Faith

Not Fundamentalist Anymore

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When I was a kiddo I heard my Mom talk about being a 1fundamentalist. This was clearly a good thing. Doesn’t everyone want to get the fundamentals right? As I grew, I also grew uneasy. I could see the other big people around me were using “fundamentalist” negatively, pejoratively. I didn’t know why. And when I became an adult, I realized “fundamentalism” was a nearly 100%-bad thing. How did something which was clearly a good thing become nearly 100% bad? 

It seems to me this is a language problem. Language evolves. Or, really, our thinking evolves and language sometimes does not keep up. 

Anyway, both uses of the term are legit. However, it wasn’t until I heard Skye Jethani say the following that things really clicked: “fundamentalism” (in the way he uses the term) is believing that your highest goal is to maintain the purity of core truths. 

So “fundamentalism” can mean several things. It surely starts out as meaning “1” below and sometimes becomes meaning “2”:

  1. I am committed to core truths.
  2. The most important thing I can do is maintain the purity of core truths. 

Definition one is positive. Who would argue with being committed to core truths? Everyone should do this in every setting.

Definition two contains the hint of a problem. And it is surely an offshoot of definition one! So it begins well. But it does not usually end well. I take definition two and expand it below. (This is all just my opinion. But I hope you find it enjoyable and helpful. It has certainly helped me to process all of this.)

Diving Into Definition Two

“The most important thing I can do” is the key part of this phrase. Surely people agree that maintaining core truths is important. But, is it always the most important thing a person can do? The only way for this to always be the most important thing is if the people who made the list of core truths never made mistakes. That seems unlikely. The reason there’s a “backspace” button on my keyboard is that people make mistakes all the time. (I literally just backspaced.) It seems to me that the major problem with definition two is that it does not make room for human fallibility. To be a bit mean about it, it lacks humility.   

Second, and possibly the most important, “maintain” puts the adherent in the position of defense which is a combat position. This requires that this person’s focus becomes all that is bad, wrong, and untrue. If a person is to keep something pure, that person must be on the lookout for all that is impure! And fight it! Thus this position likely creates a dark, negative, even fearful mindset. This contributes to the “us vs them” mindset of fundamentalists which is their most salient characteristic and, in my mind, the most damaging result of the paradigm.

Third, “purity” is an expression of perfection and the way we usually think of “perfection” is as something static. This results in an unchangeable set of core truths for all time. And while that may be perfectly reasonable for “core truths” the problem is that what is “core” and what is not “core” is not always clear, can be different from person to person, and can change over time. The real problem occurs when “core truths” are expanded to include all sorts of peripheral truths and so now practically everything is unchangeable, producing a rigid, fragile, and urgent culture. Two other thoughts that I think are relevant are 1) “perfect” and “human” don’t usually go together and 2) you should not make the perfect the enemy of the good, i.e. the pursuit of perfection often results in the destruction of not just the desired perfect result but also all good possible results; you are left only with disaster. 

And fourth, fundamentalism inadvertently encourages reductionist, overly-simplistic thinking because how can you defend great complexity? The cosmos must be reduced and made formulaic so we can defend it and maintain its purity. 

Application of Definition Two

Within the context of American Protestant conservative Christianity, I use “fundamentalist” in the “definition two” sense for the rest of this essay. In fundamentalism’s attempt to maintain the purity of its set of core truths, this often means it teaches most of the following: 

  1. Truth can be statically contained in words and even systematized.
  2. The Bible is in all ways 100% reliable, and the Bible should be interpreted literally as much as possible.
  3. There is only one correct way to interpret the first few chapters of Genesis.
  4. Women can not lead over men in church.
  5. The United States of America has a special place in “God’s plan”.
  6. The contemporary state of Israel is God’s chosen people whom we should treat with deference.
  7. The world is out to get you so keep yourself as pure and unstained from them as possible and, if you really want to help the world, fight culture wars (also, fight all the non-fundamentalists).

Comparison/Responses to the Seven Positions Listed Above

  1. Philosophy of Theology and Knowledge
    1. Two Views of Theology
  2. Inerrancy of the Bible
    1. Response
  3. Origins of the Universe
    1. Origins Today: Genesis through Ancient Eyes with John Walton
    2. The Bible For Normal People, Episode 17: Denis Lamoureux – The Bible, Evolution, & Christian Faith
  4. Women in Church Leadership
    1. Women in Ministry: A Biblical Basis for Equal Partnership
  5. Christian Nationalism
    1. Statement from Christians Against Christian Nationalism
    2. Thoughts On “The Light and The Glory”
  6. Christian Zionism
    1. What is Christian Zionism?
    2. What are our problems with Christian Zionism?
    3. Munther Isaac: Christian Zionism as Imperial Theology
    4. The Historical Roots of Christian Zionism, it’s Theological Basis and Political Agenda
  7. View of Culture: Us vs Them
    1. If You’re Fighting the Culture War, You’re Losing
    2. The Voting Booth

The resources I link to are not necessarily the best (although they’re very good) but instead are simply ones I’ve found and appreciated in my journey. (I will likely amend these resources over time. If you’ve got one, send it my way!)

