“Wicked looks at what happened in the land of Oz — but from a different angle,” the most popular show on Broadway advertises. “So much happened before Dorothy dropped in.”
As we shuffled out of the theater at the end of the show, we were reminded of how complicated the relationships of our own lives have gotten since deconstruction unexpectedly dropped in. Throughout the evening, we saw nearly a dozen people from various chapters of our lives who also were in attendance. And although all our exchanges were pleasant, we were all well aware of the fact that we see the world from very different angles.
A summer of storytelling
The story in American religion this summer has been how people experiencing and processing the world from very different angles have resonated with or have been offended by different productions.
It all started when white conservatives panicked over Disney casting a Black woman as Ariel in their remake of The Little Mermaid.
When Amazon released the documentary Shiny Happy People, many of us from a variety of perspectives recognized the story it told about spiritual abuse in our own conservative upbringing.
Then conservatives swarmed to the theaters to support Sound of Freedom, which deals with the topic of child sex trafficking but has been promoted by Donald Trump and actor Jim Caviezel due to its advancement of QAnon conspiracy theories.
The movie with the most buzz this summer has been Barbie, which is breaking box office records with its themes of toppling the patriarchy and exploring what it means to be human.
Oppenheimer brought us face to face with the harsh realities of human violence in war and with what it might look like to pursue ethics of peace.
Kirk Cameron spent his summer releasing a children’s book against Pride Month and promoting propaganda in his war against librarians through his partnerships with Brave Books and Fox News.
Even John MacArthur has tried to enter the storytelling fray by promoting a documentary that glorifies his church’s refusal to take precautions during the COVID pandemic.
One character in Wicked asks, “Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?”
“For better or worse, the world is changing.”
For better or worse, the world is changing, leading us all to examine through the stories from our different angles what is happening in the land of Earth.
Is our reality a comedy or a tragedy?
In the 2006 film Stranger than Fiction, Harold Crick — played by Will Ferrell — goes about his day while hearing Emma Thompson’s voice narrating everything he thinks, feels or does. Eventually, Crick begins to realize he’s part of a story and seeks advice from Dustin Hoffman’s character, who introduces him to the concepts of comedy and tragedy.
“To quote Italo Calvino, ‘The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death,’” Hoffman’s character explains. “A tragedy, you die. A comedy, you get hitched.”
Many of the conflicts we experience in religion and politics today have to do with how we consider the relationship between the individual and the communal when telling our stories as either comedies or tragedies.
Can one consider their individual story a comedy if it ends in tragedy for others? Can we consider the collective story of the universe a comedy if it ends as a tragedy for many within it?
A legal story of law and punishment
For conservative evangelicals, the universe is a legal story where a perfect God reveals perfect laws and then either punishes those who fail to obey the laws perfectly or imputes perfection onto the accounts of some by punishing Jesus instead.
Answers in Genesis explains: “God declared at the end of Day Six of Creation Week that all he had made was ‘very good.’ Of course, that raises the question: What is ‘good’ to the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God? Answer: perfection. Logically, this should not be surprising. What else would one expect from a perfect God other than a perfect creation?”
The reason we no longer experience reality as perfection, according to conservative evangelicals, is that Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s rule not to eat a piece of fruit. Because they broke the law, the penalty was the entire universe began to experience death.
Despite their script saying we are born in sin with no ability to please God, they also claim God still demands perfection.
“God actually does demand perfection,” The Gospel Coalition claims. “But not because you can be — because Jesus has been, is, and always will be perfect. He imputes his holiness to you as a beloved child of God.”
In the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, J.I. Packer adds: “(God) reckons righteousness to them, not because he accounts them to have kept his law personally (which would be a false judgment), but because he accounts them to be united to one who kept it representatively (and that is a true judgment).”
“To the evangelical God, the story is about static perfection and nothing will fall through the cracks.”
To the evangelical God, the story is about static perfection and nothing will fall through the cracks.
“Every sin ever committed by every person who has ever lived will be punished,” John MacArthur explains. “That is required by divine holiness and divine righteousness and divine justice. It will either be punished everlastingly in the life of the sinner or that punishment will be borne by Christ.”
Because God’s demand for perfection can be met with the justice of punishment, Answers in Genesis concludes, “There is the glorious hope of restoration to perfection when Christ returns!” But to the evangelical script, that hope will only apply to evangelicals. The rest of humanity will be punished for eternity.
