Ethical religion
Despite the corruption we see all too often related to religious personalities seeking power, real ethics, real faith *serves*. Reminded of that with the death of Rosalynn Carter...
A significant disadvantage to the “work from home” phenomenon: Holidays creep up unawares. There are no in-office signals with co-workers decorating their spaces and anticipation of paid time off.
The two posts planned for this week? Postponed until next week, after our long and welcome Thanksgiving holidays. This week, I’m taking a little step back and posting about people and things for which I am grateful. Join me in “giving thanks” for everything good and honest.
In the late 1980s/early 1990s, I knew a man named Dr. Foy Valentine. Foy had long worked for social justice. Even before the civil rights movement, Foy fought for the integration of Southern Baptist churches. Even before the AIDS crisis – an awful time when Southern Baptists loudly proclaimed AIDS to be God’s vengeance on the gay community – Foy advocated on behalf of gays’ rights, within the Southern Baptist Convention.
When Jimmy Carter was elected president of the United States, Foy Valentine was one of his first hires. Ethics. Keep me honest, Jimmy said. Both men adhered to the notion that one should “never play tennis with the net down,” in Foy’s words.
For Foy and Jimmy, and Jimmy’s wife Rosalynn, religion was not a creed. It was a way of life. Ethos. Ethical living. Foy related to me that when he would visit his friend Jimmy in Plains, Georgia, they’d attend church together. Jimmy was the same man in the pew as he was in the White House as he was with his family, Foy recalled. Unpretentious, kind, and good. (Note: I felt the same way about Foy.)
Habitat for Humanity was not a means for Jimmy and Rosalynn to stay busy post-presidency. It was a natural extension of their way of life, of their ethical religion. If your brother or sister is hungry, homeless, hopeless, feed them, shelter them, give them a reason to live. With dignity and pride, sweat equity.
Unsurprisingly, the Southern Baptist Convention did not take kindly to the ethical religion practiced by Foy and the Carters. Their de facto excommunication didn’t faze either family. Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Foy took it in stride and kept ploughing. They had neither time nor energy to fight a religion intent on gaining or holding power. Power does not change the world, except for the worse.
A personal anecdote posted Monday, November 20 on LinkedIn speaks to this principle. I enjoy Becky Daniels’ posts. She’s a younger version of me – very good with QuickBooks (including Enterprise version), with accounting and financial processes, and she has the ability to cut through nonsense and get straight to the point. She granted me permission to use her post and photograph, for which I am grateful. Here’s her Monday post, verbatim.
“It was March 2013, and my little family (pre-Julia Wy) made the trip to Plains, Georgia, to see Jimmy Carter teach Sunday School.
“We, by far, had the youngest kids there. So, Ms. Jan sent our squirmy girls to the nursery where someone would be along shortly to ‘keep the kids.’
“In those back rooms, it was just a normal church. Painted cinderblock walls. Those half doors so that a parent could hand over a child easily. I sat with a tupperware container of crayons letting my munchkins color while I waited for someone to come along to ‘keep’ them.
“Then I hear a sweet voice say ‘Good Morning!!’ I looked up, and at that half door was Mrs. Rosalynn Carter.
“I responded, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Carter!’ She came in and sat with me a while asking about where we were from, and telling me her experiences traveling to Tennessee (she knew where Soddy Daisy was). She asked about us...how old the girls were, what we did for a living, where we went to church.
“After a few minutes she said, ‘why don’t I watch them so you can go on into the sanctuary to be with your husband.’
“Of all of the things that seemed surreal that day, the former first lady of the United States of America watching my kids for even a few minutes, and believing that it wasn’t beneath her to do so, is at the very top of the list.
“She has truly finished the race. She was an absolute good and faithful servant.”
Ethical religion. In the public sphere, ethical religion defends the defenseless. In the private sphere, ethical religion picks up a hammer to build houses, and ethical religion watches a stranger’s kids so the mom can go on into the sanctuary to be with her husband.
In October, I saw ethical religion in action when Reinhard Cardinal Marx linked the memorial service for Willi Graf to taking a stand on behalf of freedom and justice in our current day. His office followed up with a press release repeating that call. Like Pope Francis, he’s appealing for social justice for those formerly disenfranchised from his faith. His March 2022 statement, “The Catechism is not set in stone, one is also allowed to doubt what it says,” specifically addressed a sea change in Catholic thought towards the LGBTQ+ community.
I also saw ethical religion at work in the small Bavarian town where I stayed for that conference - Pfarrer Bopp welcoming those who are “broken,” not demanding perfection of those who would gather at their church’s table. Opening doors to women, to other faiths, to seekers.
I see ethical religion at work every time I take donations to Community Aid in Hanover, Pennsylvania. Goodwill Industries represents unethical religion, a supposed nonprofit abusing our tax laws to enrich a wealthy few. Check out salaries and administrative expenses for Goodwill if you don’t believe me. I won’t take my stuff there, not since I learned that their job training sites exist only in locations where municipalities pay Goodwill to operate them (according to an audit of one such municipality’s Goodwill Industries investment for which I assisted with document analysis). Those job training sites don’t exist based on your donations. And they charge a precious penny.
Community Aid, on the other hand, puts all its profits into nonprofits doing actual hands-on work. They support job training programs, safe houses for abused women, food pantries, and more. They work with Lutheran, Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, and non-religious organizations. Ethical religion. Faith and ethics that make a difference.
