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sinful hearts: the consequences of Inherited Sin

One of these days, as I keep promising, I’m going to write an in-depth article on why I’m against the concepts of Inherited and Original Sin, but today I have a migraine that I can’t shake so for now I’m just going to make an observation.

There are many good conversations out there talking about the negative consequences of teaching people that their innermost selves, that the core of who they are, is absolutely corrupt and wicked. I’ve talked about one here– that telling me that I cannot allow myself to trust my instincts caused emotional harm. When you’re utterly convinced that everyone else’s opinion of you automatically carries more weight than what you think about yourself … you’re going to be particularly vulnerable to emotional abuse and bullying.

On top of that, teaching your children to believe that they are horrible, disgusting, repulsive monsters is an inherently abusive thing to do to them. If your theology even remotely resembles the tactics that nearly every abuser relies upon, you need to evaluate your beliefs. My friend R.L. Stollar has an excellent long-form article on this subject, and even though it might take you a while to plow through it, you should. While Stollar is dealing with the way Inherited Sin appears in the fundamentalist homeschooling subculture, the same basic idea– although not taken to the same extreme– is present in the rest of Christian culture and the bulk of Christian tradition, fundamentalist or not.

I don’t need much else to convince me that teaching Inherited Sin is a woefully bad idea, but this morning I saw this come through my private facebook feed:

The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might think you love someone until you see the way they are when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake.

Love is something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient, love is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.

I won’t deny that love is hard sometimes. Forgiveness can be difficult. Relationships can be trying. Occasionally, you’ll saw your tongue in half just to keep the peace. People can be careless, thoughtless, and sometimes you’ll find yourself staring at your reflection repeating “she didn’t mean it that way, you know she didn’t, just let it go” while you practice breathing exercises and your heart pounds with frustration and hurt. You’ll even hurt the people you care about, and you hope they have same patience with you.

However, if you are convinced that all people are born with “filthy hearts” and “darkness,” that they’re innately evil, and that it’s your job to “love them in spite of their filthiness” … you’re going to stay with an abuser, and you’re not going to be surprised when someone is horribly cruel or incomprehensibly selfish. You’ll expect it. “Love is patient, love is kind” will exist against a backdrop of believing that every person was inescapably born to be an abuser.

Becoming an abuser isn’t something that happens to people because they were born monsters. Our culture is permeated with millions of tiny little ways that enable abuse, that teach us all that abusing others is how to win, how to be successful. After all, racism and misogyny are really just abuse writ large.

However, becoming an abuser is not our default. It is not the thing we’re born with that only accepting Jesus into your heart can overcome. What happens is the opposite: only a few people become abusers, and they target specific victims. Most of us can cause harm, could even do abusive things on occasion, but the intentionality of abusers is absent from decent people. Most of us don’t want to break down another human being into a tool we can use for our own gratification. Instead, when we look around the world, we generally see people who have a right to their autonomy.

The consequence of teaching us that we are all born desperately, unimaginably evil is that we won’t be able to recognize true evil when it happens to us. All we truly know is ourselves, and systematically destroying another person’s sense of self wouldn’t occur to us– but we’re all evil, right? So if our partner spends a lot of time telling us how untrustworthy we are, how terrible we are, how we deserve having our possessions destroyed, our body beaten, our souls violated, where is the space to call this abuse in the context of Inherited Sin?

I’m not saying it’s impossible, of course. I was calling my ex an abuser and rapist long before I stopped believing in Original or Inherited Sin. But what I do know is that I told myself love is patient, love is kind when he was abusing me. I comforted myself with the understanding that we’re all Fallen, but God is doing a work in him. I just had to stick it out until Jesus overcame his “Old Man.”

Jesus gave us a tool to help us evaluate doctrine: a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. If the doctrine is good, then the natural outworking and practice of that doctrine will be beneficial, just, and life-giving.

The lived reality of Inherited Sin is none of those things.

Photo by Sophie & Cie
May 13, 2016 by
Theology

panic at the dentist: on moral neutrality

“I have a lot of hangups” would be a most profound understatement.

I was thinking that again on my way to the dentist this morning. To explain why dentist = hangup, you’ll need some context. My family never misses seeing the dentist, and I mean never. Dental hygiene was a monumental deal– one of the most memorable spankings I received was the one night I tried to lie about brushing my teeth (the spanking was mostly for lying, but also a little bit for not brushing my teeth). Hygiene in general was important, but somehow I got the message that having clean teeth equated with being a morally good and responsible person.

So, you can imagine how incredibly proud I was of the fact that I’d never had a cavity. Every time the dentist would joke “if everyone had teeth like yours I’d be out of business!” and I’d say something about drinking three glasses of milk every day. That record lasted until a) not seeing a dentist for two years in graduate school, b) while I was drinking buckets of coffee every day, c) had an diagnosed vitamin-D deficiency and d) was not regularly flossing. The first time I saw a dentist after I got married, I had ten cavities. Ten. Flash forward two years later and one of them needed a crown.

Needless to say, I now dread going to the dentist.

This morning’s appointment was the first one I’d had in a while since I’d had to cancel my last appointment unexpectedly (as in: I was standing in the waiting room obviously about to throw up and they sent me home because they are nice, considerate, lovely people and I was being a little silly). All week I have had nightmares because I was utterly convinced that they were going to find cavities in all my teeth and I was going to need at least six root canals. At least. I was actually up until 3 am Wednesday night because I couldn’t stop feeling anxious about my dentist appointment that wasn’t for another two whole bloody days. I also kept having intrusive thoughts about the hygienist somehow picking all my fillings out (it’s happened before, with a filling that didn’t set properly).

Turns out I was freaking out for literally no reason (something I already sort of knew, but this is how JerkBrain works). The cleaning went fine, none of my fillings fell out, and they didn’t find any new cavities. I was in an out in twenty minutes, and I even got a compliment for having practically no tartar buildup.

***

I’m obviously having trouble deconstructing the idea that developing a cavity is a moral failing. If I were a good person, I’d floss twice a day and use mouthwash every night. Instead, I rarely use mouthwash and I floss maybe once or twice a week, which means that I’m a bad person. Bad people let all their teeth rot of their head, which is clearly what I’m doing when I don’t floss every single day.

However, this isn’t just about dental hygiene. Growing up, there was absolutely nothing that didn’t have a weighty, moral significance. Everything we did, saw, ate, read, or went all had eternal import. I heard a few verses tossed around to support this concept, notably one from Philippians:

Only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ: that whether I come and see you, or else be absent, I may hear of your affairs, that ye stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel …

That word “conversation” is politeuomai, and it basically means “living as a citizen.” In the context of this verse, our entire lives, all of our affairs, our conduct, were supposed to be lived as a citizen under “the gospel of Christ”– and in such a way that you’d have a reputation for living that way. There wasn’t a single aspect of our lives that wasn’t evaluated for whether or not it was a “Christian” thing to do or be or think or say.

