I just started reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Whether it was God or me, I’m not sure, but for some reason it’s been in my head to read it for a few months now and that idea stuck. On a side-note, sometimes I notice that’s how God speaks to me. A thought occurs to me, origin unknown, and unrelated to whatever I had been thinking about at the time, and no matter how many times I get distracted from it, or in cases where it’s an unwelcome thought, try to push it away, it never leaves. It just hangs there patiently and expectantly until one day I put it together and realize its been God all along, but that’s a post for another time.
I’m only about halfway through the book, which I’m reading online via Project Gutenberg, but I am completely absorbed in the storyline. I’ve been struck by several passages along the way, and one in particular captured my attention.
To emphasis it’s impact I’ll give a bit of context. Uncle Tom, the devout, loyal, and humble slave has been sold (apart from his wife and three children) to a family in New Orleans. The “master” of the family is a good-natured and kind man by the name of Augustine St. Clare who has the misfortune of being married to a selfish and callous woman named Marie. Marie attends church (when not suffering from her frequent “illnesses”) because it is the proper thing to do in society and she fancies herself quite pious. Sr. Clare does not. This particular day she has just arrived home and is apprising him of the particulars of a most agreeable sermon in which the preacher has explained away all the evils of slavery by pronouncing the “distinctions in society” as a reflection of God’s ordering of the universe.
St. Clare is incredulous, and while he is a slave-owner himself, he sees no reason to romanticize it as anything but what it is, a practice designed for convenience and financial interest, and he won’t be nailed down to giving his opinion to a visiting northern cousin as to whether it is right or wrong. We pick up the passage here:
“”I’m not going to have any of your horrid New England directness, cousin,” said St. Clare, gayly. “If I answer that question, I know you’ll be at me with half a dozen others, each one harder than the last; and I’m not a going to define my position. I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.”
“That’s just the way he’s always talking,” said Marie; “you can’t get any satisfaction out of him. I believe it’s just because he don’t like religion, that he’s always running out in this way he’s been doing.”
“Religion!” said St. Clare, in a tone that made both ladies look at him. “Religion! Is what you hear at church, religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.”
And, he’s right. Religion has caused incalculable damage to individual souls as well as the world as a whole. And, it has been linked inseverably to God. That is the greatest damage of all.
People flee from God because they see hypocrisy in the church. Or, they run because they can’t fathom any way to be what they think He requires of them. Maybe, they turn away because they have been scarred by religion and can’t separate Him from it.
However, God and religion cannot be more diametrically opposed. Religion sets impossible requirements and demands we fulfill them, God sent His son to fulfill the requirements for us (Rom. 8:1-4). Religion necessitates false piety and requires us to clean ourselves up and try to appear presentable, God rushes to rescue us when even the best we can offer is as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). Religion imprisons the soul; God sets it free (Gal. 5:1).
We were wretched, lost, doomed to destruction, and He looked on us and called us His Beloved (Song of Solomon 2:16). He covered our nakedness with robes of righteousness (Isaiah 61:10) knowing we could give nothing in return. I can’t think of anything less religious.