Here at the end of a particularly cruel April, just today, I am experiencing one of those rare moments where a number of different deep movements of spirit and thought suddenly break the surface of consciousness and align.
Here's one movement that surfaced: I had a chat today with a friend whose struggles with faith in part inspired me to start this blog. We picked up on some themes she had raised in earlier conversations, e.g., how to keep a faith when so much of the faith of one's childhood seems nonsensical or repellent. I found myself putting into words thoughts and feelings that had largely been inarticulate for a while but roiling in my subconscious for some time. It felt good to talk about what I believe and why I believe it.
The conversation also reminded me how my absence from writing on this blog, my break from forcing myself to communicate my beliefs, has muted my spirit. The engagement of conversation--with another or even with myself in writing--is a discipline I need to practice more often. I write, after all, about evangelicals training themselves to be articulate ambassadors of Christianity. While I distance myself from many of their methods and theologies, I too am a representative of Christianity.
I especially like representing a Christianity different from the one my friend (and I) absorbed as a child, the black-or-white system of certain belief. "When I was young," my friend explained (I paraphrase), "I just knew that certain things were true: that Jesus was God, that he rose from the dead. Now I don't believe that. Or at least I don't know that.
"Do you," she asked, "believe in heaven? Or that Jesus is God?"
I did, I said. And I do. But, as I explained, this is something I've chosen to believe. I do not believe because I have been presented with an accumulation of convincing empirical evidence. In fact, the whole push toward evidentiary apologetics, "proving," say, Christ's resurrection as one might prove a legal case or scientific theory (Josh McDowell is the go-to example here)--this turns me off.
I believe in Jesus as God not because I've been rationally convinced but because I'm caught by the image of God-with-us, of God's miraculous, shocking solidarity with humanity even at its most painful and alienated from God ("My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"). I see heaven as congruent with this image of the God who breaks through all barriers to be with humanity. This image of the reconciling God resonates with me, provokes an affirmation of spirit that I cannot justify in purely material terms. It's also, I said, a belief that I feel pushes me towards an ethic beyond myself. I feel I am a better person than I might otherwise be thanks to my belief in a fullness beyond my own temporal life.
And so, without being fully, rationally, finally convinced in some forensic way, I have committed to this belief. It is, to be sure, a leap of faith, an act that Charles Taylor christens "anticipatory confidence." And I have felt as I leap that I have been caught, upheld. Not all the time, to be sure. There are plenty of days where I feel only alienation and uncertainty, the temptation to stop trying, to stop leaping into the dark (or the light?).
But--and this is another difference between my childhood faith and my current faith--my belief isn't a matter of clear certainty. It doesn't depend on my moment-to-moment feeling of confidence. Rather, I keep up a fragile commitment--fragile because I am constantly aware that it could be otherwise, fragile in the sense that I don't take it for granted. Fragile, but not brittle. I look back on my childhood faith, where I like my friend just knew that Christ was God, that heaven was real, that angels surrounded us. I just knew this because the only other option to such certainty was nihilist unbelief. My firm knowledge rested on some absolute truths which, if questioned in the slightest, would shatter the entire framework of my beliefs. The appearance of utter doubtlessness was made of glass.
I sense the same brittleness in the "Bible-believing" (i.e., pro-inerrancy) and material-evidentiary branches of Christianity. The Bible is true in its every literal detail because it must be. Were even the slightest discrepancy, the slightest contradiction discovered, the entire Christian belief system would crumble. Here confidence isn't anticipated but desperately maintained no matter what.
I recognize--largely thanks to Taylor's A Secular Age--how such brittle certainty is both a product of and a reaction to the present age of pluralized beliefs and non-beliefs. Reading him this evening brought other mental wrestling matches I've been waging to the surface. I've gotten (finally) to the part where Taylor addresses and answers some of the current arguments against Christian belief. His writing on suffering and faith captures much of my own thinking, much of my own feeling.
More on him next time.
JF
Friday, April 30, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Differences and Deadlines
It's that time of the year again, when a deadline for some research project I've committed myself to looms ever closer. This time it's a mega-conference on performance studies. I've done that thing--that trick I tell my PhDs to try when they need to discipline themselves into working, that trick that I've pulled on myself multiple times, that trick I inevitably kick myself for using: if you need to write a brand-new piece of research, just sign up for a conference where you'll be presenting the work before a group of influential critical scholars. You'll get it done.
It works like a charm--most of the time--but it comes at the cost of some heavy stress when said due date is near and said research product is, well, still in the subjunctive phase. Thus my heavy stress.
The project I've promised to complete involves a brief paper laying out some connections between evangelical proselytism and liberal--anti-capitalist, to be exact--activism. In my work on various modes of evangelical outreach, I've run across more than one present-day evangelist referencing some mid-century evangelicals who noted how committed communists (the Stalinist/Maoist/Castro-esque variety) were to spreading their Marxist gospel of anti-capitalism. Why, plead the evangelists (past and present) can't Christians be at least as committed as the godless commies?
