by Tom Howarth
If a person existed on a steady diet of hamburgers and was suddenly switched to a diet of only fish, the chances are pretty good that he or she would not like it very much. Fish, like other things, can be an acquired taste. Similarly, churches, by and large, are not providing us with a diet of true Christianity but one homogenized with the values of our culture so as to be more palatable to us.
The Salvadoran liberation theologian, Fr. Jon Sobrino, SJ, asks how a society that professes to love God, say prayers and practice a sacramental faith, can go so wrong as to create a culture where the last indeed shall be … last. He concludes that there are gods other than the one true God. These other gods might not be true gods, but they are powerful gods, influential and jealous. They go by various names: the god of greed, domination, national security, money, power, privilege, economic security.
How do we displace the one true God, whom we profess to adore, with a false god we actually worship? I think we do it by segmenting God, raising God up to an exalted place beyond the reach of our other gods so they won’t be bothered and can flourish unimpeded.
Where I come from in New England, we have many tenement houses, which shelter three families, one on each of the three floors. Similarly, many of us worship a ‘tenement god’ who lives quietly on the third floor of our lives. On the first and second floors, we do our business, enjoy our recreation, our sex, our eating, our various activities, comfortably separated from the god upstairs.
It has been my experience that most churches don’t preach or practice an integrated faith but a segmented faith. That’s how we can have people who say they make choices by asking, “What would Jesus do?” also supporting and advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest–something that could never find support in anything Jesus ever said or did.
We love our god on the third floor. He is a god of goodness and blessing. And he is a god who knows his place. We don’t want a God who asks us what our sex lives–or our recreation or our money–have to say about our belief in God. But to be a friend of Jesus is to let God into our life. All of it.
Tom Howarth, long-time participant in Friends of Jesus Church, is director of the Father McKenna Center, which provides emergency food, shelter and other services through St. Aloysius parish in Washington, DC.
