A little bit after posting on Sunday, I dressed my son, strapped him to my chest in a snuggie, and took him to a church that is walking distance from my house.
It was Anglican, and beautiful, and when he started to wriggle around and I got up to go, a deliciously stout, dark-skinned woman shuffled over and insisted we stay, because this was his church.
And when I went up for Communion (again, at her urging), the man giving it out asked if Mac was taking Communion yet. Handed me the wafer as if my participation was not even a question, as if it had nothing to do with him and barely anything to do with me -- it was that foregone a conclusion.
And see: there are people in the world who haven't really experienced much love. I'm not one of them, although the problems I have kept me from accepting a lot of the love people gave me early in my life. But even being me, even having the best parents and best husband in the world, even having awesome friends and a comfortable life, even being recovered from a disease that could have killed me, but didn't, the feeling of being loved in that way, by strangers -- it gave the feeling after you take medication for a pain you've gotten used to, and then the pain is gone, and you're left wondering how you were living with it before.
I can understand how vehemently a person might react to the idea that people are killing or persecuting others because they believe God is calling them to do that, particularly if that person believes that that God -- that any God -- is a fantasy.
I have a harder time understanding why a person would look at this breed of faith -- the breed that says,
welcome, this is your church, this is the body of Christ, broken for you, though you didn't bother to get dressed up like us, though you seem not to have brushed your hair in a week, though that baby needed his nails clipped several days ago -
-- and see a dragon in need of slaying.
Why not be more interested in how else we can get human beings, imperfect and small as we are, to show love to one another? To show this kind of love, which doesn't ask its objects to be useful or sexy, or self-sufficient or charismatic or neat or whole?
I follow an blog on skepticism, atheism and polyamory that is, often, very well-written. (As is often the case, I kind of channel-surf, waiting for the girls to come back onscreen and occasionally caring about what the more loquacious male contributors have to say). A recent post was talking about how terrific it will be when we will have all the amazing art that our society produces, but will have outgrown the religious context in which much of this art was produced.
But I feel like this won't happen. I don't feel smug about that, because I don't feel it proves anything about the truth claims made by Christians about God, or Christ, or their faith. I think it just reflects the very human need for love, for honest love, based not on the pretense of who we would like to be or the promise of what we can offer others now, when we are healthy and able and appear to be whole.
Even if God were not real, even if Christ were not God, part of the human condition is the inevitable recognition of our own limitations, of our own frailty and smallness, and of the absolute irrelevance of our claims to power, to agency, to ability. Some of us recognize this early, and often. Being an addict helps, as does working with others who are disabled or sick, as does the realization that those who are disabled, sick and poor often do with regularity things I could never do.
But either way: eventually you will be old, and you will be unable to care for yourself, and if you are still loved, and cared for, it will be either because there is a source of selfless love in the world, or because you are valuable apart from what you have to offer others, or both. When people show love in this way, unconcerned with their own well-being or with the superficial appeal of the object of their love, and tell me it is because of Christ, I believe that.
It happens that no one I have encountered has shown this love and claimed that they are showing it because Christ is not real. And so I think that, to truly "move beyond" Christianity, people who have a problem with faith would need to find a viable source of the kind of love that motivates people to welcome and care for others indiscriminately. Because for many people, that kind of love is a reality for which no Selfish Gene has convincingly accounted.
Not to put to fine a point on it, there are a lot of Depends to be changed, a lot of broken people to be welcomed and loved, and I think we're unlikely to "dispel" the "myth" of Christianity with rhetoric, however sound, until a critical mass of vocal atheists begins to love those around them with similar abandon, and to articulate as their motivation something comparable to the claim:
Christ valued this person enough to give up His life, and I am called to treat her accordingly.
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