By Jean Fitzpatrick
“Say goodbye to the ‘consumer society,'” writes the blogger James Howard Kunstler. “We’re done with that. No more fast money and no more credit. The next stop is ‘yard-sale nation,’ in which all the plastic crapola accumulated over the past fifty years is sorted out for residual value and, if still working, sold for a fraction of its original sticker price. This includes everything from Humvees to Hello Kitty charm bracelets.”
Speaking of crapola, nobody does it quite like Christians. It’s amazing how much Christian kitsch you can find all over the Net: the With Him All Things Are Possible plastic travel mugs, the tubs of chocolate peanut clusters and peppermint patties with Bible verses printed on the wrappers, the Names of Jesus bookends made of resin “with an Old World Stone Appearance.”
This explosion of religious tschochkes says a lot about the kind of faith that’s spread across this country in recent years. God’s turned into a mascot for the home team to cling to, a promiser of goodies to those who hold up John 3:16 signs at ballgames. It’s as though faith itself has become a consumer item, swallowed whole and more soothing than a tryptophan-loaded bedtime snack. Milk, not solid food. Maybe it’s easy to think of God this way when material blessings are abundant. But as the layoffs mount up, I’m thinking that faiths that present God as an easy answer are going to be in trouble, as people recognize that they’ve been getting nothing but, well, crapola.
Over the past eight years I’ve been feeling like a broken record, telling my secular friends that for many religious people, faith isn’t simplistic or junky. Unlike Christian crapola, great religious art and literature through the centuries — from the cave paintings to Chartres to the Sistine Chapel — has opened our eyes to possibilities greater than ourselves, and portrayed our human struggles as a journey. To immerse ourselves in a life of faith is to be in the daily business of embracing challenge, looking pain and injustice in the face, recognizing that religion raises at least as many questions as it answers. “This book will make a traveler of thee,” wrote Bunyan in his “Author’s Apology” to The Pilgrim’s Progress.
And now, at long last we’re hearing reflections about that complex kind of faith from the White House. “I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others,” President Obama said in one interview. “….I think that religion at its best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.”
Amen. We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog, as Maureen Dowd recently observed, and it feels good. Today more than ever, making sense of the world demands all the heart and mind we can muster, because life is richer and God is greater than we finite beings can begin to imagine.
Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.