Last week I was equated with the Antichrist. The accusation was
predictable, as was the semi-hysterical tone that lay behind it. I had
written about the current crisis in Christianity, which exposes you
automatically to smears, personal vilification, and a very great deal of
misreading. I had pointed out the undeniable fact that millions of people
have deserted organized denominations but still want to follow Jesus as a
teacher of love, peace, and (here comes the truly offensive part) higher
consciousness.
Asserting that Jesus's teaching of love and peace has been hijacked to
promote war and bigotry provokes the very types I was pointing at. My
inclusion as an "enemy" of the Catholic Church and "a dress rehearsal" for
the Antichrist came from a blogger, not a Church authority. A casual
search of the blogosphere also revealed that I am a fraud, charlatan,
ignorant of the Bible, misconstruer of gospel, et cetera. Among these
attacks, the one that surprised me the least came from someone who roundly
condemned me for advocating a Christ of loving forgiveness rather than a
Christ of sin and hellfire.
Five years ago I would have been saddened by such attacks and deeply worried
that sin-and-hellfire Christianity was a rising tide, perhaps even a force
that would overwhelm us. Today the attacks don't string, because the message
of change being felt in American politics bespeaks something greater -- our
passive tolerance for bigotry and narrow-minded intolerance has reached its
limit. Christianity's crisis was never isolated. It was part of a time, so
brilliantly encapsulated by the poet W. B. Yeats, when "the best lack all
conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." A tolerant
society deserves praise for extending that tolerance as far as it can. But
standing by quietly while a religion of love becomes infected with hypocrisy
and prejudice is wrong, and eventually it dooms tolerance itself.
If the trend continues and becomes a groundswell that pushes back
right-wing Christianity, a vacuum will be left. Millions of Christians
haven't bought into the Antichrist, the end of days and the Apocalypse that
is always just around the corner. But they are also unlikely to return to
the mild-mannered ethical culture that Christianity had turned into. Decades
of innocuous Sunday sermons instigated the rise of passionate intensity --
the fundamentalists may not want hellfire, but they crave the heat that
their beliefs stir up. If their punishing, judgmental version of Jesus fades
away, the next version won't be viable unless it generates passion and
intensity from another source. Not the heat of controversy but the warmth of
personal transformation. That has always been the role of Jesus (and of all
the great spiritual teachers), and no amount of indignant fulmination can
obliterate the cry of the soul. From within the soul the answer to that cry
also comes.
