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King James Version

Theology

how in the world did I change my mind?

If you’ve been here for any length of time you should be pretty well aware of that fact that I grew up in Christian fundamentalism. It was everything, my entire world, for the bulk of the aware-of-Jesus-and-could-understand-sermons portion of my life. And then I grew up and decided that I didn’t agree with … well, pretty much all of it. Except for the God and Jesus part, which even believing in he/she/they was a struggle for a few years. A while after I’d decided well, I think I’m still a Christian but what does that even mean I started a blog to sort it all out and here we are.

Handsome and I have had a few conversations about this, because there’s a not-insignificant part of me that wonders how is anyone still a fundamentalist? It makes no sense, and is based on a lot of claims that are … well, in retrospect, I find it more than baffling that I ever accepted those claims as true, although I give myself a little wiggle room because I was a child and the second I was exposed to real information I started investigating and bam I wasn’t a fundamentalist anymore.

And that’s when I sort of stumbled into the answer to the question “how did I ever manage to change my mind?” After all, it’s not something that everyone easily does, especially when it comes to politics and religion. I was explaining my thought process to my partner and realized that I had some things going for me that a lot of grew-up-in-fundamentalist-Christianity people don’t have, and it wasn’t actually a “BAM! YOU’RE NO LONGER A FUNDAMENTALIST!” it was more “well, hello piece of information that seems to contradict something I’ve been taught, let’s look into thi– … whoah.” It has been, as the subtitle of this blog suggests, an ongoing journey.

Thing I had going for me #1: I was not a man.

I’ve casually mentioned this in a few things that I’ve written over the past few years, and talked about it in my BBC radio interview a few weeks ago– as a woman, I faced a lot of things that a man didn’t have to face. I was forbidden from doing things I deeply loved. I was shamed and mocked and belittled for being the sort of woman I am– feminine, but rambunctious. Introverted, but outgoing and occasionally loud. Ambitious in directions that no one approved of. I was told no an awful lot.

If I had been a boy and then a man, I wouldn’t have faced any of that. My rampant curiosity, my deep interest in theological discussions, my ability to stand up in front of people and shout about things– all of that would have been directed toward turning me into a “preacher boy.” I would have been one of the most amazingly privileged people in the fundamentalist community, and everything about who I am would have been nurtured and praised. Leaving behind a system that affords you a lot of power and opportunity is a lot harder to abandon than a system that is hell-bent on squashing you.

Thing I had going for me #2: I was not straight.

I was doggone terrified during high school because I thought I might be a lesbian. I thought the boys around me were repulsive (I was right: they were all, without exception, horrific misogynists and would have been controlling husbands) and combine that with the passing fanciful thoughts I had about kissing my best friend and I was in serious trouble. I rarely ever let myself think about it and when I inevitably did, I forced all those thoughts under the bannerhead of “I AM NOT A LESBIAN WOMEN ARE JUST PRETTY THAT’S IT.”

But that whole not-being-straight thing compounded with the not-a-man thing and by the time I got to college I was more likely than my straight male peers to think that this whole fundamentalist Christianity thing was total bunk.

Thing I had going for me #3: I was curious.

This isn’t to say that fundamentalists can’t be curious. Of course they can be. But their curiosity is … restrained. It has limits. The nature of fundamentalism means that there are some answers that they’re indoctrinated to reject out of hand, without investigation. But, because I was a bisexual woman and less averse to some answers than they were, I was predisposed to ask more meaningful questions and more willing to accept answers that disagreed with what I’d been taught.

I was also lucky.

During my sophomore year I had to take an Old Testament Survey class, and one of the assignments was to write a review of this book that was dedicated to how the King James Version is the Only True Bible blah blah blah. I’d grown up in this movement. Every church I attended or even visited until I was 23 was a strict King James Only church. One of the assigned textbooks I had to read every year since fourth grade was about the topic, and it was something that I was pretty interested in. It was a sticking point between me and some of my friends, and I even got into some late-night fights with roommates at summer camp about how it’s impossible to become a Christian if you read a different version of the Bible. Yeah, I know, I was that person.

Anyway, the book they assigned us was ridiculous– and that was coming from me, a staunch KJV-Only Supporter. At the time I was writing that paper, I stumbled across God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson and … well, nothing was ever quite the same. I’d picked it up at Barnes & Noble because the back copy made it sound extremely favorable toward my position (“It is the greatest work of English prose ever written”), and in fact, Nicolson is rather enamored with the Authorized Version and its history. But he approached it not as a theologian invested in defending the Textus Receptus, and was completely uninterested in proving that the KJV is superior to all other translations, or that the Sinaiticus was worthy of the trash heap and nothing more. That perspective allowed him to tell the story of how the Authorized Version was compiled and translated and it was … eye opening, especially since some of the verifiable facts he related blatantly contradicted several fundamentalist positions concerning Scripture and its interpretation.

That single book is what started this whole deconverting-from-fundamentalism process, because once you’ve opened your world to the idea that maybe some of the things you’ve been taught are wrong, Christian fundamentalism will inevitably collapse. It can’t stand up to rigorous questioning.

