I debated writing this up because I hesitate to put personal information out in a public blog like this one, or mention people that I interact with lest I accidentally piss them off. But I have been thinking about this for several weeks, and after reading an article this morning about evangelicals who are not really who you think they are, I decided that I could use this as what those of us in education would call a "teaching moment." I apologize for the longwindedness here, but I have a lot of thoughts on this topic.
I was having dinner with my fiance and some of his colleagues and their significant others. My fiance is a scientist and though he himself is a pretty spiritual person, a lot of the people in academia are not, and not only that, seem to hold some sort of innate hostility toward religion. My theory is that liberal academics perceive that there is some sort of correlation between religion and right-wing politics and since people in academia tend to be on the liberal side of things, religion turns out to be something that stands against everything they believe in. Either that or they just think religious people are rubes that believe in some invisible puppetmaster and question our sanity and/or intelligence. Okay, fine. So because of all that, I find that I'm a bit of an anomaly within that crowd. I'm not only religious and not shy about it, but I'm training to be a religious leader. While most people could get away without letting their religion slip (at least for a time), as soon as somebody asks me what I do, I'm faced with an awkward silence and either a sudden topic change or some really, uh, interesting questions that often reveal the asker's ignorance more than anything else. (I say that not as an insult, just as a statement of fact: people who don't grow up with religion don't really "get it" a lot of the time and ask questions that seem kind of silly and/or insulting to me.)
So back to dinner. Because I'm kind of an anomaly among this crowd, usually it doesn't take long before curious not religious people start asking me questions. Sometimes these are like "so what's it like to do a funeral?" but sometimes you get a question that's so bizarre it leaves you a little flabbergasted. One of P's colleagues at this dinner turned to me after it came out that I was born in Canada and asked me if Canadians believe in evolution. I was so stunned that I don't really remember what I said except something like 'well, I don't speak for all Canadians but I'm pretty sure they do.' One of P's other colleagues (also not religious) jumped in after that and started telling us about this offensive street preacher that showed up on campus and how several groups, including the Society for Free Thinkers (an atheist group), the GLBT campus group, and the Lutheran Campus Ministry came out to counter-protest him. Bless his heart for what he was trying to do, which was, I think, to let the first colleague know that, hey, not all Christians are like that street preacher.
I couldn't decide if I should be insulted or not. Maybe it was a coincidence that he happened to bring up evolution, but the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. Anybody who has spoken to me for 30 seconds knows that I'm pretty damn liberal. I'm also a scientist. I have a friggin' master's in cognitive psychology--you don't get through 6 years of higher education in a science field without some understanding of evolutionary biology. So I thought at first he was just poking fun of religious people in general, but then I thought maybe he actually thought that I don't believe in evolution, which is ridiculous. As I was pissing and moaning to P after dinner, it occurred to me that while it was probably intended as a little poke at my religion/profession, it annoyed me not because he was making fun of my religion, because Lutherans are big fans of humor at our own expense (Lake Woebegone, anyone?), but because it was a poke that was so based in misunderstanding that it made me feel stupid for being friends with somebody who so fundamentally does not get what I believe.
So rather than being annoyed, I started thinking about writing this, and so here we are. I want to write about a few basic assumptions in order to promote some understanding. I make it a part of my profession to understand other people and where they are coming from, so I would hope that others would be interested in the same.
First of all, Christianity is not a monolith. There are three major branches of Christianity in the world: Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. I'm not that familiar with Orthodox Christianity, but I can say that for Catholics and Protestants, there is no real consensus of belief. Talk to a room full of Catholics about theology and you're bound to get a lot of different answers. Talk to a room full of Protestants and you could get 3-5 answers from each person. The reason being Protestant Christianity is HUGELY splintered. It all started in around 1517 with the Protestant Reformation. After the Lutheran church split off from the Catholic church, the church had more splits than a gymnastics team. There are at least four different types of Lutherans (I'm ELCA, in case you were wondering), Calvinists, which turned into Reformed and Presbyterians, and the Methodists, Baptists (Southern and General Baptist Conference), free churches, non-denominational, Anglicans/Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, UCC, and Mennonites to name just a few. Every one of those denominations believes slightly different things, and within each of those denominations you will get the whole gamut among individuals. Some think that the Bible is literal and some think it is purely metaphorical. Some people believe in infant baptism and some think you need to be an adult who is submerged. Some people think gay people are going to hell and some ordain them (and/or don't believe in a literal hell). Although most denominations profess some sort of creed, people's interpretations vary quite a lot even within one particular parish. Asking if all of Canada believes in evolution is as ridiculous as asking if all black people like fried chicken. It's kind of insulting. How should I know? I don't know all black people and probably some of them do and some of them don't. I also don't know all Canadians, or all Christians.
