MY RELIGIOUS AWAKENING



by William R. Carr

Now, this isn't the typical story of one "accepting Jesus Christ as his own personal Savior" or being "Born Again" into the Christian faith. From a religious fundamentalist's point of view, I'll have to admit that I'm probably as much of a lost soul as ever. But it is a story of "seeing the light" -- and coming to whole-hearted belief in "God."

The household in which I was raised wasn't especially religious. While my mother had been raised in a Baptist family, my step-father was an excommunicated Catholic. Both, however, considered themselves non-denominational Christians. My mother was devout in her own quiet and unassuming way.

Having been raised among Christians, the Christian ethic has always been part of my life and personal moral code. Due to an agnostic father, who reentered my life when I was ten, however, believing in God wasn't. As a fledgling agnostic, for years I was pretty reticent to think in terms of an actual God. I preferred to acknowledge simple and honest ignorance of both the existence and the nature of any Supreme Being, and let it go at that. At that time I perceived no need for a god or God, acknowledged or otherwise. Eventually, I saw the light...

It may seem sacrilegious, from the perspective of most Christians, that even now I prefer the words of a pagan, rather than any description found in the Bible, as my favorite way of defining God. The words are attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato:

"God is Truth, and Light, his Shadow."

I'm thankful that my mother was of the Christian faith and taught me to pray every night before going to bed -- the simple child's prayer that began with, "Now I lay me down to sleep..." and ended with "God bless mommy..." and everybody else I could think of, usually including the dog, cat, and selected relatives and neighbors. I later learned and recited the Lord's Prayer at bed-time, but by then I was a serious religious skeptic, my faith undermined by both my own observations of the "Christian world" and my father's humanist influences. He held all religion in disdain (though he was a member of the Unitarian Church of the Larger Fellowship in those days) -- and he wasn't shy about expressing his views. Naturally, he was the scandal and black sheep of the family.

Because of my father's lack of faith, and in spite of my mother's influence, I literally toothed on religious skepticism, and was effectively reared an agnostic. This, of course, was when being a religious skeptic wasn't considered cool anywhere in the country. Secular humanism had not yet manifested itself, and asserted its latent power, as the dominate creed in the halls of state in Washington, its educational system and, perhaps even more importantly, Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

One of the earliest lessons taught by my father, was that there's little significant difference between an atheist and a one who believes in God. The first, he said, apparently believes in a self-created universe, and the latter, a universe created by an apparently self-created God. He held that an atheist was as likely to be in error as a believer, thus he was an agnostic. I was raised on the notion that, "More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other cause." and, one of his favorites, "Religion was born when the first priest met the first fool."

While I never considered myself a Christian (at least once I got past the age of ten), I never really considered myself an atheist either. Yet I sometimes enjoyed referring to myself as an atheist simply for the shock value it carried in our neck of the Bible Belt. I had never met another child (or any any grown-up, other than my dad), who admitted to any degree of religious skepticism.

Ironically, I still thank providence my father had the wisdom to teach me a little irreverence while I was still young and impressionable enough to properly absorb the lessons. That was his idea of a "Head Start" program. Not that irreverence itself is good, but it taught me to be a skeptic early -- not only in religious matters, but of everything that comes out of "official sources," whether secular or ecclesiastic. Of course, he exposed me to a lot of other things too -- most of them quite respectable. He introduced me to many ideas inconsistent with what then seemed to be almost universally accepted religious "Truths." 

He opened my eyes to the little appreciated fact that men thought (and thought rather well) -- long before the Christian era. He introduced me to Socrates and the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Bacon -- and many more -- heathens and heretics almost to a man. He recommended reading them all, but the Bible was one of the "hundred great books" (most of which he'd read), that he never recommended. He often referred to "One Book families" who never bothered to read that book. He said that book was full of stories of slaughter and mayhem, and that it was probably just as well that they did not read it. The primer he pushed on me was Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. When I was about twelve, he offered to give me five dollars if I'd read it. (I eventually plowed through it and collected.)

Ironically, perhaps most of those who are actively trying to de-Christianize the nation, not only denigrate Christianity in particular, and religion in general, but also degrade the authors of most of those other hundred great books which represent the "Western Canon." The authors of those great books are often referred to these days (even in the halls of academia), as "dead white men" — by those cultural forces many of us have come to refer to as "cultural communism."

