There are a few reasons why I, an American nonbeliever, started attending a Korean church. For one, I’m currently doing a degree in anthropology and have that mindset. Cultural anthropologists will immerse themselves in cultures to simply understand them and connect with them on a human level. Also, for years I’ve been into Korean culture. Lastly, my current work and living situation has become isolating and I realized I needed to do something about that.
So, after seeing there are Korean churches all over my city, the idea stuck in my head until I finally went. It’s ironic, because one of the things I like the most about Korea and other East Asian countries is that they’re highly secular.
The church I chose was the best choice I could have made. It is small, very casual, seemingly very liberal, youthful, English-speaking, even the music (lyrics aside) was good. I immediately felt the sense of community that we so need as social creatures and I felt it was such a shame that so few secular spaces provide this feeling of community. I quickly made friends, including some that were also coming from a place of nonbelief. I would go so far as to say I felt it was beautiful. But it turned ugly.
The pastor is a young, casually dressed guy who seems like a genuinely good person. Fitting for a liberal church. However, the actual content of the sermons I’ve witnessed left me in disbelief. I felt I wanted to write papers on everything wrong with them, hence this blog. And the tricky question: How much liberal churches are truly an ally in making this a more rational and humane world?
For all the very liberal vibes this place has, the sermons could be coming from the worst conservative megachurch you’ve heard of:
“If you don’t force Christian values on others, others will force their values on you.”
Yes, he said that. It sounds like it could come straight from the theocratic fascists currently occupying the American government. America was of course founded on the opposite, after centuries of religious war and persecution. A secular government permits peaceful co-existence and freedom of conscience for all. You can’t force belief anyway. Every time Christianity has had political power it has been hell on earth. It’s an exclusivist religion with awful and violent central ideas like hell, no wonder.
At one point the pastor talked about Pompeii as an example of what happens to a society who has turned away from God. But today the best and most flourishing societies are the most secular while the most religious are the worst across the world, in terms of poverty, violence, and natural disasters befalling them. And I bet he would not want to visit deeply Christian societies of the past, with their witch hunts, repression of knowledge and women, their crusades and inquisitions (which have scriptural sanction).
He tried to employ a slippery slope fallacy with respect to what sexual leniency would unravel towards, when we know what its opposite gets you: modern Iran, and societies that punish people for being human. Societies of shame, guilt, fear, and hate, however much they may speak about love.
It’s worth noting, societies like those of the ancient pagans had few religious wars or persecution and as with religious freedom, they were also the source of many other fundamental values we tend to cherish today like democracy and rights. These do not come from the Bible.
“Scripture is what matters and scripture says homosexuality is wrong.”
You’d think you might not hear this from a liberal church. But I did. There was something along the lines of a loving the sinner not the sin platitude, but this is still calling who someone is a sin. Someone having the wrong kind of love and not harming anyone.
But does this pastor follow Leviticus and kill gay people? He doesn’t. Why not? Does he wear mixed fabric? I bet he does. Based on what criteria is he making these choices what to follow? It has to be something exterior to the Bible because there’s no guidance for it inside it. He did mention church tradition. But church tradition for millennia was that slavery and execution of infidels was good. Does he agree? The Bible is full of contradictions, including on moral issues, so these inconsistencies are inevitable. But the confident denying of them and the condemning of those who focus more on other parts and have a different perspective is all the more stark considering them.
So many young people have left church over this issue alone because they can see through it. They can see the irrational inhumanity. But this “liberal” church was full of young people being spoon-fed it.
“God grounds objective morality.”
If you’re aware of apologists you’re aware of this one. It’s divine command theory. It’s might makes right. It’s just an assertion. One made by men who can never produce evidence of their god. But it’s flawed even in principle. Plato pointed this out millennia ago in his Euthyphro Dilemma.
It asks: does God command something because it’s good or is something good because God commands it? If God commands things because they’re good, or to say God is good, is to admit that morality/goodness exists separately from and do not require god. If goodness/morality are whatever god commands, those terms are rendered meaningless and arbitrary and what we would find evil becomes good if God commands it—as happens frequently in religious scriptures.