Second, holding a particular religious belief does not mean that you ascribe to a particular scientific outlook or political ideology. I thought I had made this pretty clear to this person, but I do actually think evolution is a thing, and also am all for gay rights, access to safe abortion services and birth control, and entitlements. I'm not a Republican. More power to you if you are, but I'm not. The thing is, although some individual congregations may put a strong emphasis on promoting "Christian" values in politics, in general even if a congregation holds a particular official stance, that does not mean all the members hold that view. When I was in middle school I started to disagree with some of the things that my Missouri Synod Lutheran church stated as a public stance. If a stupid 15 year old can find it in herself to disagree with a church body based on her personal ethics, I'm pretty sure that an adult can do the same. The reason I could stay in that congregation despite my disagreement is that I believed then and still believe now that you don't have to all think the same thing in order to believe that Jesus loves the world. Jesus loving the world means for some people promoting really hateful things, like the Westboro Baptist Church. For most of us, it means something else, and that "something else" varies quite a lot from person to person.
Third, church isn't just a place where people go to have their beliefs reinforced and blindly swallow whatever the preacher says. Sometimes you go there in order to be challenged, or to question, or to get told a truth that might be kind of painful or frustrating. When I preach, I think a lot about the congregation and what types of people are sitting there. Right now I'm preaching to a predominately white congregation full of farmers and small towners who tend to be pretty comfortable with who they are and what the church is like. Often when I preach, I challenge people to think like a person who is not like them, to challenge their assumptions about who they are and why they come to church, and to push them to ask hard questions. Do I rub some people the wrong way? Probably so. But I also get to challenge people to think about their faith, and that's kind of my job. If people are coming and I'm just telling them what they want to hear I think I'm failing. But if I'm letting God work through me to tell them what they need instead, that's ministry. It's not about indoctrinating, but about challenge and growth and question and helping people figure out who they are supposed to be. And not too surprisingly, who they are meant to be varies greatly from person to person. We are all individuals making up the body of Christ: fingers and toes, eyes, ears, belly buttons, butts (we all know butts), livers, etc. As diverse as one part of your body is from the next is how diverse the church is.
Generalizations and assumptions are harmful. That's how wars are started and how two parties can be shouting so loudly at each other that they're not getting anything done. So why not set the tone by trying genuinely to understand? When you ask me "Do Christians believe X" you are asking the wrong questions. What you should be asking is "What do you believe?" "What do you teach?" "Who are you?" "What is your role as a minister?" That is going to be different for every minister, for every Christian, and for every person. In order to have constructive conversation, we need to understand each other, and that doesn't happen by making broad generalizations and assumptions. If you really want to know what I'm all about, I'm happy to tell you if you'll ask me sincerely. You don't have to agree with me, but at least try to put aside your presuppositions for a second to ask the question. I think this is generally good life advice, don't you?
Next time I think I'll write about what a pastor does for the people who think we only work one day a week...
Hum, I hope this doesn't mean you won't have dinner with us again! ;) (It's your turn to choose a place :).)
ReplyDeleteMore substantively: I enjoyed this post but every time I started to write a response, it ended up very, very long, so finally I'm exercising some self-control and only responding to one little point (which will not prevent this comment from being long, just from being very, very long). You mention the hostility of academics (and perhaps specially scientists) to organized religion and tie it to political views. But that leaves a funny question about why academics generally tend to be liberal. I think that both "academics tend to be liberals" and "some/many academics are hostile to religion" have a common explanation.