My dad's favorite philosophers were Voltaire and Nietzsche, and he made sure I was properly inoculated with many of their ideas. Yes, my Old Pappy was a long way from being a born again Christian. He was, and continues to be (at 87), a free thinker on religious matters -- and one with a very dim view of all religions, and most especially (since he was raised in a Baptist family) Christian churches. Unlike me, he still refuses to consider God as a serious subject. But, while he may be short on fundamentalist rhetoric and faith, Christian conduct (strict honesty and civility, and the application of the Golden Rule), were his iron-clad, though unspoken, laws. Though my father would never acknowledge it, I came to realize that we owed a lot to his own Christian upbringing and the puritan ethic we had inherited.

Ironically, my father was more Christian in his total outlook than many professing and supposedly "practicing" the faith. I was born during World War Two, and raised on the remnants of wartime propaganda. "Japs" and Germans were still pretty much loathed by most people, and considered by many as almost sub-human. My father was the first adult I knew who went out of his way to point out that the Japanese and Germans were humans too -- and occupied civilized nations to boot. In those days, that was almost as sacrilegious in some circles as questioning the existence of angels and the devil.

Only later in life did I come to appreciate the profoundly positive impact religion has had on our society, and become aware of the reality of Christianity -- and why so many of the most learned and thoughtful Americans clung to the Christian faith. I discovered that the teachings of Jesus were particularly worthy of much more than just a cursory look. This, in spite of all of the perversity that has come down under the Christian banner.

In later years, it finally dawned on me, largely through personal observation, that our society, increasingly devoid of the religious faith of our forefathers, was tending toward chaos, loss of civility, and becoming less and less manageable as a society. This tendency, I could see, was leading us toward an increasingly authoritarian state and ultimately toward tyranny. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we are changing from a nation of self-governing people to a people who need governing, and need it badly. The increasing numbers of miscreants need authority to ride reign over them, and the rest clamor for protection. It's an old Biblical story being repeated -- of the children of Israel rejecting God's rule and clamoring for a king.

Henry George made similar observations over a hundred years ago in his Progress and Poverty. Things are much worse today, of course. He wrote, (my emphasis added).

"...civilization has begun to wane when, in proportion to population, we must build more and more prisons... it is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top.

"And so, too, of religion; the superstitions which a superstitious people will add to it will be regarded by them as improvements. While, as the decline goes on, the return to barbarism, where it is not in itself regarded as an advance, will seem necessary to meet the exigencies of the times... ...In every civilized country pauperism, crime, insanity, and suicides are increasing..."

"...There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution. If this were accompanied by a definite idea of how relief is to be obtained, it would be a hopeful sign; but it is not. ...For what is going on is not a change in the form of religion, but the negation and destruction of the ideas from which religion springs. ...Christianity is not simply clearing itself of superstitions, but in the popular mind it is dying at the root... And nothing arises to take its place... Unless human nature has suddenly altered in what the universal history of the race shows to be its deepest characteristics, the mightiest action and reaction are thus preparing... such a state of thought preceded the French Revolution... The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward which will carry us back toward barbarism."

Those words might more appropriately have been written at the close of the twentieth century than the close of the nineteenth. The civilized world did take a leap upward, materially, during the twentieth century, but the plunge downward is also apparent, and barbarism is increasingly rearing its ugly head -- in our cities, our countryside, our schools, and, most of all, in our nation's capital.

Say what you will of the clergy and priesthood, and the crimes committed in the name of religion over the centuries, there is nonetheless a great deal of wisdom inherent in the tenants, doctrines, and dogma of most religions. In most cases, when religion is abandoned, the benefit of that wisdom is lost as well. Witness the United States of today, and the mayhem caused by the many cut adrift from the religious faith of their grandparents. Witness the United States government itself, out trying to wag the world (making it safe for the corporate gods and the worshipers of Mammon), with bombs and missiles!

With the repudiation of faith, and having found nothing of comparable value with which to replace it, barbarism reasserts itself, manifest in current society by drug use, senseless violence, killing, and all nature of other national malaise.

True, if one Subtracted the hypocrites from any given church congregation, the collection plate would be remarkably lighter -- but even hypocrites tend to behave most of the time, if for no other reason than their wish to appear devout to fellow churchmen. Deprived of their church, many hypocrites lose all "moral compass" and replace "dishonest faith" and passable good conduct with perhaps "more honest" criminal conduct. Which is better?

