Away Point

Beqa, Fiji.  Saturday, February 6, 2010

 . . . the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot, the wisdom to know the difference . . .

We’re on Beqa Island, Fiji, the first stop in a five month exploration of the Southern Hemisphere.  “We” is me, my husband Brian, Brynn, age 15, and Marley, 13, and we’re here in Fiji to get Brynn and Marley dive certified before heading to the Great Barrier Reef.  Wednesday, while the girls are locked in the bure (cabana) watching Padi training DVD’s, Brian and I head out for our first dive.  “Sea Fan Coral” is the name of the dive site, but there isn’t any left.  On that dive, faced with the coral that isn’t, I am forced out of what has been a tenuous denial.  I accept, finally, that for me a part of this trip will be about letting go--about coming to terms with the fact that I am living in the time of the Sixth Great Extinction. 

Letting go comes hard to me.  My mother is a hoarder, a knick knack and scrap keeper who taught me to treasure old things:  the moth eaten Navajo blanket that her father gave her mother on their first trip west (they don’t make them with those natural colors anymore), buttons made of brass or shell or plastic  (you never know when you’ll need one), alpine heather (one boot-step can crush thirty years of growth).  In Mom’s system, the older things are, the more reverence they deserve, but stuff in general is worth taking care of and tucking away for the future, because you don’t know what that future will bring. 

Mom grew up in a downwardly mobile family.  Her father, who had lost one arm in a hunting accident, moved his wife and daughter to Colorado Springs, a town booming with opportunity.  But he died of kidney disease when Mom was a teen, and her mother got by on a book-keeper’s meager income and frugality. Every penny of expenditure was recorded in a small worn book, and things no longer used or useful went in the basement. Mom worked through high school in a laundromat where she learned to fold sheets right and iron the yoke of the shirt first, and take a load out of the drier fast so you don’t get burns on your arms from metal buttons and snaps. 

Surrounded by the residual of better times – an old pump organ, a cherry-wood buffet, the walnut desk her father had made out of a broken player piano, Mom grew up with a keen sense that you should guard the treasures handed down to you, because if they get ruined you may not be able to afford new ones. Take care of what you’ve got and you won’t end up wanting:  This message was so strong in our family that even my most spendy sibling had a savings account in high school and even the most right wing sibling has conservationist sympathies. 

Such an attitude, handed down, is a blessing and a curse. For me, for example, it has made wandering through the cathedrals of Europe or even small country churches acutely wonderful.  The glint of green hand -painted grass at the feet of a saint or the dimples worn in a stone floor are somehow magnified by the wonder of the lives given to create such beauty and the lives touched since.   But I also carry a personal scar –you can bump it with a comment about Churchill or Vonnegut —left by the firebombing of Dresden, that wonder of ancient spires and sun-through-glass and lives given and lives lived that was destroyed on three February days  before I even was born.

Last spring, when the girls were on break, we all piled into the Prius and drove the California coast, the land of redwoods and sequoias.  Standing beside the Ancient Ones, breathing in the earth-rich air, I felt my right place in the world, and my right size.  Pressed against one sequoia, I stretched up and touched the bark as high as my fingers could reach, and I was glad to be small and transient, glad that this tree had lived ten human lifetimes before me or more, and might live ten after.  And I was glad that my hands and teeth couldn’t harm these trees even if I wanted to, that I didn’t have that power, and that their skin and branches hosted forms of life beyond my paltry capacity for knowledge.  But when we stopped in museums and in restaurants, there were old black and white pictures--of twenty school children posed on a stump, or a crew of proud, grimy loggers with their saws as long as a man was tall-- and I knew deeply, painfully, like I know of Dresden, that once there were beauties grown up over millennia, that now, in our own little flash of geologic time, are gone.   And even as I touched and breathed and was glad, glad, glad to stand among the remaining giants, that ache never quite left.   

That first Fiji dive has the same bittersweet quality. We descend through silted water to a reef with bits of moving color:  swaying yellow soft corals, the occasional wrasse or butterfly fish, here an anemone hosting a black-and-white or black-and-orange family of clownfish, there a feather star with yellow tipped fronds.  But the scattering of hard corals mostly looks ill, with a gray creeping algae lapping over their edges or covering patches in the middle or eating away at one side or the other,  and I have to resist a constant urge to brush the shapeless growth away.  You can’t. 

