John Green is a novelist and human rights activist that I have deep respect for. He also happens to be a Christian, an Episcopalian to be exact. Christianity in America has been distorted and weaponized quite largely, so John felt like he should talk about some of his religious beliefs in a recent video. I transcribed it and modified some phrasing for readability, and I hop you enjoy it!
If you’re interested, discussion on this is taking place here and here.
Good morning, Hank. Its Tuesday.
Over on the Nerd Fighter subreddit, someone was like, “Does John ever talk about his religious faith?” And the answer is “sometimes, sort of”, but I thought that today I would answer the questions I get most often about religion.
I certainly understand why people are curious, but it’s important to remember that while I consider myself a Christian, Christianity – like Islam or Buddhism or many other world religious traditions – is tremendously diverse, and there are ways in which my Christianity is perhaps unorthodox or even heretical to some people, but it lines up well enough with my particular denomination – Episcopalianism – that I’m able to walk into church without like catching on fire.
1. Do you believe in God?
Yes.
Now, I have no way of knowing whether God is like “really real” or an idea constructed by humans, but I feel God’s love and presence.
I have to confess, I’m not really concerned about questions of God’s “realness”, because all kinds of human constructed ideas become real by virtue of shared belief, right? – Like human rights. So whether God exists independent of human consciousness is not a super important question for me. I realize it is a super important question for lots of people and that’s fine.
2. Do you believe in an afterlife?
Sometimes but it’s not something I spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about.
I mean the problem with the afterlife, to borrow a line from Harper Lee, is that you spend all your time in this world preparing for the next. If either an eternal heaven or an eternal hell awaits immediately after this life, this life is sort of irrelevant. What’s 100 years next to hundreds of trillions of years? That would imply that people should spend all their time in this life preparing for that immortal outcome, but I actually think there’s lots of work to do in this world, and in my faith tradition, God became a person to tell us about that work and ask us to do it together. I think we should focus on trying to do it.
3. What is that work?
That the last shall be first, that the meek shall inherit the earth, and that wherever we see the oppressed or marginalized, we see God.
I believe it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
I believe in feeding the hungry and curing the sick and offering preferential options to the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
Also, there’s the central promise of forgiveness, which kind of forms the backbone of my personal theology. The idea that forgiveness is available to all people at all times – including unto and beyond death – is called “radical hope”. Radical hope is my ground of being. I believe that while hope is obviously not always rewarded, it is always justified. I think hope is the right response to the miracle of consciousness.
Now, I don’t always act in line with that belief, but I don’t always act in line with lots of my beliefs, which is why I’m in need of forgiveness. I constantly miss the mark; I hoard wealth even though I know it’s a sin to do so; I don’t treat my neighbors as I myself would wish to be treated, even though I know that I ought to; I fail to live in accordance with my values every single day – and I’m not even sure if my values are the correct ones – so I am in constant need of forgiveness. Fortunately, it is available to me.
4. Do you believe the Bible is the literal word of God?
This is going to annoy a lot of people, but I actually don’t think it’s possible to read a text literally because I think text is inherently figurative. Text is scratches on a page that we turn into ideas in our head. That’s a figurative experience. So I think we have to make room for interpretation.
I think we have to make room for the fact that the Bible is a series of documents written in a historical context. A historical context that I cannot fully fathom.
So I feel quite comfortable applying interpretive lenses to any sacred text, which is useful for me because when the Bible justifies slavery – which it does – I can be like, “Yeah, but I’m still opposed to slavery.”
Also, there are contradictions in the Bible that cannot and should not be reconciled. In four gospels, Jesus has three different sets of last words.
I nonetheless find reading the Bible helpful. I also find other sacred texts to be full of wisdom and insight, but when I’m looking for like personal orientation, I do often turn to the Bible.
To be clear, there’s a lot in the Bible that I find out of step with my worldview. I don’t believe that my friends who are divorced are separated from God’s love because of that divorce, even though Jesus says otherwise.
So do I pick and choose? I guess. What I do is take an interpretive lens to reading, which I think everyone does. It’s just a question of whether you’re conscious of the fact that you’re taking an interpretive lens to reading.
5. Do you believe in evolution?
Yeah. I also believe in a heliocentric solar system and that the earth is round.
6. Do you believe in trans rights and marriage equality?
I do. I simply believe that being the person God made you to be cannot separate you from God’s love.
Also, my faith instructs me that wherever I see the marginalized or oppressed, I see God, and I know that LGBTQ people are marginalized and oppressed because they are disproportionately the victims of violence, discrimination, and diseases of injustice. That’s not a particularly hard one for me.
You know what is a hard one for me though? Why does evil exist? I don’t know, and it bugs the hell out of me. I guess I line up with the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer on this one who said, “God is weak and powerless in the world and that is exactly the way – the only way – in which God can be with us and help us.”
But the so-called “problem of theodicy” – how evil can exist in a world where God is good and all powerful – is a big problem for me. I think it’s a big problem for religion in general, at least for theistic religions. The truth is the universe either is completely indifferent to our needs and wishes or else behaves precisely as if it were, and I struggle to reconcile that to the idea of a loving and powerful God. Perhaps God is not as powerful in the world as I wish God would be, perhaps God cannot act beyond God’s purview, but regardless, it’s a problem for me.
For me, “everything happens for a reason” worldviews just aren’t sufficient because I’ve seen too many things that definitely didn’t happen for a reason, at least not a reason I can fathom. Sometimes that makes me angry with God for either lacking power or refusing to use that power, but mostly I’m angry with humans. We are the ones who fail to listen to the voice within us that says that no one should be homeless, hungry, victimized by violence, or the other coercive powers that so deeply mark human social orders.
7. Do you think Christianity is the right religion?
No.
I don’t labor under the delusion that Christianity is a better religious tradition than other ones, or for that matter that those who reject religion are wrong. I mean, religion has caused a tremendous amount of suffering and misery and injustice in human history.
Personally, I am always going to worship; I am just a worshipful creature, so I want to be constructive about what and how I worship. Also, I really like prayer. Prayer for me is like a exercise of my empathy muscles.
9. Do you worry about your brother’s soul (Hank Green, an Atheist)
No, I do not.
In almost every way, we are called by the same voice. We disagree about where the voice comes from. I think it comes from on high. You think it’s of and from the world. But we agree that the voice calls humans to try to make a world that is more equitable, less hierarchical, and less marked by injustice, and fighting over where that voice comes from feels to me a little bit like a waste of time, not least because there is so much work to do.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.