These are the words of a popular American spiritual in our hymnbook, written in 1900: "Guide my feet while I run this race. Guide my feet while I run this race. Guide my feet while I run this race, for I don't want to run this race in vain!" As human beings, we are all looking for lives that are meaningful and purposeful. We don't want to run this race in vain.
In our liberal religion, while we look for the purpose of our lives, we put great value in the freedom to choose our own paths while obeying some basic moral principles. This is not a new thought. It is even reflected in this passage from the New Testament, from Paul's letter to the Galatians: "You, my friends, were called to be free; only do not turn your freedom into license for your lower nature, but be servants to one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Galatians 5:13-14)
The Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wrote something in this same light: "We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth. An outward revelation is only possible and intelligible on the ground of conceptions and principles previously furnished by the soul. Here is our primitive teacher and light. Let us not disparage it. ... The only God whom our thoughts can rest on and our hearts can cling to, and our consciences can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls."
Conservative religions view human life differently. The message is that God is in charge and that there is only one way for us to be. In his book The Purpose Driven Life, evangelical preacher Rick Warren selects other Biblical passages to demonstrate this. In the chapter, "The Reason for Everything," he quotes a passage from the Letter to the Romans: "Everything comes from God alone. Everything lives by his power and everything is for his glory." And in the chapter, "Accepting Your Assignment," he quotes from the Gospel of John (out of context, I might add): "I glorified you on earth by completing down to the last detail what you assigned me to do." (John 17:4 - The Message translation) God, he suggests, seems to have complete plans for us, even down to the last detail!
Living in a country that seems to have swung towards the Religious Right, it's always been perplexing to me as a religious liberal to understand the attraction. What is it about the evangelical and fundamentalist movements that draw people in? It's a mystery.
A few months ago when I learned about the Reverend Rick Warren, the evangelical minister at Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, California, and a popular author. Do you remember the story last March about Ashley Smith? She was the young woman held hostage in her apartment in Duluth, Georgia by Brian Nichols, a brutal man who had just killed four people. Ashley supposedly subdued her captor by reading him a chapter of The Purpose Driven Life. This is the best selling book by Rev. Warren. The books cover says it sold over 20 million copies. It has been translated into 56 languages. It offers readers a 40-day personal spiritual journey, and presents what Warren says are the five Biblical purposes of life on Earth. These purposes are very God oriented:
Many churches, corporations and sports teams have run workshops based on this book for their members and employees.
I wondered what it was about this book that sold millions. And what was so compelling that one chapter caused Brian Nichols to repent his life of crime and surrender to authorities. Immediately after this intriguing news story broke, the sales of the book, already on the New York Times best seller list, shot through the roof. Apparently, other people must have been curious about the book, too.
I eventually added to the total number of book sales, although I bought the book second hand. A footnote to the hostage story is that Ashley Smith admitted in her written memoirs that she had also pacified Brian with crystal methamphetamine. So maybe it wasn't Rick Warren's persuasive words after all! Still, the book is an American and worldwide phenomenon.
On reading The Purpose Driven Life, including the chapter that Ashley read to Brian, I was struck by how much the book sounds a lot like pop psychology and self-help books. It is easily digest-able in clear, short chapters. If you read a chapter a day, maybe in 40 short days you will find your purpose in life! Who wouldn't want that?
However, this is not any old self-help book. It is an evangelical Christian self-help book. To begin with Warren is clearly a Trinitarian Christian and uses the name Jesus Christ interchangeably with God and the Holy Spirit. This is pretty standard for all branches of Christianity. However, Warren goes beyond that and falls into the evangelical or "born-again" Christian camp, but not the strictly fundamentalist camp.
To those of us who lump together the evangelicals and the fundamentalists, they're not the same thing and I'd like to take this moment to make the distinctions clear. Fredric Muir in his book Heretics' Faith; Vocabulary for Religious Liberals gives us a handy definition of fundamentalism:
"[T]here are important distinctions to be made within conservative Protestantism. The largest group is born again Christians, a term that we've heard many times. Born-again Christians comprise the largest number of conservative Christians. Subsets then follow. The first subset is evangelicals, who are born-again and believe in the authority of scripture, as well as in a direct experience with God; they also believe in sharing the Gospel (evangelism). The next subset is fundamentalists who are born-again evangelicals who additionally believe in the inerrancy of scripture, that is, the literal translation of biblical texts. To be a religious fundamentalist means to be anti-modern, it means being opposed to what the modern world not symbolizes, but what it actually is."i
I'd place Rick Warren among the born-again evangelicals, but not among the fundamentalists. He isn't anti-modern and he freely interprets biblical texts to appeal to a more mainstream audience.
