The Baby with the Bathwater

Image created when I asked ChatGPT to "Put this guy in a toga in a church and have an angry nun stand behind him."

Being a big ole homo, I questioned the religious and societal upbringing that surrounded me in the sixties, seventies (and even now) and which apocryphally condemns me for being the very person that apparently God created me to be. The steepled buildings which advocated this censorship had mandatory rules that required "no questioning" if you wanted to belong. But what are the chances that anyone believes everything that their church tells them to believe in any fashion other than the way that Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street believes in Santa Claus: "I believe… I believe… It’s silly, but I believe"?

It turns out that questioning your church is not a symptom of "a lack of faith" but an excellent method of arriving at answers for yourself. Of testing a theology for credibility. And that is truly "a blessing" because blindly misunderstanding and misapplying dogma—ignorantly or maliciously—is one of the things that has gotten us into the political mess that this country is embracing on its 250th (and maybe penultimate) birthday.

My church (Babcock Presbyterian in Towson, Maryland) never explicitly told me that my budding love of Broadway showtunes and handsome men was an abomination; In retrospect, Presbyterians seem better than most religions at conveying and proselytizing a loving and kind New Testament God rather than the the often wrathful and transactional God of the Old Testament. But the Baptists—and even Catholics to a lesser extent—are experts at surgically extracting and emphasizing the random passages of crap that they personally want to emphasize. Not sure if you remembered the amazing response by "President Bartlett" in the West Wing ("The Midterms" in Season Two) in deconstructing that behavior but it's worth a reminder, regardless.

Caesar divided Gaul into three parts. It occurs to me that religion—at least the religion I inherited—can be divided the same way.:

• Mythology To my way of thinking, much of the Christian Bible reads to me the way Greek mythology once did: stories meant to explain the unexplainable, moralize the unknowable, and organize a chaotic world.. We read those Olympian tales as kids and thought of them as "fun and magical stories." Certainly not as the spiritual and moral foundation for a historic and significant number of people. Contemporary readers certainly have never believed in those myths in the way that many may vaguely believe that Adam and Eve were real even in the face of science and Charles Darwin. These tales are the stories concocted by important men to explain things that they didn't know and couldn't answer but didn't want to lose face.

  
  

• The Self Surviving Laws of Priests, Rabbis and Imams There are also the rules that clergy (i.e.: "human beings") created and injected into the Bible and into their religious mandates to create obedience and to preserve their institutions; things like: "priests can't get married (because we want the property/wealth to remain in the hands of the church and not to be contested by the heirs), and don't eat pork or shellfish (because of Trichinosis and Vibriosis.) Or: "don't lay with other men" (because it doesn't enhance the population of the wandering tribes of Israel).
  

• What remains.

  And these things may actually have value. These are the things like the parables, the commandments, and "doing unto others" that try to articulate what morality does or should look like. I wrote an essay in college on "is there really such a thing as good and evil or are these just the rules that society creates for its self-preservation?" I'm not sure that it matters because shared values are vital for a society to persevere. And religions do attempt to articulate a sense of what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes they do it well. Sometimes they fail spectacularly. Other times they attempt to position a human "rule" as "divinely mandated." But there is a very real effort by most churches to promote true "goodness." It is a part of what any good faith (Christian or otherwise) attempts to accomplish. The problem is when especially religious people with too much hubris to recognize that their opinions are not always called for and that they may have drunk so deeply of the KoolAid that they can't tell the difference between what they may personally want and what is truly good or harmful to society. Is my commitment to share my life with another man truly going to hurt the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Jones down the street? Or do they have to regurgitate the response of "that ain't normal" just because it isn't normal in their limited scope of existence. I gotta tell you: watching a team of grown men make millions of dollars to try to "penetrate the enemy territory with a spherical pigskin" isn't my cup of tea but I don't try to yell "it ain't normal!" just because I find it silly and boring.

A family member once advised me that my rejection of organized religion due to their persecution of the LGBTQ+ community was a case of me "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" and that observation made me stop and take stock of my motivations.

Now, I may enjoy hearing Christian mythology but, truthfully, I really just think of them as manmade stories trying to explain the unexplainable. Is the tale of Prometheus being chained to a rock really that different that a pillar of fire and a parting of the Red Sea? Or walking on water? Living inside a whale? All of the animals in the world gathered together on one boat?

And the laws of the clergy are often commonsense or power preservation rules with a coat of Rust-Oleum "Satan Scarlett" or "Pristine White" liberally lacquered on top. Why does God want you to tithe or is that just some guy's way of getting money into his or the church coffers? And seriously: no woman priests? Does God really think that they are lesser than his patriarchal and hypermasculine creations? Women are fine (and best qualified!) to raise the children but not worthy of raising a flock?

But what I can say is that "what remains" does have value to me. It is the wheat separated from the chaff. The ten commandments are—for the most part—not uniquely Christian but are basically the same rules that all civilized and moral people of all faiths or nonfaiths preserve to maintain civil society. Don't murder. Or steal. Forgiveness, love, kindness: these things are (or should be) valued by all people and taking communion or getting baptized is no guarantee that you do more than give lip service to these values. I remember getting a bible when I graduated from "Sunday school" to the actual church congregation and it had a dozen or so full color illustrations in it; one of them was of a meek, Caucasian Jesus holding a lamb and surrounded by children. And I can get behind that representation much better than I can support the imagery evoked by Pete Hegseth in his "spiritual" defense of war (which apparently has greater value than "defense" in this administration.) And for me, the story of Jesus being sent to make sure that we accepted his message is one of the most fundamental and beautiful lessons that we can embrace in our lives. Was he real? Was it a historical event but with a coat of Rust-Oleum? Does it really matter? What remains is his message that says: "the human condition is flawed. And we do things that are wrong or hurtful. But that the path to redemption (maybe in heaven or maybe just in our own tranquility while on this plane of existence) is to be sorry for them. And we must try to do better. And we are forgiven when we fail if we simply regret that we didn't do better.

This is what we owe ourselves. This is the baby that is in the bathwater. To be the best versions of ourselves. Maybe questioning faith is not the abandonment of faith at all. Maybe it is how we rescue the baby from the bathwater.