August 26, 2007

Vanguard or Rearguard?

By Harry T. Cook

Though viewed by some as a thoroughgoing disaster, the experiment of which I have been a part for two decades, and, in fact, to which I have been a major contributor - an Episcopal congregation in suburban Detroit - is evolving by fits and starts into a model of what organized religion will have to become if it is to be the vanguard rather than the rearguard.

The vanguard forges ahead, ever adventurous, ready to face the challenge of greater forces, sure enough of its own cause to press on despite its detractors. That evidently is how the writers of the New Testament gospels imagined the career of Jesus of Nazareth and the trajectory of the movement that grew up around his ethic.

The rearguard also moves, but marches backward as if in retreat, ever afraid of what may be coming up behind. Its marchers see only the past as they stumble in reverse watching the sun set rather than rise.

Virtually all religious institutions - however large or small their seeming successes - are in rearguard mode, always beating back against the current of thought set in motion by the Enlightenment going on 300 years ago.

Jews of almost every stripe, excluding those of the secular humanist movement, cling to the myths they call their history, viz., the Exodus, the great Davidic kingdom, the revelation of the divine law to Moses, despite historical and archaeological evidence - not to mention commonsense - to the contrary.

For them, Yahweh by whatever unspoken name is still the great and powerful One even though He failed to take cognizance of His particular people's suffering in the Holocaust - or was impotent in the face of it.

Christians continue in a similar vein. The God that didn't save the Jews from Hitler also didn't save Jesus from a Roman gallows. Yet, that is not seen as a failure but as a world-beating success, because God raised a dead Jesus from his grave, the latter's death having, in fact, been the will of that God so to make the blood spilt in the crucifixion the payment for human sin.

Such impossible things are uncritically confessed by millions of religious people in their rituals and creeds even unto this day, as if by saying them aloud and in unison they can be made ipso facto true.

Any number of Christians - including the current President of the United States - stubbornly resist the plain facts about the evolution of life as set forth in the painstaking observations of Charles R. Darwin and his successors over the past 150 years. In thus resisting they insist that the deity sponsored by their religion somehow through "intelligent design" wrought the entire known universe along with each and every smidgen of it so that every hair on every human head is numbered while the fall of every sparrow is duly noted.

In the Protestant Episcopal congregation of which I have been the rector for almost 20 years, such tradition (and mistaken) thinking and hopelessly pre-Enlightenment theology are being quietly laid to rest, respected as parts of our past, but, along with the washboard and wringer, the horse and buggy and the manual typewriter, being consigned to the museum of our thought-bank.

What is taking their place? A process of discovering that our focus is not on some faraway, imagined deity for whom we are to have a measure of fear, nor yet on the necessity of preserving tradition for its own sake but on the common life of our fellow human beings and ourselves as we strive to effect justice, peace and universal human dignity for their own paramount value.

Where, when and how we choose to allow pieces of our Jewish-Christian tradition and culture to inform our evolving life and are disposed to consult the wisdom of old in the ancient texts that have come down to us, we are content to be known as Christians connected by our history to the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church. It's as good a tradition as any.

Yet, if an external authority were to attempt to require of us affirmation of beliefs or conformity to practices uncongenial to our experiment, I think we would resist and claim for ourselves the liberty known by those who realize they are free to make up their own minds.

Meanwhile, we are guided by the insights of reason and experience, being fully engaged with the inquiries of science unfettered by retrograde piety and politics.

As Daniel Webster once said of his alma mater, Dartmouth, It is, sirs, a small college. And yet there are those who love it, so say I of our modest Episcopal parish in the Detroit, Michigan suburb of Clawson from which we look forward as a vanguard in the strange business of extracting meaning from life.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.