Though truly Christian societies have been rare, there could be nothing better than a truly Christian society -- one where the people actually practiced the teachings of Jesus. It would spell the end of human strife, at least in the civil context. The only thing men of such a society would have to contend with would be the Huns and Vandals at the gate, or the wrath of God, Himself, in its varied  and sundry forms. But, fortunately, God usually provides abundantly for His children. He has certainly provided well for the citizens of this "once Christian" nation. And this nation has the resources, but no longer the will, to repel the Huns and Vandals.

Speaking of Huns and Vandals, an Englishman saw them coming a century and a half ago...

"Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the Twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the Fifth -- with this difference... that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions." (English writer, historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in a letter to an American friend in 1857)

Who are our Huns and Vandals? Such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, and several organized minority organizations and pressure groups (not to mention our own president, the Supreme Court, and Congress), are certainly high on the suspect list.

As for the assault against religion, high-flying secular humanists (in the guise of academics and organizations like the ACLU), are in the vanguard. The greatest sin of many secular humanists, even though they themselves may not require "religious faith" to walk the straight and narrow (many actually do have good intentions), is their desire to see others deprived of their faith, in the belief that reason alone will suffice to keep society civil.

History, I believe, has proven that this belief is naive to the point of being criminal when put into practice as a national policy. Reason, combined with the necessary degree of wisdom, is always in short supply in any society, no matter how well endowed materially and economically. Even common sense isn't all that common. Secular education has not proven equal to early and continued religious education as the basis for the maintenance of a truly civil society. Far from it -- as is abundantly apparent in America today. We have too few "God fearing" individuals, and too many who don't even fear or respect the common law.

Voltaire, as a Frenchman, was a Catholic. He was the bane of the clergy, and the scandal of all Christendom. Had he lived in earlier times, he would have been lucky to escape being burned at the stake. Nonetheless he said, though he knew she (the Church) lied, he loved her still.

When someone, a few decades ago, cried "God is Dead," the echoes of the pronouncement reverberated enthusiastically all around the nation. Faith receded in our nation -- largely replaced by the "do it if it feels good" philosophy. But perhaps rumors of God's demise have been slightly exaggerated.

I came to agree with Voltaire's opinion that, "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him." A Godless society is a society adrift and a danger to itself. Yet our present society is rife with people who wish to expunge God from our national consciousness.

This partially enlightened heathen -- this long-time secular humanist -- finally came to a belated respect for religions (yes, even for organized religion, and even most fundamentalist churches), and to a very real and profound reverence for God. Perhaps I wasn't quite born again, but I sure did come to an awakening.

I saw the light when I finally figured out that without God, government and the Almighty State becomes the closest thing to an Heavenly Father we can hope for. That realization scared the hell out of me, and made me into a believer! Yes, one of those dangerous individuals referred to as "true believers."

"Ah, Ha!" the protagonist may exclaim. "Yours is not faith at all, but a contrived rationalization with a political purpose at its core!"

"No," I would counter, "I don't claim faith in God, merely the knowledge that He exists, and I'm damned glad He does. God does not require my faith, or anybody else's, to exist. As for political purposes, one could hardly be faulted for being forever thankful that his inalienable rights were bestowed by God, and not by Washington or United Nations bureaucrats. Heaven help us if we ever accept such a notion!"

You can argue the matter until the Mekong River and Lake Chad glaciers collide and cover the Indian subcontinent with ice crystals -- all to no avail. All such argument becomes academic. God simply Is. Say what you may, this heathen is a believer!

It was Socrates, I believe, who said something to the effect that, "Understanding begins with the defining of terms." Failure to adequately define terms precludes understanding and will put the ship of Truth on the rocks every time. As Ezra Pound once pointed out, "With the falsification of the word everything else is betrayed."

"God is Truth..." and Truth covers a lot of territory. Even some atheists believe in it to a limited degree! There's just a whole lot of Truth out there that nobody is capable of knowing, so some simply reject the lion's share of it. But you can be sure that it is there -- it couldn't be any other way. Could anybody rationally argue that the Universe, and everything beyond and within, is composed of lies and untruths? Is the Great Beyond a falsehood merely because it is beyond the limits of our comprehension?

