers: Religious Exemptions?; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Oct 14 07:33:13 PDT 2021
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Religious Exemptions?
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| Essay by Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers
October 14, 2021Like so many of you, I had planned to pen a tribute to Jack Spong on this page, but there is little I can offer that has not already been said. Truth be known, I am an author because Jack once gave his personal recommendation to Harper Collins that they should consider my work. He lectured to my congregation at Mayflower UCC one Saturday morning for four and half hours. When Fred Plummer asked me at a Westar meeting to consider taking over the Spong newsletter, I declined for one simple reason. I am not Jack Spong. There was only one, and he changed the religious landscape for so many grateful souls. It has been said that immortality can be found between the covers of a book. May it be so.
There is something else I’d like to write about, however. It has been both strange and infuriating to me. Like so many of the injustices and inequities revealed by the pandemic, evangelical Christianity’s deepest values have also been unmasked. Now that more and more businesses are requiring those who return to work to get the vaccine, people who have already decided not to get the shot, often by feasting on misinformation, have also decided that their “personal freedom” trumps any biblical injunction to be our sister and brother’s keeper. But that is not all.
They are now claiming that being vaccinated against the deadly Delta variant in the middle of a terrifying surge is also against their most deeply held religious beliefs. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows employers to provide reasonable accommodations for employees who object to work requirements based on religious beliefs that are “sincerely held.” Since this exemption cannot be waived for social or political beliefs, religion is broadly defined as an individual’s beliefs, not necessarily the beliefs of a particular religion or denomination. This works well for people who claim to follow Jesus but whose love of the neighbor is hard to recognize.
There is abundant evidence to suggest that after deciding not to get the vaccine for personal or secular reasons, a “religious exemption” is now the go-to rationale. That is, people who refuse to get a miraculously safe and effective vaccine to protect not only themselves but the rest of us are suddenly finding God, and then creating God in their own image. Who knew that God is the real Q?
As reported in the New York Times, a couple in Paducah Kentucky, have found a way not to get the shot after the hospital where one of them works announced a vaccine mandate. “There are many reasons why we don’t want to take it, and faith is one.” Their concerns include a perception that the vaccine was rushed, problems with what they have read about the vaccine’s remote connection to abortion and similarities to the biblical “mark of the beast,” a symbol associated with the Antichrist.” Of course, they do not believe that they will get the virus itself.
What’s more, pastors are now helping people who have just discovered their “religious” reasons for keeping the pandemic alive and deadly for the rest of us. They are drafting letters for their parishioners (often in exchange for a donation), so that the religious reasons seem more “sincere.” You just check a box confirming that you are a “practicing Evangelical that adheres to the religious and moral principles outlined in the Holy Bible.”
Hold on right there. A person who adheres to the moral principles outlined in the Holy Bible would be getting the vaccine to be like the Good Samaritan who helped the man who was beaten and left for dead (on a ventilator) along with all the other unvaccinated fools who worship God in the wrong way or on the wrong mountain. She would be like Jesus, listening for the voice of health care workers who are crying out, like blind Bartimaeus, to be seen and healed. We laud them as heroes, and then we make their lives a living hell by failing to roll up our sleeves and get a shot that would empty out most of the ICU beds in the country. No wonder they are leaving the profession in droves.
A person that adheres to the moral principles outlined in the Holy Bible would understand that if faith does not make a person more selfless, but instead provides divine sanction for acting more selfishly, it is worse than the atheism they despise. According to Mark, the first gospel, Jesus is a healer who teaches entirely in parables. So, what would he make of people who begged science for a miracle, got one, and then decided that their hatred of the government, or Democrats, or the Deep State requires them to reject it? Would he not tell a modern parable of the Fool Who Would Not be Vaccinated?
A small-town pastor in rural Iowa is busy writing letters for his congregation that provides Godly reasons for not getting vaccinated, offering them a four-paragraph letter stating that “a Christin has no responsibility to obey any government outside the scope that has been designated by God.” If this is true, then we should all consider ignoring the most basic rules of civic compliance that are not found in the Bible. To begin, at every intersection on the roads built for us by the state, we should stop on green and go on red. Afterall, no one is going to tell us that we can’t kill ourselves and others if it means a victory over the forces of darkness!
