Running in Packs

There are lone wolves, but there are not many. Wolves prefer to run in packs.

I heard a radio interview with a Southern Baptist spokesman.  He said (in a manner of speaking) that there were 14- or 15,000 Southern Baptist congregations in the United States.  They are outnumbered only by Roman Catholics, who not only have more parishes, but they run in larger packs.  

He--the Southern Baptist spokesman--said that the home territory of most Southern Baptists was coming unglued.  The South is changing.  As an example, he referred to the number of congregations in the South who were admitting divorced and remarried members, and (Gasp!) maybe even gay members.  (As a matter of fact, the divorce rate in the South is higher than the national average.)  That, the spokesman said, was not Biblical.  Real Christians, he said, do not put marriage to a popular vote.  

Let us overlook what a Biblical marriage would be like.  It, indeed, would not be democratic, and it might not be very pretty, but it might make a lot of men happy.  

What was evident from what the spokesman said, was that Southern Baptist religion was really an attempt to affirm First Century values, or at least what they think are First Century values.  What is Jesus believed to have said?  What did St. Paul write?  Or St. John? How did First Century people view the world?  That is what we should be like!

First Century people believed the world had three stories:  Heaven above, Earth here, and Hell below.  God and his angels lived in Heaven, and maybe some day so would we.  Or we might end up with Satan and his minions of evil doers.  This life, here on Earth, was a testing ground for our eternal life or pleasure or pain.  Something like that.

Christianity, generally, affirms that worldview.  To believe is to affirm God in Heaven, Satan in Hell, and to know that this life is preliminary to one of those fates.  Generally.  Some Christians--not many, in fact--do not live with that view of the world, but they are a distinct minority.  Even so-called "liberal" Christians agree that God is, and maybe Satan is, too, and that something like Heaven of Hell is at stake.  They shave off such parts of the First Century worldview that is patently just an ancient worldview, but it is a seldom Christian who is willing to leave that whole view of the world behind, and look at what seems to be the case today.  

Muslims do similar things, from a more Sixth Century perspective.  When religious people in the Western tradition ask for your participation, they want you to affirm the values of the ancient times of their origins. What did Jesus say?  What did Moses say?  What did Muhammed say?  "If you want to run with us, this is what we want to do.  This is how we will try to arrange life together.  These are the values we will try to enact into law, politically and legally."

For a long time, people like the Southern Baptists were the moral heart and soul of the Bible Belt.  It was their territory, their hunting ground.  But it is very hard consistently to affirm what people used to think, two thousand years ago.  We let some things go.  We try to talk our way around other things.  We pare the belief system down, and say that we will never, never, ever give up believing some things, however anachronistic:  God, for instance, and maybe eternal life after death.  Maybe let the angels go, along with imps and demons.  If you keep most of them, you might be a Southern Baptist.  If you let most of them go, you might be a Unitarian-Universalist.  Or maybe not religious, at all, if being religious means having to think of the world the same way Moses or St. Paul did, as an ancient Mesopotamian did.  

And, as the Southern Baptist spokesman demonstrated, religions are, indeed, a way to affirm how you want society to be arranged.  The "Bible Belt" is just a way to describe a part of the country that accepted what they believed to be "what the Bible said" about marriage, work on Sunday, divorce, drinking, swearing, the place of women in the world, and what an ideal marriage was when the man was "the head of the household".  Catholics have an alternative, but similar view of what they believe we should be as a society (marriage, sex, divorce, abortions, birth control, and so on).  

But the South is getting away from the Baptists.  The connection is not as tight as it was once thought to be.  (It looks pretty tight to most of us, but even the Southern Baptists are worried.)  

In any case, we really do not live in the First Century. We live in the Twenty-first.  Advice from the past might be a good thing, but it surely is not enough to describe the values most human beings want to affirm today.  

We do run in packs, so it is important to take a close look at what the pack is really doing.