All around us, the gray skeletal remains of old table corals, mounding corals, bigger and more numerous than anything now living say that this reef once looked different.  Once there were giants here.  How long ago, I wonder?  And how different was it?  I think about the schools of tuna and big fat parrot fish, and spotted eagle rays that were our frequent companions when Brian and I first learned to dive off the coast of Honduras fifteen years ago.  Were they here, too, back then? 

Let it go, I tell myself.  Let it go.

And mostly I do.  The next dive, and the next day, and the next, I wiggle in close to the underwater wonders that can, even now, surround us.  An outrageously blue and yellow ribbon eel the diameter of my finger reaches out of her hole and snaps as if she could drive off the whole lot of us intruding primates.  A pair of feathery lionfish, a lumpy scorpion fish lurk in the crags.   A yellow and black angelfish saunters by.  A puffer fish makes such a ball out of himself that I laugh out loud.  A Spanish dancer flatworm floats from the dive-master’s hand to the bottom, its ruffled edge fluttering, sure enough, just like edges of the Flamenco dress Brynn wore when she was three. 

On the third day, there is the wonder –thrilling only to me and Brian—of encountering Brynn and Marley underwater with their infinitely patient instructor.  Our kids, thirty feet under and breathing!  Over there is the one who used to whisper her bedtime fears into a purple-paint- and- glitter covered dream jar.  And there, the one who still scooches over so I can snuggle her at night.  I recognize them first by their movement s, those teeny idiosyncrasies of motion that are like a handprint or voice, that let you pick out your kid on the soccer field-- or in the water-- even if your eyes are permanently blurry from too much time at the computer.  They twist and wave and then vanish through the muted light as they go on their way and we ours. 

This morning we are to leave Beqa, and I want to see the shore reef before we go.  We have been on boats each morning and then hiding away from the sun in the afternoons.  But before our arrival, Brian had done a fair bit of research to land us here specifically for the dive course because people said that along with warm staff and incredible food (both confirmed) it had the best snorkeling around.  He knows that I love drifting with a snorkel over a shallow reef where the sun is warm and the colors bright, even more sometimes than diving. 

So we walk to the cove by our bure and across a mudflat exposed by the tide, and we slosh through waving grasses and past a place where spiny stars hid in all the little holes with their too-long tendrils hanging out, and then finally we get to the point that the water is deep enough that we can float, just barely, and paddle along with our hands hoping that the next rise won’t scrape our tummies.  Then, abruptly we are at a sea wall, with fifteen feet of water beneath us and the edge of a huge, complex reef stretching off to the left around the point that separates us from another small cove where the dive boats anchor.  It is by far the biggest colony of corals I have ever seen.

But it isn’t.  A colony, I mean.  It is a vast gray landscape of bones—of small spiky bones and bold branching bones, and boney mounds that standing alone rise ten feet from the sandy bottom just off of the wall. It is a science fiction dystopia for fish, a world that evokes Blade Runner or Mad Max or The Lathe of Heaven or the ruin outside the Matrix.  From where we float, you can look down on the ruins of a vast city with its towers and crevices, passages and hiding places.  And you can see survivors, alone, or in small bands, making their way through the ruins into which they were born, the road warriors eking a living out of the remains of a civilization advanced beyond their knowing (or ours).  A crown-of-thorns prowls for a meal of living coral.   

Let it go, I tell myself.  Let it go.  And a pair of black-tipped reef sharks swim by. 

Twice I see a beautiful, perfect healthy coral.  I’m not talking about the fragments that are ill and dying, tenacious hold-outs  where the creeping algae covers only parts of a colony, where a few branch tips are putting up a fight, where one curve of a green mound seems to be growing even as  the other side is slowly subducted beneath the gray.  There are, among the skeletons, plenty of these. A bit of yellow here, a blue prong, a green curve.   I’m talking about the kind of specimen that, like a giant sequoia, makes you want to kneel and breathe in the whole sensory experience so that you can go there again in your own mind when you need to be small, when you need to worship.

The first is a creamy staghorn,  rising out of a crumbled brown and pink substrate.  Each limb has the sturdy girth of a baby’s arm but is fuzzy- the tip of a budding antler in the spring.  The whole living surface has the same translucent glow of a new sprout or a fern fiddlehead. I hang above it suspended till a slight current pulls me away. 

