Evangelical Christianity and Me (Part 2)

I've touched on the role that the Friends (Quakers) played in my mother's religious life. Before we joined the Episcopal church when I was about 5 or 6, my mother was attending a Quaker meeting, and I was going to First Day school (RE) there. I remember that only vaguely. At some point we must have been going back and forth between that and the Episcopal church, because my mother is very fond of telling a story when, coming home from the Friends meeting one Sunday (where I had apparently been very bored), I said to her: "I want to be babatized and go to the Episcopal church!"

I don't have a clear memory of this. Sometimes it seems familiar to me, but I'm not entirely confident that it's indigenous to my memory as opposed to residing there from repetition of the story.

Even after we did join the Episcopal church, my family remained very close to a number of Quaker friends, some of whom taught on the college campus where my father (and later my mother) taught, others whom they'd known from Philadelphia, where my mother had worked as a teacher at a Quaker school.

Then, starting in 8th grade, I attended a Quaker school as well, further cementing my ties with that faith. I think I got three particularly strong messages from my experience with the Friends: Their strong commitment to social justice, the concept of the light of God in everyone, and a respect for pluralism (which I know may not be universal among Friends). Meanwhile I continued to attend the Episcopal church, was confirmed therein when I was 12 or 13, and remained quite happily engaged with it through high school. I also was active in an ecumenical Christian youth group in the community, which had representation from Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. Our own priest had been a driving force in putting that group together. I am not sure, in retrospect, whether the Baptist church involved was American (Mainline) or Southern (Evangelical), but I rather suspect the latter.

And it was during this time that I continued to encounter strongly fundamentalist peers. Most of them were through the Boy Scout troop to which I belonged, but one of them was a classmate at the Quaker school -- an African American -- who had had a born-again experience in about 11th grade or so and in my senior year tried mightily to convert me. We had many earnest -- and mostly good-natured -- arguments/discussions, but he never did succeed in converting me.

Yet the impact of his persistence was ironic. He had come to believe certain things in the Bible literally, and as I reflected on my very clear understanding that the Bible was not to be taken that way, I found myself examining the creed that we recited every Sunday in my own church. "Born of the Virgin Mary." "On the Third Day He rose again." It was one thing to read the Bible symbolically, but here we were, reciting those phrases and stating unequivocally, "I believe..."

Could I really believe these things? I asked myself. And if I couldn't, wasn't it as absurd to be stating them as articles of faith as it was to believe in the literal creation story, the literal forecasts of Revelation, or the literal notion that only by asserting personal belief in salvation through Jesus Christ could I be spared from eternal damnation?

Although I had only a superficial awareness of other religions (besides Judaism -- my sister had married a Jew when I was a high school freshman), it was at this time in my life that I became very clear on one principle that has stayed with me ever since: With so many religious faiths in the world, I just could not believe that Christianity was the only "right" one and all the rest were "wrong." I concluded that in some way all must have a piece of the greater cosmic truth, whatever that was.**

In my first semester of college, I went once to the Episcopal church near the campus. It was the fall. A guest priest was there that day. I remember nothing of the sermon except one line. Well into his delivery, the priest acknowledged that there were some who sought a "Copernican revolution" in religion, placing Christianity alongside other faiths and taking away its primacy. I found myself nodding in agreement -- and then he followed up: Well, he said, that was absolutely the wrong idea.

I stayed for the end of the service, but when I left the church, I didn't go back. I attended the Episcopal church a few times after that, back home (once because I went to Christmas Eve services with a girl I briefly dated); I attended Quaker meeting once or twice over the next several years, but was bored, missing the liturgy of the Episcopal church if not the wrestling with dogma, however gently couched. I took a Religious Studies 101 class in Interpreting the Bible in my senior year of college -- a class I liked very much. But I felt little interest in returning to the church of my childhood, or to any Christian church in those days. Eventually I found my way, some seven years after I graduated from high school, into a UU church (as I've written about here.)

But over the years, I've continued to harbor a bit of a grudge toward fundamentalism and Evangelical/"Jesus Saves" Christianity.

Why is that?

I've come up with three answers--none of them mutually exclusive, all of them probably a piece of the answer.

1) I felt it both anti-intellectual (especially the rejection of science) and monstrously unjust. (It was only fairly recently -- within the last decade I think -- that I connected the fundamentalist insistence on the literal Adam and Eve story with the Jesus Saves Christology: Without the literal fall, the atonement theory has no meaning. I mention that in passing here.)

2) Somewhere deep down, I may have harbored an irrational fear -- what if the fundamentalists are right? And resented them for sparking that fear.

3) And I resented them for tainting even Mainline Christianity for me, contributing to my loss of faith in a source of real comfort, guidance and meaning during my growing up.

There may, indeed, be yet other reasons I have not managed to articulate for myself. Some days, I think 1) is the most powerful source of my resentment. Others, I find it is 3). Sometimes -- not much any more if at all -- even 2) has raised its head.

