Isaiah 1:1-3,10-17--"Religion Poisons Everything"?

The summer of my sophomore year in high school, I had the good fortune to attend the Governor’s School for the Arts in North Carolina. One of the memorable characters whom I met that summer, both peers and teachers, was Dr. Howard Bleeker. Bleeker taught at a state university in New York, and he had a special role in the Governor's School in those days: Bleeker was the school’s resident atheist. Now, as you can imagine, some students at the Governor’s School were fascinated and excited to meet someone and hear ideas the likes of which they had never heard before. And as you can also imagine, some students were scandalized and threatened to hear such ideas and meet such a person the likes of which they had never heard before. I was neither one really, perhaps because he was not such a person nor were his ideas such as I had never met or heard before. I remember one evening talking with my father on the phone and laughing together about why it was that the Governor’s School had to go to New York to import an atheist into North Carolina. Was it that there were no atheists on the faculties of colleges and universities in North Carolina? We knew better than that, even in the 1970s. Meanwhile, one of my best friends at the Governor’s School and his father were not laughing. His father was a Lutheran minister, as mine was, but his father wrote an angry and accusatory letter to the Director of the Governor's School and to the Governor himself about how scandalous and threatening it was that high school students were being exposed to such people and such ideas.

What is your reaction when you are exposed to people and ideas that are different from your own, that maybe even stand in direct opposition to your own? How do you respond? Some people respond with fascination and excitement and quickly abandon themselves and their own for the new and the exotic that they are hearing and meeting. Other people are immediately scandalized and threatened by people and ideas such as they haven’t met or heard before. I’ve been thinking about Bleeker and my Governor’s School experience 35 years ago this summer because in the last three years—in fact, in each of the last three years—a book promoting atheism has been on national bestseller lists. In 2005, you may recall, it was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. Harris writes from the perspective of philosophy and neuroscience, and Harris says religion is what is wrong with the world. In 2006, it was Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Dawkins is an eminent evolutionary biologist, and in his book, Dawkins dispenses with the whole idea of God. Based on a particular conclusion of evolutionary theory that he posits as the central doctrine in his atheistic theology (which is what The God Delusion is, it’s a work in theology from an a-theistic perspective), religion is just plain wrong, Dawkins says. And then in 2007, it was Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. “Religion poisons everything,” says Hitchens, perhaps not surprisingly, because those of you who have been following these conversations know that when Hitchens was a young man, he was sexually abused by a priest in his parish. So perhaps you can understand why this bright and articulate journalist would come to hold that religion poisons everything. Religion wrongs people. So how do we respond to a Bleeker, a Harris, a Dawkins, a Hitchens? As individuals and as “a community of believers in God as revealed in Jesus Christ as Lord,” how do we respond? I want to make four suggestions.

The first suggestion is this. We ought not let arguments and attacks and criticisms such as these make us anxious or alarm us. In the long view of things, these kinds of criticisms and attacks and arguments are as old religion itself. The philosophical criticism of religion is as old as philosophy as a way of thinking and being in the world, and that's very, very old. The scientific criticism of religion is as old as science. The emotional criticism of religion is as old as the hurt and pain that people have experienced within religious communities. For centuries, each generation and age and era has seen and often even justified the attacks on religion from philosophical and scientific and emotional perspectives. So the first thing I would suggest is that we not become overly alarmed or anxious because what we are reading and hearing now is as old as religious faith and practice itself. And for every argument, says Donald Phillip Verene, Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University, “there is always a good counterargument.” “Argument,” he says, “is always a partial way of thinking” (The Art of Humane Education, p. 11), and thinking and I won’t keep you here all afternoon engaging in partial thinking by going into arguments and counterarguments. I think I have more important suggestions than that. First, we ought not be anxious and alarmed at yet another round of criticism of religion.

But second, we should listen to and learn from these criticisms. We should listen to and learn from them. Sam Harris is exactly right when he says that religious extremism is one of the most dangerous threats to human existence in the world right now. He says he sat down to begin writing his book on September 12, 2001, as a response to the atrocities of the day before. We can all agree with Harris. We can all agree that religious extremism in whatever religious tradition, even our own, is a danger to the world in which we live. But there is more. Harris is critical not only of the extremists in religion; he’s critical of religious moderates, as well. For example, he says that we moderates are not being entirely honest and truthful about what we think about the Bible. He says we’re not being honest and truthful about what we think about religious authority. He says we’re not being honest with ourselves and the world. And you know something? Harris is right. We moderate Baptists in particular, places like First Baptist Greenville, have talked a lot about what we are moving away from in Baptist life, but we have not always spoken as clearly and truthfully about what we are moving toward. In the way that Scripture is an authority in our lives, we’ll say, “Oh, not like that; not like them.” But then we don’t honestly and completely go on to say, “What we mean is this.” We should listen to and learn from Sam Harris’s criticisms, not just of the extremists, but of us as well.