The second is a spiky little rose-colored bush.  It hosts a cloud of blue fish that range from the size of guppies to the size of those goldfish they call feeders at the pet store.  As Brian dives close the cloud shrinks, like a blue puff, into their coral sanctuary and then puffs back out again as we move past, kicking slowly.

Each time, after, I catch myself thinking, Please, please be a mutant. Please be alive because you are different, because you and your offspring can flourish in this brave new world of our making. Please let there be corals in the next round of life on earth.

 Let it go, I say.  But as I round the corner into the second cove, I start crying through my snorkel, just a little catch at first, then big sobs that won’t stop.  I kick and cry, past the last of the dying corals and defiant survivors.  Then, gradually, I get intrigued by the sounds I am making, whimpering noises that seem more like a little kid than a Valerie, and that uh-uh-uh when you can’t quite get your breath—it sounds different underwater—and wheezy squeaks; and as I notice the noises, they fade away.

 I swim on away from the reef and over the sea grass and sand toward the shore, on and on, and the world is just water and air and sunlight streaming through both.  As it was in the beginning.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-tarico/sad-about-haiti-give-to-o_b_441125.html

Last week I wrote an article about solar powered Bibles that are being sent to Haiti as aid.  As a former Evangelical, I was trying to explain the psychology that turns a tragedy into a marketing opportunity for religions that need recruits.    On a whim, I pulled up the website for Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  Ok, it wasn’t a whim, it was a hunch based on past experience.   At the time of the 2004 Asian Tsunami, I was researching local mega churches and ran across Mars Hill for the first time.  I was appalled to see their  home page recommendations for members:  pray for the people in the disaster zone, give to Mars Hill church, give to our church building efforts in India.  (Why wasn’t it “Pray for Mars Hill Church, give to the people in the disaster zone . . . ?)

There is little more sacred to me than compassion – the part of us that feels someone else’s pain as our own and seeks to alleviate it.  My deepest spiritual values were violated by what Mars Hill was doing; I would say that the moral heart of humanity was violated.   

The solar Bibles project struck a similar note, which is why it occurred to me to see what Mars Hill is up to now.  To my dismay, they were once again channeling the compassionate impulse into what is best described as self-promotion :  promotion of the church, it’s pastor, Mark Driscoll, and the viral fundamentalist ideology that both serve.

The Mars Hill website directs people to one of Driscoll’s side projects – a website (churcheshelpingchurches) seeking to direct aid money into church reconstruction.  By filtering and selecting Bible verses, Driscoll makes the case that God never meant for Christians to take care of poor, suffering people but rather poor suffering Christian people (and potential converts.) “ I challenge all thoughtful, biblically-minded Christians to find a single instance of the New Testament church filling the plates of the ‘general population’ poor.”  Cofounder of the site, James MacDonald of Harvest Bible Chapel  penned these words:  “Children are crouching in shivering fear as people stand stunned and staring in disbelief at the remains of what they once called their home. The world is racing to help these people in unimaginable crisis, but who will help the church?”

This explicit co-opting of the charitable impulse may be characteristic of successful mega-churches.  In The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren hops among 15(!) Bible translations to back up his points, one of which is right in line with Driscoll.  Warren chooses the New Revised Standard Version to ensure that readers don’t think God is talking about “general population poor” when Jesus says “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me.”  (In place of the elipses, the NRSV says “who are members of my family”, which Warren has already defined as the tribe of born again believers. p. 126.) Later in the book, Warren comments,  “Notice that God says the needs of your church family are to be given preference . . .. ”  (p.259).  And for Warren, becoming a “World Class Citizen” means this: 

If you ask me, I will give you the nations; all the people on earth will be yours.(Psalm 2:8 NCV)  Prayer is the most important tool for your mission in the world.  People may refuse our love or reject our message, but they are defenseless against our prayers.  Like an intercontinental missile, you can aim a prayer at a person’s heart whether you are ten feet away or 10,000 miles away.  What should you pray for?  The Bible tells us to pray for opportunities to witness, for courage to speak up, for those who will believe, for the rapid spread of the message, and for more workers.  Prayer makes you a partner with others around the world.  You should also pray for missionaries and everyone involved in the global harvest.

