Hilton Head Island, SC – February 23, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 23:13-22; Isaiah 30:8-14
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For they are a rebellious people, lying sons, sons who will not hear the instruction of the Lord, who say to the seers, “See not”; and to the prophets, “Prophesy not to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions.” – Isaiah 30:9-10 (RSV)
Forty years ago, when I was still a young whippersnapper minister, many prognosticators were insisting that belief was on its way out. It was predicted that within a few decades hardly anybody would be believers, meaning religious believers. Religion was in severe decline, the observers said, and strong commitment to other institutions was also fast disappearing.
The past thirty years have shown those predictions to be almost completely without foundation. Religious zealots abound all over the world in countries which are predominantly Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jewish. Political extremists also seem to be found in practically every nation on earth. By no means does this mean that everyone is a zealous religious or political extremist. Probably most people who believe in any religion or any political system or ideas are moderates. But it is the people on the extremes, on the fringes, who give belief a bad name, because their convictions often represent bad belief.
What are some examples of bad belief? When congregations or denominations support clergy who have committed serious abuse of parishioners, and uncritically maintain solidarity with the clergy and the denomination, it illustrates bad faith. When Christians or Jews or Muslims take a literalist view of their scriptures, demanding that everything must be observed to the letter as it is found in holy writ, they do grave damage to the religions they are trying to defend. Skeptics, on hearing these claims, ignorantly or perversely assume all believers are similarly doctrinaire, and therefore find fodder for their skepticism. When parents, teachers, or school boards persist in inserting creationism into public school curricula in opposition to the irrefutable science of evolution, they are exhibiting very bad belief. It goes against the best interests of the children they are vainly trying to protect from what they think is false belief, but it also damages all other students who need to learn about evolutionary science.
It isn’t only in matters of religion where bad belief may be observed, however. After three centuries in which capitalism has clearly shown its many merits to the world, it has also indicated that it must be regulated to work the most effectively. There are still laissez faire capitalists who decree that there should be absolutely no governmental laws to regulate how capitalism operates in the marketplace. Many still believe that profits are the sole purpose of the capitalist system, and that the responsible stewardship of corporations must always seek ever-higher profits above all other considerations. Leftist Democrats want all Democrats to be leftists, and rightist Republicans want all Republicans to be rightists. The extremists want to drive out all the moderates within their own ranks. Those notions represent very bad belief. It would be better if such people believed nothing, and stayed out of economics or politics altogether.
It is obvious that one person’s “good belief” may be the very essence of another person’s “bad belief.” Religious fundamentalists of any stripe are convinced that those within their religion who do not believe as they believe are anathema, and should summarily be drummed out of the corps. Many CEOs attempt to make their corporations more responsible to the research findings of increasing legions of scientists who declare that climate change cannot be denied. As a result they may be resoundingly thrashed or trashed by stockholders or others who say CEOs should pay no attention to such “unsubstantiated allegations.” In other words, there is no universal affirmation on what constitutes good belief or bad belief. If there were such unanimity, a sermon such as this would never need to be preached. Now or later you may question whether it needed to be preached anyway. But we’re in the midst of it and I’m not about to turn back.
What is dismaying about the last three or four decades is certainly not that belief has held its own but that so much bad belief has emerged. We would not be waging a very expensive war on terrorism on three fronts if there were no Muslim terrorist zealots in the world. We would have made far more progress in addressing climate change if there were not so much profit-motivated and hard-headed resistance to the very idea. The Catholic Church would be in much better shape if it had owned up immediately to the fact that for years many of its priests have sexually abused children. It shows bad belief in institutional solidarity to protect the clergy at the incalculable expense of the victims. When heinous sins have been committed, it behooves the Church honestly to admit those sins.
I want to cite three men on the United States Supreme Court who, in my judgment, have a disastrously defective judicial belief. Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh all take great pride in calling themselves “constitutional originalists.” There is far, far more to this concept than I have time to attempt to explain, and I readily admit that. But in the main, all three of these Supreme Court Justices believe that every law and statute made by Congress since the Constitution was first adopted in 1787 must be judged valid or invalid on the basis of what the original framers intended when the Constitutional Convention first proposed the Constitution for adoption. No more, and no less.
Let us be clear technically about what that means. Theoretically it means that women should not be allowed to vote. It means blacks should not be citizens, including one of those three Supreme Court justices. It means that there should still be slaves, and that for purposes of a census count, they each should represent three-fifths of a person. It means there should be no Bill of Rights, because the first ten amendments were added only a year after the Constitution was originally approved. Originalism is a highly flawed, ideologically driven judicial belief. Nevertheless three of the most powerful judges in the nation subscribe to it with inflexible and catastrophic certitude. Several noxious Supreme Court 5-4 decisions over the past three years were made because two of these men voted with the majority on the court using an originalist rationale. The third has been on the court for less than a year, and is thus far less culpable. Nonetheless, a price is always paid for bad belief.
Since 9/11, millions of Americans have been led to believe that our country/ Christianity/ The West (take your pick) is at war with Islam. That is not only a very bad belief, it is potentially a very disastrous belief. It might lead secular governments in predominantly Muslim countries to assume they have no choice but to take up arms against the western nations because of our apparently intractable opposition to Islam. Certain bellicose if also bizarre beliefs almost always result in wars. It follows as the night the day.
Bad belief is worse than no belief. The obvious solution would be for people who hold seriously incorrect beliefs either to adopt more reasonable beliefs or to stop believing anything. They should chill out, and become totally apathetic or utterly agnostic. But that isn’t going to happen. We will always be confronted by people who fiercely cling to positions which are wrong and/or religiously or politically or economically disruptive. It can’t be otherwise.
