“Everyone in America is Protestant - even the Catholics”

I was at a Thomas Pynchon literary conferrence in Antwerp when I heard Brian McHale read a paper on angels as represented in Pynchon's work (one of the passages he referred to can be read here). And he made a passing remark which I have never forgotten - "Everyone in America is Protestant - even the Catholics."

That little remark had a profound affect on me for it explained to me quite a number of things. I had been living in Korea at the time where Confucian thinking is omnipresent. Yet no one was really a "Confucian." And Confucius was not a religious leader; he was a politician and a reformer. So among the Korean population, whether they were practicing Buddhists, Christians, agnostics, or just incredibly superstitious, there was an identifiable Confucian underscore to all of their thoughts, actions, and motivations.

Mark

The same is true in mainstream American culture. We are saturated with Christian (or Protestant) ethics and ideas. And we are so saturated with the Bible that regular Christian concepts or stories do not even require much explanation. Most of us are familiar with

David and Goliath

The Garden of Eden

what a "Christ-figure" is

what a "Judas" is

crucifixion

In 1994, I came to a conscious decision in my life that I simply could not continue to be a Christian with any sense of integrity to myself. If I had continued, it would have been an act. It was a very troubling time for me for a long list of reasons. But one of the reasons was that I felt completely groundless; I felt as though I had been totally cut off from my past. It is only now - nearly a decade later - that I have been able to reconcile that yes, I still am the same person I always had been -- AND that there really was a lot of good that came out of that time in my development.

I believe in a global society. I believe in tolerance and respect. I believe that education about other people and other faiths is important. I believe firmly that it is better to talk in terms of "we" than in "us and them." At the same time, I cannot deny who I am and the culture I was raised in. And I still feel a sense of exhileration when I read certain passages of the Bible - ("For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God..." Romans 8:38-39). took me a while to figure out that I am allowed to like these things even if I don't believe them. They are beautiful and completely "like-worthy."

And I am persuaded that there is a massive contigency of people that want to belong to a spiritual community, have serious problems with the Christian church, and find other "spiritual" communities to be either too weird, too creepy, or too full of themselves to be taken seriously.

There is a case to be made for the Unitarian Universalist Church, but I still contend that they need to go further. In the admittedly small number of UU churches I have visited, the congregation appears to be a community of "angry ex-Christians." And I can absolutely attest to ex-Christians needing time to work through things, but this should not be the bond of the community.

(And furthermore, the Unitarian Churches that I have seen seem more like carbon copies of your basic Christian churches with a different script - the architecture, the organ, the hymnals, etc.)

We have a Bible that much of us seem to know. What other single text is out there that most Americans are THAT familiar with? Not even Shakespeare comes close. We are already unified by our relative familiarity with it; why not use it as a teaching text? Discuss it. Learn from it. Disagree with it when necessary - and become a closer community by disagreeing with it. Not to say that it is the ONLY text to use, but there are compelling reasons to use it.

There needs to be a new way to meet the spiritual needs of the people which is both positive and effective. At the moment, I don't feel this exists.

Mark