MUST RELIGION BE OPPRESSIVE?

I talk with a lot of people these days — students as well as professors, children as well as parents, clergy as well as laymen, the rank and file as well as the elite — and I am disturbed by what I observe to be the influence of religion in people’s lives. Religion may still be religion when it only adds to the worry and frustration of life, but it can hardly be good religion. Communism qualifies as a religion by most definitions, but it is not known for the peace, justice and brotherhood it builds in the nations of the world. Roman Catholicism, Baptistism, and Church of Christism are surely religions, but they must be judged in the light of what difference they make in the lives of their adherents.

There may be a big difference, of course, between being religious and being a real Christian. Recent playwrights have shown us that people can even be bishops without being religious, much less without being dedicated Christians. And yet the Christian faith is religion in that it is an effort on man’s part to find peace and harmony between himself and that which he considers supreme in the universe. Or religion may be defined as a way of valuing, valuing most comprehensively. Folk around here get so excited over the Dallas Cowboys that it is sometimes dubbed as their religion. Not likely. While pro football may be highly valued as entertainment, it is hardly one of those things man would die for. Let the most rabid fan’s little boy be dying in the hospital and see how concerned he is over whether Stauback completes a bomb to Hayes. Life and death, heaven and earth, faith and morals, service and dedication are the things of religion, and it is here that man values intensively.

Or religion may be viewed simply as a love story between God and man. God loves! Man responds to that love! That is the essence of religion. We believe it is most completely and beautifully expressed in Christianity, or simply in Jesus. And yet the fact remains that it is the very ones who profess faith in the Christ who are burdened and oppressed by their religion. If one’s faith does not bring love, peace, and joy into his life, something is seriously wrong. It is not overstating the case to say that in many instances our people are mentally ill by religion. Parents have driven their children from them by an austerity that is not known in the homes of the most hardened infidels. Preachers come up with a “Messiah complex” that drives them to such ends that they neglect home and family in order to save the world. Church leaders who are adamant in their orthodoxy are impatient with children playing at their door.

It is a tragic judgment when physicians have to include in the treatment of so many of our people the prescription that “you had better stay away from that church until you get better.” Many folk simply haven’t the psychological energy to bear up under what we subject them to. Several of our sisters have recently related to me that their doctors find in their church life the cause of their difficulties. One of our most prominent and prolific writers told me that his doctor urged him to cut out his literary activity for awhile, which is mostly polemical and controversial. It is ironic that doctors advise other patients to become involved in all these activities that contribute to wholeness, whether painting or writing or fraternizing, while they do all they can to deliver our folk from us.

I recently sat with one of our preachers who told me the sad story of the separation between him and his father, whom he has not even seen in almost two decades. Both are ministers and fill pulpits across the country, and yet cannot even speak to one another. Religious or party loyalties have made them virtual enemies to each other. Several instances are there where a minister cannot or will not recognize his own brother in the flesh, who is a visiting minister, not even to the extent of calling on him to address the Father of us all, since he belongs to a different party in the church. I find case after case of families that are torn asunder by religious strife. Sisters are afraid to be sisterly, brothers afraid to be brotherly. Parents are sometimes reluctant to visit their own children because of party loyalties or because the son-in-law has either long hair or wild ideas about religion. We are a people really wound up tight and with lots of hangups. To let things hang loose and look to God to put it all together is an attitude still foreign to most of us.

It is the sisters that I feel sorry for most of all. They have me about ready to launch a Church of Christ women’s lib movement, and I know of no place where one is needed more than among us. How often are they consulted about the work of the congregation? How much are they encouraged to think, to grow, to be themselves, to criticize, or simply to be? Our girls are browbeaten into “marrying only into the Lord,” which means of course some Church of Christ man, and she often ends up with a pompous ass rather than a gentleman. Then under a maelstrom of “be in subjection,” “be quiet in church,” and “remember you are a woman,” she is doomed to a life of debilitating boredom. And she is subjected to all the sectarian tiddlewinks, and is often called on to stuff preachers at her table while they carry on a party pow-wow. This is all compounded for the poor sister who makes the mistake of marrying a preacher who is still a big baby, burdened as she is with the ordeal of having to raise him along with her other children.

