It probably seems like I am only picking on Evangelicals (and Conservative Christians in general). But evangelicals aren't the only bugaboo in my reconsideration of orthodoxy: Liberal Christians have been, if not a greater stumbling block, at least an equal contributor to my discomfort with Christianity. Despite my misspent youth as an Evangelical/Pentecostal, my adult spiritual formation was at the hands of mainline Protestant liberals, and could best be described as a disaster. A qualified disaster (it wasn't all bad) but a disaster nonetheless.
There was a feeling of desperation in my seminary: The student body was almost entirely of the earnest variety. Everyone really wanted to "do good", even though most of us couldn't really articulate why. Claims to supernatural experiences were warned against, or else one of our psychology profs might accuse you of mental instability. This only applied to white students, however. "Minority" students were exempt from any criticism of behavior, belief, or doctrine. This racism was appalling: Liberal rationalism was the rule of the day, unless you were deemed a "primitive" by the school administration.
Things got even sillier when I returned to seminary for a second masters degree. In a class on post-modernism, a woman stated that the Aztecs had never committed human sacrifice, and that the suggestion that they did was a white colonialist lie. (The white colonialists were apparently miffed and jealous that the Aztecs had perfected open heart surgery at that early point in history.) The professor (much maligned as a "conservative" by some within the denominational hierarchy) gently expressed his disbelief in this notion, but the woman's response indicated that she believed that naysayers were simply racists. Nobody in the class (including myself) bothered to back up the professor. I know that I was too stunned to respond. I hope that this was the case with the other students, or else I must come to the distasteful conclusion that my academic colleagues were too stupid to question absurdity.
And what did all this seminary education do for us? Well, I couldn't help but notice that a lot of people had a very difficult time getting ordained. This seminary had a VERY complex formation process for students, as did its denomination. Students could be (and often were) forced to leave seminary or switch to a purely academic degree track because the faculty no longer supported their vocation. Yet our seniors were constantly coming back from ordination hearings dejected and depressed. They may have had excellent academic records, but they couldn't get their districts to ordain them. They couldn't relate to the folks "back home", and the folks "back home" saw our students as "dangerous".
But the worst part of my liberal formation process was that it didn't really have any sort of a goal. The big emphasis in seminary (at least when I was there) was that as ministers, we were supposed to "empower" the people we served. We really weren't supposed to lead, and even serving our people was suspect. Of course, most laypeople don't want to be empowered, and they sure as hell aren't going to pay you to empower them. So here we all were, formed to "empower" people who didn't want to be empowered, all the while completely bereft of any solid grounding in theology. Theology was not considered empowering, I guess, but this deficit meant that we also lacked purpose. Why were we trying so hard to get ordained just so we could empower the reluctant for $20,000 a year? Nobody ever cleared that up for us.
In the face of all this liberal non-rigor, I gave up. I started taking up the study of Western Esotericism, and made my mark in that community. My efforts were sometimes appreciated, sometimes not, but at least I no longer had to pretend that I didn't believe in a God that sometimes does weird things. Of course most Christians no longer wanted to have anything to do with me, but I was pretty sick of Christians (both liberal and conservative) at that point.
But now I am back, tail between my legs, sniffing around for something real to grasp onto. The gender wars are getting worse (and the wrong side seems to be beating the hell out of the feminists), and political money is fueling "conservative" movements within mainline churches. I fit in even less now than I did before. But perhaps that is a cross that I need to learn to bear.
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Lainie,
As someone who did things "the other way" but ended up in a place somewhat similar to yours (with a few important differences), I really liked your comments on theological liberalism. I grew up in such a church, and my angst came to a head when I asked the pastor "When you say 'God' what do you mean?" He could not answer me. I, too, feel quite post-evangelical these days, esp. since Bush's rise and (for a second illustration) the Southern Baptist jihad against women (ever-continuing).
I also read your post on the Bible. And yes, I too am having to work through its apparent patriarchal lenses. I still choose to believe that it is authoritative in all matters of doctrine and practice (I avoid the word 'inerrant' as one which only confuses the issue). My own pro-feminist stance finds adequate grounding in the first few verses of Genesis, we being "created in God's image, male and female he created them."
There are certainly painful verses I cannot at present explain, unless Jesus' note about OT divorce law (Moses granted divorce for any and every reason because he knew the people's hardness of heart) could also be applied elsewhere. That doesn't likely take care of all the problems -- your note re a woman being raped (I presume this is the passage in Deut. 22:22 and onward) is a good example of OT material frankly impenitrable to me. But of course at least part of the problem is that I have no idea what it would have been like to live in their culture. Perhaps such laws were actually radically feminist compared to others' approach to rape at the time.
I guess my more conservative ideas re Scripture leave me with a ton of work to be done, and a ton of praying to be pursued, as I attempt to ascertain just what God in fact was saying there... and here!
Again, thank you for the excellent and provocative blog.
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