Well, this one’s been a long time comin’.
My faith is pretty much done.
Now that statement involves a bit of hair splitting, so do keep reading.
I got off on the wrong foot as a Christian, starting in August of 1996.
I guess you’d say that from Day One (or heck, even in my pre-natal days of a person of faith) I was fed a diet that would one day, someday I knew would prove its utter vapidity.
The whispers of hostility in my very deepest places toward that sustained routine of cotton candy and popcorn have finally won out, it seems.
Most reasons for any screwedupness I’ve found within, I associate with my adventures in Christian subculture over the past 14 years.
Right or wrong, legit or not, fair or un, that’s how I make sense of my malformed inner world: blaming the (mostly) well meaning, (sometimes) ignorant people preaching (frequently) halfbaked recipes for ordering God’s creation.
I think this week those recipes finally expired.
I can’t tell you any one specific thing that’s precipitated this; perhaps it’s my depression creeping back in, the same way your grass is growing ever less visible under the steady drip of leaves.
Perhaps it has been getting back, officially, into a place of something like leadership in the local church, for the first time since high school. (Full disclosure: I’ve resigned that ‘position’ already with my higher up, so I’m not being inauthentic in any way, shape or form by sharing what I’m sharing here. I hear churches are big into not pretending authenticity.)
Or perhaps it has come from the pounding awareness nowadays endlessly clanging about my soul like an errant ping pong ball that everything I supposedly “know” about relating to the opposite sex I’ve absorbed from Christian subculture. (Also related: I haven’t had a proper girlfriend, or even more than say, three dates with the same girl, since roughly 2003. This is not for lack of trying; I blame my own ineptitude, but not entirely.)
Perhaps the biggest part of it though is the awareness that I am expected to live my life according to a script, at least in the circles in which I’ve run over the past ____ years.
And I’d say that’s all recently, finally materialized clearly in my rear view mirror for the bu**shit it’s been, is, and was.
Now here’s where the hair splitting comes into play (and where perhaps this rant will prove of some value to you):
The theological stuff-Trinity, progressive revelation, Paul writing 2 Timothy, whatever-I don’t take any issue with any of that.
I guess because, for me, all that stuff has proven harmless if not utterly impotent over my years of trying to figure out the healthy life.
I mean, the script reads that it is important and should have value, but if you wanna come snatch those things away-I’m honestly not sold on how much lacking knowledge of all of those things would make my life any different.
I just want to know if you want to spend some time together, being real, not playing characters and not acting like you’re cool with thinking the lot you’ve been given in life is the superlative of grace, the very best that an omnipotent and all perfect God could break off for you.
So find me a church (disclaimer: even if you do the work of finding it, I can’t promise I’ll show up) where I can be at peace as
-someone who finds the death penalty abhorrent, always and every time; for every person and for every crime
-someone who’s tossed off any talk of God guilt tripping us into scratching behind His Ears with lame prom songs to Jesus
-someone who believes that the thinking Christian can do better than C. S. Lewis
-someone who leans strongly liberal in his politics and refuses to be made to feel like a Samaritan or Christian deserving an asterisk because of it
-someone for whom decrying soulless corporate greed and consumerist manipulation means far more than Xeroxing the details of Christ onto other cultures’ souls
-someone who doesn’t think proof texting or tossing out Bible verses like prescriptions is a legitimate way of handling the Scriptures (or the complexities of human nature, for that matter)
-someone who finds religious conversion mostly a parlor trick
-someone who’s always felt the ways of handling the Scriptures such that they categorically condemn homosexuality were specious at very best
-someone who rejects the notion that he should tangle himself into Gordian knots finding ways to make sure God receives a commission on any and all goodness that bubbles up in his life
-someone who realizes, and is (growing) comfortable with, the inherent value in curse words for accurately conveying actual, legitimate, honest emotions
-someone whose soul is pockmarked by the searing hot pokers of girls who preemptively abort even the remotest possibility of romantic relations (indeed, I am so very guilty of brandishing similar pokers)
-someone who doesn’t buy that going on exotic trips to far flung places with a platoon of your Christian BFF’s counts as “mission work”
-someone who takes the altar call at church as his cue to leave and never, ever return to that church ever again
-someone who loves songs like Sting’s “Fields of Gold” or this one and doesn’t fall all over themselves theologically manufacturing a way for God to be the guest of honor at a party with such songs as soundtrack
-someone who thinks KLove utterly blows, by every conceivable measure
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, “I wouldn’t be a member of any church that would have somebody like me for a member.”
You find me a spot like that and… I’ll consider checking it out.
Perhaps next week… or sometime in the spring.
