By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
I know they're out there.
I forget, often, too often, just how many there are but I know they exist in much larger numbers than you might be led to believe by current spiritually embarrassing headlines and I know they are just as, if not more, passionate and healthy and deeply felt in their beliefs than the overpublicized sects of angry and frothing "true believers" screeching into the megaphone of the culture, the ones yanking BushCo's chain and pounding their Bibles and hiding their warped porn fetishes and forcing their way into our lives and laws and bedrooms right now.
They are the decent Christians. They are the calm, morally progressive, compassionate, open-hearted Jesus-loving folk who don't really give a damn for archaic church dogma or pious noise or sanctimonious candlelight vigils, for repressing women or bashing gays or slamming Islam and. in fact, turned to Christianity precisely because they believe these things are abhorrent and wrong and, well, anti-Christian.
They are Episcopalians, for example, that most nimble and intelligent and groundbreaking of Christian churches, a rather revolutionary sect that recently elected its first openly gay bishop and supports gay marriage and dares to ordain women as priests.
And they're still deeply involved in amazing charity work, AIDS and orphanages and Africa and stuff that makes you humble and amazed and they have not, due to this seemingly blasphemous dichotomy and much to the shock of their homophobic conservative brethren, been struck by lightning or doomed to hell for all eternity -- or, rather, if they have, they'll go down happy and intelligent and singing and believing in Jesus anyway, all the way down.
They are the legions of recovering Catholics, people for whom the radiant and positive aspects of this most intense of faiths still hold powerful sway but who just can't abide by the ridiculous and outdated and often homophobic and sexist doctrines hurled forth like so much flaccid manna from the unhappy red-robed automatons of Vatican City.
They are the moderate Christians, the ones who do not support illegal wars or the killing of all doctors who perform abortions and who are all for social justice and who think Bush is a bit of an imbecile, and even if they find themselves for some unfortunate reason in support of the Republican cause overall, they still think it's rather abhorrent that the man dares invoke God to support his lie-ridden wars and the smashing down of women's rights and gay rights and abuse of the environment et al.
How do I know they're out there? Because I hear from them all the time, especially when I get carried away and lump them all together in my often overly harsh criticisms of the faith and my utter lack of patience for its more rabid and small-minded and hateful practitioners and its more violently self-righteous elements, stuff so completely antithetical to what true Christianity, what true faith, true spiritual connection, is all about, it would make Jesus wince.
And these Christians -- let us call them "normal" or perhaps "natural" or even "organic" (i.e.;, devoid of poisons or preservatives or Sanctimonious Growth Hormones) -- they are filling all manner of funky or progressive (or Unitarian) churches across many a large city in America, right now.
They are streaming into huge beautiful nonjudgmental buildings all over San Francisco and Chicago and New York and Boston, etc., places that welcome gays and oddballs and spiritual nomads and pantheists and anyone else who might be feeling a divine pull, and please leave your Jesus extremism at the door and let's talk about Sufism.
And they discuss stuff that sounds much closer to mystical or cosmological or otherwise paganistic energy work than the narrow, spittle-filled believe-in-Jesus-or-burn-in-hell angles of approach you keep hearing about and that tend to slash at your heart and insult your soul.
They're not radical. They're not rabid. They're not full of venom and Rapture and they read books other than the childish Left Behind series and they don't loathe sex or despise other religions or hate their genitalia like Tom DeLay loathes congressional law, and they know full well that Mel Gibson is a rather insane misogynistic blood fetishist who knowingly swiped an illiterate 18th-century stigmatic nun's bizarre and ultraviolent hallucination to use as some sort of dangerous literal truth. Amen.
They are, in short, those who understand the deep irony that, when it comes to religion, the ones who scream and stomp and whine the loudest are often the ones who understand their faith the least.
But there is a reason these calm and moderate and private Christians don't make the news, why, despite their enormous numbers, they are not setting the cultural agenda like some sort of sanctimonious meth-addled monkey (hi, Sen. Santorum!) right now.
It's because they are not organized. They are not a club. They do not have a unified attack agenda. They do not have pamphlets or advertising budgets or congressional lobbyists or the complaint line of every TV network and program except Fox News and "The 700 Club" on speed dial.
They do not call themselves the Parent's Television Council or the Right to Life Marauders or the Family Values Coalition or some other dumbly misleading and patently bogus moniker. They are not attempting to cram already gutted public school textbooks with imbecilic "Intelligent Design" BS, nor are they writing uptight letters to the FCC en masse or ranting about nipples or dildos or low-cut jeans on teenage girls while at the same exact moment repressing their own gay fantasies and kiddie-porn collections.
They understand that our children are at much higher risk of moral and spiritual damage from, say, decimated school budgets and violent presidential warmongering and noxious Kraft Lunchables than they could ever be from Janet Jackson or Abercrombie and Fitch or healthy teen sex.
Most spiritually healthy Christians are simply living their lives, praying deeply, carefully, privately, seeing the divine all around them and choosing Jesus' teachings as the best moral compass, especially the parts about love and healing and empathy and acceptance and turning the other cheek, about how God is not some sneering angry bearded puppeteer but rather a radiant energy force inside everyone and every living thing, always, just waiting for you to tap into it. You know, just like every other religion in existence.
They are the ones who understand that Jesus was, quite simply, one hell of a powerful teacher, and healer, and mystic, and visionary, a pacifist, a liberal, a feminist, the ultimate outsider, one of the finest examples in all of history of how to radiate pure love and compassion and divine interconnection and Lord knows we could all use more of that.
The bad news is, the rabid evangelical set is growing, this cluster of lost and weirdly undereducated people for whom the Bible is literal word-for-word verbatim truth and the Rapture is imminent and the Earth is just a disposable lump and the flesh is a disgusting afterthought and should be ignored and loathed and made really really fat and sexless and sad. And, to my mind, these people deserve all the fiery verbiage and raw satire and intelligent ideological counterforce I can possibly lob their way.
But. Just as there are moderate and wonderfully articulate pro-choice Republicans and just as there are moderate and fiscally conservative liberals, so there are millions of Christians who don't adhere in the slightest to the narrow and spiritually numb worldview now being touted by the BushCo Right. And if we're going to get anywhere with this increasingly desperate and fractured American social experiment, we need to remember that.
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