The last two years, however, have seen me on a journey back to Christianity. Certainly not the Christianity in which I never believed, and to be sure, not exactly the Christianity of my own childhood and teen years. But Christianity -- in a form that I can claim and embrace wholeheartedly -- nonetheless.

I will write more about that another time.

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** Indeed, when I first read Forrest Church's metaphor of The Cathedral of the World (first presented in the book he co-wrote with John Buehrens, A Chosen Faith) some 15 or more years later -- and long after I had become a UU -- the image in that metaphor brought me back to the insight I'd had in high school. I don't have any kind of diary from when I had reached that earlier conclusion, so I have no way of knowing for sure whether I had arrived at it through the same or at least a similar metaphor. But it felt very at home with me.

Evangelical Christianity and Me

I've said this before. I was never a fundamentalist, or an Evangelical. But for most of my young adult and adult life, I've harbored a special wariness of the fundamentalist and even the Evangelical approach to Christianity.

I grew up attending an Episcopal church, and also with close association to the Quakers, in Southeastern PA. My mother's father was an Episcopal clergyman whose primary vocation was teaching and writing. He was an associate of some kind of John Dewey (by interesting coincidence, I've been a consultant for the last 10 years to an education scholar who is very much a latter-day Dewey disciple). And his principal written work (besides some letters to the New York Times around the time of WW 1 that I happened to stumble across) was a two-volume history of Christianity. I have a re-bound copy of it in my bookshelves, and I actually managed to read about the first 4 or 5 chapters a few years ago.

My mother (a/k/a EmpireStateMom for those of you who are coming in late) says his basic outlook was that of the Gnostics. I've not gotten a clear understanding of why that is or what about his outlook she equates with the Gnostics.

I open with this digression because my spiritual biography really starts with hers. My mother went to a Quaker college and for years afterward found herself alternately worshiping with the Quakers, the Congregationalists, and ultimately the Episcopalians. I was about 5 or 6 when I was baptized in the Episcopal church and I felt quite comfortable there as I grew up.

My father was an anthropologist who taught at the college level after a few years of doing research in Western Africa. He had grown up attending an Episcopal church, I believe, although I vaguely recall his family might have identified as Presbyterian. They lived in Texas.

From a very early age my father made sure I knew about and understood evolution. He was not hostile to Christianity, but pretty much by the time I had reached an age in which I could understand and appreciate Myth, I understood the earliest Biblical books to be Mythical.

I was in about 7th grade when I began to realize that some classmates in my heavily fundamentalist/Evangelical pocket of the world were not of the same point of view -- that they were absolutely certain that Adam and Eve were real, historical figures. (I even recall some of them quizzing a science teacher on the subject -- and I also recall her saying to them that she was more inclined to believe the biblical version, or something like that. It was a conversation I didn't get involved in at the time.)

Later, and separately from that realization, I came to understood the essential principle of fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity: That the sole, or at least primary, reason for Jesus's coming to earth was to be crucified and resurrected in order to in some way absolve humanity of sin, and that that "salvation" could only be achieved by "accepting Jesus as personal Lord and savior."

As I've noted previously, that was not the message I got from the church I grew up in. The message that I did get was much more indirect -- in retrospect, and not at all certain that I'm getting it right now -- I would say that we were taught that Jesus was God come to earth to help us understand God better. But it was nowhere near as explicit and cut-and-dried as that.

I never bought into the personal savior theory as articulated by the fundamentalists, and I never bought into the closely aligned view that the book of Revelation was a reliable forecast of the future of the world. In high school I first discovered the work of Jack Chick, the fundamentalist cartoonist, specifically from an anti-evolution tract called "Big Daddy." (My father pointed out the many inaccuracies in its reading of the scientific data, and also pointed out the likely intentional way in which the pro-evolution professor is depicted in line with Jewish stereotypes.) I fantasized instead trying to write a tract that would rebut fundamentalist dogma with a liberal Christian social gospel, but couldn't get very far because I really couldn't articulate the message in such simple terms.

But something about my encounter with this strain of Christianity marked me for the rest of my life. I was always on the lookout for it; in my late 30s and early 40s I even subscribed for a time to an anti-fundamentalist newsletter. That dogma is a trigger for me, in fact -- provoking a visceral reaction that I don't fully understand.

This didn't set out to be a multi-part post, but I will leave off for now and continue anon.

Abraham and Isaac

In college, after I'd walked away from the Episcopal Church for the most part, but before I discovered Unitarian Universalism, I became quite absorbed in the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. I wrote an essay about it for my Advanced Exposition writing class, using the story as as a metaphor for fanaticism that puts an abstract cause above more immediate moral obligations. (The professor gave me a B, but suggested I rewrite it for a higher grade, taking into account Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which I did.) For a subsequent playwriting class I wrote a one-act about the story, ending it with Abraham cursing God, even after Isaac has been saved, for what he sees as God's mercurial nature.

So, of course, I found these these recent items especially interesting to read...