Explanation of Order of Items

The order of the above list is mostly conceptual. A particular position on number one – a static view of theology – leads directly to number two. And number two leads to numbers three and four. 

The rest do not necessarily flow from number one. But the rigidity that number one creates reinforces the rigidity and militancy with which many hold numbers five, six, and seven.

Primacy of Number Seven

While conceptually number one is the most important – i.e. most things flow from it – most of us are not even aware of these ideas let alone the domino effect from one idea to the next. So, for those operating more at a cultural level and less at the level of intellectual investigation, number seven is the most important. Many conservative Protestants hold to many ideas within numbers one through six, but they do not hold to seven. Item seven most strongly marks an individual or group as fundamentalist. It is combat mentality, which is often paired with doomsday thinking. 

Conclusion

I really love the “definition one” sense of “fundamentalism”, which is positive and all people would agree with. I mean, it’s so simple it’s practically a tautology. But language is not under my control and the vast majority of people use “fundamentalism” in a pejorative way, so I must use it that way too. Since I’ve never heard anyone be as precise as Skye Jethani in defining a pejorative use of this term, I’m going with his use, i.e. I’m going with “definition two” above. 

Using “definition two”, I imagine it’s obvious that I choose to keep human fallibility ever before my eyes, don’t ever want to occupy a combat position towards my fellow human beings – I choose to pursue peace, and I don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Last, due to the fact that I’m a blasted intellectual, I usually do not fall into the ditch of over-simplifying; instead, my likely mistake is over-complicating matters or forgetting to take breaks as I try to process something very complicated. So, on this one count, I make for a pretty bad fundamentalist, and I feel good about that.  

Regarding the seven topics which I chose to highlight as fundamentalist, I truly support all those (and myself!) who, in good faith, pursue persuasions which are opposite from our own in order to test our own persuasions and increase the chance of getting closer to the truth and closer to health. 

Footnotes

  1. This is within the realm of American Protestant Christianity and culture. Obviously you could be a fundamentalist about knitting or being a political conservative/liberal or anything else. Maybe I  should do a knitting post after this… But it’s worth noting that “fundamentalism” is most frequently used within religion and that, according to what I read online, its most well-known expression (perhaps even the place it originates from) is, well, this one: American Protestant Christianity. ↩︎

Why I am Not Evangelical and What I am Instead

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Evangelical is a bad word in American society right now. People associate it with Trump. And people associate immorality, corruption, and abuse with Trump. 

Not too long ago, I remember a young American woman sitting at my table, at a resort on a tropical island, sharing with us what she knew about “evangelics”. After a while, I realized she meant “Evangelicals”. She had read in the news about an “evanglic” pastor who had millions of dollars; presumably he obtained these funds immorally. 

More recently, a 30-year male who I went on a date with shared with me his understanding of an Evangelical: it was purely political. He had zero theological, religious, or spiritual connotation for the term. He also shared with me that he hated the Republican Party and the Democratic Party equally. So, I imagine he had significant distaste for Evangelicals. 

Probably the best description I’ve found of “Evangelical” is this 30-minute entertaining and dense info-video produced by the Holy Post. 

So, “Evangelical” means different things to different people, as it should, because there is no governing body for this movement. It is more grass roots. This makes conversing about such an amorphous reality challenging. I once heard Skye Jethani say, when you attempt to understand a group of people, keep in mind that implied beliefs carry more weight than stated beliefs. Which is great! Because this movement has no stated beliefs! At least no stated beliefs stored in a central location that spiritual communities adhere to. The closest thing is Bebbington’s Quadrilateral (with an enjoyable rejoinder here). 

But implied beliefs are not much better than non-existent stated beliefs to help us understand a group of people. This is because, by definition, implied beliefs are never written down. Instead, they are in the air. They are in the water people “swim in”. It’s like looking through a window to see the tree. You never notice the window, although it may color your view and it will both frame and limit your view. So who is qualified to do the inherently difficult and imprecise work of finding out what is “in the air”? 

I think I am, as would anyone with my experience. For the first ~35 years of my life, I often attended (Evangelical) church more than once per week, but always at least once a week. And I attended an Evangelical college. My beloved Grandpa was a Grace Brethren (Evangelical) church planter and lover of Jesus (and all humans he met!). And never in a million years would I have imagined I would write something like this; I was among the most dedicated. Worth noting is that this ~35 years included my formative years. So there is a sense in which I will always be Evangelical because no one can fully escape the culture of their formative years. A residue remains, for better or for worse. 

So I will present implied beliefs of Evangelicalism, based on my experience, which I no longer find justified in order to explain why it would be completely inaccurate to call me an Evangelical now. Perhaps if we both tried to define Evangelicalism by listing implied beliefs, my list would not match yours, but at least you’ll know exactly what I am referring to when I say “I’m not an Evangelical”.  

