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Why Christians should be liberal

I’ve been reading through John Stuart Mill‘s On Liberty over the past couple of weeks. It’s a short work, less than a couple hundred pages, but dense enough to read slowly. For those unfamiliar with Mill, he’s seen as a “father of liberalism”. Liberalism has many branches now but I would say that what holds them together is an emphasis on the right of the individual to believe and live the “good life” as they see fit as long as it doesn’t violate “the harm principle,” meaning as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Obviously, that’s easier said than done but I think most “western” societies have tried to abide by this principle.

Mill lived from 1806-1873 in Victorian England. While his ideas may be the water in which we swim now, or so argues the philosopher Alexander Lefebvre in his excellent Liberalism As a Way of Life (a book that I finished reading and need to say something about here soon), his ideas regarding individual freedom were radical for the time. This isn’t too difficult for me to understand if I consider the plight of LGBTQIA+ Americans in my own lifetime and slightly before. Harvey Milk was killed a mere four years before I was born. Even in “liberal” California where I was raised, I heard plenty of voices desiring to push queer people “back into the closet” because their “way of life” was something, in the view of many of the adults in my life, a private matter, at best. I heard many preachers refer to nearby San Francisco as “Sodom,” citing the common misconception that the city of Sodom from the biblical Book of Genesis was destroyed by the Bible’s God because of homosexuality. On the other hand, I’ve seen society because far more tolerant, at least, and accepting, at best, of our LGBTQIA+ friends (mostly the LG part; there’s a lot of work to be done after that still). And this “progress” as many of us would call it has little to do with the generosity and gracefulness of Christians. Instead, it has to do with the continued impact of people like Mill whose “live and let live” philosophy continues to influence us, even as forces of illiberalism threaten it, like, for example, the Christian Nationalist movement.

Rejecting Christian Nationalism
For Mill, ideologies like Christian Nationalism, which argue that the United States is a “nation by Christians for Christians to practice Christianity,” and that everything from our “moral” laws to immigration policies should reflect that, are in error. They’re in error for two reasons: (1) history and (2) epistemology. With regard to history, Mill argues that Christians, and others, have made mistake after mistake when they tried to use the power of the state to force others to live as they wished, and that this history should be a warning to us that we could do the same if we veer away from being liberal. With regard to epistemology, Mill points to the frailty of human knowledge, how we are limited to our own time and place and how those limitations keep us from the “god’s-eye view” that we assume when they forget that we’re not infallible by forcing everything from our metaphysics to our morality upon others, especially if their metaphysics and morality, when practiced, doesn’t impact us directly. Let me unpack this with some exegesis of On Liberty (from the edition published by Arcturus Press for page number references).

Answering the Questions for Ourselves
Mill begins by acknowledging that one may be convinced on the truthfulness of their understanding of Christianity. He doesn’t want to attack that when we warns us about the problem of our own fallibility, at least not directly. Instead, he begins with the principle that as convinced as we might be, we can’t force that conviction upon others. He writes, “…it is not the feeling of sure doctrine (be it what it may) which I call the assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide the question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side.” (p. 36) For those Christians who care about our foundational sources in the New Testament, it is clear from the Gospels, the Book of Acts, the epistles of St. Paul, etc., that the earliest Christians felt the need to persuade people of their Gospel. They didn’t have the power of the Roman state to help them, so this was necessary, but also it says something about the very nature of Christian proclamation: ultimately, reception of the Gospel must be voluntary, even for those that inherit the faith from previous generations.

Killing Socrates and Jesus
As a warning, Mill reminds his audience of the great mistake of the Athenians who voted to execute the great father of western philosophy, Socrates, and how in retrospect that proved short-sighted and foolish. But not to stop there: if the death of Socrates was an injustice, “the event which took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen hundred years ago” (p. 37) should stop Christians in their tracks when they try to use the power of the state. It was the power of the Roman state that was used to wrongly execute Jesus himself! How then can Christians make the same mistake?!

Similarly, Christians should ponder the origins of their religion, and how the Romans mistreated (at best) and persecuted (at worst) Christians, only for Christianity to eventually emerge as the religion of the empire. If Christianity was true, and it was going to be true for your average Roman, what foolishness to persecute it! But persecute they did and persecute they continued to do, even after becoming Christian, just against Christians that were perceived as “unorthodox” or “heretical”. Seemingly, Christians didn’t learn from the early rejection and persecution the concept of tolerance. Once the oppressed was in power, they became the oppressor, and Mill wants to warn against the impulse to do this. As Mill writes “Orthodox Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.” (p. 38) If St. Paul could be in error, so can you!