We should listen to and learn from Richard Dawkins’s criticism. What I would suggest that we learn from Dawkins is that we have done an inadequate job of accounting for the Christian tradition as it relates to the twenty-first century. Not the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth century, not the twentieth century. The twenty-first century. We need to say to our theologians in our seminaries and divinity schools and colleges and universities and in our pulpits, “It’s the twenty-first century!” How do we integrate the scientific and technological lives that you and I live every day into the great traditions of the church and vice versa? Dawkins makes a big deal out of the fact that he knows atheists in the Anglican church. But there’s a long tradition of atheist members and deacons in Baptist churches. That may come as news to you, but it doesn’t come as news to any pastor who has served Baptist churches down through the years. How often are the decisions that we make inside church and outside church only marginally or tangentially related to our theology, to our vision of who God is and what God calls us to? The decisions we make in our daily lives are driven by reasons and justifications and explanations that have nothing to do with God. And then when something happens that we don’t expect, that is unimaginable, that breaks into our decision-making and reasoning and justifying and explaining, we say, “Where did that come from? That wasn’t on my radar screen. I didn’t see that coming.” No, because the truth is, you and lead much of our lives as practical atheists. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. We don’t need a “God hypothesis” to build good bridges. We don’t need a God hypothesis to make love or to diagnose cancer. But as long as our everyday individual lives and decisions are made based only on criteria that leave God entirely out of the picture, we are living as practical atheists. How do we integrate the practical atheism of our lives into the great traditions of the Christian faith and vice versa? The good news is, the sky is not falling because Harris and Dawkins and Hitchens write such books. And the even better news is that the ceiling isn’t coming down because of you and me. We need to learn from Dawkins how far our daily lives and our scientific and technological understanding of the world—ours, yours and mine—is from our confession of our faith in God, and we must use that reminder as an opportunity to move our faith and practice into the twenty-first century and integrate it with who we already and really are in our thinking and living.

And Hitchens? From Hitchens we should learn never to underestimate the power we have within this community of faith to inflict pain and hurt and alienation. Thinkingly or unthinkingly, we can do or say things to people that will drive them away not only from us but from God. Thinkingly or unthinkingly, we can not say or not do things that will drive people away not only from us but, worse yet, from God. From Hitchens, we should learn to look around us and ask, “Who is hurting, and what am I doing to cause that pain? Who is hurting and what can I do to reduce that pain?” We wrong people in the name of religion and under the disguise of religion, and we must listen and learn.

The third thing we should do in response to these criticisms of religion is that we should be more constantly and consistently critical of our own religious faith and practice. In this morning’s Old Testament lesson, the prophet Isaiah says, “O you rulers of Sodom, . . . you people of Gomorrah!” (1:1). I would remind you that he was not speaking to atheists. He was not talking to “godless” people. He was addressing the leaders and the people of God’s “holy habitation,” as it is called in the Old Testament, Jerusalem. And Isaiah is saying, “You the people of God are so far from who God calls you to be that you are Sodom and Gomorrah.” The internal, self-critical vision of the biblical community of the people of God is something we must never lose sight of. We must not look first to defend our faith or protect our faith from the criticisms of outsiders. We must look first to purge and heal our own religious faith and practice from our own shortcomings and failings from the inside out. Religion's biggest problem is not the criticism of outsiders but the failing--my failing and your failing--to be who God would have religious people in any religion to be. You and I must take up the perspective of the prophet Isaiah and the perspective of Jesus of Nazareth who spoke to religious people of their day, God-believing people of their day, people devoted to their offerings and their sacrifices and their prayers but who were unwilling to see that the character and quality of their lives was utterly inconsistent with the words of their mouths. So along with not being alarmed or anxious about criticism from atheists and along with identifying what we can learn from the criticism of atheists, we must also reinvigorate our own self-criticism, our own confession of our sin, our own recognition not so much of how far from God a Harris or a Dawkins or a Hitchens may be but how far from God we are. Isaiah says to good, religious people a word of correction and criticism: “Cease doing evil.” That was not to atheists; that was to good, “Bible-believing people,” so to speak. “Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow” (1:16-17). Jesus extended Isaiah’s sermon to additional examples when he said to show hospitality to the stranger, feed the hungry, give a drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46). Those are words of criticism and correction to people who are so comfortable and complacent in their worship that their lives no longer express who God has called them to be and what God expects of them.

And that brings me already to my fourth suggestion. You can’t be expected to answer the arguments of Harris and Dawkins and Hitchens. You would need to become a philosopher and a neuroscientist and spend the next 30 years taking apart Harris’s arguments. He leaves a lot of arguments on the table to be taken apart, trust me. Study neuroscience--and astrophysics, too, while you’re at it. Those are the two great theological fields of the next fifty years. If you want to be a twenty-first-century theologian, study one of those two fields or both. You would need to become an evolutionary biologist in order to undermine Dawkins’s claims on his own turf. And there are plenty of good arguments on the table. He just leaves them there. Dawkins is a great biologist, but he would have a lot of trouble in a systematic theology class; he makes a lot of basic mistakes. But the force of his argument is still there. You would need to become an evolutionary biologist so that you can argue with Dawkins with knowledge and authority because he categorically rejects the presuppositions and assumptions of every frame of reference other than evolutionary biology. And I certainly hope that none of you ever must go into the blackness of Christopher Hutchens’s experience and life and soul to counteract the pain and the hurt and betrayal that he suffered in the church. You and I can’t do that. We have other callings. And that’s precisely my point. You don’t have to counter those arguments by arguing back. What you are called to do, in the words of the Kyle Matthews song about Albert Schweitzer is to make you life your argument. Isaiah and Jesus and other prophets and teachers of Israel and the church did not call us to be philosophers and neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists and hurting souls. Some us become those things along the way. But what we are called to do constantly and consistently is to make our lives our argument: cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow; welcome the stranger; feed the hungry; give water to the thirsty; clothe the naked; care for the sick; visit the imprisoned. In these things, there is no poison. In these things, religion is not what’s wrong with our world, religion is not wrong, and religion does not wrong. In these things, it’s your life. It is the character and quality of your life and our life together in the presence of the risen Lord and empowered by the Holy Spirit that is our best argument. Let’s make our lives our argument.

This material is Copyrighted © 2007 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.