Now those lying abed in our hospitals have essentially closed ICU’s for the rest of us because they did not get vaccinated. But when they get covid they beg those in the citadel of science to heal them, and suddenly believe the science behind monoclonal antibody infusions. Each infusion costs $2,100 per dose, paid for by the evil federal government, compared to free vaccinations which overwhelmingly prevent hospitalization in the first place. The difference is that conservative talk show hosts, and their hero, Donald Trump (who in my opinion is the answer to the question What Would Jesus Not Do?) got the treatment—at the country’s finest government hospital no less—and it saved their lives. Then Mr. Trump never told a single soul, including his goose-stepping legions, to get the vaccine. It brings to mind the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept.
This madness plays out like a political map of the U.S. Seven southern states who perpetuate the lie that Biden did not win the election, account for 70% of the orders for monoclonal antibody infusions. They hate wasting tax-payer dollars, so perhaps they might consider getting the vaccine as a deficit reduction plan? The real problem, of course, is that they think of such problems as the fault of other people they despise. They consider themselves to be the victims of vast conspiracies that they read about, believe, and then act upon in ways that endanger us all. When they are lying in a hospital bed gasping for breath and clinging to life itself, they often announce both their penitence and stupidity, but it’s too late. A single vaccine would have saved them, and protected countless others, while the treatments they demand now save only themselves.
This is how the pandemic unveiled the true nature of so much evangelical Christianity in America. This is how a gospel of love and inclusion for the Gentiles (everyone else) became a cosmic bargain, the individualized reward for those who say they believe the right things—even though most of those things are developed doctrines that Jesus would not recognize. The mark of a truly religious person should be a heightened moral imagination, not a weeping spectacle of fawning gratitude because Jesus died to save the most unholy of Trinities—Me/Myself/and I.
In searching for a reason not to be vaccinated, a woman in Indiana did “research” into the dangers. She listened to a “health and freedom” conference hosted by an anti-vaccine podcast, and download materials from America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization that peddles false information about the vaccines and promotes as a treatment the livestock drug ivermectin. She finally landed on a verse from the Bible to back it all up from 2 Timothy:
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Exactly.
Amen.~ Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, Oklahoma City, Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, where he still teaches. He is the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, “Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.” More information is at RobinMeyers.com |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Jeff
I was brought up to understand that we meet God in church. What is it supposed to mean when people say that God is within me? I don't think I've found that to be true.
A: By Rev. Mark Sandlin
Dear Jeff,It's hard for me to say what a particular person or persons meant when you heard them say that, but I can tell you what it means to me.
Think of humanity as the ocean and each person a wave. Each wave is different, but equally wet, equally made of the ocean. Wetness is to the ocean as God is to humanity. We each are a unique part of a whole, yet decidedly part of that whole. We are made of the same stuff. And, in each of us resides the divine. Not separate and different parts of the divine – instead, we are all part of the same Oneness. We are all part of the ocean that is God. We are all dripping wet.
A conversation between a young man and his guru was once overheard, the student proudly stated, “The purpose of religion is to find God.” His teacher responded, “Not quite, the purpose of religion is to find ourselves, within which we shall find God.” Or, as Rumi once said, “I looked in temples, churches & mosques. But I found the Divine within my Heart.”
Look into every great religious, spiritual, and wisdom tradition, and we find the same precept — that life’s ultimate truth, its ultimate treasure, lies within us.
Jesus was once asked when the kingdom of God would come. The kingdom of God, Jesus replied, is not something people will be able to see and point to. Then came these striking words in Luke 17:21: “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” With those words, Jesus gave voice to a teaching that is universal and timeless.
Particularly for those who grew up in conservative or mainline churches, the trick is letting go of some of the things we've been taught about God. It's particularly true when it comes to ideologies which suggest that God is separate from us and, thus, must be sought after and searched for. When you do begin letting go of those, instead of always looking for God, you end up feeling God and enjoy walking in the joy of this ineffable Presence. The Good News is that it produces real transformation in how you think, live, treat others and the world, because it opens up up to see God all around us and not only within.