Now, the example of early Christian persecution may lead some to think that persecution is justified. In other words, they may conclude that persecute we must because if something is true, it will rise to the challenge, just like Christianity did. Mill rejects this (“the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplace,” p. 41). If for no other reason, that such a mindset deprives a generation, or many generations, of the benefits of that truth. Mill observes, “The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when as opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of it reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecutions until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.” (p. 42) This is wonderful, but bad for the many generations who lost out on the truth that was buried by the arrogance of the times.

The Impotence of Intolerance
What does our intolerance accomplish? Not much. Mill uses the example of the atheist who is willing to face the public consequences of their atheism in Victorian England. Are they not the most honest hearted people? They must believe their atheism truly? What about the atheist who poses as a believer to avoid penalty? What does this create? Churches with atheists who don’t want to be there, i.e., Christians who are pretending! “Under pretense that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood.” (p. 43) To do this is to cultivate vice among the people and suppress virtues like truth-telling, all in the name of preserving “Christianity” among the people.

What does our intolerance accomplish? It doesn’t remove the “heretics,” according to Mill. Instead, it suppresses the greater minds of a generation. If people’s very livelihoods are at risk, they won’t pursue the truth (p. 45). If they don’t pursue the truth, that generation loses out on their insights (p. 46):

“A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the genuine principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions into the premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth those arguments on all great subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves”

The Universal, Ugly Side Effects of Intolerance
And it’s the fear of being wrong that hurts us all. Because an environment open to free thinking may create heretics, yes, but it will create much more good: “Truth gains more even by the errors of the one who, with due study and preparation, thinking for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.” (p. 47) When a society suppresses free thinking, it hinders creativity-within-orthodoxy, making orthodoxy dull and lifeless. Mill writes, “The greatest harm is done is to those who are not heretics, and whose mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?” (p. 47)

Steel Man
In Mills’ view, “orthodoxy” should be able to hold its own in the court of public opinion. Religious dogma proves itself weak when it must be forced upon others, as if suddenly people pretending to believe something out of fear makes it true! Mill argues, “Whatever people believe, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objections.” (p. 49) (On a side note, I don’t think this is meant to encourage the “I did my own research” culture of the Internet. Remember, he qualified that research must be done by “one who, with due study and preparation” is “thinking for himself” with a strong emphasis on that “due study and preparation”. If I want to talk about climate, or astronomy, or geology, or vaccines, etc., “due study and preparation” may take years!) For Mill, one shows that they have a strong view not because they can articulate it, but when they can articulate it and its opposing view. When you can steel man your opponent’s argument, but still find it weak, then you know you have some solid ground upon which to make your stand. And you can’t debunk a view you don’t like by citing opponents of the view. One “must be able to hear them from person who actually believe them” (p. 51). Now, maybe the average person doesn’t have the time to do all this “research”. So be it. But those who shape public thought and policy must! “If not the public, at least the philosophers and theologians who are to resolve the difficulties, must make themselves familiar with those difficulties in their most puzzling form; and this cannot be accomplished unless they are freely stated, and placed in the most advantageous light which they admit of.” (p. 52)

Dead Beliefs
Mill notes that many “teachers of all creeds” often can be heard “lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the mind of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recognize” (p. 54). But he says, “No such difficulty is complained of while the creed is still fighting for its existence” (p. 54) In other words, if you want people to remain committed to a belief, you shouldn’t want it to be commonplace. You must want people to be confronted by it! Mill comments, “To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest impressions upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without being ever realized in the imagination, the feelings, or the understandings, is exemplified by the manner in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of Christianity.” (p. 55) For Mill, the teachings of the New Testament “are considered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians,” but they’re rarely practiced in actuality, because they’ve become so common place. People take comfort in merely affirming these doctrines, but they’re rarely confronted by them. How can this be? “The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which be believes to have been vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government; and own the other, a set of every-day judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and interests and suggestions of worldly life.” (p. 55) In short, Christians interpret something like say the “Sermon on the Mount” through the lens of their culture, denominational teachings, etc., seeing them as morals that they affirm because those morals have been interpreted for them and to them in such a way that they feel like they’re in the right.

Once this has happened, whatever power such teachings had to confront said Christians has been removed, and now this sense of “rightness” can be weaponized. “But in the sense that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable to pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that they are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that they think laudable.” (p. 56) Anyone who has been around Christianity for any length of time knows this is true if they’re honest. And speaking personally, I know it to be true of myself. When I read the Sermon on the Mount without trying to justify myself, I often come away thinking “how can I live up to this?” Christ’s teachings will do that. One can weaponize Christ’s teachings only if they’ve found a way to interpret them so that they, suspiciously, always align with the morals and values of the reader! Mill knew this and tried to spotlight it for his readers.

