Five Signs Of Toxic Religion

"Five Signs of Toxic Religion"

John 10:22-30
April 25, 2010

At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and
Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered
around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the
Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The
works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you
do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I
give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my
hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it
out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

As many of you already know, I was in Mississippi this past weekend to see family and
to witness the University of Alabama’s spring football game, which is a glorified
scrimmage, really, between different parts of the team. I have good news, though:
Alabama won the game, and thus we are already 1-0 in defense of our national
championship. Now, as much as I enjoyed that experience, going to the game and all,
what I really enjoyed was time with my family, my mother, my sister Allison, and my ten
year old nephew Drake. I don’t get to see them that often because of the distance, of
course, so I made sure to take Allison and Drake to the spring football game in
Tuscaloosa, which is only about an hour and half away from my mother’s home. When
we got back from the game that night, my sister brought up a subject that is rarely
brought up in our household—religion, and more specifically, her desire to start going
to church, and to take Drake with her. I know that it sounds odd that no one in my
immediate family is religious, me being professionally religious, so to speak, but that is
the way of it with my family—we’ve never been a religious family, and my entry into the
ministry and my interest in faith was something that totally surprised my parents, though
they’ve been nothing but supportive of that interest and my spiritual journey.

My sister asked me about churches, and about where and how to possibly look for
one, and she said something that really touched me…that she wanted to look for a
church that didn’t, essentially, turn Drake against me, his uncle, and his partner,
Douglas. You can imagine how very touched I was by that, that she didn’t want to send
her child to place that would, essentially, poison the well of our relationship and poison
him with what she saw in so many church going folks—a close mindedness about so
many things, and so intolerant of those who did not think like they do, believe like they
do, and love like they do. My sister doesn’t want that for her son, maybe even for
herself, but she wanted what we have here—community, a place to go with fellow-
travelers who follow after the way of the Christ, a place, where, hopefully, at least in our
better moments, grace and love abound, amidst all the imperfections that we carry
within us.

But the journey she is on, and the hard working of finding a safe place for herself and
her son, got me to thinking about the question of how we ultimately know whether or not
God is the One speaking to us, whether or not what we believe about God is actually
true about God, the voice we believe to be speaking of love and hope and welcome is
actually the voice of God, and not just our own well-meaning interior voice, telling us
what we want to hear. Of course, I’m not going to solve this problem with this sermon,
since it’s a dilemma that haunted the church almost since the beginning, since the
beginning of its inception—how do we know the difference between the voice of God,
and our own inner voice?

That’s the sort of question that is being put before Jesus this morning in our text—the
religious elders of his day want to know whether or not he is long promised Messiah,
whether or not he is sent from God. It’s a simple enough question, but it carries with it
all the weight of my sister’s question—how do we know whether or not the religion we
believe in is the “right” religion? How do we know that the One we follow is worthy of
our discipleship? How do we know you are the One, the people ask him on that day,
thousands of years ago, and we too are still asking that question, of him, of our own
religion, of our own faith.

If we look at Jesus’ response to that question, I think we get a really good clue about
how to discern whether or not our faith, or any faith, is rooted in God or something
else. What Jesus says is that he has told them the truth but they didn’t believe him—
but he doesn’t stop there, he doesn’t just point to his words. In fact, he points them to
what really matters, which is how his words were followed up by his actions. You know
the voice of the Good Shepherd, you know that it’s the voice of God, not by what is
said, but by what is done by the One speaking those words: The works that I do in my
Father’s name testify to me—it’s what is done by people that matters most, not what
they say, something Jesus clearly spells out here in this text. His own, his children,
Jesus’ followers will know they are following him because of the kind of life they live, not
simply because of the words they say.

I’ve said a couple of times here in this pulpit that the only measurement that ever
makes sense, in terms testing out whether or not something is from God, is whether or
not it follows two simple rules that Jesus himself said distilled all of his teachings,
everything in the Gospel, all of it could be distilled in these two things: love God, and
love each other. If the voice we are hearing doesn’t call us to do those two things—
admittedly, both difficult things, especially the whole love your neighbor thing—then it’s
not the voice of God we are hearing. But, of course, I know that one can argue round
and round about what the meaning of “love your neighbor” actually is—does it mean
this or does it mean that? That’s the difficulty of proposing a positive test for discerning
whether or not the voice we hear is the voice of God—we Christians obviously disagree
about what love means and how it should be lived out.

Well, perhaps there is different option, a different way of thinking about this, one
practiced by the ancient mystics of the church, who once argued that one can arrive at
a truth about God by not just saying what God is, but also about saying what God is
not. In another words, we can find our way to the truth of a thing by saying what the
positive characteristics of something are—for example, that one can say that hears the
voice of God if it tells you to love others--and yet we can also find the truth of
something if we name some negative characteristics—we can know that it is not the
voice of God if it tells us to hate other human beings.    That particular theological
parlor trick—a very good one, actually—is what the theologians call apophatic
theology—the negative way, the way that seeks truth of something by saying what
something is not. Maybe if we use that method, a way that says to us that if one hears
this or that thing in that voice we hear, we can then know that the voice we hear is not
from God. Maybe the answer to my sister’s question about what church to attend is
best answered in the negative—look for these things and if you see these things being
lived out, being spoken from the pulpit, being taught in the Sunday School, then run,
run like the wind, and take my nephew Drake with you!

