Conversations with Christian and Atheist Activists: Rev. Robert Chase________________
by Jeff Nall, 1/10/07
Constantly kept aloft by media reports of their extremist views, the religious right presents a monstrous, theocratic visage that terrorizes many freethinkers. As a result, many of us have the tendency to make generalizations about Christianity as if it were a monolithic religion, when in fact the community contains a diverse range of opinions. I once had this tendency, having grown up in a predominantly atheist family that was constantly insulted and fearful of religious mobs taking away our freedom.
The truth, however, is that many Christians want nothing of the portrait of Christianity painted by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Progressive Christians share not only freethinkers' concerns over the melding of church and state, but they also share the legacy of having established a clear separation. Christian rationalists such as John Locke, Joseph Priestly and others fought hard to for the division of religion and government. In fact, scholar Isaac Kramnick contends that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson drew from Priestley's writings on the separation of church and state when the two men planned the 1786 statute guaranteeing religious freedom in Virginia.
Christianity is not at all the one-dimensional religion that well-funded ideologues like Dobson and Falwell would have you believe; the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey identified more than 30 different groups under the banner of Christianity. Unfortunately, the diversity of opinions within the Christian religion are not well represented in the media.
To find out more about what more moderate Christians believe, I spoke to Rev. Robert Chase, Communication Director for the United Church of Christ (UCC). Founded in 1957, the UCC has more than 5,000 congregations across the United States, and has about 1.4 million members.
Though the religious right would have us believe that all Christians think the same way Pat Robertson does, Rev. Chase explained that vigorous debate is taking place within Christianity over issues such as end-of-life decisions, Biblical literalism, the notion of "true religion" and the value of conversion. He specifically singled out the Terry Schiavo case as an example of the mainstream media’s one-sided coverage, presenting the religious right attack as "the" Christian position, when in fact many Christians saw the matter as a private affair.
Interview: Rev. Robert Chase
How has Christianity changed over the years?
I think that there are a whole variety of forces and factors both historical and contemporary that shape the way Christianity is viewed across the culture. The biggest concern that I have as a progressive Christian voice or one with a progressive perspective is that there tends to be the view that Christianity is monolithic, kind of like in the 60's all people thought that all blacks thought the same or there was a women's perspective. Often the media will say "the Christian perspective."
I remember when there was the Terry Schiavo case there were the concerned folks lined up on one side and the Christian groups lined up on the other side. And that implies that there's one way of viewing faith within Christendom and nothing could be further from the truth... So there's a wide variety of expressions of faith within the Christian tradition and as it's expressed in our contemporary culture. And so the first thing we'd want to do is disabuse people of the notion that all Christians are cut from the same cloth or think alike or have the same processes or perspectives on how they interpret what's happening the world today.
Take something like the notion of "true religion" which was largely developed in Rome with the birth of Christianity. From your perspective on the issue of "true religion," do you feel like yours is the only religion that can get you to where people need to go?
My religion is the only religion that can get me to where I need to go. And sometimes it doesn't even do that too well. I think the notion of claiming a "true religion" is one of the greatest idolatries in the world today and leads to some of the unbelievable violence and chaos that we're currently experiencing. You know when you start thinking "God is on my side" as opposed to "I'm on God's side," perhaps, then you run the risk of putting God in a box that's convenient for you and your perspective or your community or your group or your cause or whatever….
On the point of Scripture, to be a good Christian or to be someone -- a part of your church, everyone doesn't necessarily have to read the Bible literally, correct?
I think the biggest split in the Christian church today, that's capital "C" across all denominations, is the split of Biblical literalism as opposed to a contextual understanding of Scripture. Once you start getting a literal interpretation, I mean you could get crazy about this... there's symbolic language... What we believe is that God speaks to each individual in the context of his or her own life.
A group named The Rockridge Institute did a 2005 project speaking with a number of progressive Christians. One question the institute put to the participants was: "How do we reconcile 'spiritual progressivism' with 'separation of church and state'?"...
I'll respond to it two ways, and again using Scripture since that person used Scripture, Jesus' famous saying, "render to Caesar what's Caesar's and to God what's God," I think really calls for a separation of church and state... The old notion of power corrupting, unfortunately, is what occurs frequently and if we are apart of the power elite, we in the religious community, that becomes hard for us to speak truth to power.
I think you're seeing some of that, for example, in the administration today. Some of the justification for some of the policies that the administration has undertaken is on a faith basis or justified as being the way that the president's religion is expressed, and therefore there should be a blurring of the line between faith and civil society. The classic example of how that can be destructive is in the Taliban. I mean there's an example where the civil society and the religious society are one and the same, when there's no check and balance, then extremism is a very real possibility...