 (Note:  If you didn’t fully appreciate the name of “Harvest Bible Chapel” you have the context now.)

After I wrote about solar Bibles and  Churches Helping Churches, one Huffington Post reader (and, I presume, Mars Hill Member) pushed back:  “While it is true that Mars Hill Church is encouraging efforts to rebuild churches in Haiti, it shouldn't be overlooked that the congregation donated over $429,000 to general relief efforts (not including the church rebuilding project).”  As evidence, he or she provided a link, to the church blog, so I went there.  Perhaps their ratio of aid to recruiting was higher than I thought.  But were the Mars Hill members donating to general relief efforts or the church general fund?  The blog seemed to suggest the latter.  (And wasn’t Driscoll explicitly teaching against the former?)  Here was Pastor Jamie Munson’s advice to people who want to actually do something in response to Haiti. 

• Start giving to the church.
• Quit living on your own and join a community group.
• Pursue church membership and align formally with your church family.
• Confess to your community group about lack of giving or participation in Jesus’ mission.
• Consider financial coaching: get help building a budget so that you can align your finances with right priorities.

 In my experience visiting Mars Hill, this is in keeping with the church’s general philosophy.  At my last visit, the church newspaper Pop Vox  made the case that God  (not Mark Driscoll, but God) wants Christians to give first and foremost to their home church—and to do it regularly and to do it till it hurts.   Perhaps one of the secrets to mega-growth is making sure to capture community resources and channel them in the service of that growth. 

I am not saying that the Mars Hill effort is ill intended, and I have no doubt that at some level it will involve providing food, shelter and medical care to people in dire need.  In a place where people are dying of trauma and hunger, Bibles and church buildings are likely to be much better received if they are paired with goods and services that meet people’s basic needs.  Also, it must be remembered that congregation members who are opening their checkbooks are genuinely compassionate people, seeking to do good – or they wouldn’t be susceptible to the appeal. 

But at what cost? 

Because Bible believing Christians perceive themselves as a light shining in darkness, a moral beacon to the world, they often don’t understand that much of the critique written about their religion, like this article, is prompted by moral distress.  For Evangelicals the diversion of energy into recruiting activities seems to be in the service of a higher good. From the outside, it seems opportunistic, just like Scientology’s high-profile relief flight to Haiti.  It is morally distressing, with a high opportunity cost and, consequently, a high human cost. Genuinely decent, loving people who seek to serve Goodness are having their precious empathy and compassion channeled into activities that range from exploitative to merely inefficient or insensitive.  A young Christian friend of mine caught sight of the Solar Bibles headline.  “Really?” she asked (with that inflection that only teenagers can conjure).  “It seems so elitist.  You really have to be not hungry and not in pain to think—Hmm.  What would comfort me is a Bible.  I think that’s what I’ll send.” 

While Doctors without Borders was struggling to get anesthetics for amputations into Haiti, an Albuquerque group queued up aid of their own sort:  600 solar powered talking Bibles. Eve now, food, water, and medicine are having trouble reaching Haitians because of damaged transportation facilities and supply lines, but the missionary group says some of their Bibles are on the way.  

I first read about the solar powered Bibles after a friend forwarded an article from an Australian news source--the point being that half way around the world people found the story controversial enough to be newsworthy. Why?  Because it is morally troubling, even for most Christians.  According to the gospel writer, Jesus says “I was hungry and you gave me bread,” not “I was hungry and you gave me Bibles.”  How can anyone see pictures of crushed buildings, blood covered children, and people begging for food, and think of it as an opportunity to win converts?

Like many others, I read about the solar Bible effort with a sense of revulsion.  But as a former Evangelical believer, I also read about it with some sympathy for the people packing the boxes.  There is no doubt in my mind that they think what they are doing is kind and good.  I would bet my psychology license that their behavior is driven by genuine concern for the people of Haiti.  I simply believe also that the Evangelical mindset has tremendous power to co-opt and redirect a believer’s moral priorities and sense of compassion.

One of the most pernicious attributes of ideology, whether secular or religious is its power to disconnect true believers from moral emotions like empathy, shame, and guilt.  In fact, what often happens is that the ideology repurposes both these emotions and the rest of a believer’s moral machinery in the service of the ideology itself.  Let me explain. 

