Keeping The Faith

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner was someone who had an incredible spirit and fought through extremely tough circumstances without succumbing to the easy piety borne of ignorance. She treated people as they deserved to be treated, and for that adhered more to the Bible than her contemporary figures in the evangelical movement. She started as a laughingstock but closed her life as an inspiration. She will be missed.

“I refuse to label people,” Ms. Messner said in a 2000 documentary, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” when asked about her attitudes toward gay rights. “We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt, and God didn’t make any junk.”

There's an incredible first-person story in this weekend's LA Times about William Lobdell, a writer who became extremely religious and sought to write a column on faith for the paper. As the years went by, with sex scandals and cardinals covering up pedophiles and all of the rest of the grotty side of the church, Lobdell found his faith slowly slipping away. We all at one point or another search for some higher power to help explain the unexplainable, but then when we're faced with the imperfections of human beings who purport to hold absolute moral authority, the explanations fall short. How does one look to man for proof of God? It's a very provocative read, almost too good for a mainstream newspaper, and while it asks important questions is will likely be met with criticism. Maybe if more religious leaders were like Tammy Faye, acknowledging of man's foibles yet tolerant and compassionate, it would be a lot easier for people like Lobdell to cover them without that sense of alienation and scorn. Absolute loyalty is not absolute faith, and what disgusted Lobdell the most were the subjects of the obviously morally diffident laity, who had no problem defending them outside of all reason.

I sought solace in another belief: that a church's heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God's house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff's deputy, spoke out for the victim.

If we were all a bit more honest, and less unequivocal that our belief was the ONLY belief, that our lifestyle was the ONLY lifestyle, this world would certainly be better for it. It requires thinking for oneself and coming to one's own conclusions. I wish we had more Tammy Fayes to be symbols of this in action.