Melancholy, Reviews and Religious Adherents

The professor who lives in my neighborhood has moved on, leaving the pale pink pages of the Financial Times Arts & Weekend for scavenger readers to pillage. Of course, with the internet, one really doesn’t need to raid the front porches of neglectful neighbors who forgot to forward their publications. However, August has been unseasonably mild, and in such good weather, the only way to read the newspaper is the old-fashioned way, which is what my wife did last weekend in the Bartholdi flower garden as I took a refreshing, Olympics-inspired run on the National Mall.

Sunshine and good cheer aside, I have always had a bent towards melancholy, lurking behind my eyes like a heather-gray wraith, keeping more colorful emotions from exposure. Thus, this FT article caught my attention when I returned, huffing and puffing under the open blue.

I like the tongue and cheek opening of the article describing dissatisfaction driving our economy. Indeed, I have been impressed as I have watched the Olympic coverage this weekend how the (mostly excellent) commercials have created a since of inspiration while subtly hinting I won’t be happy until I bought their product (proud sponsors of the Olympic games). It’s a lesson we all should have learned in all those anti-climatic Christmas morning moments, five minutes after the biggest present has been open, this surprising whisper that owning a Lego castle is not the closing chord of a symphony, resolving dissonance and achieving, finally, satisfaction. Perhaps an appreciation of what we have above what we want (what we feel we “deserve”) could do much to end credit card debt. Of course, our economy would take a huge hit.

Of the books reviewed in the article, the one I would be most interested in reading would be Julian Baggini’s Complaint, because, to my great interest, he brings up religion. “Baggini’s arch-enemy is religion,” writes FT, “all the major variants of which teach us to accept our miserable fate as God’s will. Christianity, for example, tells us to turn the other cheek.” Baggini writes “Complaint is a secular humanist act. It is a resistance against the idea… that suffering is our divinely ordained lot and that we can do no more than put up with it piously.”

I’m curious if Baggini’s sense of theology or history is as bad as the review (unintentionally) makes it out to be. Indeed, it seems that a large complaint against religion, by it’s other “arch-enemies,” is that the faithful are trying to make changes to the system and to others, not only now, but throughout history, in varying degrees of severity (and, I would argue, morality). The Christian right dares to involve itself in politics. Al Qaeda and its cohorts have not been turning the other cheek. Some of the most effective positive social change in the past century have been religiously driven (Gandhi, King, Tutu).

The famous “turn the other cheek” passage, interestingly enough, is from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the very text which inspired King and Gandhi.  Dan preached a sermon on it a couple months ago. The Sermon on the Mount, he argues, teaches an effective, moral middle way between the weak, opiate religion Baggini and Marx criticize and the fanaticism of fundamentalists from the barking Brother Jed to the biting Osama Bin Laden.  To turn the other cheek is to neither back down, nor result to violence. It does not ignore reasons to complain. Martin Luther King understood this, and he stood up to racial inequality without resorting to violence, and he led others to do so. James understood this too, when he wrote, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Religion, when done well, is active and peaceful.

Among Christians, there will be a sense of melancholy and dissatisfaction. We possess an awareness of how the world is fallen and how it should be.  Our complaint is against the world, the flesh and the devil. Our hope is in Christ, who gave his life to overcome them. We work to reverse the effects of the fall, in ourselves, in the world’s systems and in each other. Theology of an inactive stoicism or violent fanaticism, whether from religious teachers or from critics, is bad theology, and disregards a rich history of Christian activism.