The importance of Biblical reliability and can we be good without God.

This is from a blog post from Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Con" blog (http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/02/god-the-sex-vote-and-human-dig.html) and comes at the beginning (the rest of the post is long passages from another article and not specifically related to Biblical reliability). I thought the text he cited from his review of the book by the Episcopal priestess was the most telling:

Do you ever wonder why the poor and the working classes, if they're religious-minded, are almost always followers of the most conservative forms of religion? And why the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be a partisan of liberal religion, if you're a partisan of religion at all? You could say it's a matter of education, but correlation does not equal causation. I think it has more to do with the kinds of lives poor and working-class people lead. I've written before here about how the deep need for some sense of structure and guidance in her life and the life of her kids brought our former cleaning lady, a Mexican immigrant, into the Pentecostal church. She was not remotely a theological sophisticate, but she knew she needed Jesus, and she needed Jesus in a direct way, and in a practical way. That it's hard for the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church, or the mainline Protestant churches, in this country to reach people like her, right here in our own country, ought to make us reflect on the shortcomings of bourgeois religion, and bourgeois religiosity.

Here's what I mean: if this woman, Maria, and her teenage girls came to our parish, they would certainly be welcome. They would be in the presence of a liturgy of unparalleled beauty, and indeed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But if they had no prior experience of Orthodoxy, I wonder if they'd come back? It's not like we're a wealthy parish or anything, but the Orthodox faith takes work to get to know. Similarly, as a Catholic I was often amazed and grateful for the depth and beauty of the Catholic faith, but I often sat in mass wondering what would keep a lost soul from the underclass coming back to church. I know enough about the charismatic churches to know that whatever they lack in theological depth and sophistication, they make up for in speaking directly and realistically to the struggles of those on the economic margins. Whatever the criticism I have of those churches and their theologies, I am grateful for them, because they're reaching people who are drowning in this cultural tempest, and offering them a lifeline that these folks just aren't finding at the more established churches.

To illustrate the point further, here's a passage from a review I once did of the Rev. Chloe Breyer's book about her Episcopal seminary years:

Chloe decides to set up a Bible study for a group of Bellevue patients who are in from Rikers Island, the notorious city prison. She plays a video segment from the Bill Moyers series Genesis. The inmates see Bible scholars agreeing that Genesis gives us plenty of questions, but few answers. Her students don't get it.

"They're supposed to be experts, right?" says Tyrone. "So then why are they giving us all this stuff about not having any answers? I mean, it doesn't take a Ph.D. not to have answers! And if they don't have any answers, then who does?"

Others chime in with contempt for the equivocating liberal scholars Breyer so admires. Finally, a Muslim convert speaks up. "See, this is what I'm telling you, man. The Koran is the place to go for answers! . . . I became a Muslim because the Koran has the most truth in it. You don't argue about what it means. You read it, and you know what to do. The Prophet got the word directly from God."

"Is that right?" asks Tyrone. "Is that how it is? The Koran has more answers than the Bible?" Undeterred, and unable to grasp the significance of the moment, Breyer sets out to teach these poor sinners that the Bible doesn't have to be taken literally. There are lots of gray areas, she tells them, and they should feel empowered by the fact that they can interpret Scripture any way they like. The inmates are unmoved.

"They want answers, not questions," Breyer writes. "[T]he more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers."

In other words, the people who have the most to lose from a life without moral boundaries are those who have the most attraction to strict religion. I know, I know, there are exceptions. But I believe it to be true that those who support a libertine cultural politics are those who either have not thought about the consequences of their politics on the broader society, or don't have to think about it because they can't imagine paying a material price for living by those principles.

(snip)

I don't think there is nearly enough understanding in America today, and not only among liberals, for how necessary a strong belief in God is for most people -- especially the poor and working classes -- to build lives of dignity and order. I think about how poor my ancestors were, and not too far back, and how the only thing they had was their God and their dignity. Not all of them did, and amid the same material deprivation, they led lives of squalor and disorder. It's hard to make a direct comparison, of course, especially over time, but it occurs to me that they were as secular as any educated upper-middle set, but they were poor, and made room for nothing to keep them morally anchored, and aware of the dignity that they possessed as creatures of God. And what that required of them. Having read the galleys of Julie Lyons' upcoming book about her black Pentecostal congregation in poverty-stricken south Dallas, I am more convinced than ever that when you are living in conditions of poverty and moral chaos, the church is the only thing that will save you (and I'm not talking about in an eschatological sense). Again, I recall Robert D. Kaplan's discussion of how whatever you might say about Islam's strictures, the Islamic faith made it possible for the people of Egypt to endure lives of great stress and suffering while keeping social order and dignity.

We don't understand these things in America today. But we might yet again. The hard way. I mean this: Can we be good without God?