Under ordinary circumstances and with normal brain development, certain moral instincts are built into us.  Universally, for example, we have an aversion to the thought of babies being burned for the pleasure of adults.  We have some general notion that stealing is wrong.  We value honesty.   

Research in brain science is showing that moral reasoning and behavior is driven by a set of inborn emotions--empathy, shame, guilt, disgust, righteous indignation, moral pride—and that these in turn drive moral reasoning and behavior.  These emotions, along with specialized circuitry for analyzing morally relevant situations (and some pre-set defaults) are shared by our whole species.  Why?  Because they allow us to live in community with each other.  

We humans are social creatures.  To use the technical term, we are “social information specialists.”  Our primary resource is information, and we mostly get it from each other.  Without the ability to cooperate and share knowledge we’d all still be in the Stone Age—or the tree tops.  The only way we thrive in the long run is if we support the well-being of our community and, as we are starting to recognize, the broader web of life.  That is what morality lets us do.  It helps us to treat the wellbeing of others as if it were our own – because in a peculiar way it is. 

For this reason, empathy or compassion is at the very center of most religious and secular wisdom traditions – usually in some form of the Golden Rule.  Often the best means we have of guessing what another sentient being wants or needs is by projecting ourselves into their situation:  How would I feel?  What would I want?  What would make me happy? 

This is where a viral ideology like Evangelicalism can hook in and take advantage of our moral make-up.  First, it can diminish empathy by downplaying the importance of here and now suffering.  Second it can make something other than a person’s apparent needs (like food or anesthetics) seem critically important.  Third, it can re-direct our mother-bear instincts away from protecting vulnerable individuals and toward protecting the ideology itself.  Believers may come to feel more protective of their religion than they are of actual human beings. 

1.      Diminishing suffering:  Evangelical Christianity downplays the horrors of suffering in several ways and sometimes even glorifies it. 

a.      Bible-believing Christians are taught that this world is just a prelude to the next – the one that really matters.  Suffering is part of God’s plan, because it surrounds us, so it must be.  Mother Theresa, for example, is said to have told a man in pain that Jesus was kissing him.

b.      Because God is described as fair, there is a heightened tendency for believers to fall into the “just world hypothesis” to think that people deserve what they get.  This can lead to a pattern of blaming victims for their own misfortune:  pregnant teens shouldn’t have been having sex, rape victims should dress differently, poor people should work harder.

c.       In the Bible, when God intervenes he often does miracles that affect a few people rather than responding to the suffering of the many.  A few blind receive their sight, one lame man stands up and walks.  This teaches people to focus on the “miraculous” exception rather than the pattern.  Believers can praise God for saving a handful of orphans, neglecting the tens of thousands He just created. 

d.      In the central story of traditional Christianity, Jesus was born to be a human sacrifice; his ministry was just a prelude to Golgotha.   Suffering, rather than something to be fought against, is seen as redemptive.  The human race is saved by torture.

2.      Redirecting focus:  Economists say that religions create “goods” which then have “scarcities” that people desire and compete for—God’s favor, for example, or sacred space, or a certain status during the afterlife, and Evangelicalism offers several great examples of this.   

a.      Evangelicals prize salvation--a “personal relationship with Jesus,” and the promise of heaven—so it is natural that when they are being altruistic, this is what they want for others. For someone who is salvation focused, the best thing he or she can do is to save someone’s soul.  If feeding people wins converts, fine.  But if you have to choose between food and Bibles, only one saves people from eternal torture.

b.      In particularly evangelistic denominations, even children are taught that God wants them to be “fishers of men.”  Think Jesus Camp.  A Buddhist might get a feeling of virtue or self esteem from pursuing compassion, mindfulness and simplicity; for some Christians, this same satisfaction comes from a convincing others to become believers.

c.       Rather than being defined by service, generosity, or other consensually valued character qualities and activities, virtue can get re-defined as a life of Bible study, church attendance and prayer and/or sexual abstinence.  These behaviors may become more highly valued than the qualities that normally make someone a “decent human being” a “good colleague” or a “great neighbor.”

