Whatever Happened to Christianity?

I wrote this several years ago but never posted it until now.  This essay provides background information for my "Christianity:  The Ultimate Heresy" article.

A friend recently lent me a book by Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism:  A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture.  Bishop Spong puts forth what I would consider a common sense viewpoint:  the Bible is not literally true; it is not the inerrant Word of God; it was actually written by flawed human beings.  Spong believes, for example, that the Epistles were written by Paul, not by God.  Makes sense to me.

Consider Spong’s predicament:  he is now a retired bishop, who spent his entire career in the service of the Episcopal Church.  Like many of us, he is too intelligent to believe that the Bible  is literally true.  But, because of his position in life, he feels obligated to not reject the Bible outright, so he ends up wrapping himself around the axle of his own justifications.  A more elegant solution, it seems to me, is to view the Bible, along with other ancient religious texts, as documents of historical interest that contain some valid spiritual advice, but which are of only marginal relevance today.  For our present age, in which we are witnessing the murder of our planet before our very eyes, we need to develop a modern spiritual message.  We need to enter the Silence on our own, and develop a contemporary version of the universal, timeless spiritual message, using modern language directed toward modern sensibilities.

The original followers of Jesus were cultural creatives, the spiritual seekers of that generation, who weren’t satisfied with the existing dogmas.  That’s why they were willing to listen to Jesus in the first place.  But, inevitably, times changed.  Christianity itself hardened into dogma, and became increasingly unable to fill its followers’ spiritual needs.  Turn the clock forward 2000 years from the time of Christ, and we find that very few cultural creatives now consider themselves to be Christian; in fact, almost without exception, cultural creatives are anything but Christian.  Whatever happened?

Let’s briefly look at a human characteristic that has made the blind acceptance of traditional religions possible:  the fact that most people are unable to develop new beliefs in adulthood.  Their minds harden up during adolescence.  Whatever they are programmed with as children stays with them for the rest of their lives.  I’ve seen no statistics to indicate what this percentage may be, but I would guess it to be the great majority of humans.  The minority, the people capable of thinking for themselves -- the ones who had been most likely to become Christians when the Church was new -- are now the ones most likely to reject the Christian dogma they are programmed with as children.  When they reject the dogma, they leave the Church.  A religion that loses its brightest believers each generation is in deep trouble.

According to Joseph Campbell in his epochal book, Creative Mythology, this process was already well underway by the 12^th Century.  Campbell says, “In Christian Europe, already in the twelfth century, beliefs no longer universally held were universally enforced.  The result was a dissociation of professed from actual existence and that consequent spiritual disaster which... is symbolized in the Waste Land theme:  a landscape of spiritual death, a world waiting, waiting... for the Desired Knight, who would restore its integrity to life and let stream again from infinite depths the lost, forgotten, living waters of the inexhaustible source...  For those... in whom the authorized signs no longer work... there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for ‘meaning.’ Coerced to the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living death; and if any considerable number of  the members of a civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have been passed.”

(I’ve been asked to translate the previous paragraph.  Here goes:  Already by the 12^th Century, people who knew better were forced to profess Christianity anyway.  They were forced to pretend that they believed in something they didn’t really believe in.  This destroyed their integrity, which caused them to become empty inside.  They were fakes.  They became husks of what they could have been, and ended up always searching for “something,” they knew not what.  When a critical mass of society is in this predicament, the society is in deep decline.) 

(This search for “meaning” describes not only my own personal quest, but the lives of millions of other former Christians:  the search for, as Campbell puts it, “the infinite depths of the living waters of the inexhaustible source” -- which, fortunately, turns out to be the center of our very existence.  It’s amazing how hard so many of us have had to search for something so close at hand!  It would be far better if children were told the truth in the first place.  How elegant it would be if adolescents didn’t have to rebel against what their parents taught them, and to waste so much of their adult lives searching for what they already have!) 

