“The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown from religious ideals.”
No, that was not written by a promoter of any particular religion but by a Harvard psychologist and philosopher, William James, who in his “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) viewed religion not as “poison” (Christopher Hitchens’ word) but as food and medicine. (The quotation is from page 239 of his “Writings: 1902-10,” The Library of America, 1987.)
The current “On Faith” question is whether religion-motivated benevolent behavior can suffice for human need: “Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church just hosted its third ‘Global Summit on AIDS and the Church.’ Do you think the world’s biggest social problems—poverty, disease, homelessness—can be cured by well-intentioned religious believers?”
Yes and NO. Success is power, and power releases the human potential for evil as well as for good. We Christians should make claims for God but not for ourselves. Jesus warned us against “false messiahs”—including ourselves when we get big ideas about our importance. In our daily praying of the Lord’s Prayer, we honor this realistic caution about human limits: “Our Father..., your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven....” Life is a gift from God, and life at its best will be—in this world and the next—not our achievement but God’s gift.
But also YES! “Religious believers” have, in William James’ metaphor, the “wings” to rise high over and descend benevolently upon social as well as personal problems.
The historical evidence for YES is persuasive, though much of it is not in plain sight. Millions of the medical, educational, and civil institutions begun by Christian missionaries in the past two centuries have survived, but few are now Christian in name. Christian missionary Frank Laubach (“each one teach one”) taught the basics of literacy through 92 of the world's governments, but those highly successful programs are not Christian in name.
Not in plain sight may also be because secular society tends to repress the Christian origin of humanitarian endeavors. Our public schools don’t teach that Johnny Appleseed was a Christian missionary, and the fact that Martin Luther King was a Christian pastor is fading from public sketches of him.
Even more not in plain sight is the childhood Christian motivation of some humanitarians who are not practicing Christians. Bill Gates was a child in the Sunday school of a Seattle church the Sunday I preached there—a church with a strong emphasis on benevolence.
In the worldwide works of the Carter Center, Sunday-school-teacher Jimmy Carter’s Christianity is not in plain sight. Nor is Dame Cicely Saunders’ Christian commitment in the modern Hospice movement.
I’m not hopeful that governments will successfully attack the great social problems, but I am hopeful that “religious believers” will continue to do so. Government "can’t reach the inner recesses of man’s being which must be touched if life on this planet is to be...tolerable.”
So said Clarence Jordan in 1968, the year before he died. The final fruit of his life was HABITAT FOR HUMANITY, which has built hundreds of thousands of houses in more than a hundred countries, with no religious requirements for home ownership. The Christian motivation is not in plain sight except that the ceremony of ownership includes, with the presentation of the house-keys, the gift of a Bible.
Every Habitat house is a dream become a deed. My title is from Clarence’s “Cotton Patch” translation of the Bible’s Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds.” A fellow student, I remember him as determined to try to live the Sermon on the Mount. In ’42, he and Florence (+ another couple) started (in rural Sumter County GA) interracial “Koinonia Farm,” which suffered years of violence—machine-gunning, bombing, burning, crop destruction, boycotting. In ’69 (the year of Clarence’s death), Millard and Linda Fuller joined, and the name was changed to “Koinonia Partners.” (Jimmy Carter’s wife Rosalyn came to Clarence's funeral with a turkey she had roasted.) Three years thereafter, Loree and I in the Jordan home drank with Florence the last bottle of scuppernong wine that Clarence had made. Then, in the Fuller home, the Fullers and Elliotts knelt to pray for guidance as to the next stage of the housing mission. In the Congo, Millard led in building four homes and sent me 20 slides showing the process. I returned them after making a duplicate set for Loree to use in money-raising meetings in NY churches. (In ’76, the headquarters of HABITAT FOR HUMANITY INTERNATIONAL was set up in nearby Americus GA.) Everything starts small, not everything stays small.
God gives the human spirit wings to fly to human need.
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