So, what might these negative characteristics be, these thing to look for, when looking
to see whether or not a church or a religion, Christian or otherwise, is good or bad?
The theologian and Baptist minister Charles Kimball actually offers us five
characteristics of a religion gone bad, so to speak, warning signs of when a religion
become evil, which is the name of the book he wrote on this topic. Interestingly, Dr.
Kimball also got his PhD in comparative religion, with an emphasis on Islamic Studies at
Harvard, so he obviously has the ability to look across all the different faiths, and see
the negative characteristics that crop up in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as well as
the Eastern religions.

The first warning sign of corruption in religion is demands that one believe absolutely in
the rightness of its beliefs—it demands that what’s right for them is right for everyone
else—everyone else is wrong, and should be converted. You heard something like that
in the talk of Ann Coulter, the political pundit, a few years, when she said that we in the
West should bomb the Middle East and force them to convert to Christianity.   Or you
see it in some of the Middle East countries that outlaw any other religion other than
Islam, like in Saudi Arabia. When a religion or a church body demands that you believe
only what they determined to be “the truth”—the absolute truth—and there can be no
room for true dialogue, and the only option available for those disagree with them
theologically is conversion, then you know you are dealing with a death dealing
religion. That does not mean that you shouldn’t believe in your God, your
understanding of faith and morality, but when you demand that all others mujst and
should believe as you do, that it is the only way, then you know you are in the midst of
a faith that has gone soundly wrong.

The second warning sign of a religion gone bad, according to Kimball, is when blind
obedience is demanded of its followers. If a leader or a group of leaders demand that
one should give up your sense of self and your opinion, that one should leave your
common sense and intelligence at the door, then situations like the tragedy at
Jonestown can happen, where some nine hundred of Jim Jones’ followers killed
themselves in a mass suicide in Guiana, Africa, because Jones told them do it. We
should be wary, very wary of anyone who tells us that we should never question
something, whether it’s a leader, or a sacred text, even our Bible. And, according to
Kimball, this is especially true if the text, or the leaders call us to do acts of violence in
the name of God.

The third warning Kimball gives his readers is to avoid the temptation of establishing
what he calls the ideal end time. Whenever a religion becomes obsessed with the end
of things, with time, with the end of the world, all sorts of things can happen: religious
zealots can try to take over the government in order to bring about a theocratic state,
one ruled by God’s laws instead of man’s laws. In the very popular LEFT BEHIND book
series authored by Tim LaHaye one sees how so much violence by the characters in
the book against non-Christians is justified because of this belief that end of things
requires the suspension of normal rules of Christian behavior, behavior that would
have horrified the early church, a church that actually forbid its members from being
violent at all. One sees this madness in the terrorists who drove the planes into the
world trade center—all sorts of violence can be justified if you are trying to restore or
help bring about a more godly world, so they believe, by bringing about the end of time,
or an ideal time, a time sanctioned by God himself.

Which brings us to the fourth warning, intimately connected with the third warning, and
that is when a religion determines that the ends justifies the means, that we can
supposedly commit minor wrongs, maybe even major wrongs, in pursuit of the right
thing. The World Trade Center attacks demonstrate this twisted logic, but also the
killing of doctors who perform abortions, or the suicide bombings in Israel done mostly
by Palestinians, but sometimes even by Jews. Sure, killing innocent people is wrong,
but if we do it in pursuit of a higher good, ultimately it’s justifiable—after all, collateral
damage can’t be helped, so goes the twisted logic. But the truth of the matter is that in
Christianity and every other major religion, how we do what do is as important as why
we do what we do, and so if the immoral means are justified by pointing to the end goal,
well, you know you are in the presence of faith gone horribly wrong.

The fifth and final warning of religion gone bad is when the religion or a leader of a
religion tells its followers that it is fighting in God’s name, and that one is fighting a holy
war. Certainly we’ve seen that of late with Osama bin Laden’s jihad against America, or
with the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or we Christians
during the crusades against Islam—one side declaring holiness of their cause against
the evil on the other side. I’m not saying that war is not sometimes justified—but I am
saying, along with Dr. Kimball, I am saying that the moment we mix up God with the
messiness of our motives for fighting this or that war, nothing, and I mean, nothing
good can from it.

Now, it is in those five negative warnings that we get a hint of what to avoid in seeking
out a religion, a faith, and it’s a starting point I can give to my sister Allison as a way to
help her find something that is right for her and Drake. I have no doubt that one can
find elements in our Christian faith that touch upon these elements—we Christians
have gotten it wrong too many times to be too judgmental about other religions. What
is amazing is the way that Jesus lived out his faith—when people wanted him to declare
a holy war against the Romans, he turned them down. When people of other religions
came to seek him out, the Greeks, he welcomed them at his table. When Jesus’
disciples wanted him to use violence to protect him, he told them that the ends don’t
justify the means—those who live by the sword die by the sword, he told impetuous
Peter. What Jesus did was to tell the truth of his faith and the truth he had come to
because of his relationship to his Parent, his father, and he only challenged the faith of
others when it so clearly caused actual hardship on the day to day lives of people—
remember his complaints against the Pharisees who ignored the spirit of the law in
favor of the letter of the law? To look at this life, this life of Jesus, that is what a
genuine life of faith looks like, something to model and something to compare the rest
of us to, that is something I can offer my sister, though I am afraid most of us will be
found wanting in that comparison. Still, I hope she finds something, some place for
herself and a place to take Drake, a place that will love him and help him to love others,
in the same way that Christ did thousands of years ago. Amen.