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Jesus Died for This (Excerpt)

A Satirist’s Search for the Risen Christ

Becky Garrison

Look Inside

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition
The Itinerarium (the blessing on the journey)
Holy Land Happenings
Cutting the Christian Cheese
Walking the Thin Line
Balaam's Ass Rides Again
A Divine Nobody Meets the Wright Stuff
Cashing in at the Christian Casinos
Mother Teresa Unblugged
Good without God
Holy Hippies
The More Things Change
Remembering Rightly
Jesus Sent Joe
Rogue Relative
When the Saints Go Marching In
Living on a Prayer
The Ordinary Radicals
Go West, Young Man
The Connections Continue

Epilogue: The Promised Land?
For Further Reading . . . Reflection . . . Respite

Acknowledgments

Preface to the New Edition

From 2007 to 2008, I embarked on a series of business and personal travels that I labeled accidental pilgrimages. These treks took me from one promised land (Israel) to another promised land (the Pacific Northwest) with multiple stops throughout the United States and a side trip to the UK and Ireland.

Apparently this journey interested the folks at Zondervan Books, a subdivision of Rupert Murdoch’s conglomerate Harper Collins Christian. They were in search of the latest holy hipster they could market to the growing tide of SBNRers (that’s spiritual but not religious for those not immersed in the world of godly geekdom). Even though I lacked the requisite theological tattoos, had no clue how to get ziggy with Žižek (let alone flash my Foucault), and had no interest in playing worship with Coldplay and candles, they somehow thought I fit the bill. Initially, I felt jazzed at the opportunity to take on the branded biblical BS manufactured by those a/theist Christians marketing themselves as a “new kind of Christian.” They promised to possess that elusive evangelistic elixir that will somehow save the dying institutional church. They kept preaching in true Field of Dreams style that with enough missional money, they would tell you how to build a better church so that people would come.

But I knew from following the actual statistics (thanks Public Religion Research Institute) that people were leaving church in increasing numbers and not coming back. No matter what color lipstick you put on the church pig, it still oinks. These self-proclaimed church experts proved they were more posers than prophets as they peddled their twenty-first-century version of spiritual snake oil.

Someone has to call this Christian crapola on the carpet. With The Wittenburg Door closing shop, I felt a responsibility to carry the mission forward as a solo satirist. I wanted to continue fighting this good fight to find glimpses of the divine amidst the mounds of Jesus’s junk. But by the time the book came out in 2010, I lacked the spiritual strength to take on the Theological Tysons that still reigned supreme in both evangelical and more progressive and mainline church contexts. So I left this unbiblical battle with the score Becky zero, Christian Industrial Complex 666. Someone once called me Cassandra (or Kassandra) because they felt I had much in common with this Trojan priestess in Greek mythology who was fated by the god Apollo to utter accurate prophecies that were never believed. So I presumed when I exited the world of biblical branding that my satirical words of warning against this spiritual sh*t show would go unheeded.

When I retrace my pilgrimage steps, I can see signs that my satirical observations proved to be spot on. The murmurings of #churchtoo abuses whispered to me in secret are now coming to light (though considerably more work needs to be done in this regard). I felt in my bones that this ongoing church and state circus would result in their clown car careening toward Christian crazy town. (That said, I can’t come up with anything more satirical than Trumpvangelicalism, especially when sprinkled with liberal doses of Evangelicals for Biden/Christians for Kamala.)

On a personal note, in the chapter titled “Holy Hippies,” I realized my late father was not only an alcoholic but he possessed extreme narcissistic traits as well. Also, I can now see how this alcoholism ‘n’ narcissism combo extends to most of my extended family tree. While I had done considerable work healing from the impacts of familial alcoholism on my psyche, my work unpacking the traumatizing impacts of their narcissistic actions was just beginning. 

Thanks to the latest research into narcissism and trauma I can see the threads of spiritual narcissism woven throughout this book. This includes a few folks I quoted and even praised who have since let their spiritual narcissist flags fly. Now I get why those I once considered peers or even friends went gonzo or ghosted me. It’s how extreme narcissistic personality types roll. No wonder the institutional church and its commercial counterpart the Christian Industrial Complex fail to respond to our current global challenges in a Christlike manner. Simply put, you can’t create compassion and empathy ex nihilo.

Upon rereading, Jesus Died for This? seems to have crafted (albeit by accident) a narrative that reflects not just my exit as a professional Christian author but the collapse of the entire Christian Industrial Complex as well. Unwittingly, Jesus Died for This? has now emerged as a time capsule documenting that time in Americana Christianity when, to quote American troubadour Don McLean, “the music died.”

I welcome church historians, religious scholars, and spiritual seekers to join me in retracing my steps. Let us explore together how John Winthrop’s clarion call for this New World to become a City on a Hill morphed into a mound of religious rubbish. What can we learn from the U.S. Church’s recent past that can help us move forward in creating a heaven here on earth that, in the spirit of my ancestor Roger Williams, truly welcomes all? (And by “all” he meant everyone from the holiest to the heretical.) As one who currently finds her “church” in her local brewpub or tasting room, I’ll drink to that. Cheers!

