Felt Board Christianity

Last updated on: August 5, 2015 at 8:04 am by Anne Kennedy

Felt Board Christianity 2015-08-05T08:04:51-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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As the exposing of baby killing has unfolded over the last few weeks I’m surprised to find a sudden convergence of various threads, that I thought were unrelated to each other, suddenly twisting themselves together in my own thinking. Many of us, well, maybe I won’t begin there. I, me myself, have long long been horrified by the knowledge that the ordinary mother, the woman who happens to become pregnant, in this country, has the right to do away with the child if she sees fit. The horror that I have felt, from my youth, isn’t, I don’t think, because I have a better moral compass than the average Chrisitan, but springs largely from two sources. One, I’m not from here. And two, I have read the bible.

When I was sixteen, I found myself in the United States for a whole six months, attending a local public school, trying fo beat my way around long, overly bright, clinical feeling hallways filled with loud, apparently self confident teenagers. I slunk around the margins for that time, trying to figure out how to get along and not get in trouble or draw any attention to myself at all ever. Which I basically managed to do. Except on one occasion, which turned out nicely. I wrote an essay in my English class and I got an A on it. And the subject of the essay, which I see now would be utterly rejected by all, was how incomprehensible to me, as an outsider, is the American conception of Rights. As far as I could see, knowing basically nothing about America’s system of laws and it’s constitution, everyone around me had the right to whatever they wanted, the instant they discovered that want. I think I must have heard two girls fighting in the hallway, pulling each other’s hair, and one of them must have screamed, ‘I’ve got my rights’. My little clunky essay (although, just to remind you, I did get an A) was a treatise on how, as a Christian, I get to leave all my rights at the door. I don’t get any rights, I said, because I am a horrible sinner, and I deserve nothing, only death, but Jesus purchased me by his blood, I wrote, and so now I don’t have to die, but that is a gift, not a right. Remarkably, it being the early 90s, I was allowed to get away with writing stuff about God and Sin. I didn’t get in trouble or anything. Did I mention that I got an A?

Where I grew up. Women do have rights. They have an essential human right. They have the right to have children. A woman wants children, and it’s her husband’s job to give them to her. And if she can’t have a child, for various reasons, someone in her family should probably give her one of theirs, because everyone should have a child. Children are essential, absolutely and completely, for survival and everything. If a woman is angry and demanding her rights, it might often be because she wants another child.

So that is one thread. The other is the bible itself. It probably sounds pretty arrogant for someone like me, and who am I anyway, to say I don’t think women should be allowed to murder their children because I have read the bible. But I’m going to say it anyway. Reading the bible, and not with your fingers crossed, is a nice way to come to the conclusion that murder is wrong and that the thing in the womb is a person and that therefore murder is the correct word to use when talking about getting rid of it. I’m toiling through Isaiah right now and there are difficult lines like, “your hands are full of blood” and “Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished” and plenty of heaped up anger about the abuse and neglect of the fatherless. Those would be the people who didn’t have a father, those little ones carried along by women who have been promised something and then abandoned by the person who made the promise. When the father takes off, what should we do? Well, in America, the woman gathers herself up and goes to other people who make a promise, that if she kills what’s inside her, everything will be ok. She believes both promises, false as they are, because it’s her right.

So I said there were two threads but there are really three. The third thread that is weaving itself into this picture is the sudden catastrophic downfall of Christianity in this country. If you fill up a cup with emotionalism, boredom over scripture, idolatry, and scrawling flowery cliches–two poems and a puppy, as it were, for the sermon time–you have a nice full cup of foaming wrath being poured out all over Twitter. Some actual professing Christians, publicly known and writing women, think that what is going on is either not a big deal, or actually a good thing. Some of these are thought to be poetical, good at writing, clever with an image, able to rub two words together and get something nice out of the effort. And because they are basically articulate, they get to peddle the shiny lie that they are nuanced, that they have depth to their thinking.

But take some of the lines, some of the ugly words of support for the barbarous butchery of planned parenthood, and measure it up against the actual poetry and nuance of scripture, the clear articulation of God that he is very angry against sin and that you can’t do whatever you want unless you want to die forever, and to me, it looks like a Sunday School Felt Board. It is that compelling. In other words, not at all.

How did Christianity in the west come to be a bunch of women, screaming that they have their rights, and then insisting that they have said something clever? I’m sure lots of people have good answers to this question. Thing is, until we roll up the felt board, and stuff the little flat figures in an envelope, and stop telling the stories as if what matters most is how David felt while he was killing Goliath, and wondering how we feel when we kill the Goliath in our lives, and admonishing each other to try to be happy about ourselves, and begin instead to ask what God thinks, and wonder about who he is, then we will continue to be stuck here. Which would be tragic, because not only is it boring, it’s not going to end well.

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