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The following is a letter that I just sent to (Father) Brent who had encouraged me to take his catechism class, although, having belonged to four churches, I wouldn't join another one unless I had been going there for years. Besides, I became an Episcopalian at age 23, so I wouldn't need to join the national body, and I wouldn't have to take the class to join the local parish. I think my letter might qualify as blunt, but sometimes I just don't know how to soften things without diluting their meaning. Perhaps, if I sat on it for weeks, but I don't have weeks, and I've already worked on this letter over a period of three days.
I know you're awfully busy, so I hate to burden you with a fairly long letter, but I find it necessary.
I was surprised to hear people in our catechism class speak of struggling to believe, because in the church of my
childhood, no one would have admitted as much. Is it not the case that people need never struggle to believe that which they know to be true, and that to do so suggests the triumph of need over integrity? I don’t know what I can be to such people other
than an obstacle to their “faith,” and therefore an object of their hatred, and this raises the question of why you
wanted me in the class.
The catechism (not you, the
catechism) takes me back to my fundamentalist childhood in that the preachers I
knew then also addressed difficult questions with smug authority, as if their
answers were meaningful, obvious, and incontrovertible, when they were anything
but. I see little difference between the fundamentalism I knew then and the
fundamentalism of the catechism and creeds, although my childhood church disavowed both as
“the works of men.”
I said nothing in our recent class
because I could see no benefit in questioning every point—something that I came
very near doing in the first class—that is unless I imagined that answers were
to be had, which I did not. While I appreciate the fact that you encourage
“hard questions,” I still imagine that there is a limit to the number that I, as a nonbeliever, might in good faith ask, and as you
said during our last class, if someone isn’t open to learning from the
material, then he doesn’t belong in church. As I wrote to you on the
day we met, I’m an atheist, and as such I’m not open to learning about the
characteristics of a supernatural deity except inasmuch as I can interpret them
metaphorically, and I see no way to interpret the catechism and the creeds
metaphorically. My attendance at church has been solely a right-brain endeavor
through which I had hoped to find some peace with religion. By contrast, the catechism and creeds
are entirely left-brain.
I regard the catechism—and the creeds
it supposedly elucidates—simply as the position of the side that won; the side
that canonized the Bible; that wrote the creeds; that excommunicated,
persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered those who held other views. As
if all this weren’t enough, they did everything they could to destroy the
writings and the memory of those whom they persecuted. So, I’m to be open to their writings, to
imagine that men with blood on their hands were inspired by God! I’m hardly less open to the Islamic State, the main difference
being that these “Christians” successfully carried on their program of control
through terrorism for well over a thousand years, and are still doing it right
here in America to the extent that they’re able (I write this as one who spent
37 years in the Bible-Belt).
I’m ever aware that for most of the
history of Christianity, I would have been tortured and killed in the name of
Jesus, and that right here in America, people whose views are considered heretical are still losing
their jobs, being disowned by their families, having their pets poisoned and
their children bullied. While Jesus had his faults, I never imagine that he
would have approved of people who use viciousness to support their claim to
having a corner on the truth, but this is what the creeds represent to me.
The creeds don’t even pretend to
encourage love and acceptance, but are instead tools for enforcing propositions
that never made the first person kinder or more moral. You say that they need not
be taken literally, and that the word belief doesn’t have to mean intellectual
acceptance, yet people were once murdered because they didn’t take the creeds literally (how easily the church forgets its crimes). When I read those
creeds, I hear the screams of people being burned at the stake, and their
screams are no less anguished for having happened hundreds of years ago. When I’m
in church, I simply tell myself that I’m hearing the mythology of the people
among whom I have come, so I will take whatever of good I can from it, and
leave that which I regard as bad. It is the best that I can do, the best that anyone with integrity could do.
When you said that the creeds were an
anchor to the church, I remembered the time from my childhood when I stepped on
a plank and a nail went into my foot and was held there by the
sole of my shoe, because that too was an anchor of sorts. Given your statement
that the biggest complaint that Episcopalians have about church is the creeds,
maybe I’m not alone. Since the entire class won’t be about the catechism, I would like to continue if you still want me, and can help me figure out how to
make it work, because just as questioning everything didn’t go well the first
time, questioning nothing didn’t work any better the second time.
Despite my atheism, you told me that there was a place for me at Resurrection, and I have tried to believe you. Now, I don't know what to think, nor do I know what you think in light of what you said about the necessity of remaining open to that which I told you from the outset I didn't believe. It's as if I'm suddenly back in the Church of Christ where the heart means little and the acceptance of authority everything. In case I have somehow failed to make myself clear, I don't accept the creeds or the catechism as having any authority. Those writers whom the church silenced produced far more profound and beautiful writings than these.
Appreciatively,