The process of dissociation from the Church greatly accelerated in the middle of the 19^th Century.  By that time, modern geology had showed that the Earth was actually billions of years old.  Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was in direct conflict with Biblical Creationism.  The more intelligent Christians could no longer accept the Biblical worldview of Adam and Eve, Heaven and Hell, Jesus dying on the cross to atone for our sins, and an all-loving God who will lovingly send us to eternal torment in Hell if we don’t profess the correct ideology.

Christianity has been bleeding away its most intelligent believers at a rapid rate for over 150 years now.

My wife  and I were raised as Christians – she as an Episcopalian, me as a Southern Baptist.  We were sent to church and Sunday school every week.  We were indoctrinated as well as the Church was able to indoctrinate us.  But we were too intelligent to stay.  As we reached adolescence, our response to Christian dogma was typical of cultural creatives like ourselves – as soon as we were old enough to take control of our own lives, we quietly left the church and never looked back.

Multiply this by the millions of our fellow Boomers who did the same thing, and you have a Church in serious trouble.  Not only is the Church losing great numbers of believers, it is losing the most intelligent and creative believers, who are now ex-believers.  One end of the Christian bell curve -- the intelligent end -- is continually being truncated.  Sure, many intelligent, spiritual Christians remain.  But taken as a whole, as the generations pass, the Christians who remain tend to be the least inquisitive and the most credulous members of society.

Add to this the recent phenomenon of politically active Christianity, and we have a serious problem on a planetary level.  When the political process is unduly influenced by small-minded and mean-spirited fundamentalists, then we as a civilization are unable to intelligently address the terrible problems – overpopulation, environmental destruction, climate catastrophe, peak oil, economic meltdown – now confronting us.  Retrograde politics will prove lethal to us and the entire planet. 

Bishop Spong is fighting a rear-guard, and ultimately impossible battle.  He’s trying to make the Bible relevant for the most intelligent Christians by pointing out that it need not be taken literally.  Christianity, in Spong’s view, is not about rigidly adhering to dogma, but about compassion and love, of becoming an “authentic human being.”  As Spong says in his book,  “The call of Christ to me is an eternal call to love, to live, and to be.  It is an invitation to work for those things that create life, to oppose those people, those attitudes, and those systems that distort life.  It is to become aware of the freeing, exhilarating, consciousness-raising experience of the Holy God.”  Sounds good to me.  I would never argue with such noble sentiments.

But one need not be a Christian to do this.  The Christian filter is strictly optional.  There are a multitude of ways to approach spirituality, and Christianity is but one.  Once a person admits the possibility that Christianity isn’t the “One True” religion, and that the Bible isn’t the inerrant “Word of God,” the whole edifice starts to crumble.  And as millions of ex-Christians have discovered, once we’re free from the confines of Christian Faith, we don’t miss it at all.

My Adventures Among the Christians

 I wrote this in 2010, about an incident that happened to me in 1985.

In 1985, in my ignorance, I performed an experiment upon myself.  What if I tried the combination of severe negativity with large quantities of marijuana?  Create an uncontrolled negative space on hyperdrive...  what a fabulous idea!  (Never let it be said that I have ever lived a mainstream life.)  Well, guess what?  It took me 25 years to figure this one out, but this is what happened:  I managed to manifest my Shadow in the spiritual realm.  This was for real.  I literally manifested it.  It was alive inside of me, and there was no way to escape it!  (Such are the risks of inadvertent experimentation when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.)  The Shadow was going to destroy me, of that I had no doubt.  I have never experienced such primal, existential fear in my life, and hopefully I will never need to again.

To make a long story short, God (or whatever you want to call it) took over my life for about 10 days around Easter 1985 (the time of spiritual resurrection, how symbolic).  I was but a speck of dust within the Cosmic Hurricane.  (It’s really not so bad if you surrender to it, and you have no choice but to surrender to it.)  Events soon deposited me at the home of a charismatic Christian woman who performed a spiritual healing on me.  She lived way back in the hills outside Truth or Consequences, NM – a wonderfully symbolic name for what was happening -- and was about to happen -- to me.  It was like a scene straight out of The Exorcist.  It took a couple of hours, and I was disconcertingly awake during the entire process.  I lay on her bed and twisted and moaned as the demon fought back.  From time to time my breath turned bad, so I was told afterwards.  She prayed and spoke in tongues and finally drove that demon out.

