A Review of Benjamin L. Corey’s “Unafraid”
Nothing to Fear, Right?
I know I’ve told this story on Medium before, but in the context of Benjamin L. Corey’s upcoming book, Unafraid, it’s a story well worth repeating. When I was about two or three years old, and my parents and I lived in Toronto, Ontario, my mom took me to a Catholic church service. In my memory, this was probably the first time I had stepped foot inside a church, after my infant baptism (and, for the baptism, I don’t think I was walking quite yet). Anyhow, I remember feeling that the service was boring and stuffy, and I know I was either acting up or fidgeting or otherwise driving my mom (bless her heart) crazy.
So my mother, at some point halfway through the mass, turns to me while pointing to a door to the right in front of us, located beside the altar area, and says to me, “If you keep on acting up, the boogeyman is going to come out of that door and take you away.” Now, I don’t remember if I actually smartened up and sat piously for the rest of the mass, but I do remember eyeballing that door and wondering how many kids of my age had been spirited away by monsters.
Flash forward to Grade 3. At that time, my family was now living in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, a small village just to the east of Algonquin Provincial Park. One of the local Catholic priests — being that I was attending a Catholic school and all — paid a visit to my class to field answers to our burning religious questions, and mine was something along the lines of, “How good did you have to be to get to Heaven?” And I think the priest tried to convince me that God doesn’t keep a scorecard of all of the good and bad things that you’ve done in life. But I wasn’t convinced.
For many, many years I thought of God as being a wicked, unloving entity — fuelled by Old Testament stories of God sending she-bears after sinners and flooding the earth after much debauchery. So this is where Corey’s book comes in. He had a fundamentalist upbringing, and pretty much thought that our Christian God was a God that was going to condemn us all to a lake of fire if we didn’t repent our sins. The thing is, Corey has come to see God in a different, more kinder light. In fact, Corey — while still retaining ties to the Anabaptist movement — is a radical Christian who believes that gay people should be included in the church, among many other things.
It’s an interesting faith story that Corey shapes for us in Unafraid. And given that he has one foot on the conservative side of the fence, and the other on the liberal side, the book comes off as being rather centrist. Corey wants us to find God through Jesus in true evangelical fashion, but he also has ideas about the Rapture (it’s not going to happen) and Hell (no reference to it exists in the Old Testament, so it probably doesn’t exist quite as we picture it). Better writers than me could parse and summarize Corey’s arguments and his commitment to his readers that God is, indeed, love. However, I did find myself glazing over large tracts of this book — even if Corey can cuss like a sailor with the best of them (yay!) and his message is a fairly progressive one.
For one thing, I found that, mostly, there’s not much of the author’s personal story that is told in these pages — it’s there, but it feels muted among all of the lecturing — as which is a little disappointing because personal stories are usually the most interesting things about these kinds of books, along with what I call the “God talk.” Instead, much of the text is relegated to drawn-out homilies about the topic at hand in each chapter, whether Corey is rapping about the Rapture, conservatives versus liberals, or the fact that Jesus is the end word on all things that happen in the Bible. However, that’s not too much of an egregious thing. Why? I suppose that this book is really meant to convince through impassioned discourse that God is good to those still on the ultra-conservative, fear-based side of the political and religious spectrum that Corey wants to swing over into a more liberal world-view, without denying their evangelical upbringings at the same time. To that end, and I’ve said this before in other Christian book reviews, too, this book was not meant for me.
You see, I’ve read the late Marcus Borg and also Living the Questions, and there isn’t really anything new that Corey brings to the table that hasn’t already been covered by those other sources, really. In fact, Borg goes — much to my pleasure — even farther than Corey does, suggesting that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally and is not the infallible word of God. Corey wants to, in a way, have his cake and eat it, too (you know, be a religious conservative and a liberal at the same time) — and I’m not raining down judgment on him for that.
If that’s his worldview and he’s not out to hurt anyone (and I don’t think he intends to inflict pain on another human being), then — in the words of Pope Francis — who am I to judge? Meanwhile, I’ve already come to the point where I see God and Jesus as love, but my beliefs are pretty far out there, man — farther out there than what would probably make Corey comfortable. But that’s fine. You don’t have to believe what I believe, after all, as long as nobody, you know, dies or anything.
All of that to say, I didn’t really take to the message of the book because I’ve heard it all before from somewhere else, and in some really much more outré ways. While I still don’t really get what Corey is trying to say about demoting the Old Testament to a secondary status in comparison to the Gospels (I’m not sure how you could come to the conclusion that God is loving without chucking a few bits from Genesis and so on wholesale), read the book if you have a troubled relationship with the big guy upstairs. This is especially true if you’re a right-wing, red-meat eating Christian. Unafraid proposes a less toxic relationship with God for those of that persuasion, and this volume might keep Him from becoming your own personal bogeyman to torment you and take you away from the land of the loving. All I can say is Amen to that. We need books like this one on our shelves.
Benjamin L. Corey’s Unafraid: Moving Beyond Fear-Based Faith will be published by HarperOne on November 7, 2017.
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