6 min 07 sec: app reading time

January 2, 2025

THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING 

Dear Friend:

"Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense" (October 15, 2013) by Francis Spufford is a well-put-together, pugnacious defense of Christianity.

By refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is still valuable. 

It draws on the profoundly ordinary vocabulary of human feelings, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of a mature view of the Christian experience as a religion. 

Those of you know know me and read my writings know I only affirm religion if it affirms the consciousness of relational love.

Some find it in Christianity and other religions; many others walk out of religion because they can not stomach the hierarchical, patriarchal God they experience. 

Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, Richard Rohr and James Martin will appreciate Spufford's crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis.

"Unapologetic" is a book for Christians who are fed up with being patronized by non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative, and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made. (Not "all" atheists, in my view, fit Spufford's label.)

Having left religion myself over 17 years ago, while not becoming an atheist or agnostic and paradoxically remaining a Seventh-day Adventist, I don't necessarily agree with Spufford's theological Christian views. Nor is it my purpose to debate, refute, or affirm them in this brief post.

However, his point about "The Crack in Everything" in Chapter 2 of his book is universal across all religious and non-religious paths of human existence.

Spufford's approach to Christian faith is different than standard “apologetics.”

Spufford starts with an emotional experience, not a doctrinal proposition.

He describes what mercy and grace feel like.

Here are the key lines applied to his theological view. 

"It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas."

This fits with my own experience of faith within religion and more so out out of religion.

Over the last 17+ years, I've tried to sort out Christian doctrines in what's called "Deconstruction of Christian theology."

Contrary to popular belief two dimensions showed up in what has been my spiritual journey.

1) I didn't have to construct anything after deconstructing Christian theology and sorting doctrines out.

2) At first, I was fearful as I started to experience the open landscape of possibilities God allowed me to see as grace, love, and human potential beyond the religious constructs of sin and evil. It was in this open landscape that I experienced what Spufford describes in his work. Good and bad people all share the "cracks of our human condition." 

Culture often elevates wealth, celebrity, morality, roles, power, and socio-economics to a level that masks the "human cracks." 

As a Pastor, I have been honored to hear through the years the stories of fellow Pastors, professionals, church members, and people who were admired for their cultural pedigree. They would never dare to tell the world their inner feelings because they would be shamed and demonized instantly.

Faith, or what I like to call a relational trust with God for me, as for Spufford, is grounded in particular emotional experiences like being lifted from the monotony of the ordinary by Bach's organ piece "Toccata and Fugue in D minor," Handel's masterpiece "Coronation of the King" or a sunset by the ocean. The serendipitous epiphany of a transcendent experience fills my moment with emotions I can't explain with words. They connect me to the Divine presence. 

Beyond the "cracks of life" we all experience, there is something greater that invites us to consider the insights that can create meaning out of brokenness. 

While we might, then, like to dwell theologically on themes like mercy, grace, or awe, Spufford begins with the experience of human brokenness—of doing what we have said we don’t want to do, not doing what we have said we do want to do, or breaking promises, relationships, and hearts.

The tradition’s word for this is “sin” in the Biblical narrative. 

Spufford’s term is "The Human Propensity to F-things Up" or THPtFtU as a profound human condition we all share in common!

His shocking description speaks to me better than the word "sin."

Whether it is "sin," tendencies, proclivities, or THPtFtU, the claim is that we all experience it and participate in it, not just as discreet acts but as a condition of being authentically human.

This may be hard for some to swallow, acknowledge, or face up to within the hallways of churches and sacred places. 

We are heavily invested in the idea that we are good people, morally upright, seeking God, and that we don't mess things up, at least intentionally. We have a strong capacity to deceive ourselves about our brokenness, either just blanking it out altogether or blaming it on others, circumstances, or external pressures.

We tend to divide the world into two big categories: the good people and the bad people. 

I don't need to ask you to guess where we fit and where the "others" or the ones we deemed to be "bad people" fit in.

Spufford describes what THPtFtU feels like when we’re in the midst of it. But in contrast to much talk of "sin," "guilt," and "condemnation," he moves quickly to avoid such division as superfluous and shallow by, in one stroke, stating that we all experience THPtFtU feelings by design or by default. Humble awareness is perhaps what we need the most to wake up to such feelings.

Here’s a bit from the chapter that I particularly like: (You can replace Christianity with God or religion if you wish)

"So of all things, Christianity isn’t supposed to be about gathering up the good people (shiny! happy! squeaky clean!) and excluding the bad people (frightening! alien! repulsive!) for the simple reason that there aren’t any good people. Not that can be securely designated as such . . . This I realize goes flat contrary to the present pre-dominant image of it [Christianity/ church] as something existing in prissy, fastidious little enclaves far from life’s messier zones and inclined to get all ‘judgmental’ about them... What’s it’s supposed to be is a league of the guilty. Not all guilty of the same things, or in the same way, or to the same degree, but enough for us to recognize each other.” 

We need to experience our brokenness and our need for grace and mercy as we get together with others like ourselves and extend some compassion to our fellow travelers.

Somehow, the mutation of the THPtFtU condition has become contagious in the culture, communities, and the church. 

Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell was a rather unknown journalist fascinated by social science. So what happened? What changed? What did he do to become a household name? He wrote "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference."

A quarter century later, Malcolm sat down to update the book that made his name — only he realized that he had a lot of new things to say about social contagion. 

He just published in 2024 "Revenge of the Tipping Point," a riveting sequel in which he explores the "dark side of contagious phenomena." 

What Gladwell has revealed through the years of social research is simple. "Small things" can move the social scale up or down. 

In his first book, he proposed optimistically that small endeavors could change the human condition for the better. 

In his latest book, he proposed that small, dark endeavors impair large masses of people. A few people giving in to THPtFtU impacts others negatively and in mass we all end up succumbing to the phenomenon. 

I grew up believing church was where the really good citizens, the above-average Americans, and the Enlightened people hung out. 

What I came to find out is that THPtFtU is experienced as brokeness at all levels. The result is that it’s like the worst sort of Christmas letter (all the kids get straight-A’s, we go on the most amazing vacations, but also help needy people tons) without end! It's all good minus the "brokeness" we carry in silence! 

That's the stuff that will wear you out.

I meet too many Christians who don't need a Savior but an idol to hold on to while they parade their virtues. 

For them, the whole idea of being saved is sort of embarrassing! They see the "other," the lost ones, the bad people, as needing to be saved, and they move on to judge them as unworthy until they "accept Jesus or salvation salvation."

My fixation with Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem" comes from the first half of my life, having journeyed boxed within the narrowed confines of religion and the second half out of religion, realizing humans are humans and we are all broken. "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Thank God for the cracks in our lives. 

When we experience them, as Spufford shares, there is room for the transforming power of God to uplift us. 

I invite you to let God's love and light pierce the corners of your consciousness in 2025. Would you join me as I commit myself to it?

With you on your journey,

Pastor Harold