Now, Mill thinks it’s actually a good thing if we’re a bit syncretistic. That may be a topic for another post. So, Mill isn’t trying to shame Christians for building their morality from multiple points of view. All he wants is for us to admit that this is what we’re doing, and he wants Christians who act as if they’re the ones who alone understand the New Testament and its teachings rightly to pause and be a little more introspective.

Mill’s Liberalism
When I say that Mill thinks Christians should be liberal, I don’t mean, necessarily, that they hold to a “liberal” theology, like say one that reinterprets the creeds, or that they embrace the individualism of libertarianism, or that they embrace the policies of neoliberalism, etc. I mean, specifically, that we take into consideration our own fallibility, especially around matters regarding religion, or philosophies of how we should live, and that we recognize from history how often the most confident were the most in error. This demands humility. It requires a little of “live and let live,” especially if we can’t show how someone else’s actions, beliefs, associations, mythologies, etc., hurt other people (and by “hurt” we mean actual harm, not just discomfort or a feeling of disagreeableness). Christians should take from their own scriptures the scenes where people crucified Christ wrongly, and how St. Paul boldly persecuted, and how the Roman Empire suppressed, as a reminder of how easy it can be to be confidently wrong. If Christians abide by the principles Mill sets forth, they won’t have microwaved answers on what politicians or policies to support in modern democratic life, for example, and at best they’ll have one driving principle for dogmatism: avoid harming others. If Christians took these ideas into consideration, I think we’d see a far healthier Christianity, at least in the part of the world where I live.

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Simon Critchley on our desire for asceticism

It may do the philosopher Simon Critchley an injustice to take these two paragraphs out of the context of his book, Mysticism, when they’re somewhat unfathomable without the context of chapter 2 (“Seven Adverbs that God Loveth”), but I have to post these words somewhere for future reference! Critchley writes (p. 87)):

I am curious about the meaningfulness of asceticism today. The forms of ascetic practice in which people engage are legion: hot yoga, ceaseless meditations, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive devotion to routine, which was particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism becomes pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and other ‘disorders.’

We are strongly drawn by the desire for asceticism, it seems to me. We are fascinated by the extremity of mystical practice—think of the wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics like Christina the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants in the early Middle Ages. But we find such behavior and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox, the flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.

Why did these two paragraphs grab my attention. I pondered that for a moment and I think it’s because it says something similar to the entire book by Carolyn Chen, Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in the Silicon Valley. She shows how religious we humans are…even when we’re super irreligious. We need patterns and rhythms. Religion used to provide that to most of us. As we become more secular, the desire for order and meaning doesn’t go away, we just plant it elsewhere. Harvey Cox made many similar observations in The Market as God. Even the great atheistic philosopher, Daniel Dennett, toward the end of the documentary I, Pastafari, says something about how secularism shouldn’t go back to the superstitions of religion but sure needs to discover all of the social benefits that those religions offered before it’s too late. I guess what I’m saying is that as annoying as statements like, “you may not be religious but you have a religion” or “we all worship something” may feel to those who have left organized religion, the fact is that they contain a truth. We humans can’t dump the things that made us human over all this long millennia of our evolution. At best, we can reword and reinterpret them. I think Critchley captures this with relation to the mystical impulse.

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Why did we have our son baptized?

Last month, a good friend and colleague of mine who is an Episcopal priest baptized my son. While I don’t owe a justification for this decision, I did feel like I wanted to put my reasoning into writing so that I could see it plainly. The decision to baptize our son was made by my wife and me, together. These reasons are my own though, and I won’t claim to speak for her. The questions that I’ve listed to guide this post are sometimes based on questions that I’ve received and at other times are based on questions that I imagine someone might ask. All that being said, here’s my rationale:

Do you feel like you’re forcing your religion on your son?
No. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m critically religious. In other words, I try to be as self-reflective and thoughtful about my beliefs and practices as possible. I try not to hold my religious views in a closed fist but with an open hand. When it comes to matters of dogma and metaphysics, I don’t concern myself with them too much anymore. I have loosely held theories, for sure. If you were to ask me to debate them, I would pass. I don’t claim to “know” much about the nature of “God,” the “soul” and what happens to us when we die, etc. I hope that there is a being—or, maybe I should say that there is “Being”—to which the word “God” points. I hope that there is some sense of existence after death, and that the injustices of this life are resolved “then” and “there”. But having such hope doesn’t mean that I’m ignorant to the very real possibility that when we close our eyes for the last time, there’s nothing, and that those who died unjustly in this life receive no reward for their suffering. I’m convinced that even if there’s life after death that we should live with the possibility that there isn’t. We should live like this is all that we get. But I hope that there’s more. And I hope that the primary exemplar of my religion, Jesus, was right in teaching us to have a posture toward this “more” as we would have toward a loving parent (“Our Father…”).

