As I’ve been looking at a number of responses to this “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus” video, I’ve noticed that they are all very sectarian… usually saying something like “our church is the right one” which doesn’t address the need this man has. Why has this video gone viral? Why are so many people hungry for what he has to say? Where, in a sense, has religion gone wrong that this particular video has caused such a stir?
Did you know that the single largest group of psalms in the Psalter is songs of lament, songs of people yelling at or questioning God? In the book of Job, Job gets angry with God, even while trusting God to do the right thing. I think this is what our poet friend has done. He went through a very difficult time in his religious community, a time of personal trial in which he confronted his own failings. He talks about it. He talks about his pornography addiction, and about putting a face up, pretending to be holy when he knew he wasn’t. And because he was living a lie, at first, he rightly or unrightly assumed the rest of his community was as well.
The truth is we are all struggling to be holy people and we fear that others will judge us for our sins and so we keep our weaknesses to ourselves, afraid to be seen for the imperfect, mark-missing earth creatures, which is probably the best translation of adam in Genesis, that we are. The truth is this man experienced God and it changed his life. For that I’m grateful.
The truth is, in fact, that when Jesus died on the cross his death was a culmination of his salvific action in our world and it saved us from sin and did it once and for all. The truth is that we still sin and though we sin we are saved from its power over us. The truth is we owe it to ourselves and to God to keep struggling to be better people and not to become comfortable in our sin and savedness. If we don’t try to be better, how will we ever be the prophets of the Reign of God we are all called to be?
The truth is that Jesus gave us a community to rely on so we would not have to go through this alone. God be praised, there is no such thing as an individual Christian. WE are the body of Christ. The truth is that one of the gifts of religion is that we can learn from the experience handed down, traditioned to us from our ancestors so each generation doesn’t have to re-discover everything about our faith in a void. The truth is that religion fails at times because human persons fail. We all need to look at our lives and see if we are living up to the message of God in our lives and call our faith traditions to constantly turn back to it. The truth is that in community there will always be someone to call us back to the truth.
I hope the poet will remember the gift his community is and the gift they have given him by handing down the faith to him. And I hope we all remember that without a personal commitment to living our life of faith, then our religion is in fact hollow.
Remember, the Church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church.
(All pictures are my own work.)
Dear David and All,
ReplyDeleteI am not a regular blogger but have read your comments about "Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus."
I had not heard about this video and how it had gone viral until I read about it in last Friday's Wall Street Journal.
I noted that it said what you indicated: the most sectarian responders were the most vicious. And Catholics seemed to be noted as significant in this area.
I have been fascinated with this notion of Jesus (Christ)> religion (Catholicism) for some time and have addressed it in my new book.
The key argument of the "New Atheists" is not as much that God does not exist but that the God of religions (especially Islam, Catholicism and Mormonism [in that order for them]) is not believable.
I watched the video for the first time after reading your blog and think the young evangelical guy who is the poet has a clear articulation of the issue (from an evangelical perspective). I think it's quite known that evangelicals are much more Jesus-centered than religion-grounded.
Thanks for the posting.
Michael Crosby OFMCap.
Thanks Mike. I hope your book is helpful for people in understanding.
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