In 1985, the poet and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry wrote a very brave book on the American race issue from the point of view of a white family that had once “owned” other people. It was his own family he was talking about. His interactions with African American and white elders as a young man growing up in the post-Civil War South became the raw material of this book called The Hidden Wound.
One of the things Berry recalled was the ironic fact that both slaves and slave owners were of the same faith, and sometimes sat in the same small rural churches attending the same services-though seated separately, of course. “How do you get to heaven?” Berry asks rhetorically, “Well, … you get there by obeying the moral imperatives of the Scripture, by loving one another ‘in deed and in truth.’ But the churches, with their strong ties to the pocketbooks of racists, felt obliged to see it another way: the way to heaven was by faith; one got there by believing.
“When the ministers of these churches turned their attention to the world,” Berry adds, “they did so with the puritanical passion of St. Paul, violently opposing such ’sins’ as drinking, failure to attend church and ‘immorality’-sins of somewhat questionable status in the first place, and which the church found it easy enough both to condemn and to live with.”
This fury for belief is one of the core properties of fundamentalism, whether we are talking about Muslims or Catholics, Buddhists or Baptists. Remember that the conservative Romans considered the early Christians to be atheists, because they did not honor the Roman gods. But even the Romans did not require belief, just a few bows and scrapes toward the gods of Rome. The Greeks were sometimes openly skeptical about their own gods, yet they went on inventing them and borrowing them from neighboring cultures. For them, any force that had more power than a human being and that outlasted a human lifetime was a god. So there were gods of storms and of love, of the sea and of the sun.
The monotheisms took the opposite tack, beginning first with the idea that there is only One God and, if there are any good qualities in the world, then He (He’s always a He) has them. Thus we get formulas like “God is love.” But each monotheism saw this Supreme He as belonging only to them and condemned those who were outside their fold. We are chosen; you are not! Among some, this still goes on today.
Yet we need to find it within ourselves to respect the values of those who do not believe. Many kind and thoughtful people do not believe in God. In fact, a recent poll shows 15% of Americans having no religion at all and another 12% who say they believe in a “higher power,” but not the personal, creator God of the monotheisms.
A very simple study done close to home points at a curious fact. The Oregon Department of Corrections did a study to evaluate the effectiveness of religious programming in its prisons. They compared the religious preference declared by inmates on entry into the system. Then they looked at the number of disciplinary infractions these prisoners incurred over a period of several years.
Now, which religious preference would you guess had the least behavioral problems? It was not the Quakers or the Buddhists, not the Lutherans or the Native Americans, it was-drum roll please-the atheists.
What on earth can this mean? This is only a guess, but it might be that atheists and agnostics have spent a lot more time thinking about metaphysical and ethical issues. It may mean that they have realized-as have some believers-that we are most likely to survive as a species only if we stop considering those who do not believe as we do to be the Enemy. It’s just my guess, but perhaps the non-believers have re-discovered in their own lives the ethical imperatives that our churches turned their backs on in the wounding times of slavery.
By Kobai Scott Whitney
This column first appeared in the “Faces of Faith” section of the The Daily World on 21 March 2009