I find that simple talk about Jesus is refreshing to such women. They hear a lot about doctrine, the truth, the Lord’s people, the loyal church, but little about the fruit of the Spirit and the precious promises of God. The right way to say things they know, and the party line they know, but who is Jesus? One sister recently told me of how one leading preacher among us subjected her to conversation that included suggestive jokes, lurid descriptions of sex problems of people in his congregation, and along with it was careless about where he puts his hands or tried to. I explained to her that it is impossible for one to behave that way if Jesus dwells in him through the holy Guest of heaven, that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ” simply rules out that kind of stuff. She looked at me as if I were speaking some strange doctrine. It was clear that she hadn’t heard much about Jesus and the indwelling Spirit from our preachers.

Top all this off with a legalism that demands that one toe the line or face the frowns of “the in-group” and you have a case of “mental illness in the making. A sister can hike all over town with covered dishes, drag her kids to church through snow and ice several times a week and browbeat them into being quiet, and listen to party prattle from the pulpit until she could scream, and then end up in the hospital with a mental breakdown. No wonder their doctors tell them to “stay away from that bunch down there for awhile.” But how can they “forsake the assembling of yourselves together”? Scared to live and afraid to die, our folk are led down the endless and hopeless path of loveless loyalty until they are well nigh ready for a straitjacket.

It was to such burdened souls that Jesus said, “Come to me all of you that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Rest in Jesus is a precious reality for us all now, and he never intended that his teaching be used to make life hard and cruel. He wants us to be joyous and happy. He came that we might have the abundant life, not frustration and oppression.

Our youth may jar us into realizing what we are doing to ourselves and others. They are up in arms with long hair and bare feet because they don’t want what has happened to their parents to happen to them. It isn’t so much that they’ve had it, but that they don’t want it. They see our littleness, our concern for the sins that matter less, our sham and hypocrisy. They’re checking our because we have “a form of religion but deny the power thereof.” It is in turning away from us and looking elsewhere that they see the real Jesus.

The other day I addressed a congregation of our people on the reality of the Christ in our lives today. I had somewhat to say about Rev. 3:20, where the Lord tells one of his congregations that he stands at the door and knocks. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” I talked about inviting Jesus into our hearts, our homes, our work. I spoke of the intimate relationship that should exist between the disciple and his Lord, that it can be just as real as any two friends sitting and sharing together.

A woman who has been in the church many years came by afterwards, and with tears on her cheeks confided in me that she had never really opened the door to let Jesus into her life as that scripture taught, however true she had been to the church. She wanted me to pray for her that it would all be real to her, just as Jesus said it would be when one opens the door.

Believe me, that is the answer to all this oppression that is upon us. If Paul could write from that cold cell, with chains rattling as he moved his hand, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice,” then we in our proud cathedrals can find a place for praise and joy.

Following one of my lessons to our folk on what the fruit of the Spirit means to us in terms of crucifying the flesh and its lusts, a long-haired, bearded youth came by to tell me that a tumor had been removed from his soul. I showed how Jesus delivers us from homosexual behavior, envy, partyism, hate, racism, and smallness of soul, and that he gives us joy, peace, love, forbearance. The fellow gave up his tumor so as to have room for Jesus.

He used the right word, tumor. We are tumor afflicted if ever a people were. The tumors of fear, frustration, anxiety. The tumors of hate, strife, partyism. The tumors of uncertainty, doubt, suspicion. It need not be. Believe me, it need not be. If religion remains an oppressive experience for many people of the world, a kind of opium that dulls the senses to reality, we may not be able to do much about that. But we can certainly see to it that it is not so with us. The same Jesus that knocked at the door of the Laodiceans also knocks at the door of our hearts. “If any man opens unto me . . .” he says. It doesn’t have to be the congregation as such, but you as an individual. To know the rest that Jesus gives, that is the answer to an oppressive religion. And thank God that so many of our own people are looking beyond party lines to the real Jesus who knows no party and is bound by no man’s creed. — the Editor