The Op-Ed Page

Bart Campolo

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

The first time I heard the term “secular humanism” many decades ago, it was in a negative context. I translated it as “angry atheist” and stored it in my mental junk drawer along with other assorted concepts I wasn’t sure merited further investigation.

Humanism reemerged as something to consider when I came across the story of Bart Campolo. Bart is the son of Tony Campolo, a progressive Baptist preacher and former spiritual advisor to Bill Clinton. Bart entered the family business as a spellbinding evangelist and founder of Mission Year, an urban ministry focused on improving the lives of young people. Through his twenties and thirties his faith eroded and he now rejects anything supernatural. In 2016, he started a podcast called Humanize Me. I’ve listened to dozens of episodes and, despite the trauma of his public deconversion, he remains a charismatic, insightful, and loving human being.

The trouble with humanism, Bart admits, is that it’s hard to gather a community around a belief system grounded in this world and not in the next. He has been able to generate a faithful online following but the idea of a humanist church has not been a galvanizing one. Bart attempted to start an in-person community in Cincinnati called Caravan, which, based on the website, appears defunct. But the four founding principles of Caravan are profound: building loving relationships, making things better for others, cultivating awe and wonder, and worldview humility.

Christians are familiar with the first three precepts but not the last. Most Christian churches, though not all, practice the opposite, what might be called worldview hubris. We are sure we have found the way to heaven and we’re doubly sure it’s the only way.

A couple thoughts about our certainty. First, the math of our proposition doesn’t seem compatible with a loving God. I suspect, when creating the universe, God knew that many of us would not be Christian (currently Christians make up about a third of the world’s population). Would God knowingly create a world in which so many of his children would miss the mark? Many Christians say they believe this, pointing to verses like John 14:6 in which Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” However, few are moved to invest time or money evangelizing the lost. According to the missionary organization The Traveling Team, for every $100,000 that Christians make, we give $1.70 to the unreached.

I respect those who believe Jesus is the only way. If you interpret the scriptures literally, you have a strong case. My view is that the Bible is authoritative but not inerrant. In John 14, Jesus also says “The Father is greater than me” (verse 28) and “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (verse 11). The message I get from the whole of John 14 is that belief in the Father is the critical piece. If you define God as Love, as almost all religious people do, then loving God by loving others is our highest obligation. If love is at the center of Christianity rather than belief in Jesus, we no longer are forced to be exclusive.

Again, I realize this is not the standard interpretation of the Bible preached from most pulpits. Nor am I a theologian. However, decades of Bible study and worship have shown me the hazards of an exclusive Jesus.

First, it instills an oppositional mentality. It’s us (the saved) among them (the lost). It’s virtually impossible not to pity or fell superior to people whom you believe have made a choice that will haunt them for all eternity.

Second, it can make us solipsistic. Why waste time dealing with people who are different from us and are dammed to hell anyway? Most churches are demographically homogenous – far more so than our cities, towns, or workplaces. The temptation to retreat into the cocoon of one’s comfortable church circle is strong.

Third, it makes us afraid. We worry that there is something wrong with “those people” who either worship differently or don’t worship at all. We fear becoming close lest their foreign ways lead us astray.

Last, it makes us incurious. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and peoples of the world’s many other faiths (and no faith) have traditions that can add to our understanding of the world. Many years ago while visiting Tucson, Arizona, I came upon a group of Buddhist monks meticulously crafting a sand mandala. These flat, intricate sand sculptures take groups of monks days or sometimes weeks to construct. Once completed, they are carefully dismantled, symbolizing the impermanence of the material world. The monks’ egoless devotion to their task, which they complete in silence, and their willing acceptance of the mandala’s destruction has no parallel Christian ritual but has been a lifelong inspiration to me.

I had a Jewish patient who taught me a deeper understanding of the concept of shalom. I had a Muslim student who taught me the discipline of Ramadan. We Christians have our own array of deeply meaningful traditions, but we must allow the possibility that we don’t have a lock on the Truth.

The Caravan website reminds us how most of us come to our world view: “(M)ost of our ideas and convictions are inherited from other people and/or conditioned by circumstances beyond our control. In other words, we are well aware that if our lives or brains were different, then our worldview would be different too, and we’d be using different arguments to defend it.”

