Being a Religious Person in a Season of Religious Wars

Passover, Lent, and Ramadan: all three holy seasons converge this spring. Their dates don’t overlap entirely, but the grocery store displays in my religiously diverse neighborhood are reminding Jews, Christians, and Muslims to prepare for household celebrations at the culmination of each.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels heartbreak at the sight of Halal and Kosher foods displayed prominently, but separately. Brightly colored signs invite Jews and Muslims to think ahead to time with friends and family in two communities, estranged from one another, and both suffering terrible pain.

This is a weird time to be a religious person.

In the media, I have heard interviews with Muslims about how Ramadan is different this year because of suffering in Gaza, and I’m sure we’ll hear the same sentiments when Passover comes in the third week of April. I haven’t heard much talk, however, about how Lent and Easter, too, need to be different, but they do. It’s possible that such conversation is happening, and I’ve missed it. I work in a school, not a church, so Holy Week is a time I send encouraging notes to church-serving colleagues and expect them not to get back to me.

Fact: two of the three faith traditions that consider Abraham to be the first prophet ever to have talked with God are ripping each other to shreds in a seaside enclave of the nation at the center of all three faith’s histories. The third of those traditions— mine — is the one claimed by the imperial forces that pitted the other two against each other for generations, leading to the violence between them today. That empire, while calling itself Christian, used vulnerable, displaced persons like proxies and pawns to secure their own interests in the region all three call holy.

Of course, the empire was claiming Christianity while practicing the religion of capitalism, which treats securing control of resources like a spiritual practice. Sadly, capitalism is the spiritual practice that will never accomplish the ultimate joy of sensing oneness with everything. It has separateness and individualism written into its DNA. The empire stole Christianity and used it like a fig leaf to cover naked greed. I have made it my life’s work to educate leaders who will go out and steal Christianity back.

The Christian tradition is beautiful and worth rescuing from the strange fellow — imperialistic capitalism — that took it to bed. Rescue will require vigilance. At every Christian rite of passage and ritual, religious leaders and thinkers must disentangle the Gospel from certain cultural artifacts, hold onto the Gospel, and let the artifacts wither and die as all earthly things do.

What does such vigilance look like today? I can only begin with me. As Lent comes to a close and Holy Week is fast upon us, here are some commitments I can make:

• I will speak out about the war in Gaza as I have defined it above: a proxy war resulting from generations of foreign interference motivated by greed for control over resources. The same foreign powers that created the mess need to clean it up, and I pay taxes to one of them. I will refuse to buy notions that the war is Israel or Palestine’s fault, for although both have played their roles all too viciously, both have suffered beyond what I can comprehend. I will continue to tell my elected leaders: Make. This. Stop.
• I will hone in on where the true Christian messages of this holy season are finding voice and bathe in the sound of those voices. What are those true messages? Life is love, and love is life. Love can’t be killed, yet it’s as fragile as a not-hard-boiled egg. I’ll tend and hold love in my cupped hands, gently and reverently, just as I imagine God holds me when I pray.
• I will celebrate love’s triumph over death when Easter comes. I’ll honor Lenten disciplines until then, and ride the roller coaster that is Holy Week: the zeal of Palm Sunday; the intimacy, overshadowed by disappointment and betrayal, of Maundy Thursday; the torture of Good Friday; the emptiness of Holy Saturday. I’ll celebrate on Easter, because it’s the holiest day of the Christian year, and empire doesn’t get to take that away from me.

Again, it’s a weird time to be a religious person. When I try to look at Christianity through the eyes of secular persons who know nothing about Christian teachings of life and love, I don’t like what I see. For instance, a secular person with no deeper knowledge of the actual Christian faith will see Christmas marketing campaigns, starting ever earlier in the fall, and infer that buying stuff is the religion’s point. They won’t believe me when I say that Christianity and capitalism are two wholly different ways of being in the world.

The secular-unfamiliar would understandably believe Easter combines a gruesome death on a cross with cute rabbits and colorful eggs, which is, if you think about it, kind of upsetting. Non-Christian people who have a hard time understanding how anyone could be Christian, given the ways in which it’s shot through with capitalism, militarism, and domination over the vulnerable: I feel you.

But you, I’m afraid, don’t feel me. I don’t believe that Christianity can be conflated with capitalism any more than I believe that Judaism can be conflated with conservative Israeli politics, or Islam can be conflated with Hamas. Christianity is its own thing, and it’s beautiful. I love it despite the ugliness of some of the vessels that have carried it through history. I can reclaim it for myself, and I have the great fortune of working with students at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School who will help whole communities do the same.