[REPRINT]
March 7, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Many evangelicals wear their religion on T-shirts and around their necks and on car bumpers and eye-blacks. They hand out tracts on college campuses and stage revival meetings on military bases. They use weddings and funerals to preach come-to-Jesus sermons. In their resolve to spread the good news that Jesus saves, some also do things that are more morally dubious.
In
Tucson, nice young couples cultivate relationships with lonely college
students without disclosing that they are paid to engage in “friendship missions.” In Seattle, volunteers woo first- and second-graders to afterschool Good News Clubs that the children are incapable of distinguishing from school-sponsored activities. In Muslim countries, Christian missionaries skirt
laws that ban proselytizing by pretending to be mere aid workers,
putting genuinely secular aid workers at risk. In the U.S. military,
soldiers bully other soldiers into prayer meetings or the Passion of the Christ and then send bizarrely profane emails to people who try to stop them.
Perhaps
the most devastating consequence of evangelical zeal in recent decades
has been millions of unnecessary deaths in Africa. Many evangelicals saw
the HIV epidemic as an opportunity.
“AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history,” said Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse. Another group that pursued HIV dollars has its mission built right into its name: Community Health Evangelism. Christian ideology ultimately redirected billions of U. S. aid dollars away
from science-based results-oriented interventions such as contraceptive
access and safe-sex education and into programs that espoused
traditional Christian values: monogamy, evangelism, and compassionate
after-the-fact care for the sick.
To explain why Christians will sometimes violate their own commitment to compassion or truth in the search for converts, it helps to consider the psychology of fundamentalist religion.
Religion
has a set of superpowers—ways it shapes or controls human thinking and
behavior. Chief among these is the fact that religions take charge of
our moral reasoning and emotions,
giving divine sanction to some behaviors and forbidding others. Because
there are many kinds of “good,” all of us make moral decisions by
weighing values against each other. For example, most parents place a
value on not hurting their children and yet get them immunized because
long-term health trumps short-term pain. Religion can alter the way we
stack those competing values, adding emotional weight to some, removing
it from others.
The relationship between religion and morality is complicated. Religion claims credit for our moral instincts. It channels them via specific prescriptions and prohibitions. It offers explanations for
why some things feel right and others feel so wrong and why we find the
wrong ones tempting. It engages us in stories and rituals that bring
moral questions to the fore in day-to-day life. It embeds us in a community that encourages moral conformity and increases altruism toward insiders. It creates the sense that someone is always watching over our shoulder.
When
religious edicts align with the quest for love and truth, religion’s
power can encourage us to be more compassionate, kind, humble or act
with integrity. But religions also assert moral obligations that have
little to do with love or truth, harm or wellbeing. Consider, for
example, sacramental rituals, pilgrimages, circumcision, veiling, vows
of silence or rituals of purity.
Some demands of piety have little human or planetary cost. But other
times, divine edict compels adherents to do harm in the service of a
higher cause that to outsiders simply doesn’t exist. The Aztec and Inca
practice of human sacrifice to appease gods was one of these. To
outsiders it was a horrifying moral violation; to insiders more
analogous to a community vaccination; the young men and women who were
sacrificed gave their lives for a greater good—the wellbeing of the
whole society.
Since
religions add to an adherent’s bucket of moral obligations, they can
create moral dilemmas or tradeoffs where none would otherwise exist.
Should I spend my days studying Torah or working to feed my children?
Should I drive my daughter to the hospital even though it’s Friday?
Should I give the little I can spare to the poor or to the nuns? Should I
wander with a beggar bowl or help my father tend the fields so my
sisters can go to school? Should I encourage my poor African
parishioners to wear condoms to prevent HIV or tell them to entrust God
with their family planning?
Sometimes the tradeoffs are a matter of life or death, as when Saudi girls may have been forced
to remain in their burning school rather than flee unveiled. Or
consider the case of a young Arizona mother who had to choose between
her own death and the abortion of a 12-week fetus her church deemed a
person. She chose to live so she could continue raising the children who
waited for her at home. But her bishop, who saw the abortion as
premeditated murder, excommunicated a nun who helped her, claiming the more moral path was to allow the death of both woman and fetus as God’s will.