In the end, I’d simply say, there is nowhere that God isn’t and that includes inside you.
~ Rev. Mark Sandlin
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. Mark also serves as the President and Co-executive Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Thoughts on the Future of Christianity After a Conversation with the Founder of the Alban Institute
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 9, 2011Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to have lunch with the Rev. Dr. Loren B. Mead, known to many of you as the creator of the Alban Institute. A think tank operation, funded largely over the last fifty years with grants from major foundations, the Alban Institute has studied and made recommendations on every aspect of congregational life imaginable. For the benefit of those who might not be familiar with its activities, the Alban Institute was the source of such almost universally accepted practices today as setting congregations on the path of undergoing a self-study and creating a parish profile prior to beginning the search for a new pastor. That process, not coincidentally, has also created the position of “Interim Pastor,” a role deemed as necessary to making that long, reflective search process viable. Now retired, Dr. Mead was surely one of the 20th century’s great primary ecclesiastical innovators and Christian leaders. So enormous is his reputation and so solid has his knowledge of church life been that I listened to his words with care and gave them the attention that they merit.
On that day, he discussed with me the economic crisis in which institutional Christianity is living today. The financial problems facing the Christian Church, he asserted, “are far more than just a reaction to the current economic turndown.” It is, he believes, “a reflection of something quite systemic.” To make his point, he used the analogy of a rising and receding tide. He referred to the 20 years following World War II (1945-1965) as a time in which a rising tide of interest in religion had carried all churches into a sense of well-being. In those two decades the churches followed the culture’s rush to suburbia with the building of huge numbers of suburban structures which almost immediately were filled with people and became going concerns. That changed about 1965, he added, and between 1965 and 1975, the tide began to recede, so slowly at first that it was not discernable, but picking up speed as the years flowed by. Religious interest has clearly declined and church attendance is no longer the “thing to do.”
While he did not go into the causes of this, some of them are obvious. There were great tensions inside the church brought about by the civil rights movement as ecclesiastical racism was brought to the surface. Recall that Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was addressed to the leaders of Alabama’s Christian community. There was also the conflict that rocked this nation over the Vietnam War, setting the generations against each other and causing patriotism to cease being a virtue for many. Then there was the feminist movement that struggled against many church-inspired restrictions on women and opened doors to sexual freedom. Next came the battle for justice in regard to the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in both church and society. Only recently has that battle ended in a clear victory for gay rights.
In each of these social transformations institutional Christianity was generally on the losing side. The signs of those losses are present everywhere one looks in our society today and the Christian Church has been called on to adjust to these new realities. By being on the wrong side of history and then by exhausting its resources in losing battles, the credibility of the Christian Church suffered a huge setback. Christians used quotations from the scriptures to under gird their dying prejudices and in the process served to call the integrity of these scriptures into question, especially among the members of the rising generation. The fact that international leaders from the Pope, who has not yet addressed with honesty or integrity the scandal of abusive behavior on the part of the ordained and who still calls homosexuality “deviant” behavior, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who still believes Christian unity is a higher virtue than truth or justice, constitute other symptoms of our time that illustrate our inability to enter the future or to face reality.
Neither Dr. Mead nor I, however, believe that these things alone, as gripping as they are, are sufficient to account for the rapid demise of organized religion in our time. There is clearly something more. In denomination after denomination, including every branch of Christendom the mood of the Christian Church today is that of contraction, merging and the closing of congregations. Even the fundamentalist churches, particularly in the South, which appeared to counter this receding tide and the mega-churches built significantly on the personalities of their charismatic clergy, appear now to have reached their limits of expansion. Many of them splinter over internal control issues or seem not to be able to survive the departure of their founder.
