READING Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting On Religion In America — And Found Unexpected Peace, a book which centres on the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal:
Philadelphia’s lead investigator, a veteran assistant district attorney named Will Spade, would later tell the National Catholic Reporter that interviewing the scores of victims affected him like no other case in his career.
“It was like working in a factory,” Spade said. “And in this factory was a conveyor belt of damaged people. Every day it was another damaged person.
“There would be times when I would come home after a particularly bad day,” he continued, “and I would lie down on the couch with my head in my wife’s lap and cry, uncontrollably cry.”
It’s a book about the deconversion of the author, who had been a born-again Christian reporter. He was later devastated by observing the ugly, sinful underbelly of a self-serving institutional and individual religion. Victims’ stories, clergymen’s lies, and how members of the laity aren’t supposed to question their “fathers”. What happens in an organisation that’s run by leaders that do not pick up the phone to turn in child rapists — something most of us would do automatically? When the victims feel as if the church’s betrayal is worse that what the priest did to them — Jesus had told His disciples:
“But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)
There’s rage and contempt at how bishops and their lieutenants failed to protect children from pedophile priests. Much of it is about the hypocrisy and corruption within the Body of Christ. What’s the truth behind “smells and bells” or “happy clappy” religion? How can institutions be easily twisted for selfish and sinful needs?
One of the attorneys, Manly:
“Imagine every day your job is to go and pick up intestines that have spilled out of people’s guts.” Manly says. “You stuff them back in, and sew them up and try to find the person with the knife who did this. The clergy sexual abuse cases are like that, except it’s emotional guts you’re dealing with and you’re trying to put these people back together. Though they are adults, you’re really dealing with that child who got hurt.
“In my personal life, I was spiralling downward, and I kept thinking, how can the priest and bishops go on with their lives as if nothing happened? The priest wielded the knife, and the bishops cleaned it off and put it back where the priest could find it again — and you have to be one depraved motherfucker to do that. They are cold and calculating. How can these guys not do anything about it? And at the moment of consecration, these people are supposed to be in persona Christi, or ‘in the person of Christ’?”
He lost his faith.
“When I started this, I thought clergy sexual abuse was a holiness problem involving a few priests. But I’ve found no one in the clergy, in all my cases, who did the right thing. Some of them weren’t bad people, but they didn’t have the courage to do what was right.”
Alaska Native victims were molested by Jesuits, and the victims contend that many others — cut off for decades from legal and emotional help — have committed suicide to end their pain. Lobdell writes:
“No one would believe us,” Kobuk told me. “[Lundowski] worked for God, and I was just an Eskimo child.”
…
What had happened to helpless boys at the edge of the world made a lot more sense if there were no God. COnfronted with evil, whether man-made or satanic, our task is always to fight it. But it helps to understand it, too — and I found it refreshing to focus entirely on the fight, knowing that one bad man and one corrupt institution had been purely self-interested. I did not have to worry about God’s role anymore.
He’d seen too many innocent people live out lives full of tragedy and pain — the consequences of sin, heartbreaking emptiness of the abuser and the devastation of the abused. Basically, he lost his faith when he started to see extreme examples of “bad things happening to good people”.
It’s nothing new. Every atheist is aware of this argument, and every theist knows the answers against that. Still, it’s a good story about belief in Christianity, faith in humanity, the grey zones and all the colours of bruises in between. Welcome to the edge. There are many people there.
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So how do you break the cycle? What if the abuser was also abused? There’s no ultimate healing until we recognise that all of us are fallen men and women in a fallen and broken world in which each of us needs to offer forgiveness to others and to experience God’s forgiveness of us.
Speaking of which, I like Rowan William’s Christmas sermon:
…Can we as a society accept and even celebrate the fact that there is a place for proper and mature dependence - that human beings need to receive and learn: not so that they can get to the point where they stop receiving and learning, but so that they can acquire the habits of receiving and learning in ever-new settings? Can we help children enjoy their dependency so that they don’t just leave it behind but get to manage it with freedom and imagination as they grow older?
