The church I attended as a kid was led by a fiery and energetic pastor named John Bartlett. He built up the church, located in Tonawanda, NY, a town outside of Buffalo, by recruiting people like my family from the inner city. The church sent school buses (painted with the church's colors and logo - "
The Lighthouse Baptist Church"), to pick up congregants who didn't have cars and would otherwise be unable to attend service. At its peak, the church had a fleet of 10 buses. It was an impressive accomplishment. Bartlett took the church from a membership of 100 or so when my family joined, to about 400-500 members.
Bartlett was a good preacher - he knew the scripture, had passion and energy, and had a knack for cultivating new parishioners. Bartlett's take on the scriptures is why I couldn't listen to
worldly music as a kid. There was no gray area in the bible, you were either with the lord or with the world. My mom was decidedly in the pro lord camp. For about 8-9 years we attended Sunday morning services and often Sunday evening services as well, and during certain periods in those years we also attended Wednesday evening services, Thursday evening AWANA (a more christian version of the Boy Scouts), Friday evening basketball night (the church compound had a gym), and and occasionally did the knocking on doors thing on Saturday mornings.
Suffice to say, we were deeply enmeshed within the church and for me, opportunities to recuse myself were limited. My stroke of luck, the event that enabled me to assert my independence, was when Pastor Bartlett, the married father of three kids, took off to Florida with the wife of a church deacon (she left behind 5 kids). For my mother and many of the other city families in particular, this was a fatal betrayal. Within weeks, the Puerto Rican contingent, of which we were an original part, had shifted to a doctrinally similar Spanish language church located a few blocks from where my family lived. I think I attended service there twice before asserting that my lack of fluency in Spanish made my attendance pointless. At this point, my mother just gave up I think.
The armchair psychologists among you may be wondering whether Bartlett's gross hypocrisy is what turned me off to religion, it didn't. Credit for that goes to my
free mind. What my experience with the Lighthouse Baptist Church did was expose me to the hypocrisy and danger of fundamentalist religions. Fundamentalists believe the bible, koran, torah, etc. - books written by men long after their respective prophets were dead - to be the inerrant word of God, to be followed without compromise (that each major faith feels the same thing about their particular book of rules only means everyone who thinks differently is good hearted, but misguided). The bible and other books are the absolute word of God to be obeyed, or else. But absolutism is an unwise and impossible ideal in most instances, and striving for it often comes at a heavy price. The people who listen to these sermons believe them, and like any message that gets repeated over and over, like any message told with conviction, they're adopted and internalized by many, and given the role that the afterlife plays in religion, the dangers of its misuse are apparent.
All of this brings me to the news that
Ted Haggard, leader of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs and president of the 30 million member National Association of Evangelicals, has stepped down after his affairs and drug use with a gay prostitute were revealed. Like Bartlett, Haggard is a real bright line guy, a
with the lord or with the world type of fella, someone who believes the bible is perfect. It probably doesn't need to be said .... but of course, Haggard was a leading proponent of laws that sought to deny gay people the right to marry and professed that homosexuality is an abomination.
My big problem with Haggard, is not that he's a massive hypocrite or that he's been lying to thousands of his earnest believers and abusing the trust of the people he claims to care about (though they may care), it's that his version of Christianity has been steadily rising in influence in our government over the last six years -
Haggard speaks to President Bush weekly. People like Haggard are influencing policies that affect us all and that's personally scary as well as irreconcilable with our constitution. The version of Christianity that Haggard preaches puts us in the position of having, for example, churches fighting for exemptions to non-discrimination laws so that they can deny their employees health insurance for reproductive services, while the leaders of these churches, like Haggard or the Cahtolic priests, don't practice what they preach behind closed doors. Accross the country, Haggard and people of his ilk have been waging fierce campaigns to
replace science with theology in our public schools. We're distracted by campaigns that warn us of
wars against Christmas while criticisms against the handling of the real war we're in are chalked up to hysterical anti-Bush hatred.
Killing abortion providers becomes the lesser of two evils and while Haggard may not approve of such conduct, the theological underpinnings of the murderer's acts are similar to what Haggard preaches.
Religion cannot be held accountable for what crazy people do in its name, but the rest of us need to be accountable when we allow religion to gain new footholds in our government and civic institutions. We live in a free country so pray how you see fit, just keep your mythology and INEVITABLE hypocrisy out of my government and the laws that govern this land.
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