ON THE MATTER OF “GOD” AND “JESUS” TALK

SEPTEMBER 23, 2025 – Yesterday, for anticipated entertainment value akin to watching the trailer for the latest blockbuster monster movie, I Googled “Charlie Kirk funeral.” As with a horror film, I had no intention—or stomach—for watching anything besides brief excerpts, especially when I saw the duration of the production digitally-displayed in the corner—over five (!) hours. I don’t think the televised funeral of JFK, which my dad, a die-hard Republican, forced me to watch, was even half that long. If you haven’t seen more than a 30-second clip of the funereal extravaganza in State Farm Stadium in Phoenix in front of 90,000 fans . . . er, followers . . . you should experience this shocking display of sleeve-worn faith, amplified music blaring, smoke fountains rising, politicians scoring three-pointers (Father, Son and Holy Cow!), and American flags waving in the digital winds on each side of the main stage of the White American Altar of the Christian Right. Out of nowhere—no, actually, out of somewhere—what I found most jarring, most gob-smacking were emblematic details worn by the widow herself: MASSIVE gold and gem-studded rings, one on each finger of her right hand. On camera, at least, she appeared as a million-dollar mourner from a cast of crass. But I shouldn’t have been so shocked: as it is said of matters hidden from explication, “Just follow the money.”

In any event, the ostentatious display of purportedly Christian values posing as an outpouring of public grief, staged in the tabernacle of American culture—a state of the art sports stadium the size of 10,000 arks—was in stark contrast to the small wood-frame church that housed my earliest memories of public worship.

My dad was a nominal Lutheran—the state religion of his mother before she emigrated from Sweden. He never attended church until in tired response to my mother’s persistence he finally relented—when I was about 12. Mother had grown up in the Episcopal church. She explained almost apologetically that our humble “God’s house” on the other side of town was a “mission” church, built as an outreach post for the few remaining Native Americans in the surrounding area around the time Minnesota achieved statehood (1858). Mother was from the East Coast, where Episcopalians seemed to be in the Protestant majority, and “her church” back there was built of granite, an elegant monument to eternity.

My image of God was something along the lines of Bernice Annon, our church organist, who looked about the age of my grandmothers and during the week, doubled up as the main piano teacher on our side of town. I liked the way the wall-mounted goose-neck lamp over her left shoulder gave her white vestment a bright luminescence that I imagined was directed straight out of heaven. She never spoke a word from her exalted corner, but she communicated through the organ music she played. That made perfect sense to me—“God” speaking to us through music, especially “pure” music—that is music uncluttered with words, which I knew were a human invention, despite references during the service to the “Word of God.” When “God” walked among us mortals, I noticed that she took very short steps in her old fashioned brown heels and that her ankles were the size of tree trunks. I was thankful that the rest of her lower legs were well hidden under her low-hanging dress. I marveled at how as if by magic this aged woman—big ankles and all—could be turned into God when combined with her vestment, the lamp, and the organ music.

Jesus, meanwhile, was always more down to earth than Bernice Annon was in her role as God. In the first place, there was large the stained glass version of the vintage painting of Jesus wearing red and blue vestments, holding a shepherd’s crook in his left hand and cradling a lamb in his right arm, while half a dozen sheep from his “flock” crowd around his feet. The life-size image on the backlit stained glass that shone down upon the chancel gave everyone in the pews beyond a definitive impression of Jesus. For backup, I imagined that play-acting the role of Jesus, at least while conducting the worship service, was the rector, Cyril Hanney, a feisty Welshman with an accent, annunciation and timbre straight off a theatrical stage.

As time progressed, I landed in other churches and encountered other images of God and Jesus, but none quite as convincing as Bernice Annon and Father Cyril Hanney.

As far back as I could remember, Mother was “into” church, God and Jesus, but so was everyone else who attended Trinity Episcopal Church in Anoka and, I had to assume, so were the members of all the other churches in town. Granted, Mother’s involvement went beyond attending Sunday service, but again, she was a joiner and a doer on a lot of fronts, so it was only natural that she would assume an active role at church—teaching Sunday school, directing the junior choir, serving on the vestry, and participating in Bible study.

Eventually, she also succeeded Bernice Annon at the organ. By that time we had a new, modern church—designed by a firm that specialized in food warehouses, so we wound up with a cement-block structure that both inside and out appeared much more like a warehouse than a church. If technically it was a “house of God,” it was unrecognizable as such.

