I love how Crash Course Religions just jumps right in on the deep end of a question and doesn’t look away or try to present some weak chicken-shit answer. Thinking about religion in an academic manner is a difficult thing to do, especially for those who only think about Religion in terms of “Mine is Correct” and all others are false. I certainly looked at things that way when I wrote essays in high school about Creation and Evolution or modern philosophy versus Jesus (apologies to my high school teachers). I was at the very beginning of a journey having lived my life believing what the Catholic Church and my mom had been showing me, but suddenly questioning anything that looked like it contradicted the religious experience I had as a 15-year-old. Suddenly there wasn’t just one answer but a possibility of two. And as I read more and went to university, a Roman Catholic Jesuit university, the number of possible answers kind’a blew up in my face. 

One of the funny things, when I think back on my early Jesus-freak days, is that I looked at life’s questions with a level of unearned certainty, stemming from an unfortunate combination of adolescent ignorance and the Fundamentalistic belief system that I was learning. But even as I write that sentence, I recognize that the priests and my local parish were the fundamentalists when I was first reading my bible as a teenager, but then things shifted under my feet and the Pentecostal church that I attended was Fundamentalistic while the Jesuits at university were showing me a very long history of human learning, philosophy and, yes, religion.  How does one talk about religion if one cannot recognize all of these different layers or levels of “existence.” I think that’s what my anthropology professor was trying to tell me many decades later when it came to fundamental differences in how someone from a monotheistic culture might understand about reality versus someone from a polytheistic culture. 

The example of the indigenous people using peyote in their services (for centuries!) conflicting with mainly European legal precepts is a fundamental problem, for a country that pretends to endorse religious freedom. I’m sure the liberals among us would agree that forbidding this practice is just stupid. But what is the consensus if the question is polygamy or honor-killing (if a female relative has been caught having sex outside of marriage), or arranged marriages… or chattel slavery. I get that the founding fathers of the US wanted to avoid all of the strife and warfare over religion but also left what that meant relatively vague and not at all spelled out. Unfortunately things have gotten to the point where there are those in our current government who believe that religious freedom is itself a myth and the Founders wanted this country to be (Protestant) Christian and White. 

Four years ago I posted the following image and wrote the following note: As someone who studied Religious Studies at a Catholic university and has an earned B.A. in Biblical Studies from a conservative Christian university, this is the only way to discuss religion in a secular/pluralistic (public) school setting. This is also the only way to discuss “history,” philosophy, social studies, culture and politics. What are the verifiable scientific facts and the narratives humans have created around those facts.

Crash Course Religion has kind of said that you can’t understand religious freedom if you don’t understand religion as a human phenomenon that humans have been modifying, adjusting and adapting to current human challenges and needs since before humans started writing down our stories and histories. If this is beyond your capacity to accept, that’s unfortunate but I hope you’re happy in your cultural bubble. Just understand that it may be uncomfortable and confusing when you happen to run into other “bubbles,” because, it turns out that there are as many bubbles out there as there are people. Enjoy. JBB

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Tags:Crash Course Religions, in bad faith, religion in the public square, religious freedom, video Mondays

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