Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

The apogee of the Christian Church in North America occurred during the 1950s and ‘60s. The pews were full. Everyone went to Church on Sunday – I played hockey for the Riverside United tykes in Weston, Ontario. The cars had fins. The drive-in movies were busy. The roller skaters served at the car window, and there was a sense of moral clarity where the good guys were good guys and the bad guys hadn’t become good guys yet. Vietnam was happening but distant. Jack, Bobby, and King all had had the assassin’s bullet, but we still believed in democracy and God. In Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was our Bobby Kennedy, his sun rising against the setting sun of Pearson Liberalism and amidst the backdrop of Expo ‘67.

In Montreal, our cultural capital at the time, Expo ‘67 was called “Man and His World.” Indeed, “Man and his World” meant something different back then. There was optimism in the air despite revolutionary, cataclysmic change and revolutionary social forces that rippled under the surface of it all. The calmness and youthful energy of things meant that these changes, initially, seemed manageable and positive, if uncomfortable. The soundtrack of the era was the Beatles, a band that actually wrote songs with melodies and meaning with cartoon colors. The revolutionary pop culture guard that the Beatles were created music that you could sing along to at pubs. Not too scary.

Throughout this period, and earlier, in the ‘50s, there was serious scholarship occurring in the cultural shadows of religious studies. There were quiet whispers as Christian scholars started asking hard questions about their faith and the historical accuracy of the Old and New Testament. Powerful religious figures such as the young Charles Templeton actually left the pulpit in a sweat, depressed as he told Billy Graham and others that it was over – he just couldn’t do it anymore. Templeton had lost his faith. God no longer spoke to him, if he ever did.

There were a lot of religious men and women who progressively stared out into space as they sat with their morning coffees, their blank expressions reflecting the black void within. Modernism and post-modernism had caught up to the canons. And the canons were empty.

Today occurred part two of my discussion with author and United Church Minister Greta Vosper. Her book, “With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe,” essentially postulates that the declining attendance in mainstream churches has occurred because the public has caught up to the ‘50s-‘60s religious scholarship – the “abracadabra” nature of the Bible with its stories of miracles and magic and virgin births and blood sacrifices no longer washes.

Moreover, religious skepticism, religious aversion and cynicism are creating a polarization effect: non-believers, or diffuse Christians on one side who vaguely believe “in something” but who no longer attend Church, and religious literalists, fundamentalists and evangelicals on the other who fervently, and frothily, believe it all.

Gretta Vosper promotes a third way: looking at the question of how to live one’s life in the shadow of the Bible but within the light of secular truth and knowledge.

Is there a place for Christianity without a historical Jesus? Or without a Jesus who could perform miracles? Is there a place for ethics and morality and meaning without a God who casts thunderbolts?

God, Jesus, and the Church, are, according to Gretta Vosper, human constructions. We are the Church. Nothing is going to bail us out except ourselves.

The “Godliness within us,” and the moral and ethical responsibilities that go with it, are a greater burden than the expectation that we will be swept away by an extrinsic rapture.

Vosper’s deracination of the central tenets of the Christian faith, for many, transforms to a point where Christianity is not recognizable, where it ceases to become “Christian.” But, for many others, a great many others, there is no religious leadership or experience anyway: God is not dead. God is irrelevant, as important to an adult as Santa Claus is on Christmas Day when you have the Visa bills.

Yet, 80 per cent of us say in surveys that we believe there is something. Yet, that something is not urgent enough to bring us into the fellowship of communal worship, into Church.

Today we have a glut of aging, cynical baby boomers, fewer young people, and an even greater divide between the generations. The average father spends 30 minutes a day – sometimes per week – with his kids and half of that in front of the TV. There is increased youth violence, and an internet that spreads pornography far and wide to even younger people as well as pedophiles, increased sexualization of women – an almost numb pornogrification, and an entire generation of young people raised by entertainment and fashion industries.

There is a void. There is a lack of meaning. There are two parents working hard as hell and a world that makes less and less sense. More often than not, we have a culture that works against parents, against family, against each other. Statistically speaking, we all have even fewer friends than we did 15 years ago.

We are lonely, all together.

Going beyond the notion of Tom Harpur’s “The Pagan Christ” that the symbols and transcendent metaphors of the Bible can still feed us even if the literal stories are untrue, Gretta Vosper says there is a another way. Between abdication and abrogation of Christianity, and the literal evangelical fundamentalist, lies a third option: a sense of fellowship and a church still; the promulgation of values and meaning and life for its own beauty, for its own resonance, its own truth.

Gretta Vosper’s crystallized vision and testament is a revolution no less meaningful and probably more important than that of Martin Luther, all those years ago.

It is time religion in North America got real. But that, in itself, does not refute the light of your own belief path, whether it is fundamentalist or the darkness of nothing.