Evangelical
Protestants who believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of God
take as one of their highest mandates a verse they call the Great
Commission. I have seen it emblazoned in letters two feet high on the
wall of a megachurch: Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
(Matthew 28:19, NIV). The word evangel means good news, and the
name evangelical identifies Christians whose beliefs center on spreading
what they think is the best news ever to reach the human race: that
Jesus died for our sins and anyone who believes can be saved from hell.
(One of my deep secrets as an evangelical teenager was how much I hated
trying to sell other people on the Four Spiritual Laws that laid out the
plan of salvation.)
Follow
me, says the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel, and I will make you fishers of
men. For evangelical Christians, fishing for souls is an obligation that
can trump all others. What good does it do to feed the hungry or tend
the sick if you leave their souls to eternal torture? Catholic
Christians typically believe that good works are of value in their own
right. Universalist Christians believe that the death of Jesus on the
cross ultimately redeemed all of creation. Modernist Christians believe
the Bible is a human document and that the life of Jesus is more
important than his death. Evangelical Christians believe they have a
moral obligation to proselytize.
Beliefs
have consequences, and one consequence of evangelical belief is that
decent people end up doing ugly things in order to recruit converts and
save souls. It is because they care about being good that they do harm.
In the much quoted words of Steven Weinberg, “With or without religion,
you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil
things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” The
mechanism by which this happens is that religion creates a narrative in
which the evil serves a higher good.
A new book by Mikey Weinstein, No Snowflake in an Avalanche,
offers a window into how corrosive the Great Commission can be. It
chronicles a harrowing decade in, what is to Weinstein, a fight to the
death for religious freedom. You may be familiar with fragments of the
story. When fundamentalist Christians at the Air Force Academy began
goading and harassing Weinstein’s cadet son, Curtis, they awoke a
grizzly bear.
Weinstein
assumed at first that the harassment was an anomaly and would be
addressed quickly. Alas. The more pressure he applied using his own
standing as an Academy graduate and former Reagan administration
attorney, the more he uncovered an entrenched network of fundamentalist
Christians that ranged from cadets to chaplaincy to brass, and that
pressured all others to convert: Clubbish Bible-believing cadets bullied
Catholics, Muslims, Jews, nontheists and even mainline Protestants
(who, after all, weren’t real Christians to them). Evangelical chaplains
brazenly told supporters they were missionaries on the public dime and
the armed services was their mission field. Righteous officers pulled
rank and pressured subordinates to participate in Bible studies and
prayer meetings –and covered up abuses. Middle Easterners complained
that America’s troops were Christian crusaders, and outside
organizations fanned the flames by providing tracts and Bibles so that
combat soldiers could work on converting Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
Livid
about violations against the U.S. Constitution and livid about the
personal violations and added dangers being endured by America’s
soldiers because of the crusade mentality, Weinstein formed the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
Since then, thousands of phone calls, letters and emails have poured in
from all arms of the services--not only from the academies but from men
and women whose lives are on the line in war zones. The MRFF has fought
like a cornered lion on their behalf—fierce, muscular and
unpredictable—leaving fundamentalist perpetrators convinced that
Weinstein and his colleagues are agents of Satan.
As
exposure after exposure has demonstrated, the evangelizers are legally
in the wrong. They also are in violation of well-established moral and ethical principles including,
often, humanity’s most central moral principle, the Golden Rule. They
would be outraged if adherents of other religions solicited their
children or exploited their collegial relationships in the quest for
converts. So why don’t they give it up? They can’t. Their beliefs
require that they push as hard as they can to implement their
understanding of God’s will.
In recent years, evangelicals have expanded their outreach in the military, public grade schools,
"faith-based” community services and international aid programs,
leveraging existing structures and secular funding streams when possible
to support their work. To qualify for grants or gain access to public
facilities, they argue that they are social service providers, not
missionaries. From a personnel standpoint they argue that they are
churches, exempt from civil rights laws. America’s Supreme Court has
been remarkably willing to let them speak out of both sides of their mouths, which means this trend will continue. Evangelical organizations like Officers Christian Fellowship, Child Evangelism Fellowship, Prison Fellowship Ministries and World Vision will
proselytize as much as they are allowed to, diverting as many public
dollars as they can, because that is what their reading of the Bible
demands.
Inside
and outside of Christianity, vigorous debate is challenging the pillars
of fundamentalist belief, like the idea that the Bible is literally
perfect or that Jesus was the ultimate human sacrifice. But the evangelical quest for converts will be constrained only by whatever moral limits the rest of us set.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons.
She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old
Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles
can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
