Sermonette #5: Breaking Out is Hard to Do

When I drive out of the complex in which we live, I turn left. Rarely do I ever need to turn right. The other day, needing to turn right, I turned left out of habit. Much of our life is built around routines followed without much thought, including religion. We accept beliefs handed down to us without questioning. As far as religious practices go, even though worship expressions may vary at times, the underlying thinking and life-style expectations remain the same.

In the USA, and somewhat in Canada, there is a significant religious college movement. In both countries, many of the early universities that we now view as secular institutions were founded by Christian denominations. While they included religious instruction and majors, their purpose was to educate the whole person in an age before governments started institutions of higher education. During the late nineteenth century, and throughout the twentieth century, religious colleges continued springing up across the land. Today, there are hundreds of small religious colleges dotting the landscape, each with its unique brand of religion and its unique standards of belief and conduct.

While most Christian colleges are liberal arts focused, a good number of “Bible Colleges” sprang up with a narrower curriculum and even stricter codes of conduct than the liberal arts colleges. Bible colleges tend to be more fundamentalist in nature than their liberal arts counterparts. Christian teenagers graduating from high schools are often encouraged to attend a Bible college, even for just a year, as a means of ensuring that they would not be corrupted when they transferred to a secular university.

For the most part, those who enter faith-based liberal arts and Bible colleges are intellectually on a par with their counterparts attending secular institutions. While religious institutions often do not have as extensive a library collection or the same range of modern equipment as their secular counterparts, class enrollments between 20 to 50 students provide greater interaction, and, at some level, a more intimate learning experience than is sometimes available at larger institutions. A strictly controlled residence atmosphere with quiet hours to facilitate study and a campus life that frowns upon wild parties tend to help students to give more attention to their studies.

While these students are generally inquisitive and intellectually strong, for the most part, faith is the one area in which they tend not to raise many questions. It is often the case that students at these colleges have blindly accepted the faith handed down to them by their parents and faith communities. If asked why they hold a certain belief, the initial response is often a puzzled look, followed by a statement that it was what they were raised to believe, and if it was good enough for their parents and grandparents, then it is good enough for them.

Although questions about the application of faith and the understanding of Biblical passages are often raised in classrooms and dorms, for the most part, the questions are framed and explored within a well defined box. Those who raise more probative questions are viewed askance. Those who raise questions about homosexuality, creation, the divinity of Jesus, the authority of Scripture, divorce, premarital sex and sex outside the context of marriage, salvation, the resurrection of Jesus, etc., are marginalized as flaming liberals, or, even worse, have the validity of their salvation experience questioned. “Liberal” is not a label most Bible and Christian college students embrace. It is even less desirable to be seen as one who harbors serious doubts or may actually be unsaved.

Only the most secure, articulate and clear-minded student could stand being a maverick in such an environment. Hence, few students at Christian colleges seriously question their faith and the teachings of the church. They are like sponges soaking up what is fed to them regarding faith, and, upon graduation, they squeeze out of their own sponges the same recycled water. Many of today’s evangelical and fundamentalist church leaders on the national, regional and local congregational levels have attended these colleges. Leaders who venture outside the box are quickly marginalized and career advancement ends. Only the like minded climb up the hierarchical career ladders.

Accordingly, transitions in thought and lifestyle are neither smooth nor easy. Even when one has rejected the teachings of one’s parents and friends with regard to religion, sometimes one is still torn between what we want and believe versus what we have been taught is “right.” The baggage we have inherited from parents, friends and our worship communities has shaped our values. The baggage can still be upon our shoulders months or even years after rejecting the fundamental assumptions upon which the baggage is based. Even when one has critically dissected the issues and intellectually rejected the doctrines, we can still live, out of sheer habit, in accordance with what was rejected, and thereby create a discrepancy between what we hold in theory as true and what we live in practice.

I am not suggesting that one should adopt an attitude of, “now I do what I want, the world be damned.” Clearly, such an approach, applied too broadly, is reckless. Our challenge, as individuals and collectively as atheists, is to seek for truth, understand its dynamics and apply it to our lives. Fundamental principles such as the sanctity of life and the respect of each other’s personhood need to be fleshed out and defined in a functional manner. We need to wrestle with how those principles and others that we hold close to our hearts work themselves out in concrete life experiences. We need to move beyond the theoretical to the practical. We need to take concrete situations and apply lessons from them more globally.

In sharing our issues and questions, we can build a collective knowledge base that helps others who are on the same path or who will follow us. In such sharing, I become stronger when you challenge me to articulate and defend my rationale, and through hearing your wisdom and gleaning from your life experience. Some of this work is underway in the atheosphere. Let us each continue do our part and maybe even be more intentional as we build a collective story and pool of thought to help and guide each other.

– the deacon