Earlier this month Tom Ehrich argued that religion ”shouldn’t be this hard,” leading Rod Dreher to warn against “the siren song of easy religion.” Readers join the debate:
Responding to Tom Ehrich, Dreher neatly sidesteps the point by changing the subject, and politicizing the argument. As I understood it, Ehrich was commenting on how faith’s original role – to ease the suffering of guilt so we might have a closer relationship with God – has been flipped to a kind of Big Brother approach to guilt, where, instead of having Jesus help you carry the weight (“my yoke is easy and my burden is light”), a supposedly loving community pushes down harder. It’s a “hospital for sinners” where the sick are made to feel worse.
A few readers think Dreher made a category error:
Rod Dreher either misses the point of Tom Ehrich’s article or is deliberately obfuscating things to project his own biases onto the debate. ”Church,” “faith,” and “religion” don’t all mean the same thing, yet Dreher equates them. In the original article, Ehrich specifically makes this distinction:
Faith should be difficult, yes, because it inevitably entails self-sacrifice and renewal. Life, too, is difficult. Dealing with Mammon is difficult. Speaking truth to power is difficult. Confronting our own weakness and capacity for sin is difficult. But the institution whose sole justifiable purpose is to help us deal with those difficulties shouldn’t be making matters worse.
Another tries to reconcile Ehrich’s and Dreher’s views:
When you quote Ehrich saying religion should not be so hard and Dreher saying religion should challenge the believer, the opposition of ideas is interesting but omits a discussion of the bridge between the two. Dreher is right that Christian believers should question their behavior and confront sin, but when they do that they should do so with the glad news of the gospel – that grace will offer them forgiveness and acceptance.
Grace is something we can be sure of receiving because it is promised and is the assurance Ehrich wants to provide to the uncertain, but grace is something we cannot know we have in hand and the desire to seek grace is what can compel Christians to do the hard work Dreher favors. Grace is a practice that should infuse our behavior, and Pope Francis has demonstrated the basics of grace when he talked about being a sinner and downplayed rules of the church to emphasize the value of every person. Grace is a gift of God, and believers cannot decide how and when and where God will grant it.
A serious, thoughtful reading of What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey was a revelation to me.
The Dish 