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Why I’m still a Christian

There have been many times when I’ve asked myself, “Why am I still a Christian?” Admittedly, I don’t ask this question when pondering global Christianity, but instead, American Christianity. I find myself looking at the American church and wondering, “Is this my religion?” And if so, what does that say about me? Obviously, I don’t ask this question because I have a view of all American Christians. I’m not seeing those quietly serving food in a soup kitchen, or the pastor counseling someone who has lost a loved one. I’m seeing the personalities that make it onto cable network news, or the famous and wealthy televangelists, or those who have a large social media following. Because of the primacy of their place in society, and my lack of familiarity with what they call “Christianity,” I feel the urge to distance myself from the label. This sort of maneuver has proven wise in the past. As much as I would’ve liked to have seen the wonderful word “Evangelical” mean “people who try to live out the Gospel,” it means, in my view, something utterly opposite. There was a point when I identified as “Evangelical,” but decided that the word had become a lost cause, and chose to abandon it, lest someone assume my politics, morality, ethics, etc., before I could clarify them myself, not to mention my theology! But “Christian” is older and broader in meaning than Evangelical. So, I’ve retained it.

Even when identifying as a Christian, what I mean is that I’m trying to be one, not that I’ve arrived. I see being a Christian as an ambition, less so a status. If being a Christian means living like Christ, then I hope to be on my way, but I’m nowhere near home.

On the other hand, I know I’m a Christian as much as I know I’m an American. It’s something that I’ve inherited. And though I could choose, theoretically, to try to leave Christianity for a new religion, or no religion at all, just like I could choose, theoretically, to leave the United States, never return, maybe even apply for citizenship elsewhere, it’s the very fact that I feel frustrated with Christianity, like I often feel frustrated with the United States, that serves as proof that this is already home. The church is home, spiritually. The United States is home, nationalistically. I have residence in the “City of God” and the “City of Man”. My frustration indicates care and investment, not the opposite.

Chesterton on Christianity’s Critics
The great G.K. Chesterton made this point at the beginning of The Everlasting Man. He talks about critics of “the Church”. (He’s Catholic, so I’ll go with the capital “C” he uses.) The critics that he addresses are those who have departed from the Church. Today, we might speak of those who have or are “deconstructing” (presuming that buzz word continues to buzz). Now, I don’t want to share Chesterton’s thoughts as a way of criticizing anyone who is deconstructing or realizing that Christianity isn’t for them. I want to share his thoughts to explain why I know that Christianity remains for me, even if I struggle to settle into what that means for my day-to-day life. With that clarification in mind, let me return to Chesterton, who says of Christianity’s critics (pp. 10-11 of the 1993 Ignatius Press version):

They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

In light of this observation, he remarks (p. 11):

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard”

Chesterton uses “a Confucian” as an example, saying, “He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism.” This resonates with me. As someone who teaches comparative religion, I try to be as objective as possible. I try to represent religions as they are, not as they ought to be. I recognize my status as an outsider to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., and avoid weighing in on the internal debates within those communities. I’ll never feel comfortable saying “that’s heretical Judaism” or “that’s not true Islam”. I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying this for professional reasons, but also personal ones. I’m not Jewish; I’m not Muslim. Professionally, I don’t weigh in on what makes something heretical or true Christianity, but personally, I do have strong feelings about when Christianity is being done right and when it’s being done wrong. I do think there are healthier and less healthy expressions of my faith. I don’t have those feelings about other religions, at least not in the same way. (Obviously, as an outsider, I would prefer to engage Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, who are open minded, tolerant, willing to participate in interfaith work, etc.)

It’s not that I don’t agree or disagree with certain teachings of the various religions, but that I’m not (as?) emotionally invested in those disagreements. In fact, I prefer to find the agreements for the sake of interfaith cooperation! Similarly, I may be abstractly bothered by how things are done in China or Russia, but I don’t feel the weight of it like I do whatever is happening in my home country. Why? Because I’m not so foolish to think I have any say in “the world,” but I’m just foolish enough to think that I have a very, very, minuscule say in what happens in “America”. As an outsider, I have no standing within theological debates within Islam. As an insider, I’m just foolish enough to think I have a very, very, minuscule say in what happens within Christianity. I can remark calmly, as an outsider, about events within China, or theological disputes within Islam; I’m less calm about events within the United States, or theological disputes within Christianity.