3.      Self-perpetuation:  Religions that focus on recruiting and keeping believers – on marketing and on defense of the ideology– often out-compete those that don’t.  This is why Muslim countries are arguing in the United Nations that religions as entities have human rights—including the right to be protected against criticism.  

a.      The most evangelical forms of Christianity gain mind-share by turning the whole congregation into a sales force with divine sanction.  Individual members may support missionaries or may pack up their families to go seek converts in foreign countries.  Populations that are seen as vulnerable to conversion--poor people, uneducated people, families in crisis, youth in transition—are targeted for intensive missionary efforts.

b.      Christians are encouraged to give money to the church.  One successful Seattle mega church has two or three offerings in a single Sunday for different causes.  Another cites (twists?) scripture to make the case that God wants believers to give first and foremost to their home church.

c.       Rhetoric like “The War on Christmas,”  “The War on Easter,” “Activist Atheists,” and “Jihad” keep believers under a perennial sense of seige.  Stories of martyrs are read to children—while Christianity’s bloody history is largely ignored.

d.      Even though Christianity is the largest religion in the world, commentators and pastors lament the decline of the faith and the loss of young people.  They raise the specter of Christianity becoming a religion on the margins within a generation. 

The heart of Evangelicalism may be thought to lie in two Bible verses, both of which are taken to be perfect words from God, essentially dictated by God to the authors.  One is John 3:16, the most memorized verse in the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,[a] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This verse is paired with one called Great Commission:  “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19NIV) 

Contrast this with the verse that is the center of faith for many modernist Christians, what is called the Great Commandment.  When asked what was the greatest commandment in the Torah, the writer of Matthew tells us that Jesus replied "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:37-40)

Both evangelicals and modernists call themselves Christians, or followers of Jesus, but the two preceding paragraphs define two different religions.   As much as Evangelicals argue to the contrary, they are in conflict.  Only one of these religions sends missionaries pretending to be aid workers into Afghanistan, putting other aid workers at risk.  The other sees this as immoral.  Only one of them sets up recruiting clubs on grade school campuses. The other sees this as immoral. Only one of these religions uses money, time, and cargo space to send Bibles to people in need of anesthetics. 

I consider World Vision to be at the better end of the Evangelical spectrum based on a ratio of humanitarian aid to proselytizing.  But even World Vision goes out of their way to downplay their mission:  bearing witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ.  In the wake of the Haiti disaster, ads on the internet showed bandaged children with a banner that said, “Save a Life.”  A banner that said, “Save a Soul,” might have been equally in keeping with their statement of faith.

World Vision shares the Church's commitment to disciple followers of Jesus Christ who bear witness to the Gospel by life, deed, word and sign, with the goal of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel. We do this through the life of service that we lead, the deeds of Christian love we perform, the words that we share about our faith and the signs of prayers answered as we visibly and concretely improve the lives of others. (emphasis theirs).   

Would World Vision’s Evangelical donors, volunteers, and staff put their energy into disaster relief and poverty programs if they weren’t on a mission to disciple followers?  Who can say? At least they do both.   

At the uglier end of the spectrum is a Seattle mega-church that claims almost 8,000 members, Mars Hill, founded by Calvinist celebrity Mark Driscoll.  In the wake of the Asian tsunami several years back their website advised members to 1.  Pray for people in the disaster zone.  2.  Give to Mars Hill church.  3.  Give to our church building enterprise in India.  Five years later, their opportunism, meaning willingness to co-opt the compassionate impulse and redirect it into church growth is more sophisticated but unabated.  In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, Mars Hill directs members to a site called Churches Helping Churches.  “Who will help the Church?” it asks. 

“Rebuilding local churches helps address the practical and spiritual needs of a country, one person, one neighborhood, and one community at a time.  . . . We need to help the church of Jesus Christ as our first priority in areas hit with human catastrophe. I challenge all thoughtful, biblically-minded Christians to find a single instance of the New Testament church filling the plates of the “general population” poor.”

You can be assured that in Haiti, none of the money will go to the Catholic churches that have functioned traditionally as community centers among Haiti’s poor and that are pictured in ruins on the website’s banner.  No, the money will go to Evangelical missions seeking converts among the Catholics.  (Oh, btw, the site features another front page action item:  Follow Mark Driscoll on Twitter.) 