The essence of being an academic (and in particular a scientist) is the idea that if you want to know about how the world is, you should spend a lot of time studying it and thinking about it and talking about it with other people doing the same thing as you try to come up with plausible explanations for what you observe. On the other hand, part of the essence of conservativism and (some forms of) religion is a kind of deference to authority (e.g., taking beliefs about the world on faith) that is inconsistent with this academic ideal. This manifests itself in all sorts of ways; one that particularly gets me is abstinence-only education, whose core is the idea that education is about telling people how to behave instead of telling people how to think about and understand the world around them.
Now, obviously, not all forms of religion are about this. And one possible point of my little speech at dinner is that (as a hopefully liberal and open-minded person) I can see that the values of liberalism and open-mindedness and interest in how the world really is are values that are totally compatible with many forms of religious belief (e.g., mainstream Christianity, or reform Judaism, or at least some forms of Buddhism). But academics are also not *confused* when we see that the forces in the world opposed to these values have a bunch of things in common, including often conservativism of political belief and conservativism of religious belief. And to the extent that people are going around declaring as a matter of faith and religion that various false things about the world are true, there will always be (mutual) hostility between science and (this form of) religion.
I guess one could say that a point of the latter parts of your post is that religion doesn't *have* to be about ignorance and conservativism and unthinking deference to authority at all. This point is well-taken.
*Phew!*
Thanks for commenting. It's nice to get some insight into your piece in that conversation. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head about the connection between academic liberalism and hostility toward religion. The brand of Christianity (or religion in general) that promotes adherence to authority drives me nuts too for the same reasons, but I mostly wanted to make clear based on our conversation that there are actually millions of religious people out there who are not proponents of that ideology. There certainly are those people. There is actually some quite interesting research out there on different types of religiosity and how they correlate with political beliefs and attitudes toward authority, and people who hold a certain authoritarian brand of religion do tend to see the world a certain way, but conversely people who see religion as a quest are exactly the opposite (and are, ironically, not very tolerant toward the other brand). It's just really frustrating for those of us who really do approach our religion/faith in a non-authoritarian way to constantly be equated with a caricature of a religious person. I can understand how somebody could get that idea, but I would certainly hope that people who are generally curious and open like academics tend to be would be able to not stuff us all into the same box.
ReplyDeleteI was, shall we say, slightly perturbed by the conversation, but actually really appreciated your comments and enjoyed dinner overall. I'm getting used to those sort of jaw-dropping comments but I'm human too. For all intents and purposes I was also an academic for a while and it's been a pretty big shift to go from being (outwardly) a pretty regular person to somehow becoming the representative for all Christians in casual conversation (apparently even the pope, who knew!?). It's a process. Anyway, we'll be happy to pick next time. I'll be back in the Twin Cities in less than a month!! :)
Hi Gwen,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response, and you're welcome. I don't personally "get" religion (in any of its forms), but it's easy enough for me to see that my values are broadly compatible with (some kinds of) religious belief, and I don't find anything to disagree with in your first paragraph.
For your second paragraph, I'm glad that you enjoyed dinner; we did as well. (D and I are both still adjusting to having suddenly moved across the country to a place where we hardly know anyone, so we're a bit desperate for normal social interactions :).) For what it's worth, my experience with G is that he does have a slightly odd sense of humor and makes jokes that don't always land right, but I doubt he really intended any serious comment about your beliefs. I rather like the idea of you as personal representative of the Pope; at least it seems less ridiculous that being expected to speak for the previous one :-p.
I know what it's like to be transplanted to a place and not know anybody (and feel horribly isolated... thank you tiny town, population: 1551 mostly over age 65), so know that you guys are welcome to hang with us anytime, just shoot us an e-mail or whatever. I'll be back on the 25th so maybe we can plan something soon after. As for G, I dig that, I think I have a pretty offbeat sense of humor too. Like I said, I'm not really that easily offended, just felt the need to respond to something that's been a common thread for the last couple years for me, but which hadn't really come to a head before now. He just happened to be the unfortunate one to push me into the 'argghh, must respond' point.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how the Pope would feel about me representing him, but I'll be sure to ask if I see him. :)