But, you have to get to the place where you’re willing to question it, and in a sense I’m rather fortunate. If the circumstances of my life had been different– if I hadn’t belonged to an abusive cult, if I’d had male privilege, if I’d been straight, if any one of a number of things had been different, I might have been happy in my ignorance and unwilling to rock my own boat.

 Photo by Jason Bötter
Theology

Christian fundamentalism is about avoiding questions

My junior year in college, along with taking British Novel with Mrs. E, I took Acts of the Apostles with Mr. C. It was my first non-survey Bible class, so in that respect I enjoyed it. Mr. C seemed to take “context” more seriously than some of my other Bible professors had, so I liked him.

That semester saw the Meteoric Rise and Apocalyptic Fall of Dr. S as the pastor of the college’s church. When the administration made the announcement, two of the stated reasons were “militant fundamentalism” and “hyper-dispensationalism.” Dr. S had already become famous for pronouncing the word  concupiscence as “con-COOP!-see-ence” with a ridiculously heavy accent on the “COOP!” (it’s actually pronounced cun-coop’-ih-sense).

No one knew what any of these words meant.

A few weeks later, a Bible professor was dismissed, supposedly because he was a hyper-Calvinist. In retrospect, that’s really odd. I’ve met hyper-Calvinists since then, and he was definitely not hyper-anything. Also, no one on campus really knew what it meant to be “Calvinist,” although I’ve since learned that calling them “Calvinists” is rather silly, and the actual term is Reformed theology.

Suddenly, people around campus were being forced to encounter theology in a more dynamic way. Before this, the most that anyone interacted with theology was in the Bible Doctrines class, and in that class, theology was certainly not up for discussion.

We were at a loss. What’s hyper-dispensationalism? What’s dispensationalism, for heaven’s sake? What do Calvinists actually believe, anyway?

Mr. C announced that he would be setting aside a class period to specifically talk about these terms and explain what they mean, and that we could come to him after class with any theology or Bible-related question we had.

Essentially, a hyper-dispensationalist believes very firmly in the line between the Apostolic and Church Ages. Things that the apostles could do, we cannot do now. There are no more miracles, basically.

Militant fundamentalism . . . Westboro. Basically. I can remember Dr. S. saying the words “God hates homosexuality as an abomination” more than once. If he could have gotten away with saying “God hates fags,” I’m pretty sure he would have. However, people who claim to be militant fundamentalists usually phrase it as “contending for the faith.” If you hear those words, anywhere, you should probably run.

And Calvinists — oy, that’s a complicated bag of crazy when Arminians are saying “Calvin” like it’s a swear. But. Mr. C laid out the “five points of Calvinism” for us without an insane amount of bias, as far as I can remember.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At this point in the semester, I’d had my “something is horribly wrong with what I’ve been taught about God” epiphany about nine months before. I’d been doing a lot of surreptitious reading on the sly. A few books that changed how I thought about my faith were God’s Secretaries and Reasonable Faith. I also started reading apologetics books like crazy, completely fascinated by the concept that people had bothered to think about their faith, and to ask the hard questions– and found answers.

There were answers.

It was a shocking revelation.

One of the things I also started doing at this point was throwing any ideology or assumption I could identify in myself under harsh examination. No longer was I going to accept something as “truth.” In fact, I started assuming that I didn’t have the truth at all, and I might not ever have the truth again. Some days it is a bit overwhelming, but I’m much more comfortable with the idea of never knowing . . .  now.

One of those things I took away was my, until then, unshakable belief in the King James Bible– which is why God’s Secretaries was so influential. No longer was I going to assume that the Alexandrian Texts were the incarnation of evil. No longer would I believe that the Textus Receptus was the product of some divinely-inspired copying process. Humans are fallible. Humans make mistakes. The Bible doesn’t have to be a perfect replica of the autographa in order for it to be reliable. The Bible being “in the hands of the Catholics” didn’t have to be an atrocious crime that I intellectually avoided by believing in “pockets” of Christians around Europe that had the “real Bible.”

I also started considering really crazy ideas, like —

*gasp*

What if Mark 16:9-20 weren’t written by Mark, but added later?

Honestly, after several years of research, I decided I don’t much care about this issue as they don’t really affect anything. Also, they’re kinda crazy. Jesus tells them they can handle snakes and drink poison.

Eh, not so much. People die from that. It’s stupid. Don’t do that.

However, they also include Jesus appearing to people after he died, so that’s rather a big deal.

There’s also Matthew, Luke, and John, but these verses in Mark are crazy important to fundamentalists. They’re contending for the faith, you see.

But, I figured I’d ask my Bible professor about it, since he was also the head of the biblical languages department. If anyone would know, he would, I figured.

I asked him that day in class.

His answer was such bullshit. Even as a twenty-something ignorant kid I knew his answer was evasive and misleading — and the exact same words as my BI 102 curriculum, produced by the college. Either he knew the answer and didn’t want to tell me because he’d get fired, or he thought I was stupid enough to not recognize a bullshit response. I tried to pin him down, but he refused to stray from the party line.

That’s the day I stopped trusting authority figures. I learned to take everything they said with a grain of salt– and I had gotten very good at that. My college had been very thorough in teaching me how to sift through “secular” texts looking for bias and presuppositions. I just don’t think they expected me to apply that training to them.

Photo by Eric