In closing, here’s a question for you; I hope it haunts those of you who consider yourselves conscious of and aware of the faith to which you’ve committed your very all:
What is the difference between being a practicing, ‘solid’ Christian and whatever it is I’ve established myself as in the post above?
Someone else knowing about it and what they do with that knowledge.
That’s it.
Update, 1/26/11: Here I wrote something of a ‘Part Two’ to this piece.
Update, 11/23/11: Here is the post I shared on the first anniversary after I published this piece.
Brave to say all this in public. I admire you for that. I’ve undergone in private more or less the same process you describe here, for related but different reasons. It’s hard.
Hey (Mike) Nance:
Thanks man.
I’m really surprised at how often the feedback I’ve gotten on this has been ‘brave’ or ‘bold’ or something else (not always that started with ‘b’-full disclosure).
I think real bravery would have been to have shared all of this (and more) as I was wrestling with so very many of the same things at Hendrix. Instead, I kept it all bottled up inside, hid it, or journaled it… at the expense of working through it in community, with similar travelers like yourself. Wonder how much of this would be resolved, had I just been honest about it then.
Either way, thanks man for reading, and I hope this finds you in a place of peace.
What are you doing these days, by the way? One can only glean so much from Facebook.
Dixon, your post makes me feel like when I unclog the kitchen sink (in the most serious way). There is that feeling of deep relief…and you know that what’s left in the sink won’t be pretty…but you’re just so glad to have the clog gone. I don’t know what we are left with, but I respect you as a thinkin’ man and in a visceral way it is such a relief to me for you to put my thoughts into words for me.
sad and glad my friend. a lot of both. thanks for saying it.
Jenny-I won’t bollix this with my words. Your sink clogging image is utterly perfect, in the most serious way. Thank you.
And please be more glad than sad; otherwise I’ll be mad (which would certainly be bad).
I don’t know what else to say but, “Amen and amen.” Love you, brother.
Thanks, my brutha. Hope you found it meaningful and perhaps shined some light on a similar(?) journey.
Hey Dixon,
These are struggles that I had to deal with after college and even after Kaleo when we came back to emptiness after reaching the height of StuMo spirituality and having only the expectation to bring more folks in and trick them into attending “Happy Hour.” We had Celebration though and Tim Jackson to help guide and heal a lot of those issues, not that God was absent in it, but it was so much easier to swallow in honesty and authenticity and from another soul who had been battered by the Christian way of the South. Okay, so on to my point. My only fear is that once reaching this place, this unclogged sink, it is also a danger to start looking at those folks rockin’ out to KLove, recruiting folks to the church picnic, LOVING C.S. LEWIS 
, and with big Christian blinders on and thinking that your place is somehow elevated or more valuable. I mentioned this to Jason and he believes 100% that you are more of the mindset that you wish it was that easy for you anymore not that you are judgmental of those people. The only reason I even bring it up is because I’ve seen friends let that feeling, their pride in the unclogged sink, lead them further from community, faith, love, and just happiness in general. Notice I did not say God, because God is going to be right there in it no matter what type of kicking and screaming fits we have in life. I hope you find healing and that your sink drain can be filtered by peace and tolerance even for those self-righteous and blindly misguided college students out giving D.O.’s to perfect strangers!
I wish that we had known each other better in college and even at…the summer that must not be named.
Okay-it’s usually a sign that something is profound for me if I sit on replying to it for a while-hence the delay on responding to this.
First thing: the Unmentionable Summer.
Glad to hear someone else refer to it as such, as wow-that was, without a doubt, the most difficult ten or however many weeks of my life. I did a LOT of journaling during that period (as did a certain coworker of mine that summer-you two have met, right? Has he shown you said journal?) and it really just staggers me to go back and read some of that stuff. A very, very intense period; you and I are saying precisely the same thing.
And boy, what you say about Happy Hour, etc. is spot on-very difficult for me to think about, even now, the guy that I was expected to be back on Hendrix campus, as compared to the guy I’d been cookie-cuttered into out in Summit County. A major, major disconnect, and thankfully I gave up on being either about November or so of that first semester back.
So all these years later I say, thanks for bringing the reminder to me of how powerful those days were, not to mention prompting fresh reflection upon how far I’ve come (and hopefully you too!).
Then the Lewis/KLove/church picnics thing-love it, and you’ve hit me in a very important and welcome place.
I labored really hard to phrase the KLove/Lewis things in a fair, yet authentic-to-me way, and I hope I nailed the fair part. That’s a really fine line to walk I think.
But elitism, snobbery and then exclusion from community based on those things-couldn’t be more poisonous for a person of faith, and I’m so very thankful for you pointing that out. I promise you, I’ll be hyper vigilant of that, seriously.
