God’s Talent Pool

Over the last several months I’ve been traveling a lot, mainly in connection with the release of the book What Good Is God? I’ve also done radio interviews from my home in Colorado and written blogs for the likes of CNN.com and The Huffington Post.  Those last two assignments gave me a window into just how much hostility the topic of religion stirs up.

In answering the question, “What good is God?” I respond that I note positive benefits on three levels.  1) On an individual level, faith can help transform the lives of the needy, such as prostitutes, alcoholics, Dalits (Untouchables), and leprosy victims—the stories I tell in my book.  2) The community of faith also responds with comfort and practical help to those in need: both in natural disasters, such as an earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in New Orleans, and in human ones such as the mass murders at Virginia Tech and Mumbai.  3) Finally, the gospel spreads like yeast in bread, as Jesus predicted, affecting whole societies.  Google the websites that rate countries on freedom, prosperity, freedom from corruption, charity, or gender equality, and virtually all have in common a strong Christian heritage.  To take a striking example, what changed Sweden from a tribe of pillaging warriors—the fearsome Vikings—into the civil, generous society we see today?

I had no idea that such assertions would whack a hornet’s nest of protesters.  Hundreds of people must cruise the Internet daily looking for anyone who says something good about religion.  What an idiot I must be!  How can I possibly suggest that religion ever does any good!  Don’t I know about the Crusades and the Inquisition?  Religion does little but delude people, strip them of money, and further violence and ethnic division.

Here are a few samples of those comments:

–God makes waffle batter fluffy.  His only power.  Little known fact.

–Religion and a nickel will get you a cup of coffee.

–The question for evangelical ministers isn’t whether there is or isn’t a God or whether God matters. The question for their flock simply is; WHERE’S THE MONEY? SHOW ME THE MONEY!

–The guy looks like a wacko, like all evangelicals…

–if there is a god, he sucks.  no good god would allow some of the things going on around us to exist.  conseqently, if the there is no god we would have no one to blame.  assuming there is a god he doesn’t do any of us any good at all.

Some got more personal, such as the writer who posted about me, “He needs his neck broken, I think.  Too bad he didn’t die before writing such a pathetic book.  What a waste of paper and medical resources.”

Lest you think these sentiments represent a radical minority, consider that before a debate on “Is religion good or bad?” between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens in Toronto , the organizers commissioned a poll of 18,000 people in 23 countries.  Final results: 52 percent of those surveyed concluded that religion does more harm than good.  (The nation with the most appreciation for religion, 92 percent, was Saudi Arabia; the nation with the least appreciation for religion, ironically, was Sweden, at 19 percent.  Ah, what short memories have those Swedes.)

As I’ve often written, in my fundamentalist past I saw the toxic effects of religion gone bad.  And in my career as a journalist I’ve met my share of characters who seem more suitable for Worldwide Wrestling than for spiritual leadership.  In fact, the Huffington Post responses caught me off guard because I’m far more accustomed to hearing from Christian flame-throwers who judge me soft or heretical.

Yet I must acknowledge that some of the oddest characters I’ve met, the larger-than-life ones with a surplus of ego and a deficiency of sophistication, are those who have accomplished most in the work of God’s Kingdom: organizing relief work, feeding the hungry, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus.  That pattern simply replicates what the Bible shows so clearly: God used Jacob with his slippery ethics, David with his moral lapses, Jeremiah with his morosity, Saul of Tarsus with his abusive past, Peter with his bodacious failures.

Thinking back over the Christian personalities I’ve known, as well as those featured in both Old and New Testaments, I’ve come up with the following principle: God uses the talent pool available.

To adapt an analogy I heard recently, when the Pueblo, Colorado, Symphony Orchestra plays Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—don’t blame Beethoven.  On the other hand, the only way many Coloradans will ever hear Beethoven is through that struggling ensemble.  Unlike Christopher Hitchens and the defenders of non-religion, I can still hear strains of the Good News wherever I go in the world, which is why I keep writing about it.