By Derrick Crowe
August 17, 2022
I want to share something that very few people know about me but, following the attack on Salman Rushdie, it feels important to share it in public.
I would say a fair number of people who know me online first got to know me as a very religious person due to the fact that I was a very vocal dissenter from the way that the Bush administration and its allies were marshaling the Christian faith to support its vicious policies. As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian community, I could see the blatant, dishonest ways in which these bloodthirsty right-wing politicians were inviting me to support Jesus–who would rather die for his enemies than lift a finger to harm them–by voting for people who were lying us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Many of those same politicians giggled into their lobbyist-funded wine glasses as New Orleans drowned.
That led me to spend an enormous amount of energy putting together a public case that authentic Christian faith must be pacifist. I ran a blog for a long time (back before corporate social media advertising companies destroyed that ecosystem) where I made that case on a daily basis, and that perspective formed the basis for my work as an anti-war activist, storyteller, and organizer. At the end of that time of my life, I wrote my first complete book manuscript, “Return Good for Evil,” which still sits unpublished in a cabinet here in my home. It was the result of years of research and work.
That book remains unpublished because I submitted it to a total of one publisher, who was extremely complementary in their declination, before I admitted the truth to myself: in the course of writing it, I stopped believing in the basic premise. I no longer believed. In the course of reading the dozens of books on the topic by scholarly believers and in constructing the case for my perspective, which I still believe is the most honest take on what the words of Jesus would argue for, it became very apparent to me that all of this work by all of these people was simply assuming the truth of the basic story: that the god presented in the biblical texts created the universe, that Jesus was representative of that god in some way during his time on earth, and that he died and rose from the dead.
But nowhere in any of the material one can lay one’s hands on, from the biblical texts themselves to the mountains of writing about those texts, is there any good evidence offered that that story is *true* that stands up to even the barest scrutiny.
I can remember waking up every day as a child roughly my son’s age with the near certainty that what I was hearing in church was a lie. I had a secret mental routine every morning of browbeating myself back into the fellowship of believers. And after several minutes every morning I’d be a Christian again in good standing and ready to go out into a community again that I knew for certain would reject me even more than they already had if I did not put myself through this. I hadn’t thought about that little terrifying bit of my morning as a kid in a long time, but when I was finally ready to take an honest look at those beliefs as an adult, those memories came back in an instant.
There is no good evidence that I am aware of that there is a god as presented in the religious texts of the major religions of the world. Relying on religion to tamp down our fears of our mortality rather than helping each other face those fears with honesty is a recipe for violent urges in the face of challenges to those beliefs. Most folks don’t act on those urges as did the person who attacked Rushdie this week in NYC. Instead, they channel that violent urge as our society teaches us to: through politics and the people we deputize to utilize violence on society’s behalf. But whether you are wielding the knife yourself or voting for people who direct the police to use force to arrest people who utilize abortion care or support LGBTQIA folks, you’re still using violence to push away a source of fear and a threat to the way you construct your self-identity and safety. The disgusting attack on Rushdie for his public criticism of a religion is part of the same phenomenon that is stripping rights from people at the federal level.
Our kids are facing an immediate end to the easy times on this planet that we enjoyed as a species thus far. I say that in the broadest possible sense–I know things are hard for many, many people. I’m referring instead to the long springtime we’ve enjoyed that formed the basis for humankind’s rise to prominence on Earth. And we’re in this position in large part because people are trained from birth in most societies to lie to themselves, just like I did, to make themselves feel better and to soothe our fears about an uncertain future. Our kids desperately need us to teach them to approach the world in a scientific, evidence-based way, and to not shy away from where the evidence leads, and to only accept propositions when there is good evidence for them. That is the only way through what we’ve created for them.
I know that large numbers of working class people are religious, and from an organizing perspective, I can’t expect to build a mass movement yet by demanding people agree with me and others like me on this issue. But I am also very doubtful that we are going to make it out of this rapidly escalating global disaster if we don’t stop elevating self-deception and a rejection of evidence-based reasoning as virtues.