Following this conversation with Dr. Mead I began to pull together thoughts that I have had for some time, but they never seemed to form a consistent pattern. Perhaps, after this conversation, they did. At least I want to state them and to invite others to react to these possibilities. The reason I believe Christianity is in a steep decline is that it cannot bring itself to face self-consciously the fact that the presuppositions on which our faith story was erected in the past are today no longer self-evidently true or even believable.
To say it boldly, there is no God who lives above the sky and is ready to come to our aid, as most of the language of prayer assumes to be a reality. That God could be imagined only when we believed that the earth was the center of a three-tiered universe and that God not only watched over and judged the world from a heavenly throne above the sky, but also intervened regularly to answer our prayers or to assert the divine will. To please this heavenly parent and ultimate judge was what we thought would assure our eternal destiny. This concept of God began to die with the revolution in thought started by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it has grown as we have become citizens of a space age and are now beginning to embrace the enormity of the size of the universe. Our planet Earth is not only not the center of the universe, it is not even the center of our galaxy that includes some 200 billion other stars, most of which are bigger than our star that we call the sun.
This God, traditionally defined as supernatural in power, we assumed was capable of miracles in a wide variety of circumstances. When Isaac Newton began to publish his work in the latter years of the 17th century, introducing us to natural law and to cause and effect, both miracle and magic were squeezed out of our consciousness. Elie Wiesel’s book NIGHT on his experience in the Holocaust was the most powerful articulation of how this idea of God died. The God of the Bible, who had intervened in human history in the cause of freedom by sending plagues upon the Egyptians and by splitting the Red Sea to enable “the chosen people” to escape from slavery at the time of the Exodus, was nowhere to be found when this God was so desperately needed to free “the chosen people” from death in the prison camps of Nazi Germany in the 20th century. Belief in such an intervening God became simply no longer credible.
Next, the entire way we tell the Jesus story was challenged and, though many Christians cannot admit it, actually set aside as no longer believable by the work of Charles Darwin. The primary Christian myth assumes an original perfect creation from which human life has somehow fallen. That idea makes no sense when we embrace the fact that we have actually evolved over billions of years from single cell organisms to complex self-conscious creatures. There was no fall from an original perfection since there was no original perfection. The concept of “original sin” is largely regarded as nonsense today. Yet the fall from which Jesus has rescued us is the way we continue to tell the Jesus story. Our churches and clergy still parrot that incredibly negative Christian idea that we have been “saved by the blood of Christ.” Protestants still shout their guilt-producing mantra “Jesus died for my sins,” and Catholics still refer to “the sacrifice of the Mass” as reenacting the moment when salvation was procured. These concepts fill our hymns, our liturgies and our sermons despite the fact that they make no sense outside the parameters of the pre-suppositions that are culturally no longer believed. How can one be saved if one has not fallen? How can one be restored to a status that one has never possessed? How can God be worshiped if this God requires the death of the divine son in order to have our sins forgiven? If there is no payoff, no benefit to be gained from faithful worship and righteous living, then many ask today “why bother?” These are the things the Christian Church is up against today in this post-Christian age. None of them will be solved by inviting people to listen once again to the “old, old story” or by joining in the singing of “The Old Rugged Cross.”
The problems facing institutional Christianity today in the Western world cannot be addressed by tinkering around the edges of our theological formularies or structures. As important as they have been making good parish profiles will not do it nor will even making wise choices in the selection of our clergy. We are not today in a temporary status of watching the tide go out with confidence that in time the tide will come back in . We are rather living through a cataclysmic transition from the presuppositions by which we once lived and having no idea how to tell our faith story in terms of the emerging world view for which our religion of yesterday has no relevance. So churches are dying, vast anger, rising out of cultural depression at the loss of yesterday’s meaning and unstoppable changes, are now our daily bread.
The consensus of the past is breaking up. The consensus of the future has not yet been formed. We live in interesting times and dangerous times also. Political shell games and pious rhetoric will no longer suffice.
Before we can move to address these issues we must understand them. I see little present indication that either church leaders or political leaders understand the depth of the problem we face. Time alone will tell, but in the meantime doing church business as usual or practicing politics as usual is a prescription not only for disaster, but for extinction.~ John Shelby Spong |
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