Including, apparently, brushing your teeth.

I was talking to a friend recently and, in trying to be encouraging, I stumbled into something that I think could be helpful for a lot of us:

Not everything is meant to be received as a comment on your character.

Some things just … are. They just exist. You do them or not, you say them or not, you read them or not, you eat them or not, and none of it says anything about who you are as a person. A doughnut is just a doughnut, regardless of how your body is perceived by our culture. Curse words are just curse words, and saying them doesn’t actually mean you have a shallow vocabulary. Cavities … are just cavities, no matter how much your dentist might tsk at you about flossing.

Last night my small group met, and we got to this passage in our Bible study:

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.

After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable … “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.”

He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” (Mark 7:14-23)

Aside from the hilarity of hearing Jesus say (roughly) “you eat then you shit,” this passage has a place in my heart because it’s the exact opposite of what Christian culture generally communicates. Don’t watch R-rated movies. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t listen to “bad” music. The implicit idea is these things are capable of defiling you … except Jesus says they can’t, that it’s only defiling actions that matter, and he lists some pretty obvious ones.

I especially loved this passage last night, the night before my dentist appointment, because Jesus is responding to the Pharisees freaking out about him not washing his hands. Jesus is saying “look, y’all, whether or not I wash my hands has nothing to do with whether or not I’m a good person. The only thing that matters is whether or not I do good, loving things.”

Whether or not I have a cavity can’t say anything about my character. Whether or not you exercise, or clean, or diet, or whatever,  doesn’t say anything about yours.

April 22, 2016 by
Theology

when Good Friday lasts forever

The first Holy Week I was blogging, back in 2013, I wrote a brief post for Good Friday, describing the resonance I felt with those who watched Christ suffer, bleed, and eventually die from being crucified as a rebel:

A few years ago, I stood in a dark place. The ground trembled and shook under me, and I stared up at heaven and watched my god die. Everything that I thought I had known– known with an absolute, unreachable certainty, was gone. Shattered. In a moment, in the space of a few words, it felt like everything in my universe was a lie. I had been deceived, tricked.

Horror-struck, I watched the truth pierce the side of the person I’d thought was god made flesh, and the pain was so intense I could feel a hollowness inside– an emptiness torn apart by swords and spears. Truth and reason and experience and emotion were the pallbearers that carried my faith away. And suddenly, the world was cold and dark and empty, because all the light had gone out. The veil was torn, and I couldn’t see anything worth hoping in behind the curtain. It was just a room. It was just a piece of lumber, a few pieces of iron. It was just an empty space carved into rock.

Tears washed my face in the night; my heart echoed along with the cries of “why can’t you save yourself? Why can’t you save me?” Why did I carry a back-breaking cross in your name? 

They carried him away and buried him under a mountain of shame and terror. I sealed the door shut with guilt and fear and betrayal and anger and rage.

Eventually, the sun shone, piercing clouds and making the world seem strangely normal again. I went back to work. I continued learning. I talked with friends who never knew what I had just witnessed. I hid in upper rooms I created inside of my head, places where my god had never been– and never would be. All the promises I’d ever known were broken, and the lie of them was bitter. I couldn’t speak them to another person, and every time I offered an assurance to another, it felt like feeding them false hope and platitudes. I wanted to rage inside of my own temple and hear the crash of silver on marble tile.

He was dead. The god of my childhood was nothing more than a corpse.

I wrote all of that, and then immediately wrote the post that followed it, words filled with hope and ultimately confidence. It’s been a long three years since then, though, and my faith has continued to take heavy battering. It’s shifted, struggled, grown, transformed. In many ways, the sort of Christian I was three years ago and the Christian I’m becoming bear little resemblance to each other. Back then I still thought it was important to cling to a certain set of facts to be a Christian, and now I feel that facts have very little to do with faith at all.

I’ve had my faith challenged, shaken, even broken at times. In a way, I’ve faced down the same choice Judas did: abandon Jesus because what he offers makes no earth-bound sense, or go to Good Friday with him like Mary Magdalene? Some days, like Judas, I almost feel like giving up. If I can’t know that Jesus is resurrected, if I can’t be sure that he’ll come back to break all chains and cease all oppressions, then what is the point? If Christianity doesn’t make any logical, realistic sense, then I might as well side with those who are more pragmatic– dreams and belief and pixie dust don’t do anything real.

For me, it feels like Good Friday isn’t just a day during Holy Week– it’s every day of my life.

Nearly every day I stare at a bloodied cross and a body laid to rest in a tomb, and I wonder and doubt. I wonder sometimes if I’m being completely ridiculous. If there is a god, then why does the world look like this?  Nearly every day I lay my God to rest again. I bury him. I mourn him.

But, I still have a choice in those moments. Maybe my God is dead. Maybe he’s not miraculously coming back from beyond the veil to give me the proof he gave Thomas. But does it matter? If I want to follow him, does whether or not he resurrected and ascended truly make the difference between whether or not I try to do what he said? If the resurrection never comes, if I’m never given concrete-hard proof that Christianity is the religion, what happens?

Do I stop believing that it is my responsibility to make the world a better place? Do I stop trying to bring an end to misogyny, racism, ableism, transphobia– bigotry in all its forms? Do I stop seeing every person as worthy of love, respect, kindness, equality, and justice? Do I lose hope in redemption for each of us individually and for the world?

If my life is a perpetual series of Good Fridays, do I spend all my days hiding, afraid of leaving an upper room of privilege and security? Do I spend these hours more afraid for myself then for those Jesus charged me to clothe and feed and heal? Do I huddle together with other Christians, separate and unmoving, cut off from our communities, unwilling to reach out and love the widow, the orphan, the prisoner?

We’re all moving through Good Friday, really. Maybe you have the assurance that in three day’s time Jesus will roll back the stone and walk among us in the flesh. Maybe, like most, you’re utterly convinced that the resurrection is a well-established fact, testified by multiple eye-witness accounts and all the other evidence Habermas and Strobel and Licona and Wright have spent books and books explaining.

Except, in the end, even with all of the arguments, all the proof in the world, we’re all still facing the same choice: hide in our upper room, or go out and do what Jesus showed us. We could be so afraid of the world around us with all its dangers and threats and, like Judas, turn to political powers for our protection. Or, we could leave the false security of the upper room and take up the same cross that Jesus bore.

That’s the choice of Good Friday. It’s a choice between fear and love.

