Use the Brain God Gave Us to Debate God
This week marks the beginning of the Christian penitential season of Lent. It's also the one-year anniversary of the release of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." The film called forth a massive outpouring from American religious communities, which descended, as usual, into a widespread national squabble about religion in the most irrational and pointless fashion.
Penitence means looking frankly at our bad habits, regretting them and resolving to do better. So let's take the opportunity to shape up by learning to express disagreements in a way that uplifts and informs -- by debating, formally and intelligently, about God.
"The Passion" revealed a serious theological fault line separating Jews from Christians. Prior to its release, groups led by the Anti-Defamation League used terrifying visions of medieval pogroms to demand that Gibson change not only his film but, implicitly, his very beliefs -- specifically, the belief that Jews had a hand in Jesus' death. Gibson refused to be intimidated and did not back down. No pogroms materialized, and the ADL never apologized for manipulating emotions.
Members of all the major religions have at times used similarly crude tactics to express disagreements. The Rev. Franklin Graham notoriously denounced Islam as a "very evil" religion. More recently, and tragically, the murder of a family of Egyptian Coptic Christians in New Jersey may have originated in interfaith name-calling on a popular Internet chat site, PalTalk.com. Law enforcement officials are investigating a possible threat that a family member, a PalTalk regular, received from a Muslim offended by online screaming matches about Islam.
Within religions, disputes also generate more noise than enlightenment. Protestant denominations are being torn apart by issues relating to the normalization of homosexual relationships, with emotional appeals too often taking the place of scriptural analysis.
The alternative to the dumbing-down of religious disputes is not "dialogue," that namby-pamby, relativistic activity for academics and other religion professionals in which all sides are assumed to be somehow right. Rather, I propose reviving the ancient tradition of the religious disputation.
In medieval Spain and France, Jews and Christians debated the divinity of Jesus and truth of Judaism before audiences of kings, priests and laymen of both religions. Often, the Jewish debaters were terrified -- held under house arrest by Christian authorities until the marathon-length debate was judged to be concluded, their arguments circumscribed by preset rules. But not always.
