Banished: Churches of the Damned

Banished: The Outcast in Modernity by the Church

By Christopher M. Vanderwall-Brown

Does Jesus teach humanity that it is permissible to withhold charity because people live in sin? Are people (or the Church for that matter) permitted or charged to withhold charity onto those of a broken nature or character or to place limits on the charity and kindness we give onto others? What does the Parable of the Prodigal Son, especially with regards to the elder brother, teach us about God's Divine Love for all humanity or as a blueprint for the church's love onto all of humanity?

For example, is it permissible to withhold food because a person might waste it or because a person refuses to sit and listen to many hours of lectures about their brokenness or their failures to uphold the criminality of their soul or lives? If someone makes a mistake or continues to make mistakes, is it charged or permissible to withhold charity upon them if they are suffering and poor?

What does our Father who art in Heaven command for us? What does Jesus teach us?

Does God put terms on our salvation or Eir charity? Must we convert? Must we do certain things in order to be forgiven or to receive God's blessings, or does God provide us these things because we ask out of love and out of divine charity? Is it merely our returning to God that is enough?

The parable of the two sons, the prodigal son demands his inheritance before his father and then departs for lands unknown. He takes his wealth, blessings, and prosperity and wastes it.

Living in the gutter, utterly broken and despotic, the son realizes that he is doomed and returned to the father's house to ask to work as a servant, to work as a slave or as a hired hand (not as a son, not with a birthright, merely a day laborer). Before the son even reaches his father's house, the father sees his son and races towards him, overjoyed. He embraces his son without explanation and proceeds to order a feast prepared and for the son to be clothed and a signet ring put upon his finger. The joy of the father at the return of his prodigal child, the child lost to him. He is so happy and filling over with joy.

The prodigal son is loved, clothed, and a feast held in honor of his return. The other son, the son who did not leave, who did not demand his inheritance, did not waste it and become low upon the Earth, looks on in disgust, in anger, in folly and pride, for he sees his brother's return in enmity to the father's love. For, having returned in rags and marred honor, the prodigal son has trampled and wasted all the father has given to him, and the other son, the son who has not failed, who has done all the father asks, instead of looking on with joy at the return of his brother, looking on with joy of the father, instead looks on in disgust, in iniquity and strife, for his pride has been heaped up against his brother for he does not believe his brother should be greeted with open arms. He is better than his fallen brother, or so he thinks, and it is his pride that is his fall. When we see ourselves as better than our fallen siblings, when we see them as lower than us, and being unequal, we have fallen pray to the greatest of iniquities..

The story is a metaphor demonstrating God's love and mirroring humanity with all those who have not left the fold and are angry and resentful because they “did as their father requested and were good, obedient children” and yet their father treats the son who has abandoned everything in equal measure with themselves. When they do this, they have become as Lucifer; they have become angry and prideful at their father and sibling for the perceived injustice at not being held in higher regard to their prodigal brother who so wronged their father, by his father, and as a result, grows to hate the father because of this perceived transgression against the loyal and steadfast son.

Has the church become the other son? Has Lucifer won us over to eir cause? Have we abandoned the true will and love of the father for that of the perceived injustice of the son who did not leave or wrong his father, but who nevertheless felt angry, prideful, resentful at his brother who trampled everything he had upheld?

When we judge others, turn away those in need because they do not meet our expectations or because they have in some way not “measured up” to our perceptions of “Justice”, have we become as the Dark One and fallen down the road of pride? Has the church become an institution of the devil and not of our Lord and savior?

Is it possible that all those critics who daily bombard us with criticisms of our claimed iniquity may be on to something and that in fact much of the church is in fact divorced from the Love and Generosity of our Lord, Savior, and Creator?