"I stopped believing in God."

The whole premise sounds so predictable it's almost uninteresting: a Christian pastor short on book ideas decides to write a book on living as an atheist for one year, and at the end decides not to come back. Setting aside all the ways that this should be impossible if one is truly a person of faith (and there are many, some of which we will get to), in a post-deconversion interview, the author says:

“I’d just say that the existence of God seems like an extra layer of complexity that isn’t necessary.”

— http://chrisstedman.religionnews.com/2014/12/29/year-without-god-pastor-im-no-longer-believer/

Questions of doubt are delicate, and no one should be lampooned or disregarded simply due to his or her faith affiliation (or lack thereof). But this is a a public choice meant to help others, so it is OK to wonder whether this pastor adequately understood his "options." And so we can ask, is Christian belief the icing on cake that is perfectly good without icing? Is it simply an extra layer of complication?

At almost every level of society & from almost every angle, faith is presented as an extra layer of complication. Faith is what you do in your free time when you have it. Faith is a hobby, another reason to get together with other people. Liking Jesus is alot like liking an NFL team - you can be a fan if you have the time & energy, and you like that kind of thing. Even deeper, faith is the act of taking seriously a fairly inconvenient ancient text with views that seem so backwards, and come with so much baggage, that you must have very "interesting" reasons for sticking with it. When seen in full, it's the kind of thing that is extreeemely inconvenient, burdensome, stifling, problematic, willfully myopic, etc.

There are a number of reasons that this position lacks integrity, including:

1. Christian faith is not a matter of "belief," it is a combination of belief and practice. So you can never live as an atheist for a year without actually being an atheist that year. And if you think you can live for a year as an atheist while on some level remaining a Christian, you probably have a very unchristian idea of what Christianity actually is.
2. The social conditions and categories that we benefit from regardless of our faith affiliation - a general understanding of human rights, love for one's neighbor, the basic equality of all persons, etc - are derived from Christian belief (this is not to say that the church's heritage is without baggage). To pretend that these conditions will self-perpetuate without Christian faith as a reference point is highly naive, and empirically untested.
3. Thinking as a Christian is more than harboring certain strange beliefs about the afterlife and several acts of history. It is not simply a set of facts that one can reject, while continuing to understand a separate set of facts the same way. Christianity is more like a set of glasses, binoculars, a telescope, and a microscope, that we have been given through which we see the world very differently than we would without it, and that cause us to linger over certain aspects of our world in amazement and gratitude. This raises the question whether Christian belief can be simply abandoned at all - whether a post-Christian person will not to some extent go on using Christian ways of seeing things, but without committing himself to ensuring that future generations will understand those tools and be able to use them.

David Bentley Hart describes how Christian belief eradicated "hard-won" ancient pagan wisdom by simply pointing out that the gods were not there. Embedded in many ancient pagan beliefs are matrices of practical wisdom - how to interact with one-another and the surrounding environment, how to go on living as a society. Those traditions have been discontinued and replaced (to some extent) by Christian traditions of thought. A post-Christian era is an untested proposition - how long before it will be a new era that rejects Christian heritage in full? How long can "human rights" be a meaningful phrase without a basic understanding of what it means to be human? No one will remain a person of faith simply from fear of a slippery slope into anarchy - belief in the Bible's God is ultimately a matter of love - but a person who rejects faith must do the hard work of identifying a tradition of goodness and freedom that does not require the resources of faith if it is to be sustainable for generations to come.

This post is meant to raise a question for Christians: is your faith icing on the cake, or does it give you a basic framework for your life and imagination? If you walk away from your faith today, will it make a difference in your life tomorrow?

The future of religion & study centers

“If the believer is haunted by doubt, the unbeliever can be haunted by faith. . . . [And] what might stop people short—what might truly haunt them—will be encounters with religious communities who have punched skylights in our brass heaven.”

— James K A Smith writing at Slate on the future of religion

You can read the rest here.

Now that Christian truth claims are found to be stranger and stranger by a culture more and more unfamiliar with them, we might find that friendship could be a necessary precursor to preaching - only our friends are going to have the time to find out what makes us tick. In Young Life, this is called earning the right to be heard.

Humans are creatures that worship, that cannot stop worshipping. All of our energetic enterprises of entertainment are marked by ceremony and extravagance, from our American Feast Day of Kris Kringle (with the accompanying astonishingly strange myth of a man from the North Pole satisfying the consumer longings of children everywhere) to NFL game day (where our modern gladiators barrel into an arena through fake smoke). This impulse does not evaporate in a secular age. The ongoing "relevance" of the Christian faith will hinge on the Christian community's ability to be a worshipping community, one into which a haunted stranger stumbles and decides to stay.

Premodern unity in a fragmented world

Though we will likely always have easy A courses, there are no easy answers, not for those who want to have lives that make sense.

We walk off our doorstep into reports of confusing times - a technology revolution, an environmental devolution, the evolution of recognized civil rights.  The social climate is polarized and paralyzed. No political party enjoys much support (voters who register "independent" are at an all-time high, approval of the US Congress is at an all-time low, and Democrats and Republicans are stable only in terms of their opposition to one another). In our private lives, neighbors have fewer reasons to talk to one another and often end up bowling alone.

Imagine trying to tell the story of how we have ended up here. Imagine trying to talk meaningfully about this world to your children. A phrase came to mind recently: Modernity is its own punishment. Of course that's too simplistic, but in many ways the sins of our fathers & mothers have intermingled with their greatest accomplishments so that it is hard to tell them apart. Yet we must learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, if only provisionally, so that we can learn to tell the story of our times (Matthew 16:3).

A friend of a friend recently posted a great reflection here titled "The Broken Glass of the World." The author gestures toward the picture I have briefly painted, and then discusses how ancient Christian mystical practices can bring unity to our lived lives, hearkening to the ancient church and to The Practice of the Presence of God.

I often feel like we are like Augustine, perched on the edge of a precipice - the end of an empire - with little idea whether order or chaos will follow. As Rome disintegrated, Christians increasingly turned toward heavily ordered lives (think monastery) to bring unity to their relationships and lived experiences - & these lives were fulfilling despite their utter refusal to physically satisfy the sexual urge!

It is hard to say what modern mysticism will look like. There is the danger that it will be a mental exercise hobby - a very brief place of centering that people will use to be more "centered," boost their memories, and forget the times. True Christian mysticism taps into our hunger to live in the singular moment beyond time - to experience almost crystalline instances of being filled with the love of Christ - in such a way that rest of our lives are slowly pulled into line with our meditative practices, practices that will not be sustained unless they are supported by & conducted alongside a community.

I don't mean to structure this in terms of problem-solution format, problem: modernity, solution: mysticism. Christians live in a narrative that is amazingly coherent (Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration), and that is the way that I make the most sense of what I see. But there is also the question of how to feel what we know to be true. It could be that some variation of ancient Christian mysticism is a better answer than the cheap & inconsequential experiences we have embraced and offer to our children as the key to meaningful lives.

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For those interested in reading more about our times, I highly recommend that you start with Robert Jenson's How the World Lost Its Story - an article available over at First Things.

French Conversion

Read this account of a French student who stumbled into Christ while on vacation (from Christianity Today). Much of his story reminds me of Augustine's Confessions, particularly Guillaume's attention to the desires that have guided the course of his life.

I am also reminded of someone who at one point asked me, "Why do you believe in God?" I stumbled through a series of arguments, before the person cut in: "No, not why, but why do you bother?"  This to me is the more pressing question to spend time on in today's university environment.