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.