In these days of turmoil, war, confusion, we should keep our eyes open for people (and sometimes organizations) that behave ethically, morally, in the right sense of “morally.” People who abuse religion too often consciously conflate morals with their brand of morality, which is creed-based. Actual moral behavior is creed-less. Actual moral behavior does not proselytize. It helps, assists, comforts.
Perhaps I am so drawn to the real White Rose story because of its moral and ethical underpinnings. These young adults and the older adults they associated with were willing to stake their lives on the belief that in a dark, dark world, it mattered that they behaved ethically and morally.
It mattered to Willi Graf – he gave his seat on the streetcar to a forced laborer, although doing so was a felony.
It mattered to Alexander Schmorell – he joined Nikolay Daniel Nikolaeff-Hamazaspian in giving food to POWs in camps around Munich. It mattered to Alexander Schmorell – he visited Russian forced laborers in Russian garb, taking them food and necessities, although doing so was a felony.
It mattered to Lilo Ramdohr – she stored leftover leaflets in her little broom closet, although doing so was a felony.
It mattered to Eugen Grimminger – he helped his wife’s family get out of Germany, he raised money for White Rose resistance, he quietly assisted anyone he knew who fought an evil regime, although doing all of that was a felony.
It mattered to Wilhelm Geyer – he broke up a Nazi rally, though he stood alone, he raised his children to question Nazi ideology, he stayed true to the integrity that supported his artistic endeavors, although all of that meant he lost a lucrative career, lost his artistic coworkers who aligned themselves to Nazi ideology, and although he knew that doing so was a felony.
It mattered to Christoph Probst – he fought through depression and anxiety enough to get out of bed and take principled stands, knowing that doing so jeopardized the wife, children, sister, stepmother, mother, half-siblings, and father-in-law he cherished so deeply, and although he knew that everything he did, said, and wrote was a felony.
It mattered to Willi Graf and Wolf Jaeger – they no longer were content to write words, they considered active resistance, blowing up a building, while wrestling with their conscience about the morality of doing so, all the while knowing that what they considered was a felony.
It mattered to Traute Lafrenz – she could not stand by while Jewish friends were targeted, so she joined others in Hamburg to get them out of the country, although doing so was a felony.
It mattered to Werner Scholl – he could not bear big words and as early as September 1939, started his own personal campaign of actual sabotage, although doing so was a felony.
I could go on – their story brims to the top and overflows with tales of small valor, small deeds of great measure. Deeds birthed by deep-rooted desire to make things right, to impart as much justice as one person can grant, to demonstrate the greatest amount of compassion possible in a compassionless world. Ethics, morality, in its rawest form. For some, ethical religion. For others, an innate sense of what is right and just.
When Sophie Scholl considered suicide, she confided her thoughts to Otl Aicher. She had been reading far too much Augustine, internalizing that writer’s emphasis on one’s worm-like appearance to a great and almighty God. It helped nothing at all that she read Augustine at the same time she was going through a personal “slough of despond.”
Sophie could not stand her family, she was alienated from Fritz Hartnagel, she felt eternally alone – a feeling she could not shake no matter how hard she tried. Worse yet, she could not pray. Augustine’s God – the God she thought she was supposed to pray to – was too distant, too cold, too unapproachable, too uncaring. Sophie believed she could never be worthy enough to pray to that God. She was not worthy to be loved, not by a man, not by her family, not by her Self, and above all, not by God. In German, no matter the religion, one prays to God “per Du,” informally, as speaking with a friend. Sophie could not even pray to God “per Sie,” formally.
She told Otl she contemplated suicide. Things were that dark…
Otl’s words to her were inspired by an ethical religion, an ethical faith, a faith built on compassion and justice. His response to her suicidal thoughts:
“Do you know the small God? The God, who does not control history, who does not judge, who does not set his foot on the neck of his enemies? He is there. He does not care about kings and the powerful of the earth, he does not care about emperors and popes, he does not care who wins wars. Rather, he cares about the poor, the hungry, the abandoned, the lonely, and the suffering, all the little people who have been tossed onto the compost heap of history. The entire world cannot be in greater need than one single soul. This God stands with the suffering soul at the abyss of nothingness. …
“The great God, the God of trumpets and armies, the God of nations and collectives, that God never appeared in Galilee. The God Jesus was a God with whom one speaks.” (Otl Aicher, innenseiten des kriegs, pp. 63-70 for entire quote and context.)
That is what Otl told Sophie as she contemplated suicide.
While Otl spoke to Sophie out of his Catholic tradition, his words apply to any of us who wish to make a difference in our hard, difficult world, regardless of our religion or lack thereof. No single faith, indeed no faith at all, has exclusive rights to ethics and morality. If we are to heal the world – tikkun olam – we must pick up hammer and saw, pen and keyboard, piano and clarinet, needle and thread, shovel and pickaxe, whatever tools we have at our disposal.
And – as Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Foy taught us, as Pfarrer Bopp wrote, as our White Rose friends clearly demonstrated: We do not wait until we feel we are perfect. If we wait until we’re perfect, those kids in the nursery won’t have anyone to watch out for them. If we wait until we’re perfect, injustice will prevail for lack of caring. If we wait until we’re perfect, nothing will change.
Choose ethics. Choose true morality. Choose justice.
It’s what matters. And I am grateful to all who choose that path.
© 2023 Denise Elaine Heap, including translation of Otl Aicher’s words. Please contact us for permission to quote. If you wish to quote Becky Daniels’ narrative or photograph, we will forward your request to her for permission.