Defining and Refining My Faith

I doubt this will be a single coherent piece. It's likely to be a sprawling catastrophe of a composition, but it's well past time to begin putting my thoughts into print. I intend to examine the religious aspects of my upbringing—the various levels of the church, the private school it once ran, and my home environment—in the hope that I can articulate what I believe and why. In particular, I want to separate what I actually believe from what I feel I should believe.

• intro and scope—how did we get here?

  • this has been a long time coming, but the decision to start seriously outlining it was sparked by video essays from Laura Crone and Renegade Cut; the former prompted me to confront and accept the complexities of Christian tradition, and both invited me to consider the ways in which the teachings I was raised in may have been built upon distortions (e.g., faith and doubt, the existence and role of Satan) and the harm done by the Christian establishment
  • maybe cover those in more detail?
• faith and doubt

  • exist in symbiosis
  • “I believe in gravity” is not an expression of faith, because gravity's existence is not a matter of uncertainty (though some have argued in bad faith against this idea)
  • anyone who says they can prove God exists is lying—to themselves and to everyone else; that's where faith comes in
• anti-Catholicism in NCA's curriculum

  • this is a weird one that has never really left my mind
  • it's impossible to adequately discuss world history without mentioning the Catholic Church; it was hugely influential, first on Europe and later the world
  • the Church did absolutely do some fucked-up shit
  • since Catholicism is still a flavor of Christianity, it is undeniable that atrocities committed under the banner of Catholicism were therefore committed under the banner of Christianity
  • it is possible, from a Christian perspective, to criticize those actions, acknowledge that the Church was wrong, and even to draw meaningful parallels to more contemporary actions
  • it is not possible to do so from a fundamentalist Protestant Dominionist perspective, which is exactly where Abeka falls
  • their curriculum instead argued that Catholics were fake, bad Christians who worship idols and support an unbiblical hierarchy; therefore, the Church's historical actions are incomparable to those of present-day (Protestant) Christians
  • it's fascinating to see an organization such as Abeka condemn the Pope effectively running the government when that's exactly what they want from an ideal Christian leader (Bob Altemeyer has entered the chat)
  • anyway, this whole attitude definitely stuck with me for a long time and colored how I interacted with some family members (including that one conversation with Dad that I wish I hadn't tried)
• NC's children's/youth ministries

  • I entered this system at age 9, so I experienced their 5–9, 10–12, and 13–18 ministries
  • Laura Crone describes how, in one of her early Sunday school experiences, the teacher pointed out how wild some Bible stories could be (sparked by that of Jesus walking on water) and admitted that she didn't take them all at face value
  • I never had such an experience at NC, and I might go so far as to say that such an admission would not have been tolerated there; I certainly doubt my own mother would have reacted well had I said, “so-and-so told us they think Jesus walking on water was a bit unbelievable!”
  • here's the thing: I don't think anyone in a teaching position had ill intent; if you believed that you had the answers to all of life's problems in a conveniently compact package, would you not feel an obligation to present it as such, especially to the children who have been entrusted to your care?
  • I'm also not asserting that NC was an absolutist fundamentalist environment (though they for sure had fundie-adjacent beliefs)
  • no, I think it's more a case of well-meaning inertia
  • imparting a nuanced understanding of such a complex topic to children and giving them space to freely explore that space was not in the job description of those who led KidZone; that's a tough thing to manage for a group that size, and frankly I doubt most of those adults were even capable of doing so
  • their primary function was to entertain us and teach us a bit about Jesus while our parents were having their sermon
  • and that's how inertia begins: this isn't the right age, they'll get it later, then rinse and repeat until they're adults and (possibly) expected to navigate those complexities on their own
  • what happens when they begin leading the children's ministries?
  • even if they felt comfortable expressing doubts (I certainly wasn't), would they have the right tools to do so?
  • if I had been able to do so, would I have been satisfactorily engaged in response, or would I have been waved off with, “go read your Bible and pray more”?
• NC more generally

  • and I guess that was NC's biggest flaw: they weren't total absolutists, and they didn't punish doubt, but there was a certain disinterest in exploring nuance or context
  • to pull again from Laura Crone, I found her discussion of the widow's mite to be surprisingly powerful; it was an examination of a story I knew from an angle I hadn't considered, and that power was entirely derived from the context she provided
  • by contrast, Bible quotes at NC were generally stripped of this context, often pulled from whichever translation provided the best fit for the point at hand; the Bible says XYZ, and we're going to take that at face value
  • my gripe is not that they used multiple translations, but that they did so in isolation from each other; that feels more cynical, right?
  • moreover, services repeatedly argued that faith is totally incompatible with intellectual understanding (if you're thinking about it, then you're already doing it wrong!), which was obviously a hard sell for me
  • it's interesting to me how, while Mom says the Catholic Church never encouraged her to read the Bible like NC did, I never felt equipped by NC with the tools to interpret and think about the Bible
  • I am told that, in addition to pastoral staff being available for discussion, small groups were the primary arena for deeper doctrinal discussions, but I bounced off before ever joining one
  • by the time I left NC, small groups had transitioned from semi-stable study groups into a regularly-changing roster of topic-based gatherings (i.e., instead of A's group and B's group, they had the rock-climbing group and the Revelation group)
• the church as community

  • this is admittedly less about faith or my faith and more about me as a person
  • tons of people find church fulfilling as an act of community; I truly love that for them, but I have never felt the same
  • most of my participation was very…contractual? If I didn't feel needed, then I wouldn't want to go
  • in practice, this meant I was highly enthusiastic about my role on the media team but uninterested in showing up to church if I wasn't on the schedule
  • case in point: my departure from NC's youth group and later CotK's; both were painful because they severed me from my only connection to these groups; both were preceded by (unintentional) statements from the leadership that my contributions didn't matter
• antisemitism in Christianity

  • this might seem like a tangent, but I think reckoning with the built-in antisemitism is a prerequisite for practicing Christianity ethically; it should also be an interesting historical study
  • Christianity claimed to be the fulfillment of Judaism, and it's a small jump (really, no more than a hop) from there to arguing that Jews who do not convert are betraying their own faith and thus rejecting God
  • then there was the political climate in the early years of the church; in an attempt to present themselves as no threat to the Roman Empire, the early church thought it wise to denigrate the Jews