Photo by Der Robert

 

March 25, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 183-217

Well, folks, this is it: the last chapter review from Radical. Since it’s largely a summary chapter, it gives me the opportunity to talk about some things I haven’t had the space for earlier.

One of the first problems that this chapter amptly highlights is David’s tendency to present things as either/or dichotomies:

Meaning is found in community, not individualism; joy is found in generosity, not materialism; and truth is found in Christ, not universalism. (183)

While there are certainly problems in individualism, materialism and in some ways universalism, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the opposite of those concepts are immune to critique or excess. Community at the expense of the individual can be unhealthy, even abusive. Even viewing generosity as the opposite of materialism is in itself a problem; materialism is the belief that the physical is more important than the spiritual, and giving all your stuff away isn’t actually a repudiation of that belief. In fact, generosity could be an affirmation that the physical is more important than the spiritual, and it’s possible to be generous for selfish reasons instead of altruistic ones.

Lastly, as a universalist, I staunchly reject the notion that I stand in opposition to Christ.

These things are not opposites. You don’t have to reject one to embrace the other. In part, David seems to have spent this book arguing that being “radical” is at least somewhat a rejection of nuance.

The rest of this chapter is an explanation for how the reader can live out a “radical experiment” over the course of a year, and he gives us five things to do that “guarantee[s] that if you complete this experiment, you will possess an insatiable desire to spend the rest of your life in radical abandonment to Christ for his glory in all the world” (184). These five steps are:

  1. pray for the entire world
  2. read through the entire Word
  3. sacrifice your money for a specific purpose
  4. spend your time in another context
  5. commit your life to a multiplying community

One problem, David: I spent the bulk of my teenage years doing all of that, and the only thing I learned to do was be heartily sick of all of it. I read my Bible through at least seven times in a variety of ways. I kept prayer cards in my Bible cover and prayed for a half-dozen missionaries every day. Every Wednesday my entire church would literally get down on our knees to pray for every single missionary we supported across the globe. Every year I would commit to give sacrificially “in faith.” I spent several hours every single Thursday going door-knocking, and every few years we would have cycled through our entire city. I was devoted to a church, and then a college, with similar goals as David’s Brook Hills Church.

Turns out it was all a cult and not really good for much except being ridiculously good at Sword Drills. I certainly did not graduate from almost ten years of living out those five steps having an “insatiable desire” to live in “radical abandonment to Christ.” In fact, it had the exact opposite result: me, in general, saying fuck it, I’m done.

So. Try not to make promises you can’t keep, David?

I’ve commented before on David’s apparent readiness to ignore any aspect of Jesus’ sayings that don’t agree with him for the purposes of this book, but it happened again in this chapter. He uses the instructions Jesus gave to his apostles in Matthew 10– which even a first-year Bible college student could tell you might maybe not apply universally to the entire Church for all of time— in order to convince us that prayer supersedes action in any believer’s life (186-87). Supposedly, Matthew 10 overrules all the other instructions Jesus gave to the apostles at other points, like the times when prayer doesn’t enter into it (“do you love me? Feed my sheep”).

You can’t just take what’s convenient at the moment. Yes, at several points, Jesus emphasizes the need for us to pray, both in word and example– but the bulk of his life points to action as being at least slightly more important. And, in encouraging us all to view prayer as primary to a Christian’s life, David cites Evan Roberts and his prayers as having “precipitated a revival in Wales in which an estimated hundred thousand people came to faith in Christ in a matter of months” (190). Except I looked up Evan Roberts, and the man didn’t spend all his time in a broom closet with his hands folded. He was a preacher, and an effective speaker capable of drawing huge audiences. That’s not prayer; that’s charisma.

Another glaring problem with David’s perspective is that it borders on idolatry of the Bible:

God has chosen by his matchless grace to give us revelation of himself in his Word. It is the only Book that he has promised to bless by his Spirit to transform you and me into the image of Jesus Christ. It is the only Book that he has promised to use to bring our hearts, our minds, our lives in alignment with him. (192)

Maybe I’m forgetting something, but I’m almost positive that God promised no such thing. Yes, they sent us their Word, but according to this “Book,” that Word is Jesus (John 1). Jesus transforms us. Following Jesus brings us into alignment with them. But only if we choose to act on what the Word illuminated for us: a radical life committed to love.

I also want to take a moment to highlight something that’s more an annoyance than anything else, and David is hardly the only one guilty of this. Jen Hatmaker did the same exact thing in Seven:

We are affluent people living in an impoverished world. If we make only ten thousand dollars a year, we are wealthier than 84 percent of the world, and if we make fifty thousand dollars a year, we are wealthier than 99 percent of the world. (194)

While yes, this is “true” after a fashion, these sorts of examples fail to take cost of living into account. If I made only $10k a year in my area, I’d be utterly destitute. I wouldn’t be able to afford rent, regular bills, and buying food regularly would be a serious concern. However, if I lived in Cambodia or Vietnam or Mexico and made $10k in American dollars, I’d be living it up. But, like I said, on the scale of things, this is merely annoying.

I think one of the larger problems woven throughout the entirety of Radical is David’s nearly overriding sense of white guilt, only translated onto a global scale. He dismisses the crises facing us here at home– how does one blithely use the $10k number without bothering to consider whether we here at home might be struggling with homelessness, even if we make that much? America, comparatively, is a wealthy nation, true– but that doesn’t mean we don’t face homelessnes and food insecurity, or point-blank food deserts. Many areas lack access to clean water, even. Collectively I think we’ve lost sight of that amid all our talk about “first world problems.”

In step #4, David encourages us to seek out “another context,” and pushes us toward contexts dominated by his idea of global poverty and ethnicity– an idea inculcated by his whiteness and economic status. Despite all the time he’s spent overseas, he has never let go of his tendency to see non-American peoples as the Other; he’s also never let go of the idea that he– and other middle-class white Americans like him– are “burdened with glorious purpose” and that brown and black people– who, because they’re not white and middle-class Americans– need us to fix them, their cultures, and their economies.

That position dismisses the disaster and harm white people have caused over the course of our many neo-colonialist attempts to assuage ourselves of guilt. Guess what? Black and brown people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (since, apparently, no individual countries exist in David’s world) are perfectly capable of handling their own damn problems, and many of their problems would be best served by white people staying the hell out of their way. (Which, of course, is not to say that foreign aid and investments and the like are all ill-conceived efforts we should totally abandon. We just need to re-examine our ready acceptance that TOMS shoes are a good thing.)

In the end, there are a lot of things that David and I agree upon, especially our mutual desire to help people. However, if this review demonstrates anything, it’s that when someone ignores how their white, male, able-bodied heterosexual, American experience affects their interpretive bias, inevitably there will be concerns.

