Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Religious Thinking: Sappy, Shallow and Sentimental?
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
January 2001This column is now three years old, still something of a toddler. On a good month it appears in eight Pennsylvania papers. I am grateful to those papers and to readers who have encouraged the efforts of an outsider to journalism.
My goal is to connect the world of religion with readers who may have little experience of faith. To say something engaging in 600 words without the luxury of footnotes is a monthly challenge.
There have been responses that startle me.
One is how often a copy editor, I suppose, supplies a conventional and pious-sounding headline that contrasts strongly with the man-bites-dog text I try to provide. If something is religious, does it need to be sappy? Do people assume that? I wonder.
This is not to dump on editors, but to identify a cultural problem. The expectation that religious thoughts are shallow, sentimental, and irrelevant had to come from somewhere. Religious people need to ask if our public statements are so burdened with code words that they seem meaningless or worse to many who hear them.
In my Christian tradition, I was disheartened to hear Christmas radio spots urging people to accept Christ as "Savior" and seek his "forgiveness." I affirm those concepts, but think it almost useless to mention them without connection to anything the average person might both understand and see the need for.
The assumption that people automatically understand what we are saying is the chief obstacle to effective religious communication.
I made this mistake when I wrote that people are at their most dangerous when they are sure they are right, an idea history continually supports. I was not careful to emphasize that my concern was the danger, not the belief.
People wrote that they thought I was rejecting the idea that we can know truth. Far from it; I do insist, however, that any truth that leaves room for hate is too small a slice of truth. I have not yet met anyone who claims to hate the sin and love the sinner who manages to keep the hate neatly confined.
People who believe they are defending truth or principles face the temptation to dehumanize or punish others. Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews can find in their histories, ancient or modern, moments when the mixing of political power with religious orthodoxy led to shameful acts. Political and ethnic orthodoxies have been even more dangerous.
Religious voices must be raised in opposition to those who seek to punish or scapegoat others. Credibility begins at home, however; religious communities are best able to speak for justice and compassion when they have made it their own discipline.
The concept of discipline brings me back to where I started.
Religion is literally what binds life together. A blunt and compelling line in the Talmud teaches that only a fool receives any of life's pleasures without a thanksgiving. Christians have increasingly returned to calling their chief act of worship the eucharist, which means thanksgiving. Learning to receive life as gift changes the experience of living.
In Bethlehem I met the most positive and one of the most productive people I've ever known. When her father died, she revealed that he would not let her go to sleep when she was a child until she had thanked God for five things from the day just ended.
He communicated religious truth to her in words she could understand. That truth made her a loving person more open to the experiences of life, a person expecting blessings.
Can we learn to make our communication so clear, so useful?
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