Hmmmm… (part 1)

I have talked about politics in highly opinionated terms, I have discussed college football and basketball in downright inflammatory language, what’s left that I could give offense with?

Oh yeah – religion!!

(more after the jump, or just click the link. Go on. Ah ye will. Go on go on go on go on.)

So I guess this first part is more a of a full-disclosure, air-it-out type post so people will know where I’m coming from. And let me lead off by saying that I know that every religion comes freighted with literally thousands of years of moral and cultural baggage, and that as a rule, I’m trying to assess things by where they stand today in 2008. So…

I was raised Southern Baptist. The key factor here is that I was already of a reliably church-going age (though not yet a teenager) by the time that the effects of 1980 had trickled down to the local church level. See, the basis of Baptist theology (relative to other Christian sects) has always been grounded in two concepts: “priesthood of the believer” and individual church sovereignty. The former means that your relationship with God is pretty much between you and God, unmediated by any force outside the Trinity. The latter means that a local church can basically do whatever they like in terms of their beliefs and practices, and that if the membership wants to have the Lord’s Supper every week, or hire a woman preacher, or whatever – well, as long as it’s what they voted for, no other entity in Nashville, or Houston, or Rome, or anywhere else can tell them they’re wrong. Denominational authority flows from the ground up, not the top down. And until 1980, that was the way of things.

In 1980, though, the Southern Baptist Convention began a 10-year process of changing all that. Without going into the details of church government, the practical upshot is that the denomination began to dictate from the top down on topics such as biblical inerrancy and literalism, the role of women in the church, and (significantly) an erosion in the church-state balance. In the past, Baptists had been strongly in favor of a sharp line of demarcation between church and state, largely for fear that the state would have a negative impact on the church if the line were crossed. In the ensuing decade, though, all that changed. Long story short: by 1990, the Southern Baptist Convention was based on a doctrine of pure top-down fundamentalism straight out of Darby and Scofield, despite assertions to the contrary in the Statement of Baptist Faith and Message. (In fact, the BF&M is non-negotiable for Baptist missionaries and faculty of Baptist seminaries.) Since 1990, a number of new entities have broken off, under the rubric of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, specifically to proclaim themselves out from under the SBC.

For me, by the time I hit adolescence, it was rapidly becoming apparent (to paraphrase Codename V, one of my all-time heroes) that there was something very wrong with this church. The preaching was increasingly dour, the music joyless, and the attitude toward teenagers seemed to be that they were even more inherently sinful that the usual person. By the time I got out of high school, I was pretty much done with the Southern Baptists.

So then I went off to college. Now, I will trash my undergrad institution from here to eternity, but one thing they had which was beyond reproach was Chapel at Six. Monday night, 6 pm, services in the funky round brick chapel with its four huge single-color stained-glass windows and the big round altar rail…and a Methodist chaplain who stood there in his jeans, not in any pulpit, speculating about whether the writers of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” knew they’d written a hymn and making remarks like “If you somehow feel moved to sing along…fear not.”

It was the first time in my life that I had any notion that you could go to church for something other than the relentless drumbeat of doom and damnation. And for four years, I had to be pried out of there, because it seemed like every Monday night, there was something that hit me right where I needed it. (And believe me, given the other 167 hours a week, I always needed something.)

When I graduated undergrad and headed north, that was pretty much the end of any sort of regular church attendance. I still would up in some church at Christmas and on Decoration Day (first Sunday in May, long story), but even after my father died, I couldn’t bring myself to regular churchgoing. Through my time in DC, I occasionally dabbled with an Episcopal church that was walking distance from the apartment, mostly because they had a convenient 5 PM service that I could slip in and out of with reasonable anonymity. And if I was in California, I would follow my girlfriend and her family to their church on the appropriate holidays – a hexagonal Catholic church with acoustic guitars and traditional Mexican Christmas practices and a priest who talked about his love of Burger King and problems in milking cows.

Finally, in 2007, I decided that I needed to get serious and start paying attention to the void in my spiritual life. And given that I was married to a Catholic girl by an Old Catholic priest from a Benedictine order, living in a town neck-deep in Mexican, Italian and Irish Catholic tradition, and coming from ten years in which a whole lot of my friends and co-workers were Catholic…well, before I knew it, I was going to Mass on a regular basis, going to a Thursday night class on various topics in contemporary religion (the last one: Wisdom Literature in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, with a healthy helping of textual analysis and the evolution of Gnostic texts), and last fall, even doing ten weeks of RCIA classes, drawing up just short of the catechumen ritual (but obviously learning enough to spell catechumen right the first time. Who knew catechumen was even in the default spellcheck?)

So there’s another thousand words in an hour and a half. Obviously I need to work on brevity. Anyway, now you have that, so you can more readily judge what comes next in Part 2…