But, why now? I am writing this now due to a confluence of three factors 1) Mr. Trump was recently elected a second time to our highest office 2) I understand Mr. Trump’s political reality to be a great stain on American history, and both a threat to American democracy and to the stability of the world, and 3) there would be no President Trump without Evangelicals. I think they form the largest cohesive voting block in the country, and their support of him has amazingly and alarmingly waned only slightly. To slightly oversimplify and yet speak accurately, Evanglicals gave us Mr. Trump. 

And yet, even with the above disaster, it is for primarily theological reasons that I am not Evangelical. The political reasons were secondary to me and remain secondary to me. But I include this brief aside so you know the fuller context for my thinking, and so we both do not forget an important new reality: Evangelicalism is no longer purely a spiritual movement, it is also and/or primarily a political movement.

But, back to how it used to be, when this movement was primarily spiritual. 

Here are the implied beliefs of Evangelicalism which are now wholly unpersuasive to me. 

1. Our sacred text, the Bible, is easy to interpret

My Grandpa used to say “God said it! I believe it!”. This well-known phrase, within the conservative/Evangelical end of the Protestant spectrum, both expresses faithfulness and implies that knowing what God said through the sacred text is relatively straightforward. 

In fact, not only is the sacred text easy to interpret, but everyone knows there’s only one legitimate way to interpret the sacred text and we, Evangelicals, know what that way is. Further, because the sacred text is easy to interpret, we also kinda know that everyone who doesn’t interpret it the way we do is sinful and rebellious; they just want to make the sacred text mean whatever they want (cue some evil music). The best example of this? Liberal Christians. 

I do not believe this. I am not sure I ever believed it, but I certainly felt pressure to be clear about my understanding of the sacred text (which in turn implies that that is possible) and, because I was never significantly exposed to alternate views on the sacred text in a good-faith way, I had no way of knowing that the sacred text is actually very hard to interpret. 

If you are only given one side of an issue, of course you think the issue is obvious!

My current understanding would more match the Eastern Orthodox, the Catholic Church, and those awful no-good “worst-group-ever!” Liberal Christians. All three of those groups view the sacred text as hard to interpret. In fact, the first group has a term for this: perspicuity (just a fancy word for “clarity”). The sacred text lacks “perspicuity”. The first two groups partially solve this problem by creating an official body which interprets the sacred text to everyone else. The last group enables people to authentically explore and ask questions and also values orthopraxy over orthodoxy (so, your exact interpretation doesn’t matter that much) which leads directly to my next point. 

2. Orthodoxy is more important than orthopraxy

Orthodoxy means “right beliefs”. Orthopraxy means “right living”.

That orthodoxy is more important than orthopraxy is absolutely undoubted and central. And it’s held with great urgency. No good Evangelical would say “well, understanding the Bible doesn’t matter as much as living like Jesus”. And, yet, that’s exactly what I believe. So, this is another reason why I don’t qualify anymore as an Evangelical. 

A prime example of Evangelicals’ emphasis on Orthodoxy is their statements of belief. Each church has one. They are frequently detailed, very specific, and sometimes long. And, most importantly, it’s how you know you’re a good Christian: getting all those beliefs and details right. Right living – caring for the poor, the oppressed, the widow, and helping to reform society – is secondary. 

Arguing about said beliefs is a natural outflow of this emphasis on ideology. Interestingly, because I am so intellectual, it took me decades to realize this emphasis on Orthodoxy was out of whack. Arguing is one of the things I do best! And that made me a good Christian! Or, at least it made me a good Evangelical Christian. (And, keep in mind, we knew all the other Christians were doing it wrong, so there was no chance I could be rescued from our poor thinking because, well, we had to stay away from bad Christians and their bad theology.) 

3. The sacred text is inerrant

This one is practically the litmus test of whether you are Evangelical, or more broadly conservative. No one knows exactly what inerrancy means (except for a few eggheads in an academic institution, and they don’t even agree with each other), but everyone has to say this. You have to say these exact words. (Well, maybe “infallibity” too – no one really knows the difference). I spent a year and a half studying this issue and wrote a carefully-researched 27-page paper explaining why the idea of inerrancy is well intentioned, deeply flawed, and damaging.  

So, yeah, I ain’t no Evangelical. 

4. The sacred text is primary and acts as a trump card

This is an awfully complicated topic. But it’s one of my favorites. It’s what I refer to as the “epistemology of theology”. Epistemology simply asks “how do we know what we know?”. And “theology” is sometimes called “God talk” or if you prefer “talking about God”. 

So, how can a creature bound by space and time talk with any authority or credibility on God, assuming God exists? Yeah, that’s way too broad of a topic. Not sure why I brought that up. Let’s move onto the next topic. Assuming that a finite creature can credibly speak about God, on what basis would that creature do so?

Protestant Christianity historically says “sola scriptura”, which actually does not mean “Scripture alone” but instead means “Scripture primarily”. Catholic Christianity says: tradition (i.e. oral tradition) + church + Scripture, with the Church acting as the trump card. One branch of Christian Protestantism has more recently said Scripture + church + experience + reason, with no trump card at all. This is the famous Wesleyan Quadrilateral. There are other formulations. Alarmingly, only the Eastern Orthodox tradition includes the Spirit of God.