And I quoted Chesterton to make this point. You know you’re not a Christian in the fullest sense when you don’t care, or don’t care enough to get bothered by much. I do care about China and Russia, but not enough to travel there to do anything in those parts of the world, or to seek citizenship in those countries. I do care about Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, but not enough to get involved in internal debates about what to believe, how to behave, and who gets to gatekeep who belongs. Whenever I’ve thought, “Maybe Christianity isn’t for me,” I’ve realized that the same care that causes me to think about this subject is the care that answers the question for me. I can’t be as objective about Christianity, at least not as a whole, at least not within my realm of minuscule influence, as I can about other religions.

The Imaginative Effort
Chesteron claims that when we make “the imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside,” of which he means “the Church” or Christianity,” we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside….To put it shortly, the moment we are impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it.” (p. 12) This isn’t to deny the validity of outside criticisms. As a Christian, I take to heart and feel the sting of comments like the one attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” But from Chesterton’s perspective, I recognize that when I look at other religions curiously, I try to find the things that I admire. This is what Barbara Brown Taylor called “holy envy”. This concept follows the guidelines for interfaith dialogue set forth by the theologian Krister Stendahl:

  1. When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion, not its enemies.
  2. Don’t compare your best to their worst.
  3. Leave room for holy envy.

To better understand “holy envy,” read my review of Brown’s book: “Recently read: Brown Taylor’s ‘Holy Envy'”. In short, the idea is that there is always something nourishing to be found in religions that aren’t your own. There’s always something that another tradition might do better, or make clearer, etc., from which you can learn. But that tradition, on the whole, remains one other than your own. If I try to take this approach to Christianity (seeing it “from the outside” as Chesterton challenged his readers to do), then I do find the beauty within Christianity that can be easy to miss when I’m distracted by all the expressions of Christianity that seem to be doing it so terribly wrong. This is similar to how easily it can be for feelings of patriotism to fade when your conationalists, or the party in power, are representing your country globally in ways that seem antithetical to the values that we’ve told ourselves make us great. But we have to remember that just as our frustration with our nation tells us that we value it, and that there’s something we find worth our concern, so with one’s religion. And this is how I know it would be, for me, hypocritical to do anything other than confess to being a Christian, and do what little I can to try to contribute to a more positive, life-affirming expression of my faith in the world. If the day comes when I stop talking about Christianity, or only with minimal curiosity that’s mostly void of any attached emotions, that’s the day that I’ll know that I’ve left Christianity.

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Midlife

A few years ago, I read Kieren Setiya‘s book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. I can’t remember the specific year. It was published in 2017. I’m confident that I read it before I turned 40 in 2022 because I remember having an unfamiliar sense of calm about that birthday—a birthday that I thought would bring a lot of anxiety. I think it’s because I read Setiya’s book. The gift of that book is that it helped me think through what people call a “midlife crisis” without the result being money spent on a motorcycle and a leather jacket. It helped me focused on two important but interrelated realities about midlife: (1) we wonder “is this it?” and (2) we lament the limited pathways that life offers us now in comparison to our youth.

Now, I can’t remember if it was what Setiya wrote that led me to the following insight, or if was just a thought inspired by what he wrote, but I remember doing a mental exercise that was sort of multiverse related. On the one hand, in an almost Stoic sense, I found calm with my place in life by rejecting the possibility that it could be otherwise. I’m not saying that I adopted some sort of determinism, per se, but that “I” would not be “I” without the events that had led me to become who I was. If you change this experience here, that relationship there, this job here, that loss there, then I become a different person. And since I was generally pleased with who I was and what my life was like, the “is this it?” question could be answered, “This is it!” I had to think of what I liked about my life—for example, being married to my wife—and I had to realize that what I have now is due to the paths I took then. Had I gone to a different school, lived in a different city, worked a different job, etc., there are elements of my life as it currently stands that wouldn’t have happened. So, I took solace in the reality that I find my life to be a net gain based on the paths that I took. At the current juncture, I feel like I’ve done good for myself and I’m happy with where I am.

