I grew up in a “Just Say No” kind of religion. Yes, there were other elements, like sayings Yes to Jesus and Church and the Bible. But a big part of being a true Christian was learning to say No.
We said No to alcohol, of course, and sex, and cursing. We said No to tobacco, unless you were a grown man and then you could smoke on the church steps between Sunday School and Worship (or “the preaching” as we called it back then).
We said No to pornography, to work on Sunday, and to doing anything with Black people (although this was mostly an unwritten rule and we rarely talked about it). In the early days, we said No to dancing and to the entire culture of Rock ‘n’ Roll and any sort of music that flowed out of that unholy commotion.
We came by this negativity in good order. We memorized the Ten Commandments, six of which are of the negative variety. Later, they were replaced by the two positive commands emphasized by Jesus—love God and love neighbor—but the two didn’t seem to carry as much clout as the ten.
Later, we recited the Church Covenant. In those days, it was printed in the back of the hymnal, which gave it semi-revelatory status. As we recited it, we pledged to say No to “all tattling, backbiting, and excessive anger” and “the sale of, and use of, intoxicating drinks as a beverage.”
It was the latter, of course, that drew the most attention. Later, I was called to pastor a church that had been constituted in 1896 with a commitment to say No not only to drinking and selling alcohol but also to renting land to saloons, depositing money in banks that financed the alcohol industry, and even buying the slop from the distillery to feed the hogs at home.
When we went to school, we were taught to keep our No quiet, especially in biology class. But when we gathered in church, it was clear that No was our chief response to modern science: No to evolution, No to earth history, No to medical fact, and more recently, No to climate change.
Our religion has a long history of elevating to sainthood people who said No, especially to marriage, to money, to socializing, and to the self. “Deny yourself” has been a major command of our religious culture and those who obeyed often went on to fame if not fortune.
The same kind of religion prevails today in many places. The devout are taught to say No to sex (especially homosexual sex), to abortion, to divorce, and (as the lines between religion and politics have been blurred) to liberals, to government, and especially to Democrats.
For decades, the religion of my native South said No to Blacks, to integration, and to restitution for 400 years of slavery. Now, they are saying No to even educating people about the history of abuse directed toward Native Americans, African Americans, and others who deviated from our narrow, No-driven religion.
In more recent days, the Just Say No crowd has added to its list of prohibitions such things as vaccinations, face masks, and public health policies, in general. One university said No when its professors were called to testify in a civil suit. Several states said No when school boards wanted to protect students from the COVID. Other states, mostly led by professing Christians, said No when the government wanted to send them money to provide health care for the poor.
No still has a powerful hold on the religious and political imagination of millions of people.
But in my time, I have pushed back against the No and embraced the Yes of life. True religion, it seems to me, is about saying Yes to God, to life, to people everywhere; it is saying Yes to the body, the mind, and the truth; it is saying Yes to Jews, and Muslims, and Christians of all kinds; it is saying Yes to music, and dance, and art in a million manifestations; it is saying Yes to myself and self-discovery, and self-expression—finding my voice, to use the popular phrase!
No still has a place in life—No, I’ll pass on the bottle—but it is the Yes of life that frees us to be the people we were created to be, to be the human race we must be if we are to survive and thrive. So, when my religion tells me to Praise the Lord, and Follow Jesus, and Love My Neighbor, and Sing for Joy, I want to jump up, pump a fist into the air, and say with all the enthusiasm I can muster, YES!!
(November 2021)