March 21, 2016 by
Theology

the road to perdition: evangelicals and the Bible

As I started writing this blog, initially just chronicling my journey out of fundamentalism, I thought of fundamentalism and evangelicalism as radically different things. At first, evangelicalism seemed pretty harmless by comparison. However, as I became a member of evangelicalism through my church and the culture I was absorbing through books and blogs and sermons, I realized that while fundamentalism and evangelicalism look remarkably different, they have far more in common than I’d realized.

To anyone familiar with the history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, that’s a remark on the obvious. Of course they’re similar: they come from the same ideological tree. At first, around the turn of the 20th century, there were only fundamentalists, unified by a set of essays called The Fundamentals. Eventually, those essays were condensed into The Five Fundamentals. Interestingly, what those are can vary a bit (see here and here), but they essentially are:

  1. The nature of God is that of a Trinity; Jesus was born of a virgin and was fully God and fully man.
  2. Salvation is by faith, not by works; it was achieved by Christ through the substitionary Atonement.
  3. Scripture is divinely inspired by God and totally sufficient for Christian living.
  4. Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead and now reigns at the right hand of the Father.
  5. There will be a literal second coming of Christ.

The most important idea to be more fully articulated at this time was what it meant for Scripture to be inspired. While not new– there are echoes of this principle in Catholicism and in the Reformers’ belief in sola scriptura— the way these early fundamentalists started treating the Bible was new.

Over time, “inspiration” became a sort of short-hand for the concept that the Bible could be easily read, easily handled, easily interpreted. God meant it for all peoples, all times, all places– and he wouldn’t have done that without giving us the ability to see the “plain meaning of the text.” As the fundamentalists gained power, it birthed men like R.J. Rushdoony and Charles Ryrie who advocated not only for inspiration, but inerrancy. An argument for the inerrancy of Scripture wasn’t present in The Fundamentals, but to fundamentalists it was the only logical place a belief in biblical inspiration could go. After a while, the fundamentalist view of inerrancy became that the Bible is totally without error: it contains no contradictions and is completely and utterly factual.

Around the time that inerrancy was being affirmed by fundamentalists, the evangelical movement began. Fundamentalists began teaching the doctrine of separation, and evangelicals opposed them. Men like Billy Graham rejected the idea that the Church was strictly for Christians– that Christians should retreat into isolated sanctuaries in order to remain unsullied by the corruption of “The World.” Instead, they advocated for the guiding principle of being in the world, but not of it. How could a Christian hope to reach the lost if they kept to themselves all of the time?

Hence the term evangelical.

However, evangelicals didn’t leave their theology behind. They still held to the Five Fundamentals, but they didn’t go along with the movement to accept inerrancy the way the fundamentalists did. At least, not at the time.

In 1979, roughly thirty years after fundamentalists had totally bought into inerrancy, the evangelicals did the same when 300 evangelical leaders signed the Chicago Statement. If you read it over, you’ll notice that the ideas they affirm and deny are important, balanced, and to a degree fairly nuanced; so it shouldn’t surprise you to know that it didn’t go anywhere near far enough to fundamentalist men like Charles Ryrie, who had already moved from biblical inerrancy to biblical literalism.

At this point, fundamentalists started proclaiming ideas like verbal plenary inspiration, and double inspiration. Men like Jack Hyles and Peter Ruckman became fundamentalist figureheads, and they taught the Bible as almost literally dictated, word-for-word, by God themself. These men believed that God chose the men because of the wordings they would  choose, and “guided” them to the exactly “correct” words and phrasings. Not only that, but some men like Ruckman took it one step further: God had even inspired the KJV translators toward choosing the “correct” words in English. Along with all of that came other teachers like Bill Gothard, who took these concepts and started applying them. In fact, if God had chosen the very words, then there could be no harm in taking the Bible literally. It was meant to be taken literally.

Young Earth Creationism sprang out of a belief in biblical literalism, and so did a slew of other problems like the anti-LGBT movement and complementarianism. It took a while for Hyles and Ryrie and Ruckman and Gothard to have an effect, but their words and ideas are now being championed by some of the most influential evangelical leaders– most notably in the neo-Reformed movement, which is dominated by a strict adherence to biblical literalism.

Oh, but the fundamentalists have, again, already moved on. They’ve moved through inspiration, inerrancy, and literalism to finally arrive at biblical docetism.

Historically speaking, docetism is the notion that Jesus was not really human, that he only appeared human but, in reality, that was just a pretense. That idea was roundly condemned by virtually everyone as heresy. However, I believe modern American Christianity has done something even more insidious then denying the embodied Incarnation of Christ: they’ve made the Bible only “appear” like a book.

It was not really written by men– it was written by God. Biblical docetists don’t have to pay attention to how these men had their own personalities, their own vendettas, their own ambitions, their own priorities, their own flaws and their own achievements. To be honest, biblical docetists don’t just ignore how Paul was quite a vociferous fellow frequently given to tantrums (I will never ever work with John Mark ever again!) and tirades (Cretans are all liars!); the fact that Paul had a temper with a tendency to see things in blacks and whites is irrelevant.

To biblical docetists, cultural contexts don’t have to have any bearing on the text– it’s not really an ancient library of texts gathered together over time and with a lot of arguing. It is divine, it is holy, it is preserved. God intended every word exactly as it was recorded to reach our ears today. They knew that we would be reading it, and mythically they imbued it with the power to make perfect, clear sense to ancient readers, and modern readers, and people reading it thousands of years in the future. It is not really a book. You can’t treat it like any old book, or expect it to follow the common sensical rules of other ancient texts. Everything we understand about how ancient near-eastern cultures viewed history or biography doesn’t ultimately matter. It’s the Bible.

In fact, the Bible is so magical that you can rip sentences– halves of sentences, even!– out of their paragraphs and force it down other people’s throats as God’s divinely ordained word for that specific moment. We can all read every letter and stand sure in the knowledge that every word was ultimately meant for our ears, not necessarily for the church to which it was written. Genre– whether it’s oral tradition, poetry, myth, parable– should be erased, for it’s not just any book. It’s not predicated on ideas of style or voicing or purpose or audience. Everything in it is literally true, literally factual, and literally meant for us today.

Hopefully it’s obvious that I’m describing not just Christian fundamentalism, but evangelicalism as well. Evangelicals might not take it as far as a man I knew who actually plucked his eye out because it had “offended him” through a pornography addiction. But just because they’re not going that far doesn’t mean that evangelical biblical docetism isn’t having real-world and devastating consequences. We may not be plucking out our eyes, but we are voting for a man who (possibly) thinks LGBT people should be stoned to death. We are taking Jesus’ words about persecution and forcing it apply to photographers and bakers. We are proclaiming doomesday messages about being in the End Times because a black man was elected President. We are telling women to stay in abusive marriages.