But then I thought back to being a teen, a twenty-something, and even an early thirty-something. The choices were exhilarating, yes, but also anxiety inducing! For example, nostalgia leads me to remember my few years in San Francisco as the most exciting of my life. So much was new! And in a city like that, every neighborhood is interesting and has a story. It’s way more exciting that the current suburbanite life that I live now. But it was stressful. There was a ton of pressure. It could be very depressing. It felt like so many choices were being thrown my way at a pace that I couldn’t maintain. My current life has a lot of routine, predictability, safety, and stability. I like it. Do I miss the energy of my youth? Yes. But I don’t miss the anxiety that came with it.

I don’t know if twenty-something “me” would be thrilled or appalled if I could go back in time to tell him who he would become. Probably, a little of both. But almost 42 year old me looks back and imagines all the paths that I might have taken, and yes, some may have had certain rewards that I lack…but I’m not interested in trading places with a multiverse “me” if he exists!

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Through days that soar or plod

In spring of 2016 I received some good news. I had been hired by a local private school known as “TMI – The Episcopal School of Texas”. (Side note: “TMI” doesn’t stand for “too much information” but instead “Texas Military Institute” which is what our Corps of Cadets [think ROTC] is named to this day. Second side note: we’re not one of those military institutes that exists to reform behavior. I know, it’s very confusing branding but it’s an effort to pull together more than 130 years of tradition.) At that point, I had teaching experience but no high school teaching experience. Thankfully, the chaplain at the time who spearheaded my hiring, Fr. Nate Bostain, gave me a chance. Today in spring of 2024, I end my eighth year at “TMI Episcopal” (we opted for the less braggadocios name being that there are many Episcopal schools in Texas).

When I was hired, I was struggling to wrap up my Ph.D. Like many doctoral students, I was petrified by the weak job market I faced. I worried that it was all for nought; I wasn’t going to be able to use my years of study. I remember the relief that I felt when I was hired. I had pay. I had benefits. I could do something with my religious studies degrees! A huge weight was lifted from my chest.

Every year during our school’s baccalaureate service (which we had this morning), we sing a song we call “The School Hymn” but that’s actually named “For the Splendor of Creation”. That first year, as I reflected on how happy I was to be working where I was working, the lyrics hit me particularly hard. Here they are:

For the splendor of creation
that draws us to inquire,
for the mysteries of knowledge
to which our hearts aspire,
for the deep and subtle beauties
which delight the eye and ear,
for the discipline of logic,
the struggle to be clear,
for the unexplained remainder,
the puzzling and the odd:
for the joy and pain of learning,
we give you thanks, O God.

For the scholars past and present
whose bounty we digest,
for the teachers who inspire us
to summon forth our best,
for our rivals and companions,
sometimes foolish, sometimes wise,
for the human web upholding
this noble enterprise,
for the common life that binds us
through days that soar or plod:
for this place and for these people,
we give you thanks, O God.

That year the words “for the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod” made me teary eyed. I had a community. They had given an unproven person a chance to teach the subjects that matter to me. Yes, some days were rough, but I was grateful.

I’d be a lying hypocrite to say I’ve felt this way every day the past eight years. But this morning as we sang this song, I was reminded, as I have been reminded for nearly a decade, how elated I was to be given a chance. I’ve sometimes struggled to identify with my institution. I’ve sometimes felt out of place. I’ve sometimes felt disregarded and overlooked. But on the whole, the common life that has brought me together with my colleagues and students has been a life-changer. Whatever our institutional strengths and weaknesses, I see TMI Episcopal as the place that gave me a chance and for nearly a decade the place that has given me academic freedom and trusted me to teach young people religious studies. As we know, the discussion of religion, whether in a church or at the dinner table, can be as fraught as talking politics. That I’ve had the support of our administration, and especially our former chaplain, Fr. Nate Bostain, and current chaplain, Fr. Ben Nelson, means the world to me.