I stayed at her house to recuperate from my ordeal, and a few days later she took me to her “Full Gospel”  church in Truth or Consequences, where I received further spiritual healing from two deacons of the church.  (Full Gospel, by the way means they believe every word in the Bible, including such spiritual gifts as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy.)  One thing I remember from this healing was, I was pulled from a seated to an upright posture (without them touching me), and they had to catch me to keep me from falling forward onto my face.  The next evening a lay minister (one of the aforementioned deacons) from the church baptized me (full immersion) in an irrigation ditch next to the home of the lady who had healed me.

A couple of days after that, I received what they call “the baptism of the Holy Spirit”  -- the ability to speak in tongues, among other things.  During the "healing" segment of the Wednesday night prayer service, after the sermon, several church members, both men and women, gathered around me while I stood on the stage.  Raising one hand to Heaven while placing the other hand on my head or shoulders, they started speaking in tongues.  What followed was one of the most remarkable spiritual experiences of my life.  It felt like my head no longer had a top to it, and my spirit was shimmering upward towards Heaven.  When I was almost there, Heaven shimmered down to meet me.  At the exact moment when the two energies met, I started speaking in tongues.  In my personal file of incomprehensible experiences, this one had a folder all to itself.

“Yes,” Yoda would say, “The Force was strong with young Solbergwalker then.”

Throughout the ten days of being not in control of my life, I was fully conscious and aware.  Events definitely had their atypical aspects, but I was at all times fully aware of what was happening to me.  I didn’t “lose touch with reality.”  It was more like “gaining touch with reality.”  Events happened to me that have never happened before or since.  And frankly, once is plenty.   

The members of the Full Gospel church took me in and put me under their collective wing.   They gave me a lot of love and acceptance.  The funny thing was (and I knew this at the time), I was being helped by the very people I had held in contempt -- or at least, disapproval -- just a few days before.  Such a rich irony, no?  But such an obvious twist of fate, considering how I had set myself up for this particular lesson.  I was raised a Southern Baptist, was taken to church and Sunday school every Sunday, and stopped going as soon as I was old enough to insist upon following my own path.  Since the late 60s, I had considered myself an Earth pagan.  Christians... well, what did they know?  I had found a much better way, or so I thought.

So here I was -- mind blown yet hyper-aware, going to church picnics, hay rides, even going to Wednesday night services, for crying out loud.  Me?  Who had never set foot inside a church for almost 20 years?  You’ve got to be kidding!  Yet there I was, no doubt about it.  Me, Mr. Earth Pagan himself, going to church with a bunch of fricking Christians!  Talk about stirring the pot, this was more like dumping the pot into an erupting volcano and waiting for a bit of mixing action to occur.

The Christians gave me a lot of love and compassion, which I obviously needed at the time.  They let me play my guitar in the church band.  None of the boring organ music I grew up with as a kid, these people really knew how to rock out. 

Of course I had trouble with the ideology.  But I put my skepticism on the back burner for the moment.  I knew I was there to learn something, though I wasn’t sure what it was.  I wasn’t pretending to be some kind of sociologist, viewing the Christians dispassionately as if under a microscope.  I was more of a frazzled nerve ending with my senses wide open:  totally there, engaged, participating, drinking it all in.  It looked to me that what the Christians were doing spiritually was nothing less than shamanism, and I found this fascinating.  Shamanism in a sterile-seeming, fluorescent-lit church on a Wednesday evening, who would have thought it possible? 

This phase lasted for about 6 weeks until the ideology finally drove me out.  I couldn’t hack the whole Bible bit.  I remember one service, when the preacher strode around the stage, holding a Bible aloft in one hand and yelling angrily about his faith.  Why the anger, I wondered.   In my opinion, they were making the Bible into a false God.  God is a living presence, to be sure, but the Bible (or any other “holy book”) is just a bunch of words.  There was no room for my intellect and creativity within their belief system.  Everything had already been explained long ago. 