Fundamentalists have already been treading the path through biblical docetism for almost two decades now, and it’s had disastrous consequences. If evangelicals don’t experience some sort of course correction in their view of the Bible, then it’s going to lead them to places the rest of us don’t want to go.

Art by Valeria Preisler
March 18, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 161-182

We are approaching the end of Radical, finally– there’s only one more chapter after this one, and then we’re moving on. On that note, recommendations for the next book review would be wonderful. I’m thinking about tackling a purity culture book this time around– maybe something like I Kissed Dating Goodbye or When God Writes Your Love Story? Is there a book that’s really popular in purity culture circles today?

Today’s chapter of Radical— “Living When Dying is Gain”– is one of the few chapters where I agree with the starting premise. It’s happened a handful of times through this reading (more often than any other book I’ve reviewed with the exception of Zimzum, I should note), but each time I ultimately disagree with the final conclusion, because David and I are working with very different theological underpinnings.

He focuses this chapter around Matthew 10, which, to be honest, has a bunch of contradictory and perplexing stuff in it. Jesus forbids the disciples from going to Gentiles and says “I do not bring peace but a sword,” but just a few chapters later he condemns those who take up swords. Needless to say, there’s a few things that seem to complicate this chapter that David just breezes right over– most noticeably here:

Out of all the amazing statements in Matthew 10 this one may be … the most important: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

… Jesus was telling them–and us–that we need to fear God, not people. God is the ultimate judge, and he holds eternity in his hands. (175)

The problem with this is that even the most cursory glance at the commentaries would tell you that we’ve argued over who exactly “the One” is for centuries. Some say it’s God, some say it’s Satan, and some people argue that it’s neither. But David ignores the contested nature of this verse and the translation difficulties and spends the last seven pages building his argument off this interpretation. Because he personally reads the text as “fear God who can [and will] destroy your soul and body in hell,” he extrapolates from that to argue how we need to see death as the ultimate reward and how this physical existence doesn’t matter (179).

Obviously that is where David and I definitely part ways. However, our paths diverged a long while before this because our basic assumptions about Matthew 10 are radically different. He reads the instructions Jesus gave to the apostles there and decided to see it in terms of the Christian missionary movement (175-78). He views Matthew 10 through the lens of missionary biographies and stories about Christian persecution. When he reads Jesus talking about how he’s “sending you out like sheep among wolves,” the way he thinks about it is colored by a life spent reading about Jim Elliot and Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

Except when he says that “It’s Christian history. Persecution and suffering as we see today in the Middle East, Asia, an Africa have marked followers of Christ from the beginning of the church” (168), he’s speaking ethnocentrically. He’s blithely ignoring the “Christian history” of things like the Crusades, or the Protestant campaign against Catholics that frequently led to burning priests. Modernly, Christians spread hate against Muslims that frequently lead to their deaths, to American Muslim homes being destroyed, and their Mosques attacked or defaced. In fact, he does that himself when he says “The tribe was 100 percent Muslim. Talk about sheep in the middle of wolves” (165).

Christians aren’t the only persecuted religious group. Far from it. Buddhists persecute Muslims in Myanmar, atheists are persecuted, sometimes killed, for their lack of belief in many countries, and Muslims persecute Hindus. David is either ignorant of this– something he cannot afford to be considering his work in global missions– or he is deliberately misleading his readers.

He puts forward that “if we really become like Jesus, the world will hate us. Why? Because the world hated him” (167), but he never bothers to ask the question why did they hate Jesus? The traditional evangelical understanding is that people hate Jesus because they don’t want to feel guilty about their sin. They want to live their lives in peace, unbothered by any attempts by Christians to tell them that what they’re doing is wrong and they could go to hell for it. They don’t like feeling convicted, so they hate either Christ or his messenger.

I read this passage differently. Because my view of the Bible is rooted in liberation theology, I read “I send you out as a sheep among wolves” and I’m reminded of the protests in Ferguson, or the protests against Trump rallies in Chicago and Kansas City last week. To me it’s clear that standing up against oppression and hatred is what Christ has called us to do, and few things earn you more hatred and revilement in this country than daring to take a stand against bigotry. Don’t obey, don’t comply, don’t keep your head down and keep walking– you could be assaulted, arrested, tear gassed, shot.

I agree with David that proclaiming the life and message of Christ can be dangerous to live out. We just fundamentally disagree about why. I believe there is something in the message of the Cross that many find deeply challenging because I believe that the Cross is a subversion of power. I believe that Jesus’ life flies in the face of Empire and systemic, institutionalized oppressions. If I am called to be like him– which I believe I am– then yes, I’m going to be hated, because Empire hates resistance. Those in power will always try to dominate and control the ones who have no power, and will always be shocked and then vengeful when we rebel. When we do not contort our faces when the old men say “smile,” when we step off a sidewalk at a protest, when we stand proudly in the face of a heil führer salute, those in power will loathe us.

Like Jesus said, we should not be surprised by that. We should not be surprised when our friends and family abandon us when we fight against racism, when they betray us and spread lies about us because we’re a feminist, when we’re disowned and thrown out into the street for being LGBT+ . . .

However, unlike David, I think that our resistance matters. I have hope that each time we fight can make a difference. I believe that participating in Jesus’ vision to bring the kingdom of God to earth is the whole point of the gospel.

March 14, 2016 by
Theology

guest post: “fear not”

Today’s post is a guest post from my sister-in-law, Carrie Field whose background is in social work and public health. It sprung out of a conversation we had over Christmas, and I’m very much excited to share it with you.

We have good reason to be afraid. We are reminded of the vast array of things to fear every time we hear a presidential candidate start talking. For some, our greatest fears are threats to national security and the moral fabric of our society. For others, our greatest fears are surging inequality and environmental degradation. All of us worry about the economy, about protecting and providing for our families, and about what will happen as the conflicts in Iraq and Syria continue to escalate. We have good reason to be afraid, and fear accordingly runs rampant through our country. Our candidates, as the good politicians they are, are tuned in to our fears, and each presents his or her own tailored solution to alleviate our fears. But have we stopped to examine our premise? Do we want the alleviation of fear to be our top priority, as it is now being treated by those who claim to represent us? Do we want fear to be the driving force of our decisions, as individuals and as a country? If we believe in following the guidance of Scripture, we may want to pay attention to its most oft repeated command: Fear not.

