A Return to Tutu's Wager

When I was in the process of becoming an Episcopalian, a close friend of mine--someone who was a serious Christian, a priest actually, but not a Roman Catholic--expressed very serious concerns about the project.  One of his concerns was over my perceived (correctly perceived, as it turned out) lack of institutional loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church.  In his mind, once you are on a particular team, you need to stay on that time--a somewhat ironic position for him since he himself was once a convert, but nonetheless his position.  But his other, more interesting, objection is that he viewed the Episcopal Church as the "off ramp" to Christianity.  In other words his position was not that the Episcopal Church was not a "real" expression of Christianity, but that it tended to be a way station for people who eventually stopped practicing Christianity altogether.

Implicit in that formulation is the notion that what is truly important is to be a practicing Christian no matter what, and that the way in which that is manifest is of secondary importance.  In many respects this is embodied in a sign that you would see at the entrance to some towns in the South "Please Attend the Church of Your Choice"--whichever one you pick is fine, so long as you pick one.  Or, in another formulation, it's better to be in a bad church than in no church at all.

The flip side of this approach was best expressed by former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu, who once said he would rather be in Hell than be in Heaven if God was homophobic.

"I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place," Archbishop Tutu said at the launch of the Free and Equal campaign in Cape Town.

"I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this."

Now, you might say this is hyperbole on the part of Archbishop Tutu, and it probably is.  Archbishop Tutu obviously does not believe God is homophobic.  But the real, underlying point he is making is that there are versions of Christianity that he would not be prepared to accept, no matter what.  See, the "Attend the Church of Your Choice" school of thought says that each and every expression of Christianity is better than any non-expressions, while the Tutu school says that some versions of Christianity are worse than not being a Christian, and thus you would be better off being a non-Christian than being a part of those bad expressions.  

As I thought about my friend's critique of the Episcopal Church, my first thought was that the Episcopal Church is not necessarily a vehicle out of Christianity, a position I certainly still hold.  But, critically, even if it is, better to be led out than to stick around in one of these bad expressions of Christianity.  In other words, I'm 100% with Archbishop Tutu.

I was thinking about Archbishop Tutu yesterday when I saw social media posts about an article in The American Conservative magazine entitled "The Meaning of Native Graves" by Declan Leary.  I have read it, but I don't think I will link it here, as I am deeply conflicted about doing anything to provide support to the author or its publication--you can find it easily enough.  In it, Leary makes the case that the Canadian "residential schools" for Native Americans (or "First Nations" peoples as they are usually referred to in Canada), in which there have recently been discovered a series of mass graves, were morally justified.  And they were morally justified because, run as they were under the auspices of primarily the Roman Catholic Church and other religious bodies, they resulted in a number of the children in those schools converting to Christianity.  Even if they ended up being killed, and certainly if they were stripped away from their families and detained under brutal conditions, they were baptized and buried in a Christian manner, and thus they presumably got to go to Heaven.

Here's a quote:

Whatever natural good was present in the piety and community of the pagan past is an infinitesimal fraction of the grace rendered unto those pagans' descendants who have been received into the Church of Christ.  Whatever sacrifices were exacted in pursuit of that grace--the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families--is worth it (emphasis in original).

Many have attempted to respond to this piece by attacking the view of what Christianity is that is embodied in this piece.  They want to have an internal argument about the meaning of Christianity, and the degree to which Christian doctrine can support this worldview.  And, it should be said, my understanding of the Christian message is wholly inconsistent with this conclusion.  But I don't think we can stop there in our rejection of this worldview.  And we, as Christians, have to be honest that the views expressed in this piece have a long history within Christian theological analysis.  Leary isn't pulling this out of the sky.  Indeed, the learned theologians of Valladolid pronounced it a draw when Bartolome de las Casas attempted to argue against the enslavement and brutality of the natives of the Americans, opposed by a doctor of theology making arguments very similar to Leary's.

No, we need to go further, to the place Tutu shows us.  Leary's position cannot be rejected simply because it is theologically wrong; we must reject it even if he has the better of the theological argument.  If God views it ultimately a good and beneficial thing for Christians to cause these people to suffer and die because they end up getting their Golden Ticket to go to Heaven, then I want no part of that God.  

We need to draw this line in the sand because this is not really about God at all; it is really about institutions.  Yes, Leary justifies in terms of the spiritual benefits and uses God talk, but the real point is that the institution of Christianity, in this case the Roman Catholic Church, is beyond reproach or moral criticism because it implements the Word of God.  Getting into an argument about the precise nature of God's command while supporting the view that "real Christianity," however defined, is beyond reproach is fiddling around on the margins of the problem.  No.  No institution, no matter how much you might think it to be acting in the name of God, can command you to commit atrocities.  No one should be that loyal to a church that they would be willing to do that.  Not only can you walk away from Christianity if that's the only version on offer, you must.

I've talked before about the idea of Tutu's Wager, a riff on Pascal's Wager.  Tutu's Wager, in my mind, goes something like this.  In the world of multiple, competing versions of Christianity, some of them might strike you as morally good, and others of them strike you as morally wicked.  You might thus be confused as to which version is the correct one.  My answer is you should wager on the versions you believe to be morally good, and ignore the ones that seem morally wicked.  If you are right, and God is on the side of the morally wholesome versions, then clearly you have made the right choice.  If you are wrong, then God is not really good in the way you thought, and why would you want to spend an eternity with such a being, anyway?  

Bottom line--do you really want to live forever in the presence of a being that rejoices in mass graves filled with little kids?  Because I don't.  Far better to be a non-Christian than to be a part of that.