One of my former parishioners from Bethesda Presbyterian in Bethesda, MD, was in town last week for a conference. He lives, of all places, in London, England now. And he brought good news: he’s getting married to an English woman, a “barrister,” as the Brits call them. She sounds very intelligent, lively, and fun–perfect for my friend.
But she is not a Christian. She claims to be “agnostic,” but he suspects she’s just sugar-coating it “because she loves me.” My friend takes his faith quite seriously–in fact, he’s actually attending a Presbyterian church in London. (Apparently “Pride’s Purge” of 1647 was a complete success and all English Presbyterians are Scottish, with the exception of my friend.)
His bride-to-be has taken to reading about Christianity, again, as he says, because she loves him. But he’s worried about her reading material, such as Christopher Hitchens–not exactly God’s biggest fan. So he asked me–what book would I recommend for her to read to explain Christianity to her?
I’ve found that harder to do than you’d think. So I thought, well, I should take a stab at this myself. Why be Christian?
Let’s start with need.
I became a Christian in the summer before my ninth grade year. I was fourteen years old. At a deep level, it was because I needed to become a Christian. Of course, I lived in the “Christ-haunted South,” as Flannery O’Connor famously said, so when one felt a hole in the soul, Jesus was the natural solution. But I did feel a hole in the soul. I felt lost and at sea, but I didn’t know why. A lot of it was natural teenage stuff. But unknown to me–at a conscious level, at least–my family was in turmoil. My mother was mentally ill. She would soon become a nightmare to live with. My dad would be burdened not only by dealing with her, but also with trying to keep mom’s illness a secret, including from me and my sister.
Over the next few years, my faith in Jesus Christ gave me stability and hope and a framework with which I could interpret the challenges life threw at me. It gave me a moral center that enabled me to resist the great temptation that I faced: not “immorality” but the desire to withdraw into a shell, to hide away from the chaos of my family life with comic books and J. R. R. Tolkien. (Yes, Jesus may also have saved me from becoming a dork, though my wife and kids may argue the point.)
One may wonder how a teen’s religious experience speaks to an adult London barrister. The fact that my faith helped me deal with growing-up does not obligate me to be a Christian for life, after all.
In fact, a case can be made that Christianity is becoming increasingly irrelevant because its promoters are frozen in spiritual adolescence. A few decades ago James Fowler developed a hierarchy of faith development structured around Abraham Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Fowler posited that teenagers are at the stage of “Synthetic-Conventional” faith, which is “characterized by conformity to religious authority and the development of a personal identity. Any conflicts with one’s beliefs are ignored at this stage due to the fear of threat from inconsistencies.”
Many people’s faith never moves beyond this level. They stay frozen there, much the same way people stay frozen at the same emotional age as they were when they experienced youthful trauma or addiction.
Much of the unfortunate focus of public Christianity today–and arguably for centuries–has been people at this adolescent stage of faith trying to enforce adolescence on a world well into into adulthood. In an increasingly complex world they attempt to impose “God-mandated” order with simple black-and-white answers.
But faith needs to grow as the person grows. Fowler said the proper next stage is “individuative-reflective faith.” This is the point where a person confronts head-on the inconsistencies of faith and life. This is a critical stage. One isn’t just reflecting back what she’s been told but takes responsibility for what she believes.
It is a chaotic stage. For me, this came in college, where I was confronted with personal freedom (to a point); opportunities to do new, often morally ambiguous, things; and tension between the evangelical faith I’d learned and the findings of modern Biblical scholarship.
It wasn’t an easy time. One temptation was to abandon responsibility. It had weighed me down at home. It had kept me from having a good time in high school. But now I was having fun. I found my old evangelical friends either boring or worse, oppressive and cruel. I had new friends who drank and partied and had fun but were also people of substance, people I enjoyed being around. And I was becoming a bit intellectually arrogant.
