Religions that value principles over people are busted

It doesn’t matter which religion it is.

There are a lot of different views of religions out there.

• All religions are bad

• Most religions are good

• My religion is the only good one, and all the other ones are bad

… to name three views. I think my current take on religions is, in brief, that the progressive ones are good and the conservative ones are bad. (This is really just my view of different Christian traditions extrapolated out to other religions.)

Of course reality is not so simple. Who decides what is conservative? Are we talking theology or politics? Surely not every tradition can be sorted so neatly into one of two boxes? If I critique conservative Islam am I Islamophobic? If I critique conservative Judaism am I antisemitic?

Because reality is not so simple, and because I don’t want to be canceled, let’s move from my “in brief” assessment to a more thorough one, and focus it on my own religious tradition: Christianity. What is a conservative Christian, and why is conservative Christianity so busted? Also, why do I keep using the word busted? Does it mean what I think it means? (I think it means some combination of janky and bankrupt, but until they invent the word jankrupt I have only busted.)

In the US, labels like conservative and liberal/progressive map somewhat neatly from Christian religion onto politics. Conservative Christians have a set of religious beliefs and practices that distinguish them, and they also have a shared allegiance to the Republican Party. So it’s not hard to use these labels pretty accurately when describing churches, denominations, or individual believers.

That being said, I do not think this straightforward 1-to-1 correspondence exists everywhere in this world. There are contexts with extremely complicated political situations, with far more political options than two parties, or with forms of evangelicalism that transcend trickle-down economics. So I want to set politics completely aside and identify what I think needs to be named and decried within religiously conservative Christianity.

There are many, many, many aspects of conservative Christianity, even completely aside from politics, that we could criticize. I won’t even make a list, though if I did it would contain things like biblical inerrancy and gatekeeping. But no, there is one aspect that I keep coming across that I want to focus on: the valuing of religious principles over human beings.

This is obviously a factor in evangelicalism, as many of us know. The Bible says such-and-such, so your own identity or self-knowledge is either grievously sinful, spiritually threatening, or nonexistent. What I am just now learning as I am exposed to more and more Catholic thinking is how rampant this garbage viewpoint is among conservative Catholics (or the “Trad Cath” movement). The religious principles are not always the same—they seem enamored less by literalist Bible interpretations and more by philosophical arguments about what is good, beautiful, and true—but the end result is identical. Human spirits crushed in the name of some abstract ideal.

I wonder if this thread is common to all the different strains of conservative Christianity and, perhaps in some way, conservative religions more broadly.

When I come up against this harmful approach, my mind almost always goes back to a specific conversation Jesus had. It only appears in one Gospel, Mark’s, and it occurs when some religious leaders are criticizing Jesus and his disciples for breaking Sabbath law. Part of Jesus’ response is this absolute zinger, this humanist bomb that is echoing millennia later:

The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.

In this story, the leaders are attempting to wield the Sabbath (a set of practices, yes, but also a very important symbol—a principle) to prevent Jesus and his friends from meeting their basic human needs. He reminds them that a religious principle is only good if it leads to human flourishing. If it is taking life instead of giving it, we owe it nothing and should in fact disregard it. Also, a principle that helps people flourish in one place and time might fail to do so in another.

When presented with this argument, the evangelical or Thomist (or whoever) will often argue that we can’t possibly determine what amounts to flourishing without the precious ideals! Well, this passage flies right in the face of that. If Sabbath were allowed to define flourishing, then obeying it would always be correct. Jesus appeals to something else—instinct? the common sense that it’s good to eat when we need to eat?—to evaluate that Sabbath law is not good for them in that circumstance.

So if you find yourself in a Facebook fight with a trad Cath who is arguing against trans rights by invoking some sort of “natural law,” perhaps it is time for a Bible study on Mark 2. (Or feel free to tag me in.)