The world’s most famous athlete, through the prism of another faith, told a largely Christian nation how he would seek redemption. And as he talked about craving and the misery that inevitably follows, he provided everyone in our bigger-faster-higher society something to think about.
By Stephen Prothero
Until Friday, when Tiger Woods stood up in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and apologized for his sexual infidelities, the American public confession was a Christian rite. From President Grover Cleveland, who likely fathered a child out of wedlock, to Ted Haggard, who resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute, our politicians and preachers have bowed and scraped in Christian idioms. Jimmy Carter spoke of “adultery in my heart.” Jimmy Swaggart spoke of “my sin” and “my Savior.” In any case, the model derives from evangelical Christianity — the revival and the altar call. You confess you are a sinner. You repent of your sins. You turn to Christ to make yourself new.
Woods was caught in a multimistress sex scandal after Thanksgiving. In January Brit Hume, channeling his inner evangelist on Fox News Sunday, urged Woods to “turn to the Christian faith.” “He’s said to be a Buddhist,” Hume said. “I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” Woods in effect told Hume Friday thanks but no thanks.
Part of Woods’ carefully prepared statement followed the time-honored formula that historian Susan Wise Bauer has referred to as the “art of the public grovel.” Though he did not sob like Swaggart, Woods seemed ashamed and embarrassed. He took responsibility for his actions, which he characterized as “irresponsible and selfish.” He apologized, not just to his wife and children but also to his family and friends, his business partners, his fans, and the staff and sponsors of his foundation. And he was not evasive. Whereas President Clinton confessed in 1998 to having an “inappropriate” relationship with Monica Lewinsky and took potshots at the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, Woods said, “I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame.”
But this was not your garden-variety confession. Though Woods spoke of religion, he did not mention Jesus or the Bible, sin or redemption. He gave us a Buddhist mea culpa instead.
The key moment in Woods’ statement came at the end, when, in an effort to make sense of his behavior, he turned not to Christian theologies of sin but to Buddhist teachings about craving. Whereas Christianity seeks to solve the problem of sin, Buddhism seeks to solve the problem of suffering. Buddhists observe that suffering arises from a 12-fold chain of interlocking causes and effects. Among these causes is craving. We crave this woman or that car because we think that getting her or it will make us happy. But this craving only ties us into an unending cycle of misery, because even if we get what we want there is always something more to crave — another woman or another man, a faster car or a bigger house.
A ‘pointless search’
In an elegant distillation of the Buddha’s dharma (teaching), Woods said, “Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security.” Here he is obviously describing his craving for sexual encounters with beautiful women. But he is also describing our collective obsession with the next new thing.
As Woods recognized, the money and fame that came with celebrity made it easy for him to fulfill his temptations. But we Americans who can only dream of such money and fame also possess an unparalleled ability to satisfy craving upon craving. Ours is the richest country in the history of the world, and our core values derive at least as much from consumer capitalism as from Christian faith. Advertisers are forever conjuring up new desires and promising us that their products will satisfy them. Our cravings, however, are endless good news for big business, not such good news for human happiness.
When Woods said he “stopped living by the core values” he was “taught to believe in,” he was referring not to Christian values but to the Thai Buddhist values instilled in him by his mother, who was in the room with her son in Florida in a show of support. When he vowed to change his life, it wasn’t to turn to Christianity but to return to Buddhism. He actively practiced Buddhism from childhood, he said, but “drifted away from it in recent years,” forgetting its crucial observation that craving is overcome not by self-indulgence but by self-control. Buddhism “teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint,” he said. “Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.”
Much has been written in recent years about America’s astonishing religious diversity. Harvard religious studies professor Diana Eck has referred to the United States as “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” In his inaugural address, Barack Obama referred to those who had just elected him president as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” We have more than 1,000 mosques nationwide, and Los Angeles likely has more forms of Buddhism on offer than any city in the world. But with roughly 250 million Christians, we are also the world’s most Christianized country.
One of the core civic challenges in the USA today is to find a way to reconcile our Christian supermajority with our many religious minorities — the Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, Sikhs and non-believers in our midst. For the most part, we are an extraordinarily tolerant society. Yes, we have our bigots, but in the U.S. religious bigotry is usually called out for what it is.
A need for religious literacy
Nonetheless, we expect, sometimes unconsciously, for things to proceed largely on Christian terms. We expect our presidents to be Christians and to quote from the Bible. And when they fall short of the glory of God, we expect them to call their shortcomings sins and to confess them not only to us, but also to Jesus. Part of living in a multireligious society, though, is learning multiple religious languages. In a country where most citizens cannot name the first book of the Bible, we obviously need more Christian literacy. But to make sense of the furiously religious world in which we live, we need Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist literacy too.
There are all sorts of lessons, moral and otherwise, to learn from the Tiger Woods affair. One important one is that American citizens take all sorts of paths to ruin and redemption. Christianity has no monopoly over either hypocrisy or saintliness.
In calling Woods to Christ in January, Brit Hume imagined that there was only one way to fall, and only one way to be redeemed. In his statement on Friday, Woods intimated that he fell not because he wandered away from Christ but because he wandered away from the Buddha. Equally important, he suggested that the way forward, at least for him, is through the teachings of a man who, two-and-a-half millennia ago, sat down beneath a Bodhi tree in north India and saw through the illusions of endlessly craving after the next new thing. You don’t need to be a Buddhist to say “Amen” (or “Om”) to that.
Stephen Prothero is a professor in Boston University’s religion department and the author of a forthcoming book, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter.
(After the public apology: Tiger Woods gets a hug from his mother, Kultida Woods, on Friday./Pool photo by Joe Skipper.)
Posted on http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/02/column-a-buddhist-moment-in-america.html