What made the professor so upset in his final days on earth were his church friends telling him that the only reason he was dying of cancer was that his Christian faith was weak. Friends like that we can do without!

Then I think of all the misery and guilt people like him have heaped on gay people, and I think: Naaaaaah.

This stuff is a huge part of modern evangelical Christianity, basically trying to co-opt and reclaim all that secular/New Age/self-help stuff for the cause of Christianity, and it’s the reason you see so much prosperity gospel and pray-your-way-to-health-and-wealth type stuff and pray-your-way-to-a-promotion/better (married) sex life/better whatever. It’s really a departure from traditional theology, which casts sin as the inevitable human condition from which we ALL need redemption (in this model, being gay isn’t good, but it’s not worse than, say, envy or pride) and poverty and suffering as conditions for which you will be rewarded in heaven. They’ve really made an American religion, in the worst sense of both words.

One of the most harmful ideas that’s come out of religion in the past 50 years is that religion can “cure” psychological problems. One of the reasons the molestation scandal in the Catholic Church got so ugly is that they kept sending the priests to programs that would “cure” them of being child molesters by praying really, really hard. And — surprise! — it didn’t work, and they continued to molest until some of their victims were able to come forward and turn them in.

Not only that, but you ended up with a lot of gay priests who had major adjustment problems because they went to seminary to try and “cure” themselves of being gay and — again surprise! — it didn’t work because it’s not an illness and Jesus isn’t going to take it away from you if you just pray real hard.