School years are long. Very long. There are days that soar. There are days that plod. On days like today though, when you see the graduating class prepare for college, and you know that you and your colleagues did everything in collaboration with their parents and guardians to prepare them for the world, it feels good. It feels like home. As former students greet you—often the siblings of current graduates who you taught years ago, marking your history with various families—you’re reminded how institutions can be beautiful things, in all their imperfection. You’re reminded how few opportunities we have in our modern society to build long lasting community with people. You’re reminded not to take for granted that sense that you “belong”. Not everyone has that.

TMI could’ve passed me up eight years ago. It didn’t. For that reason, in spite of all my curmudgeonly grumblings from day to day, I’m happy to sing, “For this place and for these people, I give you thanks, O God”!

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The sunk-cost fallacy, resignation, and failure

I’m finding Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity to be a revelation. As I move from page to page, I encounter ways of saying things that I’ve felt but that I hadn’t been able to articulate, as yesterday’s post “The sub-man and the serious man” exemplifies. Earlier in the book (pp. 28-29 of Bernard Frechtman’s translation will be my focus here), Beauvoir discusses the person who must choose to quit something and how this leaves us with a bitterness. She writes:

“In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency.”

Photo: Irving Penn/Flickr. Accessed via “Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of old age is still relevant” 

Beauvoir describes something like the “sunk-cost fallacy”. In his article “What is the ‘sunk cost fallacy’? Is it ever a good thing?,” the economist Aaron Nicholas defines this fallacy as “an inability to ignore costs that have already been spent and can’t be recovered.” We continue to invest in something that shows little promise of success because if we step away from it, if we quit, we’ll have wasted the previous investment. The fallacy argues that you may find out that you’ll continue to waste further investments if you continue investing in a failing cause. (On a side note, Ryan Doody argues that the sunk-cost fallacy is not an actual fallacy: see “The Sunk Cost ‘Fallacy’ Is Not a Fallacy”. But that’s something to discuss another day.) It’s not reasonable to keep losing simply because you have lost. The investments may be financial but they can be investments of time and emotion which represent other sacrifices. It’s unfortunate that you lost that money/time in the past but if you stop now, you can save yourself from further loss. The choice to embrace further loss because of past loss is unreasonable.

I was quite close to failing my doctoral program toward the end. I survived though somewhat traumatized. It took me a while before I could return to studying the subject that I had spent a few years researching. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I wanted to move on to something new. I think part of the trauma—which is a word I use cautiously, but one that I think is fitting here—is that I kept asking myself how I could live with myself if I quit. I had dreamt of earning a doctorate since I was an undergraduate. I had sacrificed time with friends. In fact, I had missed the weddings of two of my closest friends. I had invested a lot of time. I had invested a lot of money, both spent and not-earned (being that some of the time dedicated to academia was time not working a job that could’ve been paying me well). I willed myself to complete the program but I wondered “at what cost?” For a few years, it felt like a Pyrrhic victory. I second guessed my myopic approach to life but also I knew that if I would’ve quit, it would’ve lingered with me for a very long time. I needed the sacrifices to get me that piece of paper, if nothing else. This reason could’ve lead others to accuse me of entertaining the sunk-cost fallacy. I was carrying onward, even as it harmed my brain health, because I couldn’t accept that all my past efforts wouldn’t result in reaching their ultimate goal.

There are times when you know you are out of options and you must quit though. As I neared the end of my doctoral program, I was lucky to have been hired by the high school where I work to this day. I had done some adjunct work. I had done a teaching internship. I knew those lifestyles were unsustainable. Also, I knew that there was no path forward toward the dream of teaching religion in a college or seminary setting, so I did something that I had swore to myself that I would never do: went to work with adolescents. It proved to be the right choice but it felt like a dream was dying at the time. I had imagined myself discussing lofty ideas in a graduate school context, or maybe an undergraduate one but not in a high school. I wouldn’t say that it felt like I had failed, per se, but at the time it did seem like the Universe had offered me a consolation prize for my efforts.