I call these “the pillars of decision making”. How many pillars a tradition has and which pillars trump others, if any do at all, is what distinguishes more than anything else these traditions from each other.  

Evangelicals are “sola scriptura” people which, in my experience usually means “Scripture alone” (which is historically incorrect), which plays out as “whatever the leaders of my movement say is the correct interpretation of the sacred text”. I first began to feel how severe and unusual the Evangelical persuasion was when I ran into some Christians on the internet. They described the Evangelical/conservative view as making the sacred text into “the fourth member of the trinity”. More recently a variant I’ve heard is that Evangelicals believe in Father, Son, and Holy Scriptures (i.e. the Holy Spirit has been deleted). In either case, we get the point: the emphasis on the sacred text is so high as to redefine God himself, which is blasphemy.

For me, there are five pillars and there is no trump card: Scriptures + church + experience + reason + the Spirit. Given I am persuaded to have 5 pillars, and persuaded that one no pillar is greater than the other, this means I am not Evangelical.    

(Note: “church” includes “tradition”, i.e. wisdom passed down.)

5. Not only is certainty about ultimate reality possible but it is required

This is a deeply complex topic with unending importance. And this gets into psychology. I mean what doesn’t get into psychology? But, this topic noticeably does more than others.

In my head, there’s a spectrum with certainty on the right and mystery on the left, and of course a whole healthy gradation in the middle. The Evangelical movement, surely with other spiritual communities, is on the certainty-end of the spectrum. For Evangelicals, not only is certainty possible but it is required! It is a sign of faith that you are certain! It is proof of your dedication and commitment that you are certain. (Note: this is certainty about ultimate reality only. Obviously being certain about day-to-day reality is healthy and good. This section is not about day-to-day reality.)

I have only one question about this: how can someone be certain about ultimate reality? On this question, I was born on the left end of this spectrum. I don’t know how not to ask questions. And I’m perfectly happy to ask them about the most foundational things: God, reality, the nature of knowledge, morality, Jesus, religion and philosophy. Absolutely nothing is off limits. I start hyperventilating inside if someone tells me to stop asking questions. The long and short of it is if you ask enough questions in the Evangelical/conservative world, many important ideas fall apart. (Inerrancy is one. The Scriptures being easy to interpret is another. Reference this article for more.) I was saved by the Catholic church. That movement embraces mystery and has a love for mystery. I remember reading about one Catholic idea called “the hiddenness of God”. You know what no Evangelical would even be able to comfortably admit: that God might sometimes be hidden. That’s because we’re all too busy being certain! Or at least being told* that you must be certain. (*Perhaps not directly, but indirectly – again, these are implied beliefs). 

Large amounts of certainty means there is no room for mystery. Is it not unfaithful to be unsure? 

Interestingly, many people of faith believe the opposite. For many, doubt is an integral part of the faith journey! But not so in Evangelical-land. Certainty is almost the greatest virtue.

It was the push for certainty that nearly killed me. Literally. I’ll write about that another time. 

Many have written about the problems of pushing for certainty. I’ve read The Myth of Certainty, and many recommend The Sin of Certainty. I couldn’t possibly recommend Lesslie Newbigin’s book Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship enough. This also makes me think of Ann Lamott’s statement: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” And finally it makes me think of Paul Tillich’s comment: “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith”.

For me, faith very recently has been redefined (yet again). It is now “risk with a direction” (source) but I feel sure that a previous version of me would have defined faith as “certainty with a direction” because that’s what Evangelicalism told me. These things are opposites. One must be false.

A tremendous resource which traces the development of and interrelationships between certainty, inerrancy, foundationalism, and the Enlightenment (among other things) is this four-part podcast series titled “The Making of the Modern Mindset”: Part 1, Part 2 (episode starts at 10:47), Part 3, Part 4.

Certainty unfortunately also frequently involves staticness, meaning, things never change! Do NOT move a muscle! Which leads us directly to the next topic.

6. Belief is static and does not exist on a spectrum

This is a truly fascinating belief. And as I’ve already implied it is best friends with certainty. If you’re certain, there can be no change, right? To change something certain and/or inerrant is to choose something uncertain or wrong, and who would ever want that?

As a child, I heard the big people around me talk about “belief” a lot. A lot lot lot. But, over time, I realized no one was taking the time to define “belief”. And it wasn’t until I was well into my adulthood that I realized all of us were assuming that belief was static when, I saw, it must be dynamic. 

This vaguely makes me think of newer parts of the sacred text which says “the Spirit will lead you into all truth”. It doesn’t say only once, and it doesn’t say “all truth for all time”. I get the feeling that this is instead progressive, continuous, ongoing. And this definitely makes me think of a powerful phrase coming out of the Protestant Reformation: they wanted to be “reformed and always reforming”. I am guessing we lost the second part of that phrase a long time ago and rather quickly. This reminds me of what the historian Hannah Arendt says: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution”.