Maybe I could shake off this faith–after all, what good was it really doing me? Sure, faith had made me more self-assured, more bold, more whole. Those were all the things I’d wanted when I was fourteen, the things that had driven me to Christ in the first place.
But thanks to Jesus, I didn’t need those things anymore. I could say, “Thank you, God, but I’ve outgrown you. I can stand on my own two feet now. Ciao.”
I remember a moment where I had exactly that thought. I was in a meeting where my two worlds collided. My old fundamentalist/evangelical friends were mixed in with my new, fun-loving, intellectually curious, and iconoclastic friends.
I needed to make a choice, I realized.
I could be a person whose faith defined him or I could continue down a path of self-involvement.
I could be a person who wrestled with the challenges of life, or who hid from them.
I could be a person who was out for what life could give him, or I could be a person who lived a life of gratitude and service to others.
At that moment, I realized that I was grateful. God had given me so much. I could not imagine the person I’d have become if Jesus hadn’t entered my life at that young age. I vaguely imagined somebody like Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces or Norman Bates in Psycho.
Something had happened. I’d been changed. I’d been healed. I didn’t entirely understand. A big part of it, though, the part that Evangelicals gave me that I am forever grateful for, was relationship. Even since I was fourteen years old, I had a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. God was so real to me that I took God for granted. Sometimes–0ften–my relationship to God was as distracted and unimportant to me as the person standing in line behind me at the grocery store. But other times it was my lifeline. And one way or another, I could not ever imagine living any differently.
One can talk vaguely about Christianity as philosophy. Even as a faith. As a way of life, like zen. It was and is all those things and more to me.
But at its core, it is a relationship. The mystery and immensity of the universe had reached out to a lonely, dorky teenage boy and taken his hand, and had never let it go.
In my heart, I was still that boy. I wanted to be that boy. Because only he would have the naive audacity to believe that the mystery and immensity of the universe would bother to reach out and take his hand.
I didn’t want to turn my back on God. I wanted to figure out how to give back to God.
But something had to give. I could not wrestle with and enjoy my newfound relationship with the big world if I continued to have the “God in a box” faith I’d been mentored into.
My Fundamentalist friends viewed the Bible as “the inspired, inerrant Word of God,” by which they meant that not only was it “God-breathed” (the meaning of “inspired”), but that each word was out of God’s mouth straight to the biblical authors’ pens. And so, otherwise intelligent people would dismiss the evidence of science, history, or literary criticism if it in any way conflicted with this view of the Bible.
I could no longer accept that perspective. I didn’t believe the Bible had to be literally true to be nonetheless true about the nature of God and its witness to Jesus Christ.
Neither could I accept the “Christ against Culture” perspective of many of my peers and mentors. There is a lot that is wonderful, beautiful, even divine, about the world–even people and cultures and religions and activities that seem to have nothing to do with Christian thinking. How could the God who sent Jesus Christ be against the world?
Already I was frustrated with Fundamentalist friends who would read John 3: 16–“For God so loved the world that He gave His only son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”–without even reflecting on the very next verse: “For the Son of Man came not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”
That was a strong indication that the condemning, judgmental and short-fused God that my friends feared (and claimed to love), was not the God who Jesus Christ preached.
And why were all my Christian friends obsessed with “personal salvation” when the Bible doesn’t say “For God so loved me,” it says, “For God so loved the world“?
Once I started to pull that thread, the whole fundy sleeve started to unravel. Salvation isn’t just for individuals. It’s communal. And it isn’t just for the Elect, however they might be defined. It’s for the world.
But that meant that all the “Christian” jargon whose meaning I’d taken so for granted didn’t mean what I thought it meant. For instance, what does salvation mean when its for the whole world? What is it getting saved to? And what is it getting saved from?
These questions reframed the human need for God. I was no longer asking only, “What do I need?” Now I was asking, “What does the world need?”
And that, dear friends, will be the subject of Part II.