“Do not lose heart or be afraid when rumors are heard in the land.” (Jer 51:46)

Making decisions based on fear has dire consequences. Our fear comes out in defensiveness, hate, violence, and exclusion. We circle the wagons, erect protective barriers, and aim our weapons. Fear drove the Salem Witch Trials. Because of fear, we resisted giving women the vote and desegregating our schools. Because we were afraid, we turned away boatloads of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II. Fear of AIDS and difference pushed us to ignore an epidemic for decades. When we are afraid, we become self-centered and short sighted. Despite knowing that the U.S. is in desperate need of some positive P.R., that incoming refugees improve local economies in the long term, and that Scripture repeatedly commands us to care for the poor, the alien, and the vulnerable, still fear drives us to turn away Syrian refugees who are in desperate need of our compassion, care, and hospitality. Instead of listening to Scripture that says, “You must help needy orphans and widows and not let this world make you evil,” we have listened to our politicians as they rebrand compassion as “weakness.” When we listen to our fear, we make bad decisions – we let this world make us evil.

“Do not be afraid,” Samuel replied. “You have done all this evil; yet do not turn away from the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart.” (1 Sam 12:20)

Choosing courage in the midst of fear is our only alternative. “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently,” Maya Angelou once said. “You can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally, but to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage.” Peace, patience, kindness, and self-control all require courage. It requires courage to choose non-violence when violence is used against us. It requires courage to examine the shadowy parts of our own hearts to find whatever fear and prejudice is lurking there. It requires courage to be compassionate to refugees if you believe a terrorist may be hiding among them. But no matter the risks to our own safety, no matter how rational or irrational our fear, it does not change what the Lord requires of us: “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

“Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent.” (Acts 18:9)

We cannot follow in the footsteps of the Crucified One without courage. Jesus not only exemplified courage in the way he lived his life (continuing his ministry of reckless inclusion and compassion even at the risk of death), but also continuously asked us to do things that require immense courage. It takes immeasurable courage to trust a Savior who commands us to love our enemies and to pray for those who are plotting our destruction. It requires courage to love God and love our neighbors – the highest commands. When asked by an expert in the law who Jesus meant by our “neighbors”, Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan – a story so familiar to us that perhaps we’ve sanitized it a bit. Let’s look at that story again with some added emphasis:

In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.  A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side, reasoning that it could be a trap – perhaps the man was faking, and if the priest stopped to help, he would be attacked. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side, reasoning that he was clearly in a dangerous place, and had a responsibility to get home safely to his family.

But a Samaritan, who also saw the potential dangers and had a family to get home to, as he traveled, came to where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him, even though the man’s people had been his enemy. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

In case the importance of loving our neighbors was not clear enough from the story, Jesus later described the consequences of giving in to our fear and refusing to love. He said that if we did, he would disown us in the end and say, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” Take note: refugees are hungry, thirsty, sick strangers who need basic items for survival like clothes and homes – and whom we’ve turned away because of our fear. It’s hard to imagine a group that better fits Jesus’ description in this verse. Jesus offers no room for fear. Fear is the death of love, and we cannot afford to let love die.

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Josh 1:9)

Luckily for us, not only does God command us not to fear, but also gives us the resources for courage. We know that pain or death is not the end of the story: death has already been defeated. We know that God is ultimately in control, that if we have faith in him we can contribute to his plan of renewal for the world, even if it means suffering for a time. We have the Spirit inside us, guiding us, renewing our courage when it runs low. We have a community of believers to lean on, to encourage each other, to inspire each other. Like the Twelve Disciples, we have learned that we do not need to be afraid, since the One we obey also controls the wind and the waves. We may have good reason to be afraid, but we also have good reason to take courage.

“Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.” (Rev 1:17)

We are right now walking down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, but instead of passing one man beaten to the point of death by robbers, we are passing a million Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives: beaten, starving, scared, half-dead. Like the Samaritan, we have good reason to be afraid, even suspicious. But Jesus leaves no room for excuses or exceptions. Loving our neighbors – and our enemies – is not optional for Christians. We have been clearly, strictly commanded: Go and do likewise.

Photo by Nishanth Jois
March 12, 2016 by
Theology

this is your brain on fundamentalism

I grew up in Christian fundamentalism, and now I’m a progressive Christian. Surprisingly, at least to me, that particular path is an unusual one, although probably not rare. Speaking from personal observation, it seems like the more usual route out of Christian fundamentalism isn’t liberal Christianity, but atheism.

Unfortunately, it seems like there’s a lot of atheists out there who gave up on their religion, but didn’t give up fundamentalism. A little while ago I remarked on Twitter that it seems like atheists have more in common with Christian fundamentalists in their views on the Bible than they do with me. A few people were surprised by this. In short, it can be summed up by a saying in survivor communities: you can take the person out of a fundamentalism, but you can’t always take fundamentalism out of the person.

What I’m not saying is that this is inevitable– many of my close friends are atheists/agnostics who went through a time of being progressive Christians first. Their ultimate problem wasn’t fundamentalism, really, it was lack of belief. I think that’s true of most (if not all) atheists, even the ones who haven’t let go of a fundamentalist understanding of religion; they may not like their understanding of Christianity, but that’s not why they’re atheists.

It’s perpetually frustrating to me, though, that there’s a certain movement of atheists that brand me as an idiot because I’m religious, or that I’m incapable of being reasonable or logical because I have faith. To this type of atheist, if I don’t accept fundamentalist Christianity as the Only True Way of being a Christian, I’m being inconsistent. Over the course of many conversations, I’ve usually found out that they were at one point Christian fundamentalists.

They may not believe in god anymore, but many never stopped to examine the root claims of the belief system they were raised in. They still think the fundamentalists are right about Christianity– and about how to parse evidence. Part of the reason many argue the way they do is that they’re still operating inside of a fundamentalist mindset, only without religion. To many, Modernism is the only “correct” way to reason, and Truth and demonstrable, provable, physical fact are inseparable.

I was fortunate in the way my faith evolved. I started embracing my questions and doubts after I married a person who holds the feet of every single idea to the fire. He tries to smash every argument to bits to see if it’s worth making. He interrogates a question from every angle and won’t be happy until he’s thought about a new concept from multiple perspectives. All of that prompted me to do the same, and the end result is that I didn’t use the same framework I’d always used to evaluate evidence and questions. I didn’t rely purely on Modernist reasoning in order to deconstruct my faith system and start building it back up.

I’m drawn to dichotomies, to absolutes, to if then statements, and either or views of reality. Part of that is the fact that I’m an ISTJ with a heavily dominant sensing preference, but the biggest reason is that I grew up a fundamentalist. I want things to either be true or false, right or wrong, provable or poppycock. To this day, there are moments where I have to fight with myself to acknowledge that more than one thing can be True at the same time, even though they may seem contradictory. I have to force myself to live in the tension, to think of arguments as a matter of degree and nuance rather than totally right or totally wrong.