During what will hopefully be the only time in my life when I experience a church split (which was largely over inerrancy), I realized the two groups broke neatly across one line. One group would happily and unhesitatingly say “my theology is in flux” while the other group would never utter such words. And which group would never say their theology was in flux? The inerrantists. Those whose faith has been shaped by the requirement for certainty. 

It’s a fundamentally different mindset. I realized during this time that the faith I had been given in my childhood felt static because, well, it was; we were not invited to change anything or to engage in a meaningful way. Instead, because all truth related to ultimate reality and related to becoming right with God had already been determined in a certain way and from an inerrant sacred text, to budge any muscle was to “do it wrong”. This meant that our job was to be parrots; the authorities tell us the truth, and we parrot it back. And unfortunately that results in a lack of love and life. How can you love something which is lifelessly inflexible and invites no engagement, and more than that, directly repels engagement?

What this belief in the static nature of belief results in, among many things, is a denial of the ebbs and flows of life and of being human. There are days where I more believe in God and days where I less believe. No one in the Evangelical world could say that without getting pulled into the pastor’s office “for help”. But are we really to parrot beliefs? Must we be silent about our internal worlds which are largely outside of our control, which are organic, which grow and change over time? A person can not “flip a switch” and suddenly believe everything in the Nicene creed. That is nonsense! And yet that is what Evangelicalism effectively demands. Because belief is static. Belief is a 0 or a 1 (i.e. binary). You believe or you don’t. But, that’s nonsense. Belief exists on a spectrum. Wouldn’t it make a whole lot of sense for an authentically honest person to wake up one day and say “I’m not so sure about this resurrection business”? And yet, for sure!, you won’t hear anyone say that in Evangelical/conservative land. It’s not allowed. Believe or go to hell. 

I am grateful to have realized belief does exist on a spectrum and to realize that God’s primary characteristic in the sacred text is mercy. His most embodied characteristic is empathy. How could there be greater empathy than to become the creature you made? I know that if the Christian story is true that this God is not only good but they have mercy and empathy and love for my journey, patience as I become, and even delight in me. 

7. Emotion is the enemy

A friend of mine, also raised in the Evangelical world, once shared that he was told “emotion is the enemy”. I experienced the same thing. I was told that the sacred text was true and that it didn’t matter what I felt. From our inerrant sacred text we got inerrant theology (surely!) and, well, you know what would mess that up? Your feelings. 

It wasn’t until I read Rachel Held Evans’ thoughts on this that my thoughts became crystal clear. Out of her Evangelical upbringing and the pain it brought, she realized she was being told to disintegrate herself. Only your intellect and will are welcome when you theologize. Emotions? Leave them at home. They are not reliable. They are not true. (And doesn’t this all sound like thinking coming straight out of the Enlightenment, a period which gave us good things but also bad, as all periods do? Again, the four-part series I linked to above on how reason/rationalism has affected particularly the Fundamentalist Evangelical church is brilliant.) 

The fact is we live out of our emotions far more than our intellect. So Evangelicalism has constructed a false world for themselves, one very disconnected from reality. 

I am certain that God wants all of me, not part of me. And they want me, doubts, questions, uncertainty, emotions, lament and all! God wants me authentically. And I authentically want this God back. 

I am becoming. All people are becoming. This “continuous-change” factor is what modernity/rationalism is too overly-simplistic to handle. My theology should change because I am learning. And, given that emotion is “a signal of something important” then you bet I better bring my emotions to the table. I bring all of me to God and to this world. And it feels better that way. 

8. Defend the Fortress!

Items 1-7 contribute to what I call “fortress mentality”. This is the belief that, when I “got saved”, I entered a fortress and now I must defend it. There is a specific and precarious stack of ideas which we call “our theology”; it is reflected in the church’s statement of faith and even more than that in the implied beliefs. This structure, or fortress, about which we are certain, must be defended. And, guess what you’re largely not doing if you’re defending? Questioning or engaging deeply. 

“Journey mentality” is the opposite. There is no fortress to defend. We are not certain of everything, or sometimes even of that much. God is merciful, so seasons of conviction are expected to ebb and flow and seasons of growth often require digging up old understandings and replacing them with new. Belief is not static; and it does exist on a spectrum. Change is expected and even desired. The Spirit moves. And we move with the Spirit. 

I left the fortress a long time ago, primarily because it crumbled around me – there was no fortress left – I’ll write about that another time – and have become a pilgrim on a journey, somewhat scared, somewhat excited. 

9. Hell is a central part of the good news

This gets back to the reality that my Evangelical upbringing did not expose us to alternate interpretations of the sacred text in a good faith way. What am I saying? I had no idea until I was in my late 30s that the idea of Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) hell actually has no explicit support in our sacred text. When I found out, I felt misled! Lied to! Important information was withheld. Or, maybe, no one knew? Could an entire movement deceive itself so badly out of bias? (The answer to that is “yes”. Any and all movements can do this to themselves. It’s hard being human. Fascinatingly, I believe the Catholic Church also holds to ECT hell, so I think it’s entirely possible that part of the Protestant movement is more Catholic than it realizes.) It was a set of devotionals that exposed me to a more-supported view. I must say, there are few things I am more grateful for than this gentle, carefully-reasoned, and thorough set of devotionals.