Gone was the wall-mounted goose-neck lamp just above the organist’s shoulder, and the built-in light of the new organ illuminated the music and little else; Mother’s white vestment looked drab and hardly divine. There was no way she could be mistaken for God, even when she played Bach during the prelude or postlude.

In any event, all of Mother’s churchy activity seemed within the range of normal—at least by Mother’s standards.

Then came the episode when Mother went off the rails—for the second time, as it turned out, though the first occasion was before I was born. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and the family got to see up close the classic manifestations of the malady. Among them was hyper-religiosity.

When she plunged into psychosis, the religious stuff went completely haywire. She started drawing lots of Christian symbols on things, and she became obsessed with the rector coming to the house to administer communion. She babbled on and on about Jesus this and Jesus that. It was all a major departure from the normal course of things. In subsequent psychotic episodes, the tip-off that her brain chemistry was in revolt—even before she presented herself when I arrived at my parents’ house to visit—was the appearance of multiple Bibles lying open on the dining room table; when she was engaged in “normal Bible study,” she relied on a single volume.

For me anyway, Mother’s behavior suggested that perhaps her religious faith was more the result of mental illness than something grounded in . . . whatever it is to which faith is otherwise tethered. At the time I confronted this question, I myself had become rather religious. Now that too had to be questioned. Was my own religiosity the result of guilt for having rebelled earlier (during my adolescence) against Mother’s religious beliefs? Beyond mere attendance at Sunday worship service, had I wound up teaching Sunday school, serving on the church council (and even a stint as president of the congregation) and numerous committees, making fund-raising appeals, playing my violin during services, and joining a Bible study all to atone for my guilt for how I’d responded to Mother’s religiosity, which, it now seemed quite possible, was nothing more than the manifestation of mental illness?

In grappling with these questions, my image and construct of “God” and “Jesus” took a direct hit. Applying an historical analogy, it seemed as though in the face of irresistible forces, whatever was divine about the Divine was forced into concession—much as Tsar Nicholas II, God’s appointed representative on earth, was forced to abdicate after 300 years of rule by the Romanovs. Now in limbo, my shaken faith was like the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. It wasn’t long, however, before additional influences took hold: my reading books by Carl Sagan, by the radical theologian, (Episcopal) Bishop Shelby Spong, and by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and zoologist. In aggregate these served as my personal parallel to the “October Revolution” that had put the Bolsheviks in power—and in my case, had enthroned atheism or at least a strong case of agnosticism.

We all know how the Russian Revolution turned out, however, just as we know where the French Revolution led. Since science has yet to answer the two biggest questions of all—what came before the Big Bang and what happens to the human soul after the human body dies?—I’ve made the executive decision for me and me alone that for now, anyway, I’ll disengage from both the “Russian Revolution” and the “French Revolution.” In other words, I’ll avoid subscription to what I call “militant atheism,” admitting that my choice is driven by “psychological emotion,” not any kind of reason-based analysis. I’ll enjoy the benefits of living not in the Soviet Union or post-monarchical France but in say, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands—each a constitutional monarchy. Each is a democracy, but for better or worse, each has a glittering tourist attraction that has no real political power but on balance is an economic plus and all scandals aside, can provide leadership above the fray to rally folks around the flag, as needed in times of trouble. In short, I’ll embrace the good (religious inspired art, music, and architecture and the teachings attributed to Jesus) and eschew the bad (doctrine and dogma; tenets of exclusion, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, judgment, and militancy).

The “God” and “Jesus” on display in Phoenix yesterday, are absolute dictatorships of the mind. They are an abject corruption of Christian values and are wedded to a Disneyworld construct of Christian paradise that appeals to Kool-Aid addicts and pre-schoolers. What was billed as a funeral was by design and effect a rightwing propaganda pageant. I was appalled. This dictatorship actively seeks to integrate church and state to the detriment of both. Giving ample lip service to “God” and “Jesus,” the speakers—one after another and another—worked the stage as if they were the deities.

How all this resolves is anyone’s guess, but no matter how you perceive “God” and “Jesus”—as a human construct, as symptoms of a mental disease, as a benign but colorful constitutional monarchy, or as an absolute dictatorship—the religious-political extravaganza on stage in Phoenix yesterday was no place for reflection or contrition. It was a reminder that hordes of Americans are still drunk on Kool-Aid, and as long as that condition prevails, the viability of our democracy is threatened.

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson