Karam Ram on Beyond Religion
The famous atheist Richard Dawkins said that many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense, but September 11th changed all of that. The people who attacked the Twin Towers were men of religion. Religion is often a cause of suspicion, distrust and conflict because religious people don't always ask critical questions about their faith and can confuse religion and politics and culture together. What may just be cultural becomes invested with religious significance. So is organized religion about God, or is it really about maintaining community and identity? Can being Christadelphian become more important than actually being children of God?
Jesus's parable of the Pharisee and the publican illustrates the “us and them” attitude and how we can simplistically divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys. Paul says, “don't be wise in your own conceits” but that's exactly what the Pharisees does in enumerating his good deeds. He's saying “I am deserving of God's favor because I do all these things,” and in contrast, all the publican can say is “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
Groupthink is a very deeply ingrained human tendency. Societies and communities maintain cohesion through groupthink. Religious communities are susceptible to it when they prioritize their own identity, their privilege at all costs: “We are special. We have the truth, and because we have the truth, we are in God's favor.” The Pharisee in the parable is a very powerful example (as is the case of Al Qaeda and ISIS) of how groupthink enables certain views of the world and attitudes to become normalized, but to anyone outside that group those attitudes are just bizarre or immoral. Jesus’s parable is especially subversive because the Pharisees represented the popular ideas of piety within Judaism but in this case it isn't the religious man who is right with God, it's the sinner.
In Jesus's time groupthink was probably much more powerful because of the Roman occupation. The foundational event for Israel was the Exodus from Egypt, so they could probably more justifiably mobilize religion in favor of their aspirations for liberation. They tried to draw in Jesus by asking whether it was appropriate to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus doesn't criticize the Romans or Herod or Pilot, but Jesus was very critical of people who represented popular ideas of religious piety. Jesus is trying to bring the Jews back into an authentic relationship with God rather than one that was just based on formalism or rituals.
If religion is just about how we appear to other people, then it's only ever going to be superficial. Jesus makes the point that the Pharisees cleaned the outside of the platter but not the inside. There is obsession with respectability, with fitting in with the group, which results in hypocrisy. Jesus said in John's gospel, “I know you don't have the love of God in you. You receive honor one from another, how can you receive the honor that comes from God?” They were the children of those who murdered the prophets. They could celebrate the righteous and the prophets in death, but they couldn't abide them in real life.
These are really penetrating and cutting criticisms of the way religion is co-opted and abused. We could apply it to our own community. We may not be the worst offenders – I don't know any Christadelphians who have flown airplanes into the sides of buildings! – but these words of Jesus have a lot to say about the state of religion today and the way that religion is mobilized as part of identity politics.
In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says “I haven't come to destroy the Law and the prophets, but I've come to fulfill” because he was aware that the people who were listening to him wouldn't actually recognize what he was saying. For them, religion was all that the Pharisees represented, temples, rituals, externals. Jesus was aware that his message stressing a direct relationship with God without all of this other stuff would appear to be unrecognizable. It was beyond their concept of religion because it was about a personal relationship with the Father.
That idea of being the children of God should be important to us in a very personal and powerful way. Christ made this very clear through his personal communion with the Father. There's an incident in Matthew's gospel where the Jews ask Peter “does your master pay the tax” and Jesus said to Peter “what do you think? of whom do the Kings of the earth take tribute from strangers or from children?” The implication of the question is, “why are we having to pay this? Are we strangers from God or are we his children?” The whole point of Jesus's ministry is to bring us into a real, authentic relationship with God.
For the Jews of Jesus's day, the one thing that represented God more than anything else was the temple. The temple was impersonal and vast, but that suited everyone because it kept God at a distance. Our challenge is to be up close and personal with God. That's what Jesus came to do, to break down that wall of partition between us, to tear the veil of the temple. We need to cultivate hearts and minds that are less concerned with the appearance of respectability or groupthink, and more sensitive to the real presence of God in our lives.
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