Not only do I no longer find ECT hell a likelihood, but the Good News has changed. For the first time in my life, the good news is actually good! Because, let’s be clear, it’s not good news to tell someone “God loves you, and if you don’t love him back you’re going to hell for all eternity”. I literally laughed out loud one day in my kitchen when I realized the ludicrousness of this. Yet, it is this massive and, I would say damaging, cognitive dissonance that Evangelicals live and breathe every day (and never talk about!) that I do not anymore! I am free. Praise God! The good news is actually good! 

In the devotional above, Skye Jethani points out that in the most Evangelical book of the Bible, the book of Acts, hell is never mentioned. Not once. Instead, evangelizers speak of heaven and earth being joined together. This is the good news! Heaven, the domain of God, being joined to earth, the domain of men. Not only did God start to be a little bit loveable to me, but the entirety of the world gained a brighter hugh! Colors were more vivid. Life was better. And, again, the good news was, for the first time ever, good news. 

10. Emphasize push over pull

It wasn’t until I experienced other traditions that I felt this difference. In the Evangelical/conservative world, you believe because you should. It’s duty. Good people are Christians. Bad people are not. It is literally the right thing to do. But what if you actually do not believe? Doesn’t matter. It is the right thing to do. Thus participating in this tradition is frequently the result of being “pushed” in.

What does “pull” look like? I am still learning. But, I am moved by this passage from Desiring the Kingdom. In this book, philosopher and theologian James K. A. Smith says: 

“Our ultimate love moves and motivates us because we are lured by this picture of human flourishing. Rather than being pushed by beliefs, we are pulled by a telos that we desire. It’s not so much that we’re intellectually convinced and then muster the willpower to pursue what we ought; rather, at a precognitive level, we are attracted to a vision of the good life that has been painted for us in stories and myths, images and icons. It is not primarily our minds that are captivated, but rather our imaginations that are captured, and when our imaginations are hooked, we’re hooked (and sometimes our imaginations can be hooked by very different visions than what we’re feeding into our minds).” 

An ongoing and old political question asks, what is a greater motivator: fear or love? For long-term motivation and for true buy-in (i.e. deeper motivation), it is love. And Jesus acted in gentleness and love. I am not Evangelical in the sense that I am fully convinced the good news should be presented in a “pull” manner, not a “push” manner.

11. Emphasize triumph over lament

The Evangelicalism I experienced was American Evangelicalism. And that is a different beast than what exists in most other countries. (Example: in most other countries “Evangelical” means nothing more than “Protestant”, i.e. “not Catholic”.) And what else is wholly unique to America? We are the undoubted world’s superpower. 

“Superpower” is a term only somewhat-recently coined by historians. It required that a power existed that was so far beyond any other power on earth that, well, there’s really only one game in town. The first country to qualify for this was the United Kingdom, back when it was Earth’s largest empire. Since WWII, the United States has taken over that mantle. (There’s a fascinating history here which I’m stopping myself from sharing. I’m also stopping myself from making a tennis analogy involving Roger Federer.)

All this to say that any people-group with this kind of power and security, and even glory, is going to have a very unique psychological state. While I’m no psychologist and while I haven’t conducted research to allow me to conclude as I’m about to, I think a simple thought experiment will be convincing to both of us. What do all people want? Security. (And certainty! Certainty is a form of security.) Power. (Because power is a way to get that security.) And what else might all people want? Happiness. Undoubtedly. Do we need to conduct research to know this? No. So, we are biased towards happiness and away from sadness, and security and certainty and power act as drugs for us. We love them; they intoxicate us. Guess what being the world’s superpower gets you? The last three things I listed. And guess what we are powerfully biased towards? Happiness! 

Out of this psychological mix, I believe the American Evangelical community has come to emphasize triumph over lament. No one wants to lament. Isn’t it just more fun to pretend there are no problems? Doesn’t a perfect (i.e. inerrant) text call for a perfect people? Doesn’t a perfect God desire a perfect people? So, we pretend to be perfect and happy. We wallow in our triumph, no matter how forced and farcical it is. “God’s got it.” “It will all work out.” “God has a plan for your life, for good.”

My life hurts like hell. For the most part, I would wish it on no one. I have suffered. And I continue to suffer. Where is there a home and healing for me in Evangelical land? There is none. Because, generally speaking, Evangalicals don’t lament. 

I have learned to lament. Our sacred text is full of lament. And it brings healing. And other traditions have brought me healing by embracing lament and suffering. (One of which was also technically Evangelical but it was the weirdest Evangelical church I ever attended because it was also Anglican, liturgical, and charismatic. I will forever be grateful to this church for its health in this one way, an embrace of lament.) 

So this is the final way in which I am not Evangelical: lament and openness about my suffering is a central and public part of my life and faith. 

Can’t you say anything good at all about Evangelicalism?

