I would be a fool not to make a strong disclaimer for the follow piece, which I’m publishing because I’m probably not going to ever finish it. I wrote it almost a year ago and was deeply dissatisfied with the result. I felt like it would have been much stronger if I’d referenced specific essays that Jeff Sharlet had written, and if I pointed out that many of the essays in the book I mention below were very compelling. Read, for example, a recent, ill-named essay on Sharlet’s web site titled A Slut for Faith that critiques the blase way matters of faith are handled in contemporary weddings.

That being said, some readers might find the following fairly unsubstantiated critique interesting…

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For quite a while I’ve been following the Killing the Buddha website and the publishing arcs of some of its contributors. One of them, Don Miller, wrote published a book titled Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, and I enoyed that book quite a bit. I’ve written about it before though.

The KTB site’s editor, Jeff Sharlet, co-wrote/edited his own book composed partially of essays first published on his site titled Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible. I’ve read several of the essays in the book and listened to an NPR interview with Sharlett, and I’ve been trying to paint the outline of the disquiet I feel about his perspective. One helpful nugget from the site’s purpose statement might suffice for example:

Killing the Buddha is about finding a way to be religious when we’re all so self-conscious and self-absorbed. Knowing more than ever about ourselves and the way the world works, we gain nothing through nostalgia for a time when belief was simple, and even less from insisting that now is such a time. Killing the Buddha will ask, How can we be religious without leaving part of ourselves at the church or temple door? How can we love God when we know it doesn’t matter if we do? Call it God for the godless. Call it the search for a God we can believe in: A God that will not be an embarrassment in twelve-thousand years. A God we can talk about without qualifications.

The trouble with this is that it assumes that the best God is the one that one has the least to lose by believing in it. It’s a mutant form of gnosticism, in which any detail of specificity that God might aquire, any detail that might tie Him or Her to time or matter or language, is an embarrassment, an unnecessary messiness. Revelation is clumsy and mars the beauty of the ineffable. Like a true gnostic, Sharlet wants to know how he can be both religious (read “spiritually awake”) and superior to the religious. While I, who am prone to take superior airs, sympathize, I must reject that impulse.

I read another good summation of Sharlet’s approach by Read Mercer Schuchardt in his essay Et Tu Buddha? published in The New Pantagruel online journal (The New Pantagruel seems to be trying to fill the shoes of the now defunct Regeneration Quarterly, and its feet are slowly inflating.) One of Schuchardt’s main points:

The irony is that they believe they are swimming against the tide, when in fact it is precisely the tide of contemporary culture that keeps their heads above water and makes the swimming so easy. Is there any more marketable buzzword than the word “irreverent”? Is there any stronger gospel than the one that declares the absoluteness of relativity, the rigid and ridiculous demand of absolute objectivity in a post-Heisenberg universe? What Sharlet has mistaken for heresy is, in fact, electronic culture’s orthodoxy.

In this passage Schuchardt doesn’t really acknowledge the lengths to which the authors of Killing go to seem sympathetic. Almost as far, sometimes, as Ira Glass goes when covering Evangelicals, but these guys get a thrill out of inflating a balloon and then making sure it’s got a slow leak. Because, really, watching the air leave the balloon is the fun part.

I’m reminded of the Door’s song The Spy and hear the words in a new way:

I’m a spy in the house of love.
I know the dream, that you’re dreaming of.
I know the word that you long to hear.
I know your deepest, secret fear.

Sharlet is a spy in the house of Love; he thinks that he understands the dream, the vision on which Christian hope is founded. He knows the word, that it’s Jesus, but doesn’t know anything about a Word. And the fear that he documents now and again in his essays reads more like a sign of his distance from the Kingdom, not a hallmark of his membership. He embodies the old saw about membership, not wanting to be part of any club that would have him.

Sharlet’s perspective of faith isn’t anything new, but he’s someone who writes attractively, with a sort of insider faux-edginess. And while his writing is thoughtful, that thoughtfulness isn’t particularly expansive because of his foundational assumption that there isn’t actually any direct relationship between the religious and the transcendent.

While Mark Twain said, “It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not,” I think that Sharlet finds that he is unable to arrange his religion in a way that does not leave him restless, and in that, I think I can join him. Inasmuch as “religion” is one of the lesser things I am distracted by, Sharlet and I see things the same way.
Where he and I differ is that where I believe that the satisfaction of my conscience is lacking due to my disproportionate love of lesser things, Sharlet’s is unsatisfied because none of the “revealed” God(s) will live up to his standards. The lesser thing that he loves is the God he has created in his own mind.

I suppose there is a level on which I respect that: the gourmand who refuses to eat any feast set before him because all of the food is made of things whose origins are, when dissected, common. I want something perfect too, and everything in this life is corruptible. But the impulse to damn the materials of the present in a trade for something transcendant and unrevealed is a gnostic impulse. Much of what is before us is good, and God’s grace will cover what is not.