My seed of a contention--as yet untested by the rigors of research and writing--is that the situation in US left-leaning activism has reversed itself. That is, I think the time has come for some on the left to ask if anti-capitalist progressives can't get a little old-time religious fervor for spreading their own gospel.
Yet a quick glance at national headlines suggests that we're currently undergoing one of the most polarized and polarizing times in--well, in my memory, at least. I just watched a clip about the Tea Party protests rallying support to overturn the health care reform bill, to return to a more pro-market system (though, as many journalists and pundits point out, the reform bill itself uses market tools, not socialism). Any religious fervor about anti-capitalism must encounter a similarly passionate set of beliefs from Tea Partiers. There's a fundamental difference here that renders the hopes for conversion to or from either side dim.
I've long been drawn to writers and theorists who deal with the problems of plurality, tolerance, and disagreement. To whit: how shall we disagree? and to what end? In a number of different works, literary critic Wayne C. Booth asks us to consider "the company we keep" in life and in fiction. How do we imagine and interact with the other who passionately holds beliefs at odds with our own?
Booth had some personal experience with this as a dean during the 1960s eras of protests and student-led sit-ins. There he found himself confronted by and engaged with activists who were asserting views--or at least methods--at odds with the stances he was obliged/convinced to take as dean. Such was the intensity of disagreement, he says, that at some points one side wouldn't really launch criticisms so much as merely repeat their opponent's views verbatim ("You believe X, Y, and Z!"), assuming that the restatement stood as an obvious rebuttal of the point itself.
I was caught by that image--the disbelieving repetition of another's thesis as (and instead of) an actual rebuttal. Examples from my own life spring to mind: "You believe that health care should be a right guaranteed by government!" To me, or to an audience of like-minded progressives, such a statement functions as a simple affirmation or a happy discovery. But to others, uttering such a statement would be a call for boos and hisses. It would be formally (though not in magnitude) similar to a let-me-get-this-straight-you-really-believe-this statement that, say, person X thinks that kittens should be ground up into dogfood.
The disbelieving repetition-as-argument (I'll have to see if Booth has a better term for it) depends utterly on shared conventions between audience and speaker (repeater, I should say). It's an anti-manifesto. Rather than stating affirmatively what one's side really does believe, you state your opponents' views so baldly as to throw your own side's views into sharp relief.
It's important to distinguish this rhetorical maneuver from a related but unfair variant--the straw man technique or willful falsification, where someone attributes to an opponent views that the opponent simply doesn't espouse. No, in the kind of speech scenario Booth describes, both sides are able to state the others' views fairly and without distortion. I know exactly what you believe, an activist in this situation says, and I disagree to such an extreme that the belief as such is anathema to me and mine.
Now this is fundamental difference. Many of the critics I draw on regularly--Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere in particular--insist on the value of this level of difference to the operation of democratic politics. Mouffe sees a great deal of danger in the will to mute or smooth over disagreements through the search for consensus or moderation. Honest antagonism--or as she would prefer agonism--is in her view the fuel for the democratic motor.
My problem? I agree intellectually with Mouffe that fundamental disagreements are inevitable and ought not be rationalized away as malfunctions to be repaired. But emotionally, such conflict--the kind of conflict Booth recalls--makes me queasy. I know it's odd for a scholar of theatre to say this, but I hate conflict.
I'm all the more impressed, then, by people such as Booth who make it their life's work to begin at the fundamental disagreement scenario ask "What now? What's the ethical thing to do?" Much of Mouffe's work (and I suspect much of Booth's) involves not so much advocating an exact, silver-bullet answer but warning against the will to give up, to dismiss the other totally and--on that pretext--pursue their destruction.
To restate--what attracts me to present-day evangelism as a subject is how it, too, very often begins from an assumption of fundamental difference--those who believe on the risen Christ and those for whom the gospel is foolishness--and refuses to give up. I'm intrigued especially by worldview evangelisms that enjoin Christians to educate themselves so fully in other (i.e., non-evangelical-Christian) beliefs so that the evangelists could in fact state those beliefs fairly and clearly.
I'm not yet convinced that the capitalist/anti-capitalist disagreements going on in this country (which for the most part are more like very-strict-capitalist versus slightly-less-strict-capitalists) have reached even the point at which either side can state the other's point of view clearly and fairly. I wonder, then, if there isn't the potential for anti-capitalist progressives like me to be the first to show empathy for the other's worldview as a first step to progressive evangelization...
Hm.
More later,
JF
It works like a charm--most of the time--but it comes at the cost of some heavy stress when said due date is near and said research product is, well, still in the subjunctive phase. Thus my heavy stress.