On the other hand, it’s almost as equally frustrating when people don’t understand fundamentalism, and what it does to people. They don’t know that fundamentalists are ruled by logical consistency before any other consideration. What may seem like utter nonsense to you or me makes perfect sense if you understand the premise they’re working with and follow it to its conclusion.

Take the fact that fundamentalists can be gigantic assholes to their friends and family. To an outsider, it may seem like we did nothing but endlessly bully and criticize each other– how in the world could we possibly be friends, let alone like each other? If they were to ask me when I was a fundamentalist why I behaved like this, I would’ve said “faithful are the wounds of a friend,” along with a quip about how being harsh and exacting is the only way to be loving. That sounds absurd to the rest of us — being an asshole is not loving– but to them, it’s the only possible outcome. You must “edify” your friends toward righteousness. Anything less is the opposite of loving.

Or, another example: the fact that a lot of fundamentalist/conservative Christians think that an LGBT person who isn’t celibate or resisting same-sex attraction can’t possibly be a Christian. It goes like this:

  1. Being a Christian means being indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
  2. The Holy Spirit pricks your conscience when you sin.
  3. God the Father chastens his children for their sin.
  4. Same-sex attraction (or acting on it) is a sin.
  5. Therefore, if you do not feel convicted or chastened or guilty, you are not a Christian.

This works out to the almost desperate measures many Christians take to show how sinful LGBT people are. Unless LGBT  people acknowledge that what they’re doing is sin, they cannot be saved. You have to repent of your sin. They must show us this, or we will die and burn in hell for all eternity, and what kind of person would they be if they just sat by and “tolerated” us? If they didn’t do everything they could, no matter how awful it may seem to others, to save the lost LGBT people how could they sleep at night?

Ergo, Christians think that their bigotry and hatred is loving. This is why they can say “love the sinner, hate the sin” and feel that there’s no inconsistency between their words and their actions. They’re trying to save us from eternal damnation. If you believe that I’m destined to that fate unless I turn from my bisexuality, seemingly extreme measures are necessary in order to be loving. It’s like that old “poisoned cookie” illustration– if you know someone’s about to eat a poisoned cookie and die, leaping across the room and smacking it out of their hand is the only logical action to take, no matter how “foolish” it might appear to others.

Fundamentalism isn’t populated by unreasonable people; the problem is that they’re all too reasonable. If you don’t understand this, then a lot of other things are going to appear bizarre. Why are evangelicals supporting Trump? Why does Cruz not have a problem with pastors who want to stone LGBT people to death? Why is Islamaphobia such an issue in movement atheism? Why do MRAs want to legalize rape? Why can’t women drive in Saudi Arabia? Why are some feminists TERFs?

To fight a thing, you have to know a thing. And that’s not just an external fight, either– I believe there’s a battle for fundamentalism going on inside each of us. In many ways, it’s far easier to fall into dichotomies and binaries than it is to resist them. Harsh dualities help us make sense of complex problems. But … we can’t let ourselves fall into those traps, because that’s when we start to lose compassion and let our heads overtake our hearts.

Photo by Mike
March 9, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 141-160

With a title like “There is No Plan B: Why Going is Urgent, Not Optional,” it should be obvious that this is one of those chapters were David and I definitely disagree. In fact, one of the biggest things I disagree with him on appears on the first page:

Applied to faith, this [equality] means that in a world where different people have different religious views, all such views should be treated as fundamentally equal. In this system of thinking, faith is a matter of taste, not of truth. (141)

What a reductionist view. Unfortunately, I understand where he’s coming from. David’s view of theology is one of the reasons why Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism can occasionally appear identical. If you believe in the Eternal Conscious Torment model of hell and that the only way to avoid being burned alive for all of eternity is to “receive the gospel,” then you cannot afford to be wrong. There are enormous and extremely permanent consequences to what you think about God, Jesus, the Atonement, and soteriology. If you’re convinced of this sequence, then you’re going to have serious problems with pluralism, as you should if you’re a decent person on any level.

However, all of that is one of the biggest reasons why I believe that the evangelical conceptualization of theology is immoral, and that their religion is based on an immoral deity. At one point David tries to argue that concerns like mine are a matter of “emotion” (148), but they’re not. It’s a matter of morality. Asking whether or not God condemns people to eternal conscious torment because they’ve never heard the gospel — and their only option for hearing the gospel is dependent on flawed beings– isn’t an emotional question, it’s a moral one with high emotional stakes. Many people, myself included, have concluded that a god who behaves like that would be, possibly, the most evil creature to ever exist.

David’s argument has one core problem: out one side of his mouth he says that people are not condemned to eternal conscious torment because they never heard of Jesus, but because they “rejected God” (144-45); the other side of his mouth says that accepting God is defined by receiving the gospel (153). He’s forced into this position by the Bible as things like the Hall of Faith in Hebrews make “hearing the gospel” an impossible standard. Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah– they’d never heard of Jesus, had no understanding whatsoever of the evangelical definition of “the gospel.” He tries to wiggle around this by saying that “they were trusting in the redemption God would bring through Christ” but this comes after ten pages of him saying that people “doing their best with the information they have” are condemned to burn for all eternity. How Abraham doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “did his best with the information he had at the time” is beyond me.

The logic pattern of “all people have knowledge of God, and all people reject God” is internally consistent, however it’s based in the premise that all people have knowledge of the Christian god, and that premise is a far cry from being realistic, let alone proven. Supposedly, according to David, the Christian god does something to reveal themself in such a way that it’s possible for every single last person on the planet to have consciously rejected them. This manifestation cannot look like Tonatiuh, or Ra, or Belenos, or Yuyi, or Sol … for reasons that no one has ever demonstrated to me convincingly. Because I said so is about as far as they get, usually.

There’s no logical separation between “God condemns us to hell because we’ve never heard of Jesus” and “God condemns us to hell for rejecting themself” when the mechanism of accepting the Christian God is fallible humans preaching the gospel. That is a morally repugnant position. If the eternal damnation of billions of souls rests on people being healthy enough, wealthy enough, educated enough, and self-sacrificing enough to go to “unreached people groups” and talk about Jesus, then Christianity is a catastrophic moral failure on a scale I can barely comprehend. But this is what David believes (156).

He believes this because of a fairly common problem in evangelicalism: he reads the Pauline letters in isolation. Without Jesus, without James, without John the Revelator, it seems inevitable for people who embrace biblical inspiration to arrive at this conclusion. However, Paul is only one man, and a fallible one. His perspective is not the sum total of soteriology, and his articulation is only one view. This is why we have the collected library of Scripture. Paul, held in balance with James, John, and Peter, and viewed in light of the words of Christ helps paint us a complex and nuanced picture of faith.