This past Monday there was a cover story in USA Today about a pastor of a Southern Baptist congregation in Pennsylvania who had sexually abused children and youth during his adulthood. Then he used the pulpit to try to quell the allegations among the members about him. It had been known by some influential people that the pastor had been accused of sexual abuse of children before he was called as pastor, but they went ahead and called him anyway. The whole situation has badly damaged that beleaguered congregation.
A few days ago the Boy Scouts of America declared bankruptcy. They have been accused of covering up sexual abuse of minors, apparently going back as far as the 1920s, but particularly in the last few years. Whoever were the presidents or CEOs through all those years had more concern for the institution of the Boy Scouts than for the hundreds or thousands of scouts who were abused. As an Eagle scout, I will always be very grateful to the Boy Scouts of America for the values and skills I learned through scouting. But for years the highest leaders of the national organization grossly misused the ideals of scouting when they refused to deal openly with all those allegations. They showed bad faith, and bad faith is worse than no faith. Institutional viability must never be judged more important than justice for all the individuals within that institution.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt wrote a book called God, Prayer, and Spirituality. In it he told the story about the completely secular Jewish parents who decided the best school for their son would be a Catholic parochial school in their neighborhood. The first day the boy came home from school and announced to his father, “Dad, you’ll never guess what I learned in school today. Did you know that God is really three, that there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, and that His son died for our sins?” The distraught father sat the boy down, and said, “Let me make this clear, son. There is no such thing as the Trinity. There is only one God, and we don’t believe in him.” It is much better to be devoid of belief altogether or to be an uncommitted agnostic than it is to indulge in what some would purport to be bad belief.
An amusing Non Sequitur cartoon from The Island Packet, back when the Packet carried Non Sequitur cartoons. To me it exhibits both a non sequitur and bad belief to have given up Non Sequitur. Pictured in the cartoon was an open grave, into which a coffin had been lowered. The widow of the deceased explained to a man standing next to her, “He was a devout agnostic.” On the man’s gravestone were inscribed the words, “See You Later… Maybe.”
So what to do about all this? Agnosticism is not only understandable, but perhaps in some instances is preferable to misplaced beliefs. However, when there is bad belief, should it be meekly accepted, or should it be combated? In the Gospels, we see many examples of how Jesus dealt with the people whom he considered had the most skewed set of beliefs of any group in Judea. They are usually described as “the scribes and the Pharisees,” or simply as “the Pharisees.” Scholars don’t know a lot about them, but the Gospel writers certainly paint them in a bad light. And frequently Jesus took them severely to task for their noxious notions. The entire 23rd chapter of Matthew is Jesus’ blazing excoriation of these men and their misleading ideas.
The prophet Isaiah attacked those whom he called false prophets, people whose beliefs were anathema to Isaiah. He said of them, “They are a rebellious people, lying sons, sons who will not hear the instruction of the Lord; who say to the seers, ‘See not’; and to the prophets, ‘Prophesy not what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions.’” Some of the most seemingly successful television evangelists promote the so-called “Prosperity Gospel.” It declares that if you believe properly, God will reward you with riches. It is an enticingly smooth thing, an alluring illusion. God, Jesus, and the Bible never guaranteed riches to anyone. Instead they demand unflagging commitment. And commitment is not easy, nor is it certain to result in financial or economic well-being.
Surely God does not condone seriously mistaken beliefs in any of us, especially when those beliefs mislead those around us or issue in ill-conceived causes or movements. All of us are responsible for what we choose to think. We cannot have incorrect or misleading beliefs and expect God blithely to overlook our flawed faith. All belief has consequences, and bad belief is bound to have bad consequences.
The so-called “War on Terror,” in which our country has expended trillions of dollars, is the result of fatally flawed belief. Hard core extremists in all religions who imagine God loves only those who believe what they believe have an erroneous belief, and inevitably it divides the worldwide religious community. In that regard, religious liberals are as likely as religious conservatives to suppose theirs is the only proper belief system. Everyone is not only subject to skewed faith, but all of us at least occasionally exhibit skewed faith. It behooves us to be aware of that, and to seek to avoid it.
We shall always be confronted by bad belief. As long as human beings are free to believe whatever they choose, some of what is believed is bound to be of the cockamamie variety. But we must not allow those who espouse such beliefs to take control. Nor should we allow potentially disruptive religious or political ideas to go unchallenged. It is okay for creationists to believe in creationism, but it isn’t okay for it to be taught in public schools because pressure is put on school boards to include it in the curriculum. It is okay to believe in prayer, but it isn’t okay to insist that there be prayers in public schools. It is acceptable for people to support the Second Amendment, but it is bad faith for them always to oppose all attempts for reasonable gun control. Bad belief is never harmless; it is always harmful.
God seeks constantly to guide us into greater truth and a more accurate faith. Much of what we believe is determined by the company we keep. If we remain close to the community of faith and the people who are most genuinely concerned for the good of everyone, our faith will grow and prosper. But if we try to go it alone, or spend our time with those who are infected with highly dubious ideas, we are much more likely to fall into bad beliefs and bad behavior.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” said the abolitionist, orator, and columnist Wendell Phillips in a speech not long before the Civil War. Unfortunately, that statement has become the watchword of American libertarians. But eternal vigilance is also is the price of proper belief. All of us need constantly to test what we believe against what we know from God, Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the entire community of faith. If ever we find ourselves in a small but vocal minority, we need to ask ourselves whether we are right and everyone else is wrong, or whether we might be wrong and nearly everyone else might be right.
All beliefs have consequences. Bad belief is worse than no belief. Shall the beliefs we hold most dear enhance the world around us, or shall they add to the maelstrom of muddled thinking that characterizes far too much of human society? What say you?