The project I've promised to complete involves a brief paper laying out some connections between evangelical proselytism and liberal--anti-capitalist, to be exact--activism. In my work on various modes of evangelical outreach, I've run across more than one present-day evangelist referencing some mid-century evangelicals who noted how committed communists (the Stalinist/Maoist/Castro-esque variety) were to spreading their Marxist gospel of anti-capitalism. Why, plead the evangelists (past and present) can't Christians be at least as committed as the godless commies?
My seed of a contention--as yet untested by the rigors of research and writing--is that the situation in US left-leaning activism has reversed itself. That is, I think the time has come for some on the left to ask if anti-capitalist progressives can't get a little old-time religious fervor for spreading their own gospel.
Yet a quick glance at national headlines suggests that we're currently undergoing one of the most polarized and polarizing times in--well, in my memory, at least. I just watched a clip about the Tea Party protests rallying support to overturn the health care reform bill, to return to a more pro-market system (though, as many journalists and pundits point out, the reform bill itself uses market tools, not socialism). Any religious fervor about anti-capitalism must encounter a similarly passionate set of beliefs from Tea Partiers. There's a fundamental difference here that renders the hopes for conversion to or from either side dim.
I've long been drawn to writers and theorists who deal with the problems of plurality, tolerance, and disagreement. To whit: how shall we disagree? and to what end? In a number of different works, literary critic Wayne C. Booth asks us to consider "the company we keep" in life and in fiction. How do we imagine and interact with the other who passionately holds beliefs at odds with our own?
Booth had some personal experience with this as a dean during the 1960s eras of protests and student-led sit-ins. There he found himself confronted by and engaged with activists who were asserting views--or at least methods--at odds with the stances he was obliged/convinced to take as dean. Such was the intensity of disagreement, he says, that at some points one side wouldn't really launch criticisms so much as merely repeat their opponent's views verbatim ("You believe X, Y, and Z!"), assuming that the restatement stood as an obvious rebuttal of the point itself.
I was caught by that image--the disbelieving repetition of another's thesis as (and instead of) an actual rebuttal. Examples from my own life spring to mind: "You believe that health care should be a right guaranteed by government!" To me, or to an audience of like-minded progressives, such a statement functions as a simple affirmation or a happy discovery. But to others, uttering such a statement would be a call for boos and hisses. It would be formally (though not in magnitude) similar to a let-me-get-this-straight-you-really-believe-this statement that, say, person X thinks that kittens should be ground up into dogfood.
The disbelieving repetition-as-argument (I'll have to see if Booth has a better term for it) depends utterly on shared conventions between audience and speaker (repeater, I should say). It's an anti-manifesto. Rather than stating affirmatively what one's side really does believe, you state your opponents' views so baldly as to throw your own side's views into sharp relief.
It's important to distinguish this rhetorical maneuver from a related but unfair variant--the straw man technique or willful falsification, where someone attributes to an opponent views that the opponent simply doesn't espouse. No, in the kind of speech scenario Booth describes, both sides are able to state the others' views fairly and without distortion. I know exactly what you believe, an activist in this situation says, and I disagree to such an extreme that the belief as such is anathema to me and mine.
Now this is fundamental difference. Many of the critics I draw on regularly--Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere in particular--insist on the value of this level of difference to the operation of democratic politics. Mouffe sees a great deal of danger in the will to mute or smooth over disagreements through the search for consensus or moderation. Honest antagonism--or as she would prefer agonism--is in her view the fuel for the democratic motor.
My problem? I agree intellectually with Mouffe that fundamental disagreements are inevitable and ought not be rationalized away as malfunctions to be repaired. But emotionally, such conflict--the kind of conflict Booth recalls--makes me queasy. I know it's odd for a scholar of theatre to say this, but I hate conflict.
I'm all the more impressed, then, by people such as Booth who make it their life's work to begin at the fundamental disagreement scenario ask "What now? What's the ethical thing to do?" Much of Mouffe's work (and I suspect much of Booth's) involves not so much advocating an exact, silver-bullet answer but warning against the will to give up, to dismiss the other totally and--on that pretext--pursue their destruction.
To restate--what attracts me to present-day evangelism as a subject is how it, too, very often begins from an assumption of fundamental difference--those who believe on the risen Christ and those for whom the gospel is foolishness--and refuses to give up. I'm intrigued especially by worldview evangelisms that enjoin Christians to educate themselves so fully in other (i.e., non-evangelical-Christian) beliefs so that the evangelists could in fact state those beliefs fairly and clearly.
I'm not yet convinced that the capitalist/anti-capitalist disagreements going on in this country (which for the most part are more like very-strict-capitalist versus slightly-less-strict-capitalists) have reached even the point at which either side can state the other's point of view clearly and fairly. I wonder, then, if there isn't the potential for anti-capitalist progressives like me to be the first to show empathy for the other's worldview as a first step to progressive evangelization...
