Monday, July 21, 2008

Getting To Heaven In More Ways Than One

There was a time during my years on a theology school's faculty when I began to wonder whether seminaries were becoming the place to go for healing from the abuses that sick churches heap upon their members in the interest of saving souls from hell. A number of my students told me very disturbing things about growing up in the church, and were worried whether they would ever fully recover from it. The fictional (I hope) Prophetic Mission Church of Jonah, Indiana, which Haven Kimmel described in her Faulkneresque novel, The Used World, reminds me a lot of what they shared with me.

Prophetic Mission was one of those sealed off from the world churches which evoke bewilderment, anguish, and even horror: no associations with outsiders, no movies, TV, dancing, alcohol, travel, sex except --- and you are somehow just supposed to "know" how to get into it then ---, obey the (male) elders, discipline the wayward, ostracize those when discipline fails. In short, spare no threats or punishments in the service of a loving Jesus. And also: treat Catholics as members of a demonic sect, and get washed in the blood of the Lamb in preparation for the coming world-wide, angel-sent slaughter of Jews, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindus, Unitarians, Mormons, and all the members of Peace and Pentecostal churches as well. Rebekah Shook, one of the three heroines of Kimmel's novel, left this church around her 23rd birthday, and her life was never the same. It was worse. At least until the happy ending of the book.

The Prophetic Mission Church proclaimed with vengeance one and only one way to salvation, its own. Just as Christianity has and does, sometimes with the violence that Rebekah's elders at least had the decency to leave to their badly calumnied God, and not to themselves. I have never been able to appreciate deforming the message that God is Love into a summons to go out into the highways and byways and compel non-believers ("infidels" is the word trumped up by Christianity; Muslims later on borrowed it for their own purposes) to come in by any means necessary, conversion by conquest the especially favored one. If John's Gospel did indeed get Jesus' words right, to the effect that no one comes to the Father except by him, the Way that Jesus taught to the Father was nevertheless a very different one than it has often been understood to be. Jesus' way is the way of leaving the judging of others to God, and the way of grace-filled, uncompromising, unconditional loving and serving, especially of people who do not love us and who do not serve anybody but themselves.

So what does all this have to with anything anyway? Well, this: we have recently learned, again from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, that around 70% of this country's adults no longer see religion in the terms of the elders of Rebekah Shook's cast-off Prophetic Mission Church. More specifically, a lot of Americans are no longer convinced that there is one and only way to God, or salvation, or heaven. The hard data that yields this finding warrants closer scrutiny, of course, and will get it in the months and possibly years to come. But from what I have studied of the Pew survey so far, one especially important finding is that acknowledging other ways of being religious does not seem to diminish confidence in one's own. It only indicates a greater humility about the capacity of any one religion or religious group to discern the mind and will of God. If this finding proves out, it will give the lie to a treasured assumption of One Way types, that even considering the possibility that there might be truth in a very different religious outlook from yours can only weaken your own personal faith.

I have little doubt that people who still hold to the view that the pearly gates are at the end of only one road will be distressed by this survey and the conclusions that are being drawn from it. Hopefully, in their distress, they will find a way to avoid what became common early in Christian history, the following up of very personal and institutional confessions of faith with very public demands that hearers agree with them or face being rejected not only by the community of faith, but by God as well. It is not what Christianity asks people to believe that can make life miserable for people. It is what Christianity demands that they deny. Loving Jesus more does not have to mean loving less those who do not know enough about him to love him at all.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Coming To Faith (2)

Most Christians I knew when I was a teen-ager talked and acted like they had all read Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture together. They were comfortable with their faith, saw to it that their children had opportunities to learn the same things that they themselves learned in Sunday School, and worked hard to make their churches places to which everyone in their families would want to come. It puzzled me that they so rarely asked questions or entertained doubts about any of their beliefs. Even so, I envied them. Those days, I was trying to find a way back into the church that did not involve altar calls, second baptisms, and the crucifixion of intellectual integrity. In the South Florida version of the Bible Belt in which I was raised, histrionics like these made up the only alternative I knew to just growing up in the church and not making a big deal of it.

Friends who, in Bushnell's classic phrasing, never knew themselves not to be Christian, seemed to have had it a lot easier than I did. To me, their version of the Christian life looked just plain cozy, a balm in Gilead for my doubt-sick soul. About all the faith-based worrying that I could pick up from them was whether Jesus might see what they were doing in their parked cars on Saturday nights after the football games. Coming to faith on other peoples' terms, though, whether of the elders in their congregations or of the tent preachers in the parks downtown, simply was not an option for me at the time, and it is not an option for a lot of people now.

Sometimes I think that if these were our only ways to come to faith --- the evangelical way, and what I previously called the nurture-ist one --- then the first is surely less preferable than the second. Decisions for faith made in the heat of hell-fire-and-damnation preaching, or of a powerful conversion experience wrought by the Holy Spirit alone, impressive as they may be initially, are nevertheless notorious for their lack of staying power. More reliable are affirmations elicited at the right time and in the right ways from family members' subtle and even not so subtle pressuring, or from not wanting to be left out when everybody else in the group is kneeling at the chancel rail for confirmation, or from wanting to get in on all the good stuff that big churches in particular now offer in abundance. The rise of mega-churches, with the bigger-is-better mentality of the people who build them, make even more attractive the model of always-been/always-will-be-Christian. Womb to tomb nurture is the idea, wrapped around edifices, programs, and comparatively little outreach, except the kind that seeks only to connect more and more people to the edifices and the programs.


But nurture-ists leave no more room than evangelicals do for people to come to faith on the basis of a carefully thought out decision. The fact of the matter is that they are not very comfortable with decision-making at all, except perhaps at the time of baptism, in churches practicing believers' baptism, or of confirmation, if infant baptism is the norm. That anyone should have to make a decision, anguished or perfunctory, about believing in God at any other time is a sign less of opportunity and more of a break-down in the church's ministry of nurture. Ideally, people should not have to think about things like this at all. Evangelicals, by contrast, give every appearance of emphasizing coming to faith by way of decision, But in their case, appearances are deceiving. For evangelicals, the only decision that people should have to make about coming to faith is a decision whose terms are wholly defined in advance: come to their version of faith, or have no faith at all.

Neither approach that I have been describing fully addresses what today's spiritually hungry most need and deserve: a faith they can call their own, which embodies their most considered reflections about life, the world, God, and getting ready for what is to come, on earth and in heaven. There is no way to come to faith like this except by learning about and facing squarely as many alternatives to it as human beings have proved themselves capable of generating at all times and everywhere, and considering at every step of the way the possibility that one or more of these alternatives --- mythological, philosophical, religious, ethical --- may make more sense, for a while at least, than Christianity does. Faith worth holding onto is faith built upon respectful deliberation about alternatives to it, and not upon fearful refusal to acknowledge that there are any alternatives worthy of "good" Christians' respect and deliberation at all.