In The Purpose Driven Life, Warren's message is simple: Believe in and trust God. Only God gives you purpose and life without purpose is meaningless. Therefore life without God is meaningless. So if you don't believe in God (meaning specifically the Christian God), your life is hopeless and you are doomed to an eternity without God. Words of an evangelical, spreading the Good News of the gospel.
His view of God the Father is very traditional-a strict but loving Father with absolute control. God plans everything about you, Warren says. He is involved with every aspect of your life and even "smiles" when you do something to please him. God's purpose for us is to praise him and glorify him through prayer, though exercising our God-given gifts and talents and by how we live our lives... ideally imitating Christ. In doing this we will find joy. Ultimately, however, the purpose of life is not to be fulfilled by finding pleasure in the here and now, but to live so that we will be judged well by God at our death and spend an eternity in heaven. More standard evangelical stuff, I think.
Now heaven is something most religious liberals haven't talked about for decades. Heaven or any form of afterlife is to most of us is an unknown or a matter of speculation. And how to "get there" -- if does heaven exists -- is even more uncertain. We focus mainly on the here and now, how we live our lives on this Earth. We seek to find purpose and meaning, joy and fulfillment now, since the afterlife is all too uncertain.
Rev. Warren preaches a kind of modified pre-destination, although this wasn't clear to me. God's "plan" or mission for us is decided well before we are born. So is our genetic makeup, our talents and dispositions. Yet it's undecided whether we will follow this divine plan, the one made especially for each one of us. Warren is fond of sayings like "God has a purpose for your life." -- "Trust in God's purpose for you" -- "Totally surrender to God," and "Be obedient to God's commandments."
How many of us believe in pre-destination... that we each have a divine plan determined before our birth? I don't...and I bet you don't believe in it either. We tend to agree with Paul in the Letter to the Galatians that we're fated to be free. Who we are and where we are is also largely a matter of chance. It's purely by chance what we inherit from our parents. It's purely by chance that we were born into a certain class or neighborhood or country. It's a roll of the dice.
Then as we grow into adolescence and adulthood, most of us in this country are lucky enough and free enough to be able to make some important choices. We can alter the circumstances of our lives for better or worse. We recognize that our choices may be limited by race, gender, sexual orientation or other minority status. But as human beings, we value our freedom to choose, especially our freedom to search for meaning and purpose in life. If we are fortunate, we have several good possibilities. And the creative process allows us to shape these possibilities into reality as our gifts, resources and inspiration allow.
The Reverend A. Powell Davies was a much admired Unitarian minister of the All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the last century. Davies said, "Life is a chance to grow a soul." To me this means that we have spiritual freedom. This means that there's more than one way to we express our love and commitment to life. Its means as we grow and mature, we have the chance to grow in our appreciation of the beauty and the wonder of all of existence. It means that we may grow in our ability to be compassionate and to care for each other and the natural world. Life is a chance to grow a soul, to grow in wisdom and in purpose.
Most religious liberals see beyond a mere personal or domestic purpose in life. We expand our vision to the greater social good. James Luther Adams, a well-known UU minister and professor of social ethics, spoke a lot about life's "vocation." We can compare this for the moment to Warren's concept of life's purpose. As Adams wrote, "To speak of 'human vocation' is to emphasize the need to have a fundamental purpose in life-a 'good work' to which your life is given. Vocation is more than a personal-ethical concept. Because social institutions mediate and shape our human vocations, it is also a social-ethical concept. Your vocation is fulfilled through skills and labors that serve the purpose of the human community. Work as gainful employment is an important part of our lives, but it is only a part. Life itself is the whole."ii
If we have a sense of our life's vocation, we dignify what we do in any and all areas of our lives which contribute to a greater and common good. This may be doctoring to the sick, creating great works of paintings, taking care of children in a day care center, or registering people to vote. Specific religious beliefs are beside the point. It's our attitude toward our labors, paid or volunteer, which matter.