Hm.
More later,
JF
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Mortal Thoughts
I've been a bit off-the-grid this week. For one thing, I'm visiting my partner up in Illinois, and he lacks a steady internet signal. My access is therefore limited to short stints at the local coffeehouse (a great place appropriately called "The Coffeehouse").
For another, this has been a rough week in terms of mortality. It's unfortunate that in the week following the celebration of Christ's resurrection so many people connected--tangentially, for the most part--to my life have passed away. A friend's mother. My sister's mother-in-law.
The world also lost evangelist and writer Michael Spencer, whom I've written about before. Spencer, who blogged under the moniker "The Internet Monk" (see here), was an intriguing and provocative voice for evangelical reform. He's famous for (among other things) publishing an article version of several of his blog posts, collectively entitled "The Coming Evangelical Collapse." His diagnosis/prognosis of the US church's future struck a chord that continues to resound across evangelicalism and beyond. Doubtless his forthcoming book, Mere Churchianity (completed prior to his death), will make similar waves.
Unfortunately, I never did more than read his writing and enjoy some of his podcasts. I regret that speaking with him in person is no longer a possibility on this plane. Though some of the more conservative/fundamentalist sectors of evangelicalism would likely deny it, Spencer consistently represented a sincere, thoughtful, and deep moderate evangelicalism. He was unafraid to pose challenging, devil's advocate questions to his brothers and sisters, and he modeled an ethic of respectful conversation and interaction with non-evangelicals. All this he did without hedging or weakening the integrity of his core beliefs.
I imagine he and I would have disagreed on a number of key issues about our faith, but I think the encounter would have been mutually bracing, productive, and enjoyable.
The other losses concern people and friends whose privacy I will not risk by ruminating on them here. Besides, I didn't know either one--even through some secondary medium like writing. I experience their passing mainly though the pain of those I love and as a reminder of mortality in general. Obligatory realization alert: people die every day from causes natural and unnatural, inevitable and unjust. I recognize it's a kind of hypocrisy to make heavy weather of death only when it touches me personally. But--what can I say?--I'm human.
I have no deep thoughts here. I wish I could say that the Easter reality makes these occasional reminders of death's proximity moot. But that isn't the case.
In lieu of great ruminations, then, I'll direct anyone reading this to an old post by Spencer, whose thoughts on death from an evangelical perspective exemplify his honest spirit of inquiry. See here.
Lord grant that all those who from their labors rest, rest in peace.
More later,
JF
For another, this has been a rough week in terms of mortality. It's unfortunate that in the week following the celebration of Christ's resurrection so many people connected--tangentially, for the most part--to my life have passed away. A friend's mother. My sister's mother-in-law.
The world also lost evangelist and writer Michael Spencer, whom I've written about before. Spencer, who blogged under the moniker "The Internet Monk" (see here), was an intriguing and provocative voice for evangelical reform. He's famous for (among other things) publishing an article version of several of his blog posts, collectively entitled "The Coming Evangelical Collapse." His diagnosis/prognosis of the US church's future struck a chord that continues to resound across evangelicalism and beyond. Doubtless his forthcoming book, Mere Churchianity (completed prior to his death), will make similar waves.
Unfortunately, I never did more than read his writing and enjoy some of his podcasts. I regret that speaking with him in person is no longer a possibility on this plane. Though some of the more conservative/fundamentalist sectors of evangelicalism would likely deny it, Spencer consistently represented a sincere, thoughtful, and deep moderate evangelicalism. He was unafraid to pose challenging, devil's advocate questions to his brothers and sisters, and he modeled an ethic of respectful conversation and interaction with non-evangelicals. All this he did without hedging or weakening the integrity of his core beliefs.
I imagine he and I would have disagreed on a number of key issues about our faith, but I think the encounter would have been mutually bracing, productive, and enjoyable.
The other losses concern people and friends whose privacy I will not risk by ruminating on them here. Besides, I didn't know either one--even through some secondary medium like writing. I experience their passing mainly though the pain of those I love and as a reminder of mortality in general. Obligatory realization alert: people die every day from causes natural and unnatural, inevitable and unjust. I recognize it's a kind of hypocrisy to make heavy weather of death only when it touches me personally. But--what can I say?--I'm human.
I have no deep thoughts here. I wish I could say that the Easter reality makes these occasional reminders of death's proximity moot. But that isn't the case.
In lieu of great ruminations, then, I'll direct anyone reading this to an old post by Spencer, whose thoughts on death from an evangelical perspective exemplify his honest spirit of inquiry. See here.
Lord grant that all those who from their labors rest, rest in peace.
More later,
JF
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