Put another way: if God has good reasons for his moral commands, those reasons can be appealed to without the middleman. If he (she/it) doesn’t, his morality is unreasonable and undesirable, and only fear or prudence would compel you to follow them.
Saying god’s nature (the nature of an undefinable, shifting, unproven, incomprehensible being) is good, leads to a restating of the question: is the goodness a fundamental component of God, or is his nature good because goodness exists independent of god and he aligns his nature with goodness? If the former, good is just an arbitrary designation referring to god’s nature, and there is no yardstick to measure what goodness is or prove god’s commands are moral.
Further, God is still a subject, and divine commands and obedience have little to do with morality. They require no thought, no feeling, no learning, no understanding, no logic. Ancient Greek philosophers (who Christian writers stole from) were discussing secular ethics far more sophisticated than anything in the Bible long before it. In universities today there are whole classes on ethics that have nothing to do with the Bible or God. They’re based on demonstrable facts and scientific observations about our common humanity as a social, interdependent species. That’s not “being your own god” as this pastor also said. That’s using your supposedly God-given brain.
“Other religions are cults.”
The pastor called Mormonism a cult. I agree. But all religions are cults. By what criteria is this pastor determining what’s a cult? Christianity has thousands of sects. They can agree on almost nothing. This raises big questions about why if they have the perfect word of a perfect being before them who created them and knew what he needed to say to them, but it’s also been this way since the start. Exactly as you’d expect from a man-made religion.
Sects of Christians have been fighting over these things for millennia and issues have only been resolved by force and political councils, not any clear direction from God. We have many very different books that were once read by Christians that now are not. We had the early Gnostics who thought there was more than one God and the God of the Old Testament was evil. Key doctrines like the trinity don’t even clearly appear in the Bible but were developed later.
I started to see this pastor was likely as unaware of any of this as he was of the lack of archeological evidence supporting the Exodus narrative. And even if he was, he was only interested in twisting things to support his narrative. It was sadly nothing different than what you would expect to see from any other church.
Beyond the sermons, I was also led to some general questions about worship and prayer broadly as I watched people worshiping and praying.
Like why praise and worship? Why would a perfect being need them? Why would a loving being want them? Why is he after glory? What person worthy of worship ever demands it? Is worshiping anything a good thing? It’s clearly coming from the perspective of a tyrant (or psychopath).
The issues with prayer are possibly more immense. If one believes everything happens according to their god’s perfect will and plan, isn’t prayer asking that he alter that perfect will and plan? If he’s already aware of what has and will happen, why let him know? Is he not the cause of the problem in the first place, or the one who allowed it to happen and did nothing? The issues here could be talked about for days.
Conclusion:
Years ago, I attended a service at another supposedly liberal church at the request of family for mothers day. Expecting it to be rather innocuous, that pastor began making the demonstrably false and pernicious claim that all those in your life who don’t love Jesus will burn it to the ground. But it’s those who love Jesus who have been burning things to the ground for millennia, including each other.
It has been said that moderate religion gives cover to extremism. That’s unfortunately true to a degree. But it’s questionable just how moderate those places are. When we think about fundamentalists being the extremists what are we saying? That there’s something wrong with the fundamentals. And if you read our religions, clearly there is. Again, if they were the products of ancient men, not gods, what else would you expect?
But what do we do when we all need allies, need each other to fight against theocrats and fascists trying to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages and undo The Enlightenment by force? What do we do when we need human connection and community and religion is still one of the very best places for that? We have to live with each other, right? We may care about society, but we must care for ourselves first, do we not?
I don’t have clear cut answers myself. There is no perfect answer in a perfect book. Knowledge and progress are always won by investigation, not revelation. I’m still going to that church for the community. Maybe I can be a good influence. Maybe I can use their good influence to better myself. Some liberal churches are allies, some are not. Some are not, yet have many members who are.
I think being a humanist, being an anthropologist in the sense of striving for understanding, have to be the keys. We share the same humanity in the same world full of bad ideas and good ones, false beliefs and true ones. We can only do our best and not forget those inevitable and foundational facts.
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