Yet according to Rick Warren's more traditional view, only believing Christians have a real purpose to their lives. Either you're in or you're out, depending on your acceptance of Christ as your savior. This rather contradicts what he said previously, that God has a plan for us all. So Warren seems a little undecided here. Is it belief in Jesus Christ that gives purpose ... and which leads to salvation? Or is it being guided by God and living a purposeful life that counts? And yet in another place he writes, "Christianity is not a religion or a philosophy, but a relationship and a lifestyle. The core of that lifestyle is thinking of others, as Jesus did, instead of ourselves."iii A commendable sentiment, but I think Warren is inconsistent in his view of what's required for salvation.
It's also true (thankfully, I say) that Warren doesn't adhere to the strictly Calvinist line of sin, repentance and salvation by faith alone, but takes a kind of toned-down middle of the road approach.
Warren's traditional God is all-powerful, which most of religious liberals reject. If God is omnipotent, we ask why does evil happen? Would God have Brian Nichols murder four people on purpose just so he could meet Ashley Smith and be "saved?" On the other hand, at least Rick Warren's God is also a loving God, more like the "warm-fuzzy" God of mainstream Christianity. He is not the harsh, hell-and-damnation God of the fundamentalist preachers, striking fear in the hearts of little children. Though I take any human image of God metaphorically, I think we can't object too strenuously to Warren's loving God when you consider the alternatives. For instance, think of Pat Robertson's God, who would cause Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to suffer a massive stroke because he gave up a part of the Promised Land. Pretty extreme, I know.
So Warren's more moderate evangelical Christianity has gotten him into more trouble with the real fundamentalists. They say he's too soft on sin and the need for repentance. And they condemn his views as "humanist" (meaning it's people-centered, not God-centered) although he claims otherwise. They also condemn the other unconventional things he's written and done, including his aggressive marketing. I read some of the fundamentalists' nasty, damning on-line reviews yesterday, which made me a little more sympathetic toward him!
Like other evangelicals, Warren believes in the authority of Scripture and quotes passages even more than TV evangelist Robert Schuller. To Warren we learn most of what God (and Jesus) wants from us by reading the Bible and less about God through our direct experience. If a Biblical commandment contradicts common sense, he says don't question it, but go against your common sense and simply obey. For God, our heavenly Father, is wiser and knows what's best for us. I cringe when I hear this - and I think you do, too since we believe in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We believe in the truth of our own heads and hearts. As Channing wrote, "The only God whom our thoughts can rest on and our hearts can cling to, and our consciences can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls."
One other problem for fundamentalists, who takes the Bible literally, is that Warren draws from many different translations of the Bible (I counted 15), including some "modern" ones which paraphrase the original texts and give them "new" meanings. He picks and chooses among passages to serve his purpose. I find that quite creative, but this has gotten him into more trouble with the fundamentalists. They accuse him of being non-Scriptural and not true to the gospel.
I must admit there are parts of Warren's message that were appealing, even to a skeptic like me. I agree that life needs purpose and meaning. None of us "want to run this race in vain." His book is seductive, filled with a lot of feel-good concepts, like "God knows and loves you personally" and "God wants to be your best friend." I can understand how many people, especially the lonely, would need to hear this. And who isn't lonely at some time or other? The 40 chapters of The Purpose Driven Life's are chock full of inspiring passages from the Bible and quotes from some famous people (even an atheist like Bertrand Russell... a curious thing I thought.) The book is also filled with phrases from pop psychology, things you could hardly disagree with, like "The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act."iv
In all, I found The Purpose Driven Life interesting, but difficult to read. Not because the language wasn't clear and simple, but because I disagreed with so much of it: its mixture of platitudes and its somewhat confusing, but primarily conservative views of the nature of God and the nature of human freedom. On the other hand, I can see why it has such mass appeal, since it offers the promise of helping us find our God-given purpose in life. I am grateful for Unitarian Universalism for offering the world an alternative message, a much broader, hopeful and mature message. The challenge is for all of us to bring that message of the Faith of the Free to the world.
Fredric Muir writes, "The Faith of the Free is not concerned with falling, but with living-with living each day, with getting up every morning and walking whatever path it is we have chosen as our way of being bound to life. For me, for us, the Free Faith as belief, as works, as trust is a glorious, vibrant, and meaningful path to living religiously. Let us sing, dance, and share its melodies as we weave the web of life."v
i Fredric John Muir, Heretics' Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals (no publisher listed, 2001), 85.
ii Adams as quoted by George Kimmich Beach, If Yes Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1995), 81.