A life and death story of pitiless indifference
In his book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Richard Dawkins tells a quite different story about the suffering we experience.
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation,” he writes. “During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”
While conservative evangelicals would attribute that reality to Adam and Eve’s lawbreaking and claim it will one day be resolved, Dawkins sees this suffering as a necessary part of life: “It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.”
Thus, for Dawkins, the story of the cosmos is a selfish struggle for survival in the face of indifference.
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice,” he writes. “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Two sides of the same coin
While most people who side with Dawkins would laugh at the utter implausibility of conservative evangelicalism’s legal story given how dependent it is on literalist readings of Genesis, most conservative evangelicals would find the pitiless indifference of Dawkins’ story to be depressing.
But despite their opposition to one another, these stories share a lot in common.
“Just as Dawkins claims suffering and death are due to selfish genes, conservative evangelicals believe suffering and death are due to human selfishness.”
Just as Dawkins claims suffering and death are due to selfish genes, conservative evangelicals believe suffering and death are due to human selfishness.
Just as Dawkins suggests that suffering and death feed the living, John Piper says God’s glory and Christian delight feed off the suffering of non-Christians. “He gets glory because his grace and mercy shine more brightly against the darker backdrop of sin and judgment and wrath,” Piper claims. “And our worship and our experience of that grace intensifies and deepens because we see we don’t deserve to be where we are.”
But if your experience of grace intensifies and deepens by seeing your family and friends burning for eternity, then your humanity and love of neighbor as yourself has diminished to the same degree. Your experience of grace should not inversely affect your love of neighbor. According to conservative evangelical Calvinists like Piper, the conservative evangelical story is a comedy because it is a tragedy for everyone else.
At least Dawkins is honest about his conclusion. There is no ultimate justice in either of these two stories. Both narratives tell the tale of pitiless indifference toward those who are being fed off of. The difference is that conservative evangelicalism celebrates this story as good and claims it will last forever. The pitiless indifference of Dawkins’ story is a comedy in comparison.
If God has left any fingerprints on the cosmos, the legal story of law and punishment makes no sense. As a writer, I simply cannot imagine God writing something as incomprehensibly beautiful as quantum physics in order to evolve the universe for 13.8 billion years to create a law and eternal punishment scenario for one species on one planet during the last blip of time. The universe is not a stage for a legal drama.
A love story of wholeness and becoming
In Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life, Henri Nouwen says, “Nature is not the background of our lives; it is a living gift that teaches us about the ways and will of the Creator.”
Over the past century, there have been three primary approaches within Christianity toward modern scientific consensus. Some deny the realities we have discovered. Others accept modern science but continue to promote a theology that makes very little sense in light of it. Others, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Ilia Delio, have been willing to be present in their questions and reconsider their story of the universe in light of what we’re learning.
Teilhard showed how every part of the cosmos from molecules to galaxies “groped their way toward union.” Just as stars, planets and moons draw toward one another in a dance from their centers, humans continue the circle dance that has always been because “being is relational.”
In The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Delio says, “The cosmos is oriented toward integral wholeness, complexification and consciousness.”
For many modern Christian mystics like Richard Rohr, this story of the cosmos unfolding as the relational being of wholes within wholes reflects the language of the Trinity — where Father, Son and Spirit are wholes and in a dance from their centers create the whole of God.
In this story, all matter and energy in the universe is relational being that belongs and is being made new. Thus, this narrative of universalism is a comedy because it is the continuity of the relational life of God being imaged in the relational life of all.
Ram Dass once said if a religion tells a story “that’s worth its salt, it will be universalist.”
What we don’t know
All of us will die within the next century. If we’re completely honest, we don’t know for sure what happens after that. Will our stories end in punishment, pitiless indifference or continue in infinite wholeness and becoming?
Regarding what is coming next, “I am not privy to that information,” Ram Dass once said.
If the story of the universe continues as a comedy in the continuity of relational life, then the kingdom is here and now within and among us.
But even if the story of the universe ends with pitiless indifference, how beautiful is it that despite all of the indifference, we are alive here and now with each other?
“As I reflected, I saw that it didn’t matter which astral storyline was going to come out because I was going to prepare myself the same way for either one of them,” Ram Dass taught. “And the added thing was that I was going to deal with the suffering right in front of me that was on my plate and do my best to relieve it. I was going to do that whether Armageddon was coming or the New Age was coming. … So it turned out there were three things: quiet my mind, open my heart, and deal with the suffering in front of me.”
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He recently completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.