A few weeks back, I had lunch with a lifelong friend; he’s now a successful Southern Baptist minister. We’ve been friends since the second grade, and his dad taught me so many things that I, as a child without a present father, needed to hear. Despite our differences, we are still friends, and I value that relationship more than he likely knows.
When we lunched, he asked some questions about my “deconstruction.” I told him that I considered a pivotal point to have been 9 December 1980. That was the day after John Lennon was murdered, and the day when I heard the news. It was the day that I went to my private Christian school and was told that John had “lifted up his eyes in hell.” While there are so many points along the way that contributed to where I came to be, I feel like that one was of high importance.
I wouldn’t condemn Hitler to eternal agony. Death? Yes, I’d do it myself, with no reservations! Anyone who murders, oppresses, or is actively bringing harm to others, I accept that stopping them by any means necessary is a reasonable and justifiable response.
But condemn them to unending, excruciating pain? Hell (pun not intended) no. No! Just… no. Seriously, have you thought about what that would mean? Incessant burning, forever? No one deserves that. No one. Ever.
There I was, in 10th grade, being told that John Lennon, a peaceful person who brought beauty and thought to the world through song, was murdered and was now being punished forever by the Christian God.
That wasn’t a moment of belief cessation for me; that wouldn’t come for another twenty years or so. But that was the moment when I picked sides. That was the moment when I realized that, real or not, I could not in good conscience be on the side of a god that would condemn his alleged creations to eternal torment… especially when he was setting them up to fail from the beginning.
The preceding paragraph wasn’t something I shared with my old friend, probably because time is limited and I have ADHD and I distract myself a lot. But it’s the truth. The senseless murder of John Lennon was a line in the sand for me, and I closed my eyes and stepped over it without giving it a second thought. John Lennon was robbed of the rest of that incarnation of his life for no legitimate reason, and that’s neither something we as a society should tolerate nor something for which the victim should be punished. And yet, the belief system within which I’d been raised was telling me that John would suffer eternal, excruciating torment.
A topic that also came up in that conversation was the question of where my morality comes from if I don’t have “God” to tell me not to run around clubbing people over the head. Fortunately I have a pretty good answer for that one.
I was raised by farm-grown Tennesseans and I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians (albeit in an urban environment). My folks were from Scotland and England mostly, and those places were the homes of Germanic and Scandinavian folk who had some very strong values. As a student of history and culture, I’ve learned over time that many of the “good Christian values” with which I was raised were, in fact, the values that people from our neck o’ the European woods held sacred long before Christianity existed.
For the past few years (since around 2016!) we’ve all seen what “Christian values” really are: for sale. Many in the camps of the non-religious have said for years that organized religion was really about wealth and power, and as I watched – and continue to watch – these self-proclaimed Christians sell their souls to people who are about as close to “the devil” as I’ve seen, I’ve come to realize how right we were all along. I see a helluva lot of people doing things that would make the historical Jesus (assuming there was one) roll over in his grave, and they do these things in the service of people that the Bible specifically says don’t have a prayer of a chance at “the Kingdom of Heaven.”
As I watch our far-from-perfect nation being ripped apart at the seams, I take no satisfaction in feeling that I was right. I know many Christians and most of them, I believe, are good people with honest motives. But Jesus isn’t standing behind many podiums these days, so most Christians – Protestants and Catholics alike – get their beliefs from men and women who have stationed themselves as Jesus’ … interpreters. They’re conveniently here to tell you when you should still adhere to Old Testament laws (like wanting to eliminate homosexuality) and which ones you should throw out (is that a cotton blend you’re wearing? Hey, say “hi” to John for me!) They’re here to provide some sort of convenient explanation for why “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” really doesn’t mean what it says. Oh, and they’re passing the offering plate and raking in billions nationwide without paying a penny in taxes to this nation that they think belongs to them and them alone. I truly don’t believe the friend I referenced at the start of this post is a charlatan, nor do I think the bulk of Christians are, but there are plenty of those out there. They’ve been around for a really long time, doing the same things over and over throughout history, and it’s really sad that we humans have yet to catch on.
The current state of things here in early 2025 are symptomatic, and we all know that it’s futile to treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease. They’re symptomatic of a culture where the education system was crafted to make workers instead of thinkers and questioners. They’re symptomatic of an economic system that has you and me paying more in taxes that the wealthiest one-percent. And yes, they’re symptomatic of a culture that has trained people to “listen to that man behind the podium, he’ll explain it” and suggest that you’re tempting your eternal fate if you don’t.
Like me, you might be looking around these days and seeing people – like John Lennon, immigrants, brown people, trans people, etc. – condemned without justification. And we’re surrounded by cowardly politicians who are either too afraid or too soulless to act in defense of our nation and its Constitution.
Perhaps I’m overly-optimistic – or just too ornery to back down – but I believe there’s a chance here for us to come out better than we were when it started. On that tragic day in December of 1980, a deluded psychopath chose to ambush an unarmed man and murder him. Likewise-deluded men chose to mention this event throughout my school-day, causing me to seriously question for the first time the rationale behind their insistence that a man had just been delivered into eternal torture because he didn’t think the same way that they did. And while I’m quite certain I’d have gotten where I am sooner or later, I have always remembered that day – and the vitriolic words of my teachers – as a catalyst.
Every non-white person who is seeing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 being dismantled is being changed by the events of the last couple of months. Every woman who has already lost her right to choose and who may lose her right to vote is being changed by these events. When your grandmother can’t buy groceries next month because she didn’t get the Social Security check she paid for, you’ll be changed. When your ability to secure healthcare – which was bad enough to begin with – for your children when they need it evaporates and you can’t help the people you love most, you’ll be changed.
And that is what we really needed all along, isn’t it? For all of us to see things as they really are and decide – finally – that it’s unacceptable. For more of us to understand that we truly do live in an oligarchy and that neither of the two dominant political parties have been trying to fix it; at least in part because they owe their jobs to donations from the super-rich. Yes, we’ve all been played, by both sides, for a long time… it is better for them to keep us focused on fighting each other than for us to realize that most of us regular-folk, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, have a helluva lot more in common with each other than we do with any of them.
John Lennon’s murder was a shock to a lot of people. Sometimes that’s what it takes though, don’t you think? We get up every day, shower, dress, go to work, go to the grocery store, watch some TV… then we sleep a few hours and do it again. We humans find a certain comfort in routine, I think, and sometimes it’s just easier to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Hell, sometimes it’s all we can do. But when something happens and it’s so wrong, so shocking, so infuriating that our world is rocked by it… then maybe we get knocked off our feet and suddenly we’re taking a beat and opening our eyes.
As appalled as I may be with what I’m seeing from Washington of late, this might be the one thing that could really save us: an unprecedented level of attack from our own government against us, the working-class backbone of America… the “people” who our nation’s most sacred document was talking about when it said our government would be for us and by us.
If John were here, he’d probably write a poignant song to help us see through one of our nation’s darkest hours and point us in the right direction.
What will you do?