I started reading the Bible for the first time since Sunday School twenty years earlier.  I was reading it with the eyes of an adult and the understanding of an adult this time.  The spiritual passages just jumped off the page at me.  Christianity is actually a mystical religion!  But I could also see that there was a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat.  Obviously (at least to me) the Bible is a book about spiritual perfection produced by imperfect humans.  The Christians believed that every jot and tittle of the Bible was the inspired Word of God, and I simply could not accept this, since it was so obvious to me that the Bible was badly in need of a good editor.     

I had another issue with the Christians:  the contempt and anger they directed at anybody who didn’t share their ideology.  It looked to me that this anger serves the Devil, or whatever you wish to call this planetary manifestation of negativity.  If there is indeed a Satan who is ruler of this Earth -- as fundamentalists believe -- then it’s a no-brainer that Satan’s highest priority would be to co-opt the Christians.  And this, in my opinion, is exactly what has happened.  Just look at all the angry preachers preaching fear and hatred from their pulpits every week, and all the slick mega-church pastors preaching the Gospel of  Mammon.  Where does Jesus’ simple message of peace, love, and spiritual awareness fit into all this?

Christians of the fundamentalist stripe consider Secular Humanists (that is, scientists, atheists, and the non-religious in general) to be the enemy.  I think it’s a shame that Christians feel compelled to create human enemies.  But I would suggest, if Christians insist on having an enemy, that it be Spiritual Humanists.  Anything that leaves out Spirit, as Secular Humanism does, is a fatally flawed paradigm, and not to be taken seriously.  Secular humanism is much too limited.  Carl Sagan standing in awe under a canopy of stars is all well and good, but mere awe leaves our deeper spiritual needs untouched.  Secular humanism leaves out the unexplainable and in so doing, is leaving out the deepest levels of the human experience.  Spiritual humanism, on the other hand, has the potential to be a revolutionary new worldview that might overthrow the Christian paradigm, which has needed overthrowing for a good long while.  If there’s ever been a hot new trend on this planet, this is it -- it's the "spiritual awakening" people have been talking about for decades now.

I’m out of touch these days.  I’m not sure what’s going on with the spiritual non-Christians.  But I do know that back in 1985, only the fundamentalist Christians had a worldview that could begin to explain what had happened to me.  The secular humanists thought I had suffered a psychotic attack, which I knew to be a facile explanation.  The New Agers of that era were pretty lukewarm for the most part, compared to the Christians.  The Christians had an ideal of being “on fire for the Lord,” and many of them were.  They were fanatics who had the absolute Truth.  Skeptics are incapable of such intensity of belief.  The Christians brooked no doubt about anything, and thus had a laserlike focus, a one-pointed intent, that the wishy-washy “I believe in everything” New Agers lacked.  But a lot has happened in the past 25 years, and I think we might very well be seeing a non-Christian spiritual revival before long.  Things are about to get that desperate on this planet. 

Even though I disagree with them ideologically, and have thus become their “enemy” (these people don’t fool around), I will always have a warm place in my heart for those Christians who took me in and offered me succor in my hour of need.  In many respects they truly lived their Christian ideal, and I will always deeply respect them for that.

My ability to speak in tongues faded over time, since I never used it and never got “recharged” by fellow believers.  Sure, I could give a demonstration even today, but I would just be going through the motions, so why bother?  But I have been left with a permanent sense of wonder and humility about it all.  There is more under heaven and earth than I ever dreamed of.  It was very beneficial for me to get my face rubbed in this fact.  I like to say that "I'm a lot more humble than I would be otherwise."  Whenever I catch secular-types acting smug and making fun of Pentecostal Christians speaking in tongues, I just shrug.  What do they know? 

I moved right along, of course.  Life goes on.  I checked out other Christian churches in Las Cruces, and eventually settled for a couple of years into the Church of Religious Science, a New Age church that explained the Bible in the spiritual terms I had already come to understand.  (Maybe I’ll write about my “New Age Adventures” some day.)  In September 1986 I met Laura for the first time.  Even though I had never seen her before, I knew her instantly.  And thus began a new chapter in my life.