Faith Journal

with Ray Waddle

Christmas season … winter news of a coming savior, a December surge of gifts, tinsel, magi, mangers, music, wonder, sky-filled signs of God's action and incarnation.

It's difficult to imagine earth without the Christmas story. What a poverty this life would be.

So it might sound downright rude here to talk about … atheism.

But I've noticed more atheistic arguments this year — in new books, TV interviews, e-mails — especially around one big question: Is religion now the world's biggest problem, or the solution?

Just now, the persistent assertion of high-profile nonbelievers is that religion, all religion, is today's most dangerous force, the world's greatest enemy.

In a nuclear age of religious extremism, they argue, society can no longer afford the politics of faith. Militants love death and martyrdom more than life. We must abandon faith, the argument goes — the emotionalism, lack of hard evidence, contempt for this world — and embrace rationalism, ethical humanism, intellectual rigor.

Believers, I think, shouldn't shrink from these charges. People of faith should confront the critiques. It clarifies one's own beliefs and glimpses the heartbreak of nonbelievers who find religion so disappointing.

But nonbelievers are naive if they think they can banish faith. Religion persists as a longing for ultimate transformation, grandeur and goodness. For Christians, one sign of the image of God on every person is our restless dissatisfaction, the stubborn hunch that something greater awaits, something holy. Spiritual yearning for wholeness defines the human condition.

Nevertheless it's no stretch to agree with atheists on this point: twisted, destructive things are done in every religion's name. The question is, why? Is there good religion and bad?

I interviewed an author recently, scholar Richard Wentz, who wrote a short book with an urgent title, Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion (Mercer University Press). The book is nearly 20 years old now — and still urgent.

Wentz doesn't denounce any religion. Instead, he blames the craving to worship absolutes of our own making and call them "god" — the demon of false absolutes, such as security at all costs, anti-semitism, socialist abstractions, capitalist pieties, or belief that God is always on our side.

This false god of personal or national need uses religion to bless political resentments and social prejudices. This dark impulse distorts God into a fictitious cartoon tyrant who demands revenge, purity, boundless hatred — hence the violence of world headlines.

Wentz says the real God is beyond human projections — and yet within human reach. That's the great paradox of healthy religious life.

He finds truth in Genesis, where God says to Abraham, "I will make you a great nation and through you all the people of the earth shall be blessed." The real God is found in human relationships. God is met in big-hearted responses to suffering — not in the righteous noise of one person's absolute claim against another.

"To forget that is to permit the earth to be destroyed," Wentz writes.

What's the religious alternative to righteous violence? The Way of the Pilgrim, he says.

The pilgrim attitude is … travel light. Pilgrims feel spiritually homeless but free to "move with God" and serve the world of other pilgrims. They realize, with Ecclesiastes, that life is short, and it's vanity to become too attached to possessions and ideologies.

It's a sign of hope that every religion honors pilgrims in their midst.

Wentz's testimony echoes across time. Catholic monk Thomas Merton said God speaks to people three ways — in scripture, in our deepest self and in the voice of the stranger. Historian Huston Smith said the world's religions all acknowledge the perfection of God, the inestimable worth of people, the hallowed world as God's creation, the daring possibility of joy.

Jesus urged over and over that only forgiveness, not revenge, can break the cycle of violence. His teaching sounds impossibly impractical. Yet it's becoming clear it's ultimately the only practical solution if humanity wants to save itself from annihilation. He dared the heart to dream.

Forgiveness, like charity, comes from deep inside religious tradition. Those who'd abolish religion would have to abolish the religious imperative to forgive — and the imagination to forgive.

Heaven knows, religion can trigger arrogance and cruelty. But so can secularism (remember the Nazis, Stalin and Mao). I just doubt secularism and science can inspire the things we need most — compassion, providence, hospitality to the stranger, beauty, awe, a meaningful story of the universe — ideas and actions that spring from faith.

That's where atheism fades, and Christmas glory returns to center stage.