took and mixed in with three measures of flour until
all of it was leavened." Matthew 13:33
From the August/September 2004 Issue
The Perversion of Religion
Dave Arnolds
Dave Arnolds is a natural resource attorney, father of three and founder of the Colorado chapter of El Porvenir, a small national effort to bring clean water resources to villages in rural Nicaragua.
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the background to this piece, please see related article “The Price of Acting Pro-Life” by Diana Flahive (General Articles).
Reading the story of Catholic School teacher Janelle and her baby in the last Leaven led me to thinking about the ambiguity of religion. Like sex, religion is both essentially beautiful and a powerful source of life. Religion reveals to us and leads us to the divine, to God by whatever name we come to know Him or Her. True religion leads to a deep respect for the sacredness of life, especially as it is embodied in each human person. “When you did this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” When religious leaders function as conduits or bridges between us and God, religion inspires and sanctifies.
When, on the contrary, religious leaders place dogma above love of others, they pervert religion, for religion without love, like sex without love, is ugly and destructive. The perversion develops when religious leaders begin to believe that they alone have the truth about God and that those who hold even slightly different beliefs about God’s nature or will or laws are in error and are to be condemned. The perversion deepens by turning from condemning the sin to condemning the sinner and considering anyone with different beliefs to be a sinner. When religions divide rather than unite, condemn rather than forgive, reject rather than welcome, kill rather than nurture, they cease to be conduits to the divine.
Today powerful fundamentalist factions within the various religions are engaging in this perversion. The consequences of their demand for doctrinal purity include rejection, fear, hate, and death. This is the antitheses of Christ’s Second Great Commandment of love of the neighbor who is a Samaritan, a foreigner with different beliefs, an infidel; the antitheses of “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive…” the antitheses of the criteria for the Last Judgment - to care for Christ in the form of the least (the very least) of our brothers and sisters by giving food, drink, shelter and comfort. Further, the comic aspect of this tragic demand for doctrinal purity is that none of us can know God except in a very imperfect manner. (“We see now through a darkened mirror.”) So it is both arrogant and ludicrous to reject as infidels those who see differently through that mirror.
When Christ invited Jewish religious leaders who were without sin to throw the first stone, all of them had the humility and integrity to put down their stones and depart. Today some Catholic Bishops are throwing the stones. They have cast the stones of rejection and condemnation at gays and lesbians and at anyone who believes that criminalizing abortion is not a good way to protect life. Archbishop Chaput has even cast the stones of condemnation and rejection at an unmarried pregnant Catholic school teacher who had the courage to keep her child. He fired her and left her and her child without a source of income and without benefits like medical insurance. He denied food and drink and shelter to one of the least.
Against the background of the clerical pedophilia and hierarchical cover-up scandals (both sexual and religious perversion at their worst) Chaput’s firing of Janelle for having conceived a child in love, but out of wedlock, would form an interesting parody in a novel. In real life it is a perversion of Christianity, with implications far transcending the teacher and her unborn child, a child for whom she has demonstrated self-sacrificing love and for whom Chaput has demonstrated contempt in the name of religious doctrine.