Do you feel like the separation of church and state is also necessary to protect groups like yours from the rise of a Protestant orthodoxy that might at some point turn around and say, we'll you know this UCC group, they're really out of line in many of their views, we need to reign them in?
Right. I think that's absolutely true. In many ways that's what's happening. Our not being able to advertise on some of the networks in terms of our television commercials that we tried to air last year as an example of that. Now that's not the government saying that, but it's kind of that government-media, corporate elite that made those decisions...
Back to the church-state separation question. Can you (give an example of) the difference between a progressive Christian influence informing a person to go into the community and struggle for social justice issues, the difference between such a case and an Evangelical going in and trying to restrict gay marriage or stop passage of hate-crime legislation, or gay and lesbian adoption? What's the difference between them pushing their views and the way that progressive Christians like yourself and your group pushes?
There was a time, as a child of the '60s I recall this well, there was a time when conservative religious folks felt -- conservative Fundamentalists, the people who were on what we now call the Religious Right --believed that Christians shouldn't be involved at all in the political machinations of the day. That they should keep themselves separate and that their issues should be solely focused on personal salvation and that kind of thing. It was really the work of the Devil to get involved in the society itself.
Over the past couple decades that's really changed, and its changed radically so that the pendulum has swung to the point where now you have places like in Ohio where you've got conservative churches who are being accused of not complying with IRS statues because of their support for particular candidates and stuff like that. I don't think, in essence, there is a difference, I think that these are individuals with, whether they be left or right, with personal agendas or political agendas or causes that they believe in.
How does a group like yours perceive the rise in alternative religions such as Wicca? And how about working in coalitions with such groups in areas of social justice?
Working in coalitions for social justice would be something that we would be absolutely comfortable with so that I can state categorically. I mean we do that all the time.
Regardless of faith?
Regardless of faith or for those people who do not consider themselves part of an organized faith, or who are atheists or agnostics. We do that kind work in the social justice realm because we believe that there's a call for us to do justice.
You've got to understand, the UCC has a very broad understanding of both personal and congregational autonomy so there is a wide range of belief systems that exist within our denomination... And what we're trying to therefore do is to open our doors, especially to those who have been excluded or hurt by the church.
I mainly meant a certain acceptance.
In terms of coalition building, there's certainly room for other faith perspectives because I think many of us feel that an understanding of those faith perspectives enriches; that doesn't threaten my Christianity, it enriches it. And that's how I think many of our folks feel.
So you're not called to necessarily convert people?
We've had some bad experience with conversion. The Native Americans would be the first to tell you that. What we try to do is live by example. And, again a lot of this is me talking here, but by the fruits of the spirit people will know what my faith is. If I'm a spiritual person, a sensitive person, a loving person, a grace-filled person, then hopefully others will see that example and seek to emulate it. And that's how I think conversion happens. You leave conversion to God, you do your example.
Atheist author Sam Harris recently wrote an article arguing "The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science." Yet Martin Luther King once wrote: "Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism." Do you feel religion stands to benefit from an improved relationship via more rational religion?
For me science is a gift from God. So it doesn't threaten at all... I think that there are fascinating intersections between the world of faith and the world of science. The more I understand science, the deeper my faith because, the bottom line, and scientists will say this too, the bottom line for them is a profound mystery. If we can try to get at the heart of that mystery then we're getting simultaneously at the heart of science and at the heart of God...
It sounds like that's a big part of a group like yours has to fight against, some of these assumptions about Christian belief that these groups are purporting whereas yours is quite different.
That's right. And unfortunately in our society today you don't exist if you're not in the media; the media has dumbed down what it means to be a Christian to the point where there is, as I said at the beginning of this conversation, this kind of monolithic everybody-believes-the-same kind of impression of what it means to be a Christian and that just couldn't be further from the truth, especially as its expressed in the UCC.
Jeff Nall is a community activist and regularly contributes to publications such as Online Journal, Toward Freedom, and the Humanist. Jeff is a board member of the Humanists of Florida Association and has spoken at conferences such as the 2006 American Humanist Association conference. His recent work, “A New Vision for Freethought: Reaching Out to Friends in Faithful Places,” appears in the current issue of the AHA journal, Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism. And his essay, “Illusion of Conversion,” which tackles Catholicism’s supposed spiritual conquest of the Aztecs in the 16th century, appears in the current issue of The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies:Confluence.
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