And that involves two difficult lessons for us adults. One is simply to reconnect ourselves to our own capacity to receive and learn with joy and excitement - to become like little children, as Somebody once said. The other is to be ready to give the nurture and security that children need - to create the safe places where they can learn, where they can make their mistakes. To do this is to show that we treasure dependency and that we shan’t either exploit it or ignore it. Embracing and celebrating our own dependence gives us the vision and energy to make sure that others have the freedom to make the most of their dependence too. And this means working to give all the children of the world the security they need.
In our own society, there are problems enough - children who have never known stability in their family life, who have never known a father or who have been pushed into taking responsibility for a parent or for brothers and sisters, with a mother who is ailing, addicted or otherwise incapacitated; children with workaholic parents, materially well off but deprived of warmth and relaxation with their family; worse still, children and young people who are systematically exploited through sex trafficking, children who are trapped in gang culture. Worldwide, all these problems and more are all too visible; perhaps one of the most appalling phenomena, still affecting hundreds of thousands of children, is the exploiting of children in the meaningless and savage civil wars in places like Congo and Sri Lanka - children who are abducted, brutalised, turned into killers, used as sex slaves. To hear of these experiences is almost unbearable, yet the scandal continues.
These children are created, like all of us, to become fully and consciously children of God, to enjoy that glory we reflected on a few minutes ago. Their suffering is an insult to the purpose of God, a contemptuous refusal of the gift of God on the part of those who keep them in their different kinds of slavery. God’s gift at Christmas is relationship, not just another human relationship but relation to God the Father by standing where Jesus stands, standing in the full torrent of his love and creativity, giving and receiving. To come into that place and to be rooted and grounded there means letting go of our fear of dependence and opening our hearts to be fed and enlarged and transformed. And that in turn means looking at how we handle dependence in ourselves and others, how we accept the positive dependence involved in lifelong learning and growing, and help one another deal with it positively.
…And that again means a particular care for those who need us most, who need us to secure their place and guarantee that there is nourishment and stability for them. As we learn how to be gratefully dependent, we learn how to attend to and respond to the dependence of others. Perhaps by God’s grace we shall learn in this way how to create a society in which real dependence is celebrated and safeguarded, not regarded with embarrassment or abused by the powerful and greedy.
God has spoken through a Son. He has called us all to become children at the cradle of the Son, the Word made flesh, so that we may grow into a glory that even the angels wonder at. To all who accept him he gives power and authority to become children of God, learning and growing into endless life and joy.
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Pretty interesting case study.
1) I was handed books by co-workers.
The more that people choose their religion, rather than just inherit it, the more likely they are to make a noise about it. Miroslav Volf, director of Yale’s Centre for Faith and Culture, says this is showing up in the workplace: “It used to be that workers hung their religion on a coat rack alongside their coats. At home, their religion mattered. At work, it was idle. That is no longer the case. For many people religion has something to say about all aspects of life, work included.”
2) I attended the Alpha course, an example of an evangelical outreach contained within the older traditions.
Easy answers can come from the pulpit, but what appeals to me is Graham Greene’s doubting Catholicism, or intellectual Anglicanism, a more cool and cerebral approach. Still, what’s happening is that preachers are adapting their faith to the times. In America, Rick Warren took post-war evangelicalism and reshaped it for the world of suburban anomie and the search for meaning, becoming a one-man dispenser of “purpose”.
There’s the belief in some Christian circles that Christianity must retain the right to seek and receive converts, even in parts of the world where this may be viewed as a form of cultural or spiritual aggression.
3) Conversion
Sometimes conversion is gradual, but quite commonly things come to a head in a single instant, which can be triggered by a text, an image, a ceremony or some private realisation. A religious person would call such a moment a summons from God; a psychologist might speak of an instant when the walls between the conscious and unconscious break down, perhaps because an external stimulus—words, a picture, a rite—connects with something very deep inside.
