I read with interest a March 13 Associated Press article about New Life Church gunman Matthew Murray’s letter. His plaintive question, “Jesus, where are you? Do you even care these days?” is one I’ve occasionally struggled with, as I’m sure many have. For me, such questions are often answered in mysterious ways, such as the “Jesus Loves You” pencil--apparently dropped on the sidewalk by a child--I encountered while walking my dog on a day I was feeling down.
Recently I’ve wondered if Christians like Murray and Andrea Yates, the homeschooling mother who drowned her children in the bathtub, are the victims of depression so much as abusive doctrine. A religion can’t heal its followers unless it assures them God empathizes with their suffering. This is apparently a message that Murray, for all his Christian upbringing, hadn’t heard.
I have a particular interest in men like Murray. My father went “postal” several years ago, although thankfully he didn’t kill anyone. An orphan and lapsed Mormon, Dad didn’t attend church. The Mormon religion teaches it’s the father’s responsibility to get his children into heaven. Late in life, Dad lamented he hadn’t converted his children.
After my father died a year-and-a-half ago, I left church week after week in tears, feeling emptier than when I walked in. Realizing my religion wasn’t filling the void left by my father, I stopped attending church.
For all his faults, Dad was an empathetic man who cared more about my feelings than my morality. But the heavenly father I was hearing preached in church was a god of morality, not love. The Jesus in my church, like the one in Murray’s letter, doesn’t care these days.
There’s been talk lately about the Gnostic Gospels and why the Council of Nicaea left them out of the Bible. But isn’t it just as much heresy to preach the right gospel about the wrong god? In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught the Heavenly Father preached in your church should be at least as loving as your earthly father.
It was because I wasn’t hearing a loving God preached in my church that I decided to start this blog. Women have little voice in the evangelical church. Other than leading the music, helping in the nursery or teaching Sunday School, a woman’s recognized authority is as a mother. If a woman questions her church doctrine, her only recourse is to keep her children home on Sunday morning. In fundamentalist churches, even that is at the discretion of her husband.
As a journalist I believed this wasn’t enough. I know too many young people like Matthew Murray who aren’t finding a caring Christ in their faith. I know too many Christian women like Andrea Yates whose faith has failed to set them free from depression. Isolated from outside cultural influences, homeschoolers like Yates and Murray are the canaries in the coal mine, the first victims of toxic doctrine.
In the movie “Luther” about Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, Luther’s spiritual mentor exhorts him the best way to learn about a loving God was to preach that message to others. The blog’s name is inspired by the 95 Theses that Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenburg. I called it 59 Theses because I have dyslexia.