Yes, I most certainly can and it would be my delight. I feel the need to highlight why I have not so far. The purpose of this piece is to explain why I am not an Evangelical (and what I am instead). My purpose is not to provide a comprehensive view of Evangelicalism; I am not trying to portray all the goods and all the bads of Evangelicalism. Instead I am only trying to list its implied beliefs which are no longer persuasive to me, so I can share why I no longer identify as part of this group. 

So, what is beautiful about this group?

Fervor is the number one thing I associate with this movement. People care so much! People care so badly! This is dedication. This is commitment. And that is loved in any movement! I see emotional integrity! I honor this in the Evangelical movement.

In turn, that’s why I think of this movement as the Peter of contemporary Christian traditions: loud (it is the largest voting block in the country!), well-intentioned, and not always so wise. But certainly loveable. We know Peter’s heart. It is good.  

One of my dear friends who was raised in Evangelicalism pointed out to me that items 5 (certainty) and 10 (push vs pull) were not always as I described. He is right. In defense of the spiritual communities who identify as Evangelical and who support growth and doubt and who present the Good News in a “pull” way, yes, I also experienced this on rare occasions. Exceptions to a rule almost always exist and should be called out! 

Last, what I love most about this tradition is its love for the sacred text. While I recognize that that love may be partially unjustly founded (by believing that each word of the sacred text came directly from the “mouth” of God), this love is a model for all other traditions. Again, this is Peter-like! So much passion!

I am certain that if the Christian story is true, God loves all his children.  

What I am Instead

I am on a journey. And where that goes, I don’t know in detail. I do know the direction: I am mimicking Jesus. That’s what a Christian is, right? A little Christ? A little Jesus. 

The sacred text is hard to interpret. Its origins are unclear. God is mysterious. Deeply, deeply mysterious. We aren’t given one picture of him/them. We are given many, and they contradict sometimes. Put more simply: both the sacred text and God are mysterious. I feel God’s goodness in the sense that I’ve been invited to explore, ask questions, and be unendingly authentic. If that involves me leaving the faith, then that is good. That is how free I am. While freedom is one of the most terrifying things, it’s also one of the most loving and beautiful. I know at my current church if I were to walk in a Buddhist tomorrow they wouldn’t blink an eye and they would love me just as much. That’s how God loves me. I am free. I am growing. I am becoming. My own perspective and development matter. And I am safe. No one is tortured for all eternity in hell. The sacred text is significantly human and that is good. I don’t need certainty which is awesome ‘cause certainty ain’t possible! I can contribute to theology because it is actually changing and it should change; this thing is alive! And most cosmic-level truth lives in poetry, not prose, anyway. I hope my life is a poem reflecting the gentle, self-sacrificial, power-rejecting, and beautiful Jesus.

The Unexamined Life

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If you Google “blog” the first result (other than ads and Wordress) is “Seth’s Blog”. Impressive. The most successful blog in the world currently. Who is “Seth”? I looked around. It was hard to tell. I went to one of his other sites and it read “author, marketer, speaker, etc” – he speaks on “everything” – but in reading all this I realized one thing: he is a philosopher. A modern-day philosopher. We don’t have much bearing in modern society, in the sense of, we don’t really know why we’re alive or what to do with our time. I got this idea more clearly as I walked San Francisco this week, thousands of tourists brushing me by. What in the world do you do with your time? If society has already removed enough illnesses that you’re going to get past age two, and then well past age ten, and it has also created such a peaceful world that the immediate pressure of war does not give you an identity and a cause, and the urgency of finding food and protection is gone since we have done such a damn good job at, well, everything (compared to previous civilizations), then we are left with one big glaring and simultaneously unbelievable question: why am I alive? Surely it’s the question we should have always been asking, but if you’re busy just staying alive with no time to think, this is inevitable. Would Socrates be proud of us, the author of the phrase “the unexamined life is not worth living”?

Seth, in his own modern way, answers this. I say “modern” to point out the fact that he doesn’t really answer this. Instead, he addresses tactics, you know, he talks about living day to day, makes 10,000 assumptions, and doesn’t go into such messy territory as, uhm, religion. I suppose now that God is dead, and you can meet just about every need however you want, and all you really have to do is make enough money to stay alive the requisite amount of time, a transcendent emptiness descends.

I should clarify that I speak out of the Christian worldview. I have been doused in the idea that this world is not all there is, and I have been secondarily doused in the idea that most people think this world is all there is. The gap between physicalists and dualists/spiritualists is large. I don’t feel a pressure to make this world perfect. In fact, I operate under the premise that it can not be. It is the afterlife that I have sure belief in. Which makes absolutely no sense from a perspective. The “afterlife” is the thing for which I have the least proof (none to be exact) and yet I am banking on it more than anything. And second, the faith that teaches me this thought (Christianity) at one time had no knowledge of this thought. Weird, isn’t it? The Jewish worldview (from which sprang the Christian worldview) had no believe in life after death. Then along came Jesus, Paul, the pharisees, and I believe Greek thinking, and that changed.

