I have been a Christian all my life. I have been a little bit afraid all my life.
Growing up, I believed in a God who loves everyone but whose punishment for those who didn't follow him was eternal torture, literally the worst fate imaginable. As might be expected, this occasionally inspired a bit of trepidation on my part, a worry that I was somehow screwing up and about to end up on the Lord's bad side. I often found myself apologizing profusely to God for the stray unclean thought: a lustful look at a girl I had a crush on, an imagined swear word (I would never actually swear out loud, of course), or sometimes nothing at all, a preemptive apology for something I'd unknowingly done or perhaps might do.
It all added up to a cosmic sense of looking over my shoulder. If I ever tried something new or different or not smack dab in the center of the conservative Christian approved activities list, something in the back of my brain would whisper, "What if you're wrong, though?"
This experience is pretty common to someone with a middle class white evangelical background, which is what I had growing up, so I won't dwell on it. So too will I not dwell on the similarly common deconstruction of many of those core beliefs as an adult, my realization that what I had been taught growing up didn't always square with how I felt were the most moral ways to interact with people who were different from me, to say nothing of the way I interacted with myself. Suffice it to say that I began drifting from established evangelical orthodoxy on a number of topics, including gender and sexuality issues, doctrinal “certainties” like the importance of evangelism and damnation of nonbelievers, and a variety of other, less central topics. Many of these changing attitudes were hard-fought in my mind and heart, however, largely thanks to that recurring thought which paved my every mental rabbittrail: “What if you’re wrong, though?”
The irony was that this thought pattern rarely evinced itself in the opposite direction, at least not consciously, and I think that’s true for a lot of people when it comes to what they were taught growing up. My brain adopted modern Christian orthodoxy as the default correct position, and every new idea I considered adopting into my understanding of the world needed to be run through that gauntlet, either to determine if it could comfortably coexist with my faith (ie, “Actually, when you go back and look at the original Greek, the New Testament doesn’t necessarily condemn homosexuality”) or to determine if there was something about my previous beliefs worth giving up (one of the earliest barriers to go on that front was swearing, which I had been trained to wince away from as a youth). Seldom, when considering the Christianity I was raised in, did I think “What if you’re wrong, though?” That I could be backing the wrong horse, or that horseracing wasn’t even the right sport for the cosmic metaphor, was just not a consideration.
And yet, of course, it was, in its own subtle way. As I took my first tentative steps into the larger world, I was confronted with the fact that many of my core beliefs were the result of assumption rather than conclusion. As I read or heard perspectives different from my own, it was those outside forces, rather than my internal regulation, asking me that recurring question. I responded, and in some ways am still responding, with an attempt to better find certainty in the truth of things, to discover the best way to live and believe.
My family stopped going to church when the pandemic began, and I don’t think we’re going back -- not in the near future, anyway. We liked the church we were attending just fine; the folks there are tolerant and kind and generally non-objectionable. But when we stopped, it felt like a big exhale, a vacation from an activity I’d been trying to make stick for my entire life without seeing the same results as the people for whom church is a committed investment. That, combined with my ambivalence to many of the specifics of what’s taught in church, no matter which one, makes going back a fraught prospect. I don’t want to saddle my kids with teachings I’m not even sure I endorse anymore.
My own belief system has morphed considerably from what it was when I entered college at age 18. This is no manifesto; if you want clues, they’re more than evident in my public face or these archives. One of my primary motivating feelings right now is a comfort in ambiguity -- a belief that whatever God is, the best thing to do is treat others well, and those who tried to live the best and truest way they could will be sorted out kindly.
I feel good about this most of the time -- if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion -- but every now and then, my old companion wends its way back to me: “What if you’re wrong, though?” It’s at these moments when I realize that my journey, and everyone’s, is not about finding certainty but about feeling at the edges of truth, like the blind men and the elephant. Nothing is certain; no matter what you believe, faith in it is required, and doubt is entwined with it forever more. As it’s written in Mark, “Help my unbelief!” Help me be open to whatever that refers to.
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What else is good on the internet?
I’ve been doing a lot of good reading online as of late, but nothing has captured a particular mood quite as well for me lately as this article about Joe Manchin and the conflicted helplessness of modern life.
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From the field
My latest movie review is about King Richard, a pretty good sports movie with a very good Will Smith performance.
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.