Coming Out of the Pew
by James Ahlers on April 20, 2008 in Opinion
Pope Benedict XVI is on a mission to shut down the U.S. Catholic Church’s buffet and discipline the spiritually flabby, and I am inspired.
You know buffet Catholics – they can’t swallow the whole doctrine so they fill their spiritual plates with a little of this, a little of that. I used to be one myself, until I decided that what I liked from the buffet was not enough to fill me up and I abandoned my Catholicism altogether. The problem was, I never knew what I was leaving it for. The Pope’s effort to restore traditional Catholic doctrine has inspired me to reexamine why I left the Church and what I believe in.
I was active in Catholic and Christian youth groups as a teenager, but for me it was always more about fellowship and community service than it was about religion. I knew by the time I was confirmed in eighth grade that Catholicism didn’t fit for me. I was a skeptic from a young age, and there were too many unanswered questions and too little willingness on the part of the Church to even entertain them. I was a sensitive soul and there were too many fire and brimstone homilies in the style of Jonathan Edwards – the white-wigged 18th century Calvinist minister, not the well-coifed presidential candidate – who liked to wax apocalyptic about the miserable, hell-bound race of humanity in such uplifting works as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Our only saving grace was a God who loved us unconditionally, even though we didn’t deserve it. We learned to bathe our every natural impulse in Catholic guilt. When the bolder guys in my 7th grade parochial school class asked our stern, brooding priest Father Kramer what base you could safely go to without it being a sin and Father Kramer said just wanting to get to any base was a sin, we all laughed – but it was a nervous laugh.
As I grew up, I discovered new reasons to feel uncomfortable with Catholicism. The Church’s condemnation of non-Catholics and homosexuals, retrograde attitudes about human sexuality in general and about women, and the tragic parade of child sex abuse scandals pushed my heart and mind further and further away from my religious upbringing.
The forms of Christianity I have identified with since are more palatable to me. My wife (also a recovering Catholic) and I were married in an Episcopal Church, and found their liberality refreshing. Their priests can marry, they are more accepting of homosexuality and they didn’t seem to care that we were not practicing Episcopalians.
But these days, even this less restrictive Christianity feels more and more like an ill-fitting suit. I don’t believe most of the doctrine and I am increasingly troubled by the very notion of human beings claiming to have the right answers to divine questions. The “War on Terror,” for example, sets fundamentalist Islamic dogma – that the United States is the godless enemy in a righteous jihad – against fundamentalist Christian dogma – that we are the righteous leader of a holy crusade. In our hubris we are pitting God against God, seemingly hell-bent on making our fire and brimstone homilies reality.
Religious dogma alters our human relations in smaller ways every day. We group ourselves and others as Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Mormons and so on, and on that basis make assumptions about one another’s moral worth. We focus on our differences rather than our similarities, and deprive ourselves of connections we might make with people “more like us.”
This is why I find Pope Benedict’s challenge so moving. He wants us to declare where we stand. If we stand firmly with the Church, we in some sense stand against non-believers.
I choose to stand with all people of good will, so I am coming out as a Humanist. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God, or that I think no one else should. It just means that I believe our moral obligations to one another ought to derive not from whatever concept we have of God, but from our shared humanity. The American Humanist Association describes humanism as “a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” It is the Golden Rule as a secular ideal.
I believe the path to our salvation is the reasoned, humane exercise of our freewill, not reliance on the benevolence and wisdom of a distant deity with an inscrutable plan.
People will say I lack faith. They’re wrong. I simply choose to put my faith in people.
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Everybody worships something. In the case of atheists and those who choose to put their “faith in people,” they’re worshipping themselves- a man-made religion.