So enough of that history lesson (mostly because my knowledge has now been depleted, not because it is no longer interesting or relevant). We are, as they say, technologically rich but spiritually poor. We do what we do very well, but no one really knows if it’s worth doing. That’s certainly getting the cart before the horse. Albert Camus once said the primary question of philosophy is whether to commit suicide. While I feel at this point the need to apologize for introducing such darkness into these thoughts, I am also absolutely compelled to say: he’s right.

Kids have to think life is about looking better (better clothes, better looking boyfriends, better iPhones, etc), feeling better (happiness, great sex, validation), and pleasure in general. This is so good (up to a point), and from my Christian worldview, so unbelievably empty. I guess I too can go running around looking for more Pokemans. But this “smallness of your world” which is created by thinking that “the value of my life is determined by whatever I want it to be determined by” has got to raise its ugly face over time. I can’t be the only one to see it. In my own life, when I pleasure-seek too much, the pleasure turns on itself, the whole thing becomes counterproductive and sick, and I go “oh, yeah, I’ve done this before, I know exactly what’s going on, there actually is more to the world than what meets the eye”, and I am comforted. (It’s one of my favorite truths about the universe which can be summed up in one of my favorite metaphors: donuts. While two donuts is better than one, and three is likely better than two, four will not better than three, and five will be worse than zero. Could depend on your usual intake of donuts…)

Donut philosophy aside, I am sad for those with no richness in their life, and there will be no richness if you truly, deeply believe that all value in your life sources itself directly in you and probably also in your friends and society. Has not humanity failed itself enough to prove what a dead end this is? A very genuine friend of mine, a coworker, told me once – in the midst of his sincerity and somewhat Eeoyre-looking facial expression – that most people were depressed, most of the time. I’ve undergone enough pain in recent years to believe this, but always there was something very real, larger, and more valuable than I at play: a transcendent truth. When you remove the transcendent, what do you have? It only looks like emptiness to me.

Blindness and Wretchedness

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“When I see the blindness and wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself, and as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death , and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified…. And there upon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair. I see other persons around me of a like nature. I ask them if they are better informed than I am. They tell me that they are not. And thereupon these wretched and lost beings, having looked around them and seen some pleasing objects, have given and attached themselves to them. For my own part, I have not been able to attach myself to them, and, considering how strongly it appears that there is something else than what I see, I have examined whether this God has not left some sign of Himself.”

-Blaise Pascal, “Pensees“

Ethical, Moral

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I started an “Ethics and Education” class the other day. It is pretty philosophical. My problem so far is what is “ethics” and what is “moral” or “morality”? I spent a decent part of the class just looking up these terms in my Merriam Webster app. It appears that these two terms are, at a high level, interchangeable and mean nothing more than a preferred standard of behavior. This immediately begs a few questions. Who is doing the preferring? Presumably this is the largest part of society which may mean nothing more than the noisiest part of society. And then we have to ask what is the source of their standard of behavior? I believe it’s in answering the second question that the can of worms opens. One obvious difficulty could be that your source is your religion and it is simply not a religion that your neighbor shares with you so your morality is different. Then there’s C.S. Lewis’ idea that, at base, all morality’s are the same. That’s a really nice, neat, and tidy idea. I like it, and I do actually agree with it. Of course, there is more than “the base” and it’s when you progress further in your thought, or attempt to apply your theory that things get messy.

More to come. I hope to explore ethics/morality more.

A Burden of Beauty

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A burden of beauty. This phrase came to me while being overwhelmed at a friend’s dedication to Jesus Christ, and more largely at God’s supreme dedication to man. I sometimes hate reading/knowing these things because they are so costly emotionally. I feel the deepest part of myself being invaded, but is it not also beautiful? I’ll be more specific. When I see my sweet friend speak freely, lovingly, truthfully, and out of true and natural conviction about the best thing in life (God’s love for man), I am forced to look at this blinding beauty. Why does God love me? Why does God love anyone? Why God? A universe without Him is a bit easier, but also unbearably meaningless. So, when someone who commands my respect speaks of the paragon of what it means to be human – to know the source of life, God Himself – my heart is invariably pointed in that direction, my face is pointed towards the sun. And God is not easy. He is demanding. He is perfect. He is partially unknown and thus invariably scary. I prefer to think about cleaning out a vase I just emptied, doing the dishes, warming up the pot roast for dinner, cleaning out my email inbox, reading some Sherlock Holmes, and going to bed. Anything other than God Himself. I guess He wears me out sometimes. A silly thing given that Jesus wanted the “little children to come unto him” and drives His point home by saying that we can only know Him if we can be a child. Well, I can do that! I excel at needing guidance, at requiring another nap (or break), at having 10,000 questions and not always knowing the full ramifications of my own questions or even retaining the ability/energy to wait for the answer. My mother tells me we are all children. Whether or not we know it. I suppose in the Christian ideal, you simply know, and this creates humility.

The Weight of Glory. This is the title of one of C.S. Lewis’ books, and it’s another way of saying what I was saying: a burden of beauty, something which is both “exactly what we would want” but also costly. Why do the best things in life have to be costly?