The Defiant Man of Faith

Just a little over a month ago, I visited the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Louisiana on a radio road trip across the Deep South. When I arrived on Bourbon Street in the French quarter of New Orleans, with its sex shops and year-round Mardi Gras drunkenness, I told my listeners, jokingly, that no doubt the Big Easy (as New Orleans is known) would one day be swallowed by the earth in some awesome display of divine wrath. The joke became all too real in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast, leaving New Orleans submerged in a terrible deluge reminiscent of Noah's flood.

To be sure, I have no idea why G-d allows such terrible calamities to befall, and kill, innocent people. Indeed, those who suffer the most in these natural catastrophes-the poor and the destitute-are usually those to whom life has already been unkind, and it was an added misery that Mississippi, already the poorest state in the Union, bore the brunt of this monstrous storm.

But a famous evangelical pastor who is a regular on my radio show said that, while he did not quite know why G-d sent the hurricane against the New Orleans area, he did know that a city-wide gay pride parade which was scheduled for next week had been cancelled by the storm. Not surprisingly, many of my religious callers, while refusing to say outright that G-d had punished the area between Biloxi (gambling) and New Orleans (sexual immorality), they certainly reminded me that the Bible does say that G-d's wrath will not rest forever. (The discussion became positively painful when two callers insinuated that the holocaust was a divine punishment for the Jewish rejection of Jesus).

What is at issue here is not just the rancid old chestnut of some religious people attributing natural disasters, like last year's tsunami, as being the consequence of sin, but something far more insidious.

It was Karl Marx who famously argued that religious people are drug addicts whose barbiturate of choice is G-d. Far from being bold and courageous, the homo religious was a weak individual who used religion as a crutch even as his faith rendered him passive, feeble, and subservient. Religion taught people not to challenge, but to submit. Not to question, but to obey. Not how to stand erect, but to be stooped and bent in the broken posture of the meek and pious. Indeed, historians have made the case that only the emancipation from religion in the modern secular age has allowed for the explosion in technological innovation characteristic of the age of science. Science boldly asks the questions that religion is afraid to answer.

There is some truth to this criticism. Many religious people I know have had their will broken by what they perceive to be G-d's overpowering yoke. As many of my friends have become more religious, they have allowed their personalities to atrophy and have been rendered colorless. From the many religious couples that write to me that their sex lives have been undermined by inhibition and a discomfort with carnal indulgence, to the conformist trends of the religious clergy that have made so many rabbis, ministers, and priests dull and uninspiring, religion has snuffed out the vitality of many of its adherents. Rather than charismatically leading their congregations with the spark of their own individuality, they put them in comas with empty platitudes of faith.

For many of the faithful, the closer they come to G-d, the more they become enemies of man. When a cataclysm renders tens of thousands of innocent people homeless, it is the victims who are guilty, while G-d is always innocent. Perhaps these communities tolerated large homosexual populations. Maybe they allowed an abortion clinic in their midst. While G-d is perfect, man is inadequate. While G-d is righteous, man is sinful. I call this the submissive man of faith, the man or woman who believes that the foremost calling of religion is the erasure of individuality and total blind obedience in the face of the divine will. And the principal characteristic of the submissive man of faith is to always implicate man and exonerate G-d.

The Jewish genius for arguing with God
Read more on page 2 >>

_Related Features

God and the Hurricane Prayer Circle for Katrina's Victims Is God Angry at the U.S.A.?

Continued on page 1: »