Some years ago, a friend of mine, the son of a Baptist minister, who proudly proclaimed himself an atheist, asked whether or not I really believed in God. Knowing me to be a free thinker, he seemed to assume that I could not possibly believe in God.

"In order to answer that question," I said, "we shall first have to define the term and agree upon what God is."

Of course, a person cannot rationally define what he believes does not exist. He was slightly perplexed. So I posed a question.

"Is there anything at all that you do not know?" I asked.

He readily admitted that there was, indeed, quite a lot that he didn't know.

"Then, allow me," I said, "to define God as being comprised of everything that you do not know, combined with anything you may actually know. And yes, I believe in It."

My friend did a double-take on that, and it brought the discussion to a rather abrupt close. Of course, I doubt if I made a convert. He probably did not grasp my meaning, and he simply did not want to acknowledge that there was a God. Atheists are like that. I haven't seen much of him since, and wonder whether he ever gave what I said any thought at all.

Of course such a definition would hardly satisfy a fundamentalist nor make me a prophet among secular humanists, but it's good enough for argument among friends.

Our national existence, and the unalienable rights of all men, are predicated upon a belief in God. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." The "Creator" and "Divine Providence" are the words that clearly refer to God in our Declaration of Independence, and it is upon this presumption of the omnipotence of God that our national existence was firmly grounded. To deny the existence of God is to repudiate the very basis of and for that national existence.

Most atheists, quite frankly, are too proud to acknowledge the existence of God. They prefer to limit their acknowledged belief to Nature and Random Chance. Though there is nothing wrong with this on the surface, there is a deeper flaw. I believe it is not only an unwitting mistake on the part of American patriots, but a definite weakness. Politically, it is a deadly error, for the reason given above. Thus it is that I have adopted a certain degree of missionary zeal in urging all atheists, who would also fancy themselves American Sovereigns, to look up and see the light, lest our government evolve into the Almighty Seat of Authority to which all governments naturally aspire. Tyranny is in the genes of all governments, why encourage and facilitate it by denying Higher Authority?

"...Dogmatism begat Doubt, and men began to study the Bible, not to search out its wisdom and its truth, but its folly and its falsehood. They represent the recoil from one extreme to the other—from blind belief to unreasoning skepticism, from intellectual slavery to liberty degenerated into license. Instead of judging the Bible by God they judge God by the Bible, and finding by this ridiculous formula that he is little better than a brutal maniac, they reject him altogether and try to account for the creature without the Creator, to explain an effect without an efficient cause. If we could but muzzle the dogmatists Infidelity would quickly die.

"The essentials of the Christian religion do not depend upon the inerrancy of the Scriptures... Is it necessary that the Creator should violate his own laws to convince us that he does exist? ...When this great globe hangs motionless in space... and not till then, will I relinquish faith in an intelligent Architect and acknowledge lawless Force the only Deity." (William C. Brann, the Texas Iconoclast)

Mine is the Christianity of Thomas Jefferson. While Jefferson was a free thinker on religious matters, and an admitted Deist, he was also an avowed and devout Christian. For lack of a better term today, one may call this Jeffersonian Christianity. To the fundamentalist, of course, this is an impossible contradiction. But to discerning men of reason, it opens the portals of Truth, giving at least a glimpse of its unbounded dimensions -- and its acknowledgement was the only avenue to the possibility for lasting and just government of the type our founders sought to create.

"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me [as president], will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough too in their opinion." (a letter to Dr. Rush, 1800)

"I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others." (Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Rush, 1803).

"We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus." (Jefferson, to J. Fishback, 1809)

"I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus..." (Jefferson, to C. Thompson, 1816)

"Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian." (Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, 1822)

Necessity and politics often require peculiar and odd bedfellows. Because even today most American Christians are essentially of the fundamentalist variety, an inevitable conflict arises. While the fundamentalist cannot embrace the Jeffersonian model of Christianity, we of Jefferson's brand of Christian thought, in order to facilitate and preserve a Christian nation, must embrace fundamentalists as valuable allies against the de-Christianization of America. The alternative is to give free reign to Godlessness. All Christians must come together in a united front against the forces that would purge the nation of its Christian identity, and as our acknowledged national ethic, and God as our recognized Higher Authority.

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