There is no salvation for those outside the [Catholic] Church. I believe it.
"Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am.... She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it; she's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."
Wow. Mel Gibson said that. And as shocked as I am that he's willing to condemn his own wife to Hell, I'm even more shocked that someone can accept a belief he thinks is unfair because it was "a pronouncement from the chair." That's a sick kind of integrity.
Or take a picture from this Sunday's New York Times: two newly married lesbians kissing, surrounded by picketers with flame-covered signs reading "PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD."
Are they bigots, hatemongers? Assuredly. But to a boy brought up in the hugs, salvation and everyone-gets-a-cookie school of religion, the idea of someone saying "Prepare to meet thy God" with a straight face is bracing. Even, dare I say, countercultural.
I think it's a counterculture we can use. Americans are deathly afraid of pain and judgment in their religion, and the result is something horribly watered-down.
This year's "A Travel Guide to Heaven," by Anthony DeStefano, promises that "God is the king of all travel agents and heaven is his five-star resort." Bruce Wilkinson's bestselling "The Prayer of Jabez" guarantees material success in return for reciting the sentence-long title prayer every morning.
The Rev. Mark Stanger, a leading Episcopalian pastor in San Francisco had this to say after an advance screening of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: "Holding [the Crucifixion] up as somehow emblematic of something central to our belief--this preoccupation with both sin and blood sacrifice--is just absolutely primitive." Indeed.
Societies have a way of overcorrecting. And while Gibson and the placard-wavers have centuries of Christian bigotry to draw from, it is no coincidence that they have been so loud lately.
Their excesses are simply a reaction to the religion-as-break-between-soccer-practice-and-McDonald's preached by DeStefano, Wilkinson, Stanger and the like.
Mel may scare the bejeezus out of us, but we need him if we're going to take religion seriously.
Doing so means coming to terms with all of it, not just the parts that make us smile. Jesus, after all, could be a real bastard at times.
Take this, from the Gospel of Mark as translated by Reynolds Price: "Brother shall hand brother over to death and a father his child, children shall rise against parents and kill them and you'll be hated by everyone because of my name.... Woe to pregnant women and them suckling in those days. Pray for it not to happen in winter for those days shall be a trial such as has not come since the start of creation."
And sure, you could probably come back with 20 quotes in which Jesus is all sweetness and light. But that's exactly the point. Religion can be wonderful and uplifting; it can also be miserable. So can life. If you're getting entirely one or entirely the other, you're getting a poor excuse. A religion that fails to stare death in the eye--that fails to confront the pain in life--is worthless. As Frederick Douglass put it, you can't have rain without occasional thunder and lightning.
Honest religion can do great things for a society, especially a democracy. According to de Tocqueville, religion helps to "purify, control and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being human beings acquire in an age of equality."
It could be like that here at Duke, a seriousness that sees more in life than getting A's and getting off. But religion only works like that when it isn't itself an extension of the taste for well-being. That means it's up to us, in our own little society, to make a synthesis that gives Gibson and the placard-wavers their fair space.
They're by no means sufficient, but they are necessary.
It's been said that academic catfights are so brutal precisely because the stakes are so low. And maybe that's a good analogy for our problems at Duke. We've been brought up to excel at low-stakes poker, in resumes, hookups and 'Dillo.
When we draw a bad hand, we're furious. We sulk and shout and kick up the dust. And at the same time, the mere thought of the real world sends shivers down our spines. What to do?
Let's be honest; let's be serious.
Rob Goodman is a Trinity junior. His column appears every other Wednesday.
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