Is the founder of Mars Hill and of the Churches helping Churches site a crass self-promoter? Perhaps, but I suspect that he genuinely believes he is doing good,  even maximizing good, by turning suffering into fundraising for his brand of beliefism.  The crass self-promotion may be a quality of his belief system, not his person.  Physicist Steven Weinberg once said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” 

Weinberg’s statement may simplify overmuch, but it contains a kernel of truth.  For genuinely decent people to engage in systematic acts of harm, even for them to take milk from the mouths of babes as it were (like Mars Hill does), something has to override their moral sensibilities.  Fear has the power to do this, but so does ideology.   For solar powered Bibles or church-building to win out over food and medicine requires a religion that values conversion over compassion. But when we see this phenomenon at its worst, it is because someone in the thrall of a viral ideology has figured out some reverse alchemy that turns the precious gold of empathy into the lead of opportunism.

It appears that televangelist Pat Robertson is in the thrall of Satan, according to spiritual warriors, Drs. Valerie Tarico and Marlene Winell. "It's the only possible explanation," said Tarico. "How else can we make sense of his repeated attempts to humiliate both God and Christianity in the wake of recent natural disasters."

Tarico spotted what she saw as a suspicious pattern after Robertson's recent remarks about the devastation in Haiti. As people lay dying in the rubble of Tuesday's tragic earthquake and nations around the world are scrambling to provide disaster releif, Robertson spoke to the Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club:"

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it... They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the Devil said, okay it's a deal... Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

"Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven," said Tarico and then articulated:

When Robertson blamed the Katrina disaster on God, and said He was punishing those poor gray-haired Black people for the sins of their gay neighbors, I thought it might just be human error. All we like sheep have gone astray, you know. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But suddenly, when I read Robertson's remarks about Haiti, it was like a light blazed down from heaven and a voice spoke saying, 'Behold, the Father of Lies.' I picked up the phone and called the only person more familiar with these problems than I am, Dr. Marlene Winell. She confirmed my worst fears.

We spoke with Dr. Winell in her Bay Area office. "Demons need a host, and they can jump from one person to another," she explained.

We know this because Jesus cast demons out of a possessed man and into a herd of pigs. The pigs drowned themselves, the same kind of self-destructive behavior we are seeing in Mr. Robertson. It is possible that he was infected at or around the funeral of Dr. Jerry Falwell. In hindsight we can see that Dr. Falwell was possessed by a similar -- possibly the same -- demon.

Back in 2001, when the U.S. was reeling from the 9/11 bombings, Falwell horrified Christians around the world by blaming the disaster on gays and woman who have had abortions. "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked," Falwell said on "The 700 Club."

And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.

Could this be the work of any old run-of-the-mill demon? "I doubt it," said Winell. "Those remarks were broadcast to an enormous audience. Probably tens of thousands of people were turned off of Christianity and the Christian God. I think this is an organized media strategy by Satan himself. We're talking about Beelzebub, the Father of Lies. The guy is a marketing genius. This is the snake that sold Adam and Eve an apple in trade for paradise."

Winell went on to remind us:

Sarah Palin, as a prominent Christian could easily have been possessed by Satan, like Roberts, but she is deeply vigilant about spiritual warfare. She had the foresight to allow an African Minister pray over her for protection against witchcraft. Now would be the time for Palin to help Robertson. With her connections, she could arrange an exorcism and then get him the same protection treatment. **

Our reporter pointed out that similar comments have been made by Islamic leaders about natural disasters:

A Saudi professor at Al-Imam University said the devastating tsunami that killed over 150,000 people was Allah's punishment for homosexuality and fornication at Christmastime."These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities, and even entire countries are Allah's punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims," said sheik Fawzan Al-Fawzan.

Both Tarico and Winell saw this as confirmation of their hypothesis. To quote Tarico:

Anyone who listens to Reverend Hagee knows that Muslim leaders are controlled by Satan himself. And now you tell me they have been using words that are virtually identical to those of Falwell and Robertson?! Fawzan Al . . . It sounds a lot like Falwell, doesn't it. Look no further.

**Friends of Sarah Palin interested in helping Pat Robertson and defending the honor of Christianity can post this article on her wall at http://www.facebook.com/sarahpalin.

In real life, Marlene Winell is a psychologist and writer in Berkeley, California. She is the author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. She has a psychotherapy practice and works with people recovering from toxic religion.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org