2014

Suffering Versus Faith

Last Monday in Seattle, Teresa MacBain, an ex-minister, gave a talk about building secular community. Incidentally, she strongly recommended singing together as an exercise in group bonding, which suggests that the Sunday Assembly may be on the right track. MacBain is the second ex-minister I’ve met who would like to see the secular community have more to offer in terms of community. The first was Richard Haynes, who hosts Atheist Nexus, the most active online atheist site I’ve found. For sure there are others like MacBain and Haynes. For myself, the only reason I know anything about community is my years of experience in a Unitarian congregation. As an introduction to her topic, MacBain recounted her personal story of losing her faith. For a minister, that basically means losing your job and your community. What would drive a minister to abandon her faith? For MacBain, it was the failure of theodicy. Theodicy is an answer to the philosophical puzzle of why the world that God controls is full of pain. Why do bad things happen to good people? Theologians and apologists have come up with plenty of explanations of why this makes sense, and most of the arguments are strong enough to convince those same theologians and apologists. But for MacBain, it wasn’t an abstract, philosophical issue. It was personal. Hurting people from her congregation came to her, and she had to tell them something. For centuries, elite men have been generating wordy explanations for what all this suffering is about, but those words don’t do much for flesh-and-blood humans who are actually suffering. MacBain tried to figure it all out so that she would know what to say when a congregant came to her and needed comfort. Instead, she came face-to-face with the realization that Christianity doesn’t really do much good for you here. The Christian tradition hails from a more brutal era when personal suffering was a given, and it is not in synch with modern sensibilities about individual justice. 

In the ancient world, everything around you demonstrated that you were not worth much. Human life was cheap. Famine, plague, war, wild animals and personal violence were all eager to do you in. If you survived, life didn’t have that much to offer the average person. You put in your time laboring in the fields, and maybe you didn’t starve. There were no police, social workers or other third parties looking out for you. In this context, God was great, and that meant he was too far beyond us to worry about our individual lives. That was true of both Zeus and Yahweh. Think of the little babies that Yahweh drowned without a tear in the Flood, not to mention the puppies, hedgehogs and other adorable critters. Think of Lot’s family, which Yahweh would have incinerated along with the evildoers of Sodom and Gomorrah. If it hadn’t been for Abraham intervening, Yahweh would have killed that family of innocents and not batted an eye. The story of Adam and Eve explains where death and suffering came from, but tellingly it doesn’t explain why we deserve death and suffering. What an individual deserves was not at issue. Likewise, when you died, you were just plain dead. God didn’t even bother to punish evildoers in a hell. The tribe mattered, but individuals didn’t.

It speaks highly of our civilization that the suffering of everyday people is felt so strongly that it becomes evidence that God doesn’t exist. Three thousand years ago, suffering was taken as evidence for God instead of against him. Your suffering showed that Yahweh was a total badass, and he had cursed you before you were born. All the pain that he inflicted on humans, what did it matter to El Shaddai, the Lord of the Holy Mountain? But today God gets called to account. Why, God, did you let this child die? This everyday child? We live in a culture where everything tells you that you do matter. You have police, firefighters and paramedics standing ready to help you when you need them. If you’re suicidal, people you don’t know are waiting for your phone call so they can talk you out of it. You elect your leaders. If someone in your family is beating you, society takes that as its business, not a private affair. These days, humans look out for each, and God doesn’t live up to our example. 

Maybe the Catholics are onto something with not letting women be priests. Men are, on average, more easily satisfied with abstract ideas, and you have to think pretty abstractly to be OK with a God who watches the Holocaust without lifting a finger. When a woman asks her minister why God let her daughter die, a female minister probably has a harder time saying it’s all part of God’s mysterious plan. If the minister is a mother herself, that line will be even harder for her to say. 

Believers like to say that they have an advantage over us because they can take comfort in God’s love even in the face of personal tragedy. Certainly some believers facing loss find support in their faith. In my experience, however, assurances that everything is in God’s hands are more assuring to the person speaking than to the one suffering. Telling a suffering person that God will make things all right often seems motivated more by a desire to protect one’s own feelings than to actually comfort the person who’s suffering. When my wife was dying, she was lucky to have a Unitarian minister tending to her. Our minister helped my wife face her mortal end without recourse to any supernatural palliatives, such as the promise of going to heaven or everything having a purpose. She helped my dying wife face her reality, not duck it. Maybe those of us who face loss straight can sometimes be more help than those who minimize a suffering person’s profound experience of loss. 

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Macbain shared this link to a blog post with me. It’s by Rachel Held Evans and covers similar territory: http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/fail-abraham-test