Don’t judge too quickly— when it comes to religion, nobody believes in a vacuum

When I became the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer way back in 1990, I had little experience with any religion other than my own Bapticostal brand.

I was aware that people from other systems of faith or skepticism considered my own tradition wacko. But frankly I considered their beliefs way more wacko than mine.

The subsequent seven years that I held the religion writer’s job proved more enlightening than any degree I could have earned at the best seminary. Day after day, I sat down with Atheists, Anglicans, Baptists, Buddhists, Catholics, Disciples of Christ—all the way to Zoroastrians. You name’em, I met’em.

And in the process, I arrived at a paradigm-shifting conclusion: nobody believes anything in a vacuum. Its corollary: nobody acts in a vacuum.

Everybody has a history. Everybody believes what she believes for reasons that seem wholly logical and legitimate to her. It’s a great mistake to dismiss people out of hand, no matter how bizarre their theology or traditions might seem to you at first glance.

I thought of that again this week as I was reading on Yahoo!News a religion story that originated on HuffPost.

An Oklahoma pastor found himself in hot water after a video went viral of him rubbing his spit into a man’s face during a sermon. Pastor Michael Todd of Tulsa’s Transformation Church said he was demonstrating to his congregation how “receiving vision from God might get nasty.”

In the video clip, Todd coughs and spits into his hand before wiping the spit on a man standing next to him (who, as it turns out, is his brother).

“Do you hear and see the responses of the people?” Todd says as some members of the audience gasp. “What I’m telling you is, how you just reacted is how the people in your life will react when God is doing what it takes for the miracle.”

Todd’s rubbing of spit in a man’s face obviously struck many people inside and outside his church as outrageous, and not just because we’re in a pandemic. As said, the video went viral, and not in a good way.

However, being a fellow evangelical preacher, I recognized instantly the context of what he was doing. (For the record, I’ve never done anything like that myself.)

Todd was reenacting a miracle from the Gospel of John in which Jesus mixes his saliva with dirt to make mud, then rubs the concoction in the face of a blind fellow, which heals him.

It’s clear from the video this is only an object lesson—Todd’s not really trying to heal the guy. His moral is that miracles can be startling, unorthodox and off-putting.

After “the spit hit the fan” over the original video, in Todd’s words, he taped a second video—both funny and self-deprecating—in which he apologizes for getting carried away.

“I watched it back, and it was disgusting,” he says genially, agreeing with his critics. “Like, that was gross.”

Besides, the miracle he was trying to perform on stage didn’t happen, he jokes—his brother is still bald.

My point is, while Todd’s spit-based object lesson was ill-considered, perhaps, it didn’t appear out of a vacuum.

He was reenacting a specific biblical story for effect. The guy he rubbed saliva on was his brother and by all appearances a willing collaborator. This is important information to possess before you arrive at a judgment.

In my years as a religion reporter, what I discovered again and again was that if you genuinely want to understand why other people do things you consider strange or believe things you consider wrong-headed, it helps to first learn their backstories and consider the context in which they’re operating.

Here’s a radical thought: you might even want to consider how your own backstory and context constrict the way you see these folks.

When I started on the religion beat, I still assumed Catholics were only marginally Christian, because they worshiped the Virgin Mary and prayed to plaster idols.

Then I got to know a bunch of Catholics and quickly learned my opinions were based on misinformation and had nothing to do with actual Catholic beliefs. I was viewing a huge complex denomination through the blurry little keyhole of my tribe’s propaganda.

So. People become Buddhists for reasons. People become Catholics for reasons. People handle snakes for reasons. It’s good to know their reasons.

Like that blind man in the Bible story, we can’t perceive anything clearly, can’t tell what’s wise from what’s foolish, until our own eyes have been opened. And one way to open our eyes is to talk with and listen to those around us, even those who initially strike us as odd. We might accidentally learn something valuable.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.