Beauvoir comments on this feeling of quitting:

“Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which had engaged in the effort.”

There’s the trope of the man who talks endlessly of when he was a great high school quarterback as if that’s the last time that he had done anything successful. We feel pity for such people. We sense an arrested development. We look at someone who had dreamt of more. “You can be anything you set your mind to,” we lie to kids. As we age, we realize that adulthood is about making decisions. John-Paul Sarte proclaimed that, “man is condemned to be free” (in his speech “Existentialism is a Humanism”). You feel this condemnation as you age. You have to make difficult decisions about relationships, careers, expenses, values, etc. Sometimes you’re stuck in a real lose-lose situation where something you want to keep must be forsaken. We can’t have it all, unfortunately. There’s an exchange, always.

When we look back at perceived failures, we lose that part of our lives. It is “forever frozen in the dead past”. It doesn’t have to be. We’re unable to interpret its value in relation to our current present. When we “succeed” we see those successes as having laid the foundation for our present. Interestingly, we struggle to do the same with “failures”. Yet there are times when successes might lead us down roads that we’ll regret having traveled and there are times when failures force us to go to places that we know we wouldn’t have chosen, though it proved to be for the better.

I don’t know if there’s a universe in which I taught in a seminary or a college instead of where I’ve been for almost eight full years now. But I do know that while I have my frustrations, and I have my irritations, the past eight years have been more good than bad, by far. Most days I’m simultaneously dissatisfied and satisfied with my career but the satisfaction outweighs the dissatisfaction, the wins outnumber the loses, and the perks are more significant than disadvantages. I’m relatively happy with where my life is.

There’s a way to avoid the risk of failure completely. There’s a way to never have to experience resignation. There’s an alternative to sunk-cost. Here’s how Beauvoir describes it:

“We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.”

We can avoid sunk-costs by not investing. We can avoid failure by not trying. We can avoid resignation by not becoming involved in the first place. This is an option. In choosing this option there is a freedom but it’s merely “an abstract notion…emptied of all content and truth”. For Beauvoir, this option is a non-option. We can’t be the people who “are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything.” The freedom to fail is a greater freedom than the freedom to never try anything because we fear failing.

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Sikh philosophy, Christian history, generational differences, and the meaning of birth

Sometimes I finish a book and either because the book is a bit older, or I can’t find the words for an adequate review, or because I feel a bit too busy to write something blog post worthy, I’ll opt to leave a shorter blurb and rating on Goodreads. Recently, I’ve finished the following books that won’t get a review here but will get something there:

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Can something like Google Chromebook combat ChatGPT?

I realize the impracticality of moving to hand written assignments for many of my colleagues, especially those (e.g. English Department) who grade greater quantities of writing than I do. Is there a solution for them? I’ve noticed over the years when I create a “quiz” on Google Form that it has an option, if students are using Google Chromebooks managed by the school, to lock students to one tab. They can do their quiz on the Form but if they try to open another tab, it notifies the teacher. It’s called “locked mode”. Is this something that school administrations need to consider?

I don’t know if this solves any problems related to students writing outside of class after school hours (i.e homework) but it could help with in class writing, especially if monitoring each students screen while they type is too much to ask (which it usually is).

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New Project: “Religion in San Antonio”

This summer, I’m teaching a class called “Religion in San Antonio”. Since I plan on teaching it every other summer, and because I think there needs to be a central resource dedicated to exploring the diversity of San Antonio’s religions, past and present, I’ve created an accompanying website: religioninsanantonio.com!

I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do with it. It’ll have a blog where I’ll mention books on San Antonio history, share interesting fun facts, spotlight scholars of religion who live and study here, post some book reviews, etc. It’ll have pages dedicated to naming and exploring various religious communities by their broader religion-grouping (e.g. Buddhism; Islam). And then whatever else seems fitting.