If I come off that way… perhaps it’s because I am that way, how about that? I don’t feel like anyone saying I am a jerk or am overly proud or that I ‘think more of myself than I ought,’ to bust out a Scripture, would be reading me wrongly.
This is way too long, so I’ll hush.
I too wish we’d known each other better in Conway-perhaps we could have lightened one another’s loads during what I’m guessing was also a pretty rough time for you as well. I feel like we were both carrying similar baggage, coming from the same place(s) and heading the same direction.
Dixon,
I too appreciate your honesty. This is a real struggle that is being felt not just by you but many in our culture. I hate it when people dumb down a problem. What I hate even more are simple “answers” to complicated issues. In a very real sense life and faith are very complicated.
So…. having said that, I feel greatly compelled to state what I think is at the heart of your discontent. I know it is politically incorrect and un-post modern to use labels. So forgive me for the labels I’m about to use. Your blog post comes across as very emergent. As the enlightenment ethos continues to fade out and modernity continues to unravel Evangelicals are running in one of four directions. They are either: (A) Hunkering down into a deeper fundamentalism & biblicism or (B) rejecting Evangelicalism for an emergent Christianity (universalism, environmentalism, non-substitutionary atonement and where everything else the Church has been solidly teaching for 2,000 years is suspect and up for grabs) or (C) reading the history of the Church and finding a home in the historic church (Rome, the East or Anglicanism) or (D) leaving the Faith altogether.
What I’m hearing in your post is a reaction to (primarily) American Evangelicalism – her beliefs, her culture, her ethos. This reaction or rejection is healthy on one hand (I agree with many of your points). But in the end it is still a reaction against an inherently flawed system. What I am getting at is that what I believe is causing so much unrest, angst, depression, anger and confusion among many (perhaps a growing majority) of Evangelicals is a FUBAR ecclesiology. The emergents are even worse. They reject all the forms of Evangelicalism while still holding onto her ecclesiology.
My theory is this. There will be no rest for the individual Christian until they understand, take their place and live within an orthodox, historical ecclesiology. Until Evangelicals leave behind the silly-yet-devastating notion of an “invisible church” and re-attach a real, physical Body to a real, physical Head, they will remain disillusioned. This embracing of the visible, historic Body of Christ will lead them to a sacramental worldview in which they will begin to find healing for their souls…. which is what you and I and everyone else is after – union with Christ through forgiveness, redemption and healing.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not advocating a method within Evangelicalism nor am I offering some “third way.” I’m merely strongly suggesting that until one finds their rightful place as a member of the body of Christ, in the understanding and life of the Church prior to the last 200 years, there can be no peace.
Love you, my brother. My prayer is that you will find this peace.
Hey man:
Thanks so much-I really do appreciate your thoughts here; I can tell that some of it was kinda tough to voice, especially the labels thing! But it’s always welcome, I promise you.
I think I’d identify most with option C) you mention above, even if I recognize that I’m sort of unwittingly on an emergent trajectory.
All I can really take a firm stand on during this conversation is that I come from where I’m coming, and where I am today, in an honest way. I’m not pretending or trying to join some club. I’m not trying to hop onto some movement, self-promote, or find some band of merry rebels with whom I can start our own Blessed Union of Navel-Gazing Souls Cathedral.
I’m speaking for me, as me, and me alone.
Yet this specific post has absolutely demolished any sort of previous ‘most hits per day’ record I had here, and it’s been shared and commented on easily more times than any one I’d previously written. Perhaps it’s resonated with the sorts of folks with whom I’ve cultivated relationships in my adventures in the wacky evangelical circles over this past decade and a half. But I’ll never know, and I’m fine with that.
I do think the the rest for my soul is to be found in some sort of mainline denomination; I’ve done the blockbuster Chrsitianity and radio staples; I’m ready for the deep album cuts and the classics, to mangle more than a few metaphors.
The issue I think to which I gave the most consideration in crafting this post (and one that it seems you took most issue with) was in the talking of theological details.
I’m certainly not blowing those things off, and it’s something of a cornerstone of my own epistemology to take extraordinary umbrage with those who would be so hubristic as to torture some justification for tossing aside the 2000 years of church tradition that you and I both cherish.
I guess my issue was that I’d always encountered far too few people for whom it was as big a deal as I’d always been led to believe it should be. The profundity of it all always seemed to be in such stark contrast to what folks did with it, ya know?
I don’t know man; I’m in a lot better shape even today, a week later from its original post, than I was then.
But I still don’t think I’ll be going to church again for at least a few weeks.
Welcome my brother. I’ve kept a faith that is a far cry from the specious nonsense I’ve been raised with. I meet all your criteria so if you feel like talking gimmee an email. I’m currently at a peace that only truth brings.