COMMENTARY: Caught in the Middle _ And Loving It

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Here’s the title of a new book that just hit No. 4 on the Amazon hit parade: “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have relished that title, and applauded any author for the courage in coming […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Here’s the title of a new book that just hit No. 4 on the Amazon hit parade: “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have relished that title, and applauded any author for the courage in coming out as an atheist and for boldly taking on the Religious Right.


But I’ve been doing some other reading lately and talking to people, such as singer Susan Werner, who have spent a lot of time thinking about faith, and I’ve decided that yes, something is poisoning everything. But it isn’t religion.

What is poisoning us is this culture of either/or we have created in America.

As in: You’re either with us or against us. You’re either a person of faith (my faith), or you’re a godless infidel. You’re either a treasonous liberal, or you’re a fascistic conservative.

Both sides on the religious and political spectrum play this game, as the new publishing trend of books promoting atheism and denigrating religion proves. (See: “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins’ screed against faith in God and organized religion, at No. 16 on the New York Times best-seller list.) These books, of course, are the backlash to the previous fad _ books that blamed the nonreligious for everything that’s wrong with America.

And so the pendulum swings _ back and forth, right and left, either and or _ defining America by clanging loudly at its outermost edges.

You see what’s missing here, of course. The in-between. The gray. Where is it in our public discourse?

The in-between happens to be where I live, and I bet it’s where you live, too. It’s where most of us Americans stumble around, slouching toward Bethlehem while we try to figure out what we believe, and in whom.

That’s where you can find Werner, a wonderful singer-songwriter who’s made an entire CD about that stumbling around. “The Gospel Truth” is, she says, an agnostic gospel album, or “gospel from the secular left.”


It features songs like “Our Father,” with the lyric, “Lord lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from those who think they’re you,” and “Forgiveness,” which asks, “How do you love those who never will love you, who are so frightened of you they’re calling for war?”

Werner says the songs combine the music of faith with lyrics of doubt. “Somewhere in that middle ground, in that tension, there’s a lot of truth,” she says. “I’m both respectful of religion and the good that it does in American life, and also aware of the discrimination it sometimes fosters and the exclusion that it sometimes practices.”

The idea for “The Gospel Truth” came to Werner last summer at the Gospel Music Festival in Chicago, where she lives. The music blew her away.

“Wow,” said a friend who went with her. “Is there a way you can get all this joy, but without the Jesus?”

Werner _ who grew up Catholic but left the church when she was old enough to realize that “women can only rise so high in this corporation” _ decided to find out. So she started going to church on Sunday mornings. Many churches.

“And for a musician to get up early on Sunday morning _ that’s a lot,” she says.


She went to churches in her neighborhood and churches in other states, attending more than 30 by the time she was finished. Of course, one of those churches had to be the Rev. Al Green’s church in Memphis, Tenn., one of the highlights of her journey.

“The Reverend was there and he gave the sermon,” she says, “and you know, I would challenge people like Richard Dawkins to go and see the Rev. Al in action. You can’t paint all churchgoers with the same brush, and to hear Rev. Al preach and bring forth the message of love in the Gospels and to hear him sing _ it felt transcendent. I felt something at work that was wonderful and inspiring and American in the best sense.”

At the other end of the spectrum, she went to conservative megachurches and to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla. “I found the students there uniquely untroubled, for better or worse,” she says. “I’ll leave it at that _ they were uniquely untroubled, which I think is something to be envied and to be deeply concerned about, both. Really, both.”

Going to all those churches did not convert Werner; she remains an agnostic. “If I have a religion these days, it is music itself, that desire to experience transcendence,” she says. “And music and religion are both about seeking transcendence.”

But if she’s still at that intersection of faith and doubt, her church experiences made her certain of one thing: “I really believe we’re going to be OK as a country,” she says. “We will, we really will. We’re a fantastic society, a fantastic nation because we have all these different cultures intersecting. That stuff in the middle, where we come together: That’s what gives us our energy and our spark and our creativity.”

I don’t know about you, but that’s just where I want to live.

(Joanna Connors writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

KRE/LF END CONNORS

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