When we meet someone of a different faith, our choices include conversion, consternation, or curiosity. Choose wisely.

A version of this column appeared in the February 3^rd edition of the Florence Morning News.

The Op-Ed Page

The lady who squeezed the pomegranates.

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

I haven’t traveled widely, but the two times I have travelled internationally as an adult, I have been aware of what a privilege it is. Approximately 40% of Americans have never left the country, and 10% have never been outside their home state.

Looking back at America from across an ocean or a border grants an important, perhaps even essential, perspective. Sometimes the American way gains standing from a faraway vantage. In February 2020, just before COVID, I spent two weeks working in a hospital in Tanzania with a half-dozen students from USC School of Medicine. The hospital, one of the largest in Tanzania, was decades behind those in the U.S. The wards were open (approximately thirty to a room), and the ICU was miniscule and outdated. The radiology department had installed its first CT scanner just a couple years before. Of the deaths that occurred during our time there, several could have been prevented in the U.S. Returning to McLeod Hospital, the local Florence facility where I do part of my practice, I was grateful for the technology and expertise that I had heretofore taken for granted.

The cheese-maker.

My most recent trip, in November 2022, was to Sicily, the land of my ancestors. Returning home was a more ambivalent experience. Our small, expertly-led tour group spent 10 days travelling the length of the island and sampling its bounty. We met a family of fishers and ate tuna they had caught in their restaurant, we met a family of olive famers and watched as one poured freshly pressed oil into small bottles for us to take home, and we met a family that made sausage, pasta and cheese. We saw the patriarch make ricotta in the morning and then ate it for lunch. When I returned, my first meal in the U.S. was at Buc-ees. It was culinary whiplash.

Please don’t misunderstand. There is fast food in Sicily. I bet my brother, who travelled with me, that we would not see a McDonald’s in Sicily, and lost. There are families in America who produce food with the same sense of tradition and passion as those I saw in Italy. We have a farmers’ market in Marion where a woman, whose ancestors have been here since the town was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, sells glorious cookies and pound cakes from recipes honed through the generations. And it is of course true that many people in both countries would eat better if they could afford it.

That said, the food cultures of the two countries are different. It shows in our waistlines. Italy’s adult obesity rate is about 12%. America’s has topped 40%. Speed and work are valued in different ways by the two nations. Eating as part of multitasking is deeply ingrained here. We take out. We eat food in our cars or at our desks. Family members in the same house don’t always eat together.

In Sicily, food is more often an event. Some businesses still close in the middle of the day so that pranzo (lunch) can be savored and followed by a nap. Fresh ingredients are more available and sought after. In Sicily we shopped in two sprawling outdoor markets, one in Palermo and the second in Catania. Both brimmed with riotous displays of fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. In the Ballaro market in Palermo, I watched in awe as a woman at least in her 60s deftly and powerfully squeezed pomegranates with a manual press. With effortless squeeze after squeeze, rivers of juice flowed into the cups of her delighted customers (of which I was one). The juice of the grape is also coveted in Italy. We met a vintner whose vineyard is on the slopes of Mt. Etna. He described how just a few dozen kilometers of distance or altitude between vineyards can produce markedly different wines.

The culinary spirit I’m trying to describe was best exhibited as we dined at the restaurant Tritalo Mediterraneo in Palermo. We ate there twice, sitting outside, and laughed as we tried to communicate across the language barrier. On our second visit, we were welcomed like returning family. When I asked for the check, the owner instead brought out a bottle of Punagro (an orange liqueur) with four glasses and poured each of us a complimentary drink. That gift typified Sicilians approach to the table – as a place of refuge and rejuvenation, where time slows, and from which no sane person would hurry away.

It’s easy to believe that America has the best of everything. It is not wrong to think of our country as the shining city on a hill, as Reagan put it. But there are many different ways of living. The American way, sad to say, is not always the best. It was humbling, but necessary, for me to be reminded of that.

A version of this column appeared in the 1/11/23 issue of the Florence Morning News.

Paul, on the far right, with family members.