My friend's mother died a few weeks back. Not that it matters — since the end result is the same — but it was cancer that got her. Because the cost of nursing home care is so obscenely high and the quality of that care so disgracefully low in "pro-life" America, my friend brought her mom home and took care of her during her last weeks. It was a slow, agonizing slide into that good night, a terrible ending to an exemplary life.
Hers was the usual story for the milllions of unheralded pillars of this world: She was always there for everyone else, seldom weighing her own needs. She'd worked for years as music instructor at her church and was as much a part of the spiritual life of her community as the pastor. And yet, in her last days, she came to doubt her own religious convictions, which were not supplying the comfort she needed in these dark hours. She worried. She even proclaimed, "I must be a fake Christian," perhaps believing that "real" Christians don't feel pain or are somehow lifted aloft into the cloudy ether by angels, the sort of wish-fulfilling fantasy conjured up by those creepy televangelists and right-wing theocrats swollen with their own conceit and self-righteousness. Their Christianity is a bludgeon which they use to divide people. And their followers — the ones who are quick to remind the rest of us we're "going to Hell" for some minor, all-too-human transgression — remind me of those mobs with burning torches chanting for blood outside some hapless "heathen's" hovel in the Middle Ages.
As Mark Morford put it in his year-end wrapup, "I have watched the rise of the morally bankrupt Christian fundamentalist mind-set in America with equal parts disgust and sadness and bemusement, all overlaid with a general sense that just about everything these people do is pretty much the exact opposite of what Jesus had in mind." It is, in fact, my contention that those who most aggressively demonstrate their religious zeal are the ones most in doubt about their faith.
And it's this sort of doubt — isn't it? — coming from a fine person like my friend's mother, that scares all of us. After all, if this woman, who led a decent life and raised three accomplished daughters, could be visited with doubts, what about me, with my shopping cart tottering under the weight of regrets, black thoughts, anger and confusion? As Dylan put it, how will I get to heaven before they close the door?
It's my belief that my friend's mom is a "real" Christian. Her faith was certainly more "real" than the head architect of this war in Iraq, who claims that Jesus Christ "speaks to my heart." It's more "real" than this Christian Republican Congress — which Sen. Harry Reid, a God-fearing Christian himself, has called "the most corrupt in American history" — who cut off funds that would otherwise ease the lives of children and seniors in order to reward their corporate donors, more "real" than the grotesque fictions of the "Left Behind" series — frighteningly, one of the widest selling sagas in American history and accepted as "true" by many readers. It is certainly more "real" than a system that would consign its elderly to, as was reported by the AP recently, selling their painkillers to addicts for cash to augment their monthly $500 Social Security check. Yes, this happened in the heart of compassionate conservative country, Kentucky, where 40 seniors have been convicted of selling prescription drugs like OxyContin (Limbaugh's high of choice) since April.
If you are not visited by doubt in such a benighted world as ours, then your faith isn't real, is it? Whatever faith that is.
Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, recently gave a talk at the Library of Congress in which he expressed grave doubts about the affluent "elite" of America who live in gated communities, drink bottled water, use private health insurance and retire on private pensions, and don't give a hoot about crime, the environment, Social Security, or universal health care — in short, the matters that concern the other 80 percent of American society that apparently has no representation in Washington D.C. Diamond said, "The insulation of the elite is something that concerns me increasingly. When the elite is insulated against the problems of society, they are not invested personally in solving those problems... And in every human society in human history in which this has happened, collapse has followed."
My guess is that a large percentage of that "elite" are self-proclaimed Christians.
It's enough to give any "real" Christian some grave doubts.