The Itinerarium
The Blessing on the Journey

Although I possess this inborn hunger to connect with the Jesus that I encounter in the gospels, I often wonder if he’s truly present when Christians gather together in his name. Are we really trying to put his teachings into practice or playing the Sunday morning God game? Watching the Christian cliques gather — the holy hipsters, the Promise Keeper/Suitable Helper couples who put Ken and Barbie to shame, the prayerful powerbrokers who keep the minister and the church coffers on a tight leash — reminds me that I’m not the “right” kind of Christian.

How could I ever be one of God’s girls when my deceased dad was a renegade Episcopal priest and college professor? The Rev. Dr. Karl Claudius Garrison Jr. might have hailed from the Bible Belt, but he sought salvation from a bottle of Southern Comfort.

Then again, take a good look at Jesus’ crew. They were the unclean, the unchosen, the unloved — the very people discarded by the religious establishment. What a bunch of missional misfits. No way would they be allowed to play on most Chris tian teams.

Here’s what I don’t get: Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection turned his followers’ lives upside down. So if those disciples were willing to give up everything they had, including their lives, to fol-low Jesus, then why are many Chris tians, myself included, such misguided messes? In the words of Mike Yaconelli, the founder of The Wittenburg Door and my first editor, “What happened to the category-smashing, life-threatening, anti-institutional gospel that spread through the first century like wildfire and was considered by those in power dangerous?” What the J is going on?

As we’ve seen all too often, some Chris-tians seek out the glare of the media spotlight as though this man-made electricity represents the true light of the world. In their mission to become the ringmasters of the Religious Ring-ling Brothers & Biblical Barnum Bailey Circus, they compete with their fellow clowns to headline “The Greatest Show on Heaven and Earth.”

Ever wonder what Jesus thinks when Chris tians pretend to glo-rify his name while placing themselves in the center ring? Does he ever turn to his dad and go, “I died for this?”

Christians may claim to love this humble carpenter from Naza-reth, but we don’t act Christlike a lot of the time. Wading through biblical bunk, evangelical excesses, and undemocratic dogma searching for signs of Jesus reminds me of the eager desperation one finds in small children trying to find Waldo (or Wally, if you’re based in the UK). It’s tough, but eventually they spot Waldo’s striped shirt and goofy glasses.

Likewise, once I look beyond the ungodly glitz and Jesus junk, I can spot ordinary radicals operating below the spiritual radar. They’re so busy trying to figure out how to put the Beatitudes into practice that they don’t bother to pimp out their products (Matthew 5 – 7). You don’t find them issuing manifestos, proclamations, and declarations as pious proof they’ve created this magic elixir that will somehow “save” the Chris tian church. They remind me a bit of holy hobbits — for years I seldom saw them in action, but once I started training my eye to look out for these everyday saints, I kept noticing them everywhere I looked.

In January 2007, I began a series of business and personal travels, starting with my first trip to Israel. During these trips, I started observing what religion scholar Phyllis Tickle terms “the Great Emergence,” a period of massive societal upheaval impacting tech-nology, science, politics, religion, and the global culture at large.

With each step forward in my faith, I find myself trying to con-nect with the soil and souls of those who walked this way before me. Through their stories, we can see these threads of church his-tory and tradition woven into the fabric of the future. Whenever I find myself wandering in the wilderness, it’s usually because I went off in my own direction instead of continuing along this ancient pilgrim path.

During this research, I stumbled upon Phil Cousineau’s book The Art of Pilgrimage, a slim volume that proved to be a valuable tool to help ground me in my journeys. Cousineau defines pilgrim-age as “the art of movement, the poetry of motion, the music of personal experience of the sacred in those places where it has been known to shine forth. If we are not astounded by these possibilities, we can never plumb the depths of our souls or the soul of the world.”

Anyone who knows me will testify that the thought of me engaged in quiet contemplation gives them the giggles. I resemble a chatterbox, not a contemplative. From a very early age, I learned to use humor as a defense mechanism that enabled me to survive as my nuclear family detonated. So naturally, I turn on the snark and fast-talk my way out of a prickly situation.

But something kept tugging at my heart, telling me I needed to go deeper, much deeper. After all, I am related to John How-land and Elizabeth Tilley and John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, who were four passengers aboard the Mayflower. Perhaps there’s some presence of this ancestral pilgrim spirit embedded into my DNA.

Despite this tenuous historical pilgrim connection, I confess that I’m a newbie in this whole pilgrimage process. Hence I began a flurry of emails with the Rev. Kurt Neilson, author of Urban Iona. How could the insights he gleaned from his pilgrimage to Ireland and Scotland assist me in my conversion from traveler to spiritual seeker? He reminded me that I need to be open to see, taste, hear, feel, or smell whatever I come across and then let that transform me. Accept whatever happens and don’t try to fight it. Not exactly words a control freak like me likes to hear. But the nudging in my gut kept telling me he was on to something, and that I should stop talking and listen for once.

After I quieted down, I had to admit to the painful truth that, while I interviewed people about their spiritual journeys all the time, I forgot the last time I really spoke to Jesus. Every time I tried to pray, I felt like this rabid dog trying to catch its ever-elusive tail. Every so often, my circular motions would land me into a labyrinth, where I could stop for a bit and catch my breath. But then it’s right back on the holy hamster wheel once again.

But Kurt’s gentle voice kept pushing me forward. “The journey is the goal. And the road is made by walking. Been said by many, in so many words, more or less.”

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