A group of anti-faith folks are conducting a campaign–you may have seen the motto plastered on signs or flashing on TV: IMAGINE NO RELIGION. When I saw this phrase, I actually thought it was a pro-religion group, asking people to imagine the loss we would feel if there were no religion. But apparently the intent is just the opposite: they believe that the world would be a much better place without religion.
This sentiment fits perfectly the message of a number of best-selling books which have crowded the bookstores in recent years: Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, in which he says that belief in a personal god is delusional and “when many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion”; Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, in which he points out the remarkable insight that the Inquisition was a bad thing; and then Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, in which he disses not only St. Augustine (OK, so Augustine had a problem with sex), but also the Dalai Lama, St. Francis, and Gandhi.
Who are these people, anyway, who write with such vigor and authority about God? Are they theologians, who have studied for long years? Are they philosophers? Are they ministers or priests, who know the territory from the inside, by practice? Actually, Dawkins is a science writer. Hitchens is . . . a clever iconoclast. and Sam Harris dropped out of Stanford, where he was majoring in English and 11 years later went back there to earn a B.A. in philosophy. They are not exactly Tillichian. They are all over-the-top angry, and they all point out the worst excesses of religion–without bothering to point out the worst excesses of science, of political ideology, and of secular leaders. News flash: people are imperfect. As my grandmother used to say, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” “All” would be inclusive of religious people.
But let me tell you a real story about real people. A Methodist minister told me that a few weeks ago, a woman came to his church one Sunday, looking for help. She was in an abusive relationship, and she was frightened, with nowhere to turn. After the service, the minister talked with her, and got her the support she needed, from the appropriate agency. This woman was a stranger, not a Methodist, not a church-goer at all. Why did she choose to go to this church, then? As she said, “My assumption was that there would be somebody there who cared.”
Yes, religion is imperfect, because human beings are imperfect. We can take a message of love and new life from a prophet and turn it into a message of hate and death. But that doesn’t negate the original message, nor does that negate the institutions that try to embody that message. It doesn’t negate believers, people of faith like myself, who fail so often to do the good, and yet who, the next day, brush ourselves off and try to do better.
Imagine no religion? Imagine not having a place to go where you can assume that somebody cares. Imagine that.
