The Layering of Religion

A woman was asked by a coworker,
"What is it like to be a Christian?"
The coworker replied, ''It is like being a pumpkin.
God picks you from the patch, brings you in,
and washes all the dirt off of you.
Then He cuts off the top and scoops out all the yucky stuff.
He removes the seeds of doubt, hate, and greed.
Then He carves you a new smiling face and
puts His light inside of you to shine for all the world to see."


I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR today and heard an interview with an actor named Walter Goggins, who plays a white supremacist named Boyd Crowder on a TV show called Justified.

Overall, I thought it was a really interesting interview and it only increased my interest in that show. But what really caught my attention was the part of Crowder’s story where he finds Jesus. Does this turn him into a “good” person? Has he changed his evil ways? Thank goodness for the show, no. He is now something I believe is pretty common: a really bad person who has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal lord and savior.

A lot of Americans think that the Bible is the foundation for our moral code. If you’re not a Christian, how can you lead a moral life? I’ll be the first to say that the Bible has a lot of really good advice that’s as true and worthwhile today as it was 5000 years ago. But it’s also a Rorschach test that allows people to get what they need to justify the beliefs already ingrained in them.

Religion isn’t a uniform set of values used to fix a broken soul, it’s yet another tool added to a toolbox filled with a lifetime of experiences and beliefs. Some use it for good, some for bad.

I found this interesting because “finding Jesus” if often portrayed as something that happens to someone and fixes them. From that moment on they are righteous, moral, and good, whatever that means.

The problem is that all of those things are highly subjective. Hitler[1] believed that killing Jews was the right thing to do for his country and even the world, and he believed that God told him to do it. He was a religious man and, in his own mind, righteous, moral, and good. The same could be said about Osama Bin Laden and a thousand other famous baddies throughout history, and millions more that history has forgotten.

I don’t think it needs to be said (though I will) that religion has been used to justify anti-Semitism, slavery, murder, war . . . pretty much any vice you can imagine. Just as hammers can be used to both build and kill, so can “misguided” people use religion to achieve their ends.

As a kid I remember my father bringing home plastic bags from the book store on the campus of the University of Oregon. They fascinated me because they were green and yellow--the school colors--but the green was really made up two layers: one blue and one yellow. If you’d put a red layer on the blue you’d get purple. If you put a red layer on the yellow you’d get orange.

My point is that religion is an overlay put on top of the person your life’s experiences have made you. Finding Jesus isn’t an antibiotic that kills all the badness and turns you into an Ned Flanders-like automaton. If you’re a bad person who believes that your ends justify your means, you’ve simply found a new way to justify it.

-Doug



[1] Yeah, okay, I'm not happy about pulling out Hitler for this either, but he just worked too well to ignore.