I don’t hold with the position that the gospel is “Jesus died on the cross to cover your sins with his blood so that you can be admitted to heaven.” I believe that the gospel is far more rich than that. I believe that Jesus’ entire life and earthly ministry is “the Good News,” and that reducing faith to a single, solitary belief is to make Jesus almost totally irrelevant. I believe that Jesus came to save sinners, but the question is how. I believe that he wants each of us to do what he did– to serve, to heal, to liberate, to love. I believe that Christianity isn’t about a single question. It’s about Jesus’ entire life. It’s about our entire life.

Seeing the gospel in this light enables me to read the same passages as David does and see a message of hope and encouragement instead of despair. I don’t see a world condemned to burn, but a world that desperately needs us to love it. I can grieve with Paul in the opening to Romans as he looks around and sees so many terrible things. Each of us should be compelled to grieve for all the ways the world is broken and all the ways it breaks us. It should make us angry, like it made Paul angry … but it doesn’t stop there in Romans, and it shouldn’t end there for us, either. Romans continues to assure us that Jesus’ life– the gospel– makes it possible for things to be different. I believe that Paul is trying to show us that our broken world can be repaired.

March 7, 2016 by
Theology

Christian fundamentalism and superstition

[note: there is some swearing in today’s post]

When Handsome and I first began dating, one of the hurdles we had to overcome was the different way we were raised. He had a fairly normal, healthy evangelical upbringing. His childhood was unmarred by any of the things that affected me, and when I tried to explain some of what I’d experienced he was bewildered. To him, my descriptions of my church and college were utterly foreign. It was through seeing his reactions to my story that I finally started grasping exactly how fucked up my life was.

Before I truly unburdened myself with him, I’d only ever shared snippets and bits with coworkers and friends, and usually as funny anecdotes or to seem mysterious. Trust me, “At my alma mater, they gave you demerits if they caught you using the bathroom after 11” gets you a lot of horrified looks. Handsome, though, stated it the most succinctly: they’re literally a prison, right down to the fact that only “well-behaving” students were ever allowed off campus (ie, if you got more than 75 demerits,  you were “campused,” which prompted Handsome to ask if it fit the legal requirements of false imprisonment. Answer: it does).

My life is, to put it mildly, beyond fucked up. It’s a nightmare. It’s the worst possible thing that JK Rowling could envision happening to Hogwarts; in fact, for the bulk of my life I was constrained by all the rules Dolores Umbridge instituted during Order of the Phoenix.

I thought we’d moved past anything that could surprise him, but last night he came into the office because I was laughing so hard at this article: “Adult Coloring Books and Mandalas, a Warning for Christians.” It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, and I read him some highlights, such as:

The thing is, how is the devil going to get Christians to meditate on mandalas?

No Christian would put one in their house and sit and stare at it for an hour, chanting the sacred word! But if the enemy can get a Christian to stare at a mandala because they are coloring it, he can have them absentmindedly focus their attention on the image and they will unknowingly open up their subconscious to this image in almost the same way.

Handsome sort of laughed, but his first reaction was “wait … people actually think that coloring books can cause demon possession?” I attempted to explain the difference between “demon possession” and “demonic influences,” using examples like listening to rock music could allow demons to enter your home, or how bringing a piece of Harry Potter fanart into a church sanctuary could allow “demonic influences” to infect the congregation. There’s a particular horror with all things related to “eastern mysticism,” the form of racism that gave birth to the post I quoted above.

It’s why we held things like book burnings– to cleanse the evil spirits from our churches in home. One of my cult’s regular evangelists was a man who claimed he had pictures of demons being released from Beatles albums as they burned. I saw one. At the time, I thought it was convincing, so I brought along an old copy of a Steve Green album I’d kept hidden under my bed and tossed it into a fire.

I was laughing as I explained, but his incredulity slowly halted my amusement. Once again I was forced to acknowledge just how abnormal my experiences are. I was raised with a set of beliefs that literally amount to nothing more than tossing salt over your shoulder or putting rose petals across your threshold to protect your home from the fae folk.

Earlier that night, at small group, we ended up talking a lot about Young Earth Creationism and I tried to explain why Creationists think that radiocarbon dating is a lie, and how their argument basically amounts to nothing more than maybe the laws of Physics worked differently in the past. Connected with that post about mandalas, I realized that the “science” I was raised with is just as fucking ridiculous as thinking that a pile of rags in the corner turns into rats.

It suddenly hit me: it’s not an exaggeration to say that the understanding of the world I was given was roughly the same as a child growing up in Medieval Europe. And that’s when I got angry. No, not just angry. Furious.

It’s been a while since it’s made me angry. Most of the time I’ve learned to accept it. But every once in a while I am just so fucking pissed off because I was lied to. More than deceived– I was inculcated in a worldview that had more in common with fairy tales than reality. I was robbed of an accurate understanding of how the world works, or any ability to explore it. Sometimes, I feel violated. The leaders I admired exploited my innocence and trust in order to twist my mind into believing superstitious drivel.

As a child, I actually fucking believed shit on the level of “vampires can only enter your home if you invite them in” and “keep a lot of garlic on you.” Handsome and I joked about waving around a decorative cross we have and reciting incantations, or making a salt circle in our bedroom, but it’s still infuriating that I used to think that way.

I wish it were limited to just book burnings and thinking an analogy about potatoes could single-handedly defeat radiocarbon dating, but it’s not. That mode of thinking permeated everything. I was trained to be superstitious about spiritual matters and physical ones. I was explicitly instructed to not only accept a premise without questioning it, but to vociferously reject any evidence that contradicted it– that my salvation depended on blind faith. I was severely castigated for my doubts, and the end result was a grown-ass woman who couldn’t sleep for two days because she’d spooked herself with the idea of thinking there was a demon in her dorm room.

In my experience, Christian fundamentalism is completely dominated by superstition, and not just of the “karate is spiritually dangerous” variety. It’s indelibly a part of how they view anything. Their entire religious experience is bound up in processing all information through a set of ironclad beliefs, and they see any new piece of information as incapable of contradicting them. Instead, something that’s actually a contradiction is just incorporated as another piece of “evidence.” It’s like someone being shown that flies hatch from eggs and them saying “yes, those little white things are of course tiny bits of beef.”

Fundamentalism is dangerous because it clings to a view in the world that isn’t based in reality at all. I’m aware that religion, as a matter of faith, is hardly in the same arena as science and demonstrable facts, but even as a Christian I can acknowledge the difference between what the Bible says about the beginnings of Israel and what archaeology says. To a fundamentalist, there is no line between religion and science, nor can there be. Being a Christian, to them, means elevating ancient mythologies above the level of proven, demonstrable fact.

Photo by Martin Brigden
February 26, 2016 by