I’m comfortable talking about being part of a “tradition” that has a “creed” which participants “confess”. This means that I can say the Nicene Creed without feeling obligated to affirm or deny the literalness of each line. The “Church” speaks a certain way. When I speak “with the Church,” we say certain things. As an individual, I’m skeptical and doubtful, but I don’t say the creed or other formal, communal prayers and confessions primary in my capacity as an individual; I say them as a member of a community. This is analogous to when I affirm the statement that “all men are created equal” from the American Declaration of Independence, even if I mean “people” by “men” (whether or not this is the authorial intent is secondary) and even if it so happens that individuals aren’t “created” but are the result of billions of years of “blind” evolution (not saying this is the case but saying that it wouldn’t prevent me from affirming human dignity). My “people” talk a certain way to express our values and communities sometimes do this collectively, like singing a national anthem or saying a pledge of allegiance.

This analogy is helpful in another sense which I’ll discuss further below but want to allude to here: I’ve passed along citizenship in a nation-state to my child. He could leave the country someday. He could apply for citizenship in Canada or elsewhere, either aiming for dual-citizenship or denouncing the citizenship he was granted at birth. It’s what I have to offer him now. I can’t know what he’ll want later. Similarly, while I’m not a Christian in the same way that I was raised to be, I’ve been a Christian most of my life. It’s a tradition that I’ve inherited and that I can pass on to my son. If he choses to be syncretistic with it, that’s fine. I’ve been syncretic. My Christianity is shaped by western philosophies like liberalism; Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh ideas; and much more. I expect that my son would shape his individually lived Christianity to himself just as I’ve done, if he remains a Christian. Trust me: there have been hundreds of times over the years as I’ve observed American Christianity that I’ve considered disassociating from the label. Ultimately, I haven’t but if that’s not my son’s path, then as long as he is thoughtful, honest, and humane in the direction he chooses to go in his religiosity and spirituality, I will support him.

Why a baptism and not a dedication?
Why not a baptism? This question, as to why we chose baptism over dedication, seems to assume that a dedication is normal while a baptism is an aberration. This may be true of some Christian traditions, but in my later adulthood the Christian traditions that I’ve been mostly closely affiliated have been Methodism and Episcopalianism, both which have things like bishops, infant baptism, and all that good ol’ Catholic stuff. Yes, I was raised and mostly education within traditions that reject infant baptism, but I’m not in those traditions now. On a side note, my friend Andrew Mark Henry has put together a helpful video on the history of baptism, especially how we got from John the Baptist within Judaism to infant baptism within Christianity:

While some Christian traditions see baptism as the ritual that marks someone’s choice to become a Christian, others emphasize that baptism can be a ritual that marks someone’s choice, like parents, to welcome someone else, like their children, into the Church. Are there potential problems with this? Sure. I think of Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom and the idea that just being say European means that one is a Christian. For proselytizing religions like Christianity and Islam, this can be seen as watering down—pun intended—the seriousness of committing one’s self to God. That said, two responses come to mind:

(1) The fact of the matter is most of us inherit our religion, full stop. For my “Religion in Global Context” students, I do this exercise where I tell them to imagine we’re on a gameshow. I’m going to bring someone out on stage that the contestant can’t see. As a contestant, they have to guess that person’s religion. Imagine they can’t see the person; the one piece of information they receive is “Where in the world is this person from?” If they’re playing the odds, they’re going to guess whatever the major religion of that region is. Then I list countries like Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, and the United States, to provide some examples. My students will guess something like “Catholic,” “Muslim,” “Hindu,” and “Christian” for those four. Some countries trip them up like Indonesia, for example. Although 87% of Indonesians are Muslims, its geographic location leads most students to guess “Buddhist”. But they get most of the list right most of the time and I think this tells us something. Most of us don’t sit down and reason through all our religious options in the marketplace of ideas. We inherit our religion. In the United States, it’s mostly Christianity followed by those who don’t affiliate with any religion (“Nones”) who I think tend to be people who have rejected the Christianity of their family lineage at some point in the past few generations. When you get to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., we’re talking about portions of the population that equal around 1% or less. Very few Americans leave Christianity to become Muslim or Buddhist, for example. Most Americans leave Christianity to become “secular” or “spiritual-but-not-religious”. So, their paradigm is Christianity or not-Christianity, usually.

(2) Most traditions that practice paedobaptism have some sort of “follow up” ritual like “confirmation” where the baptized chooses to embrace their baptism at a later point in life. So, unless someone thinks that something metaphysical happens at baptism that causes salvation for the individual in a way that is time-locked (i.e., if you’re baptized at 6 months but choose to be a Christian at age 25, that baptism doesn’t count, so you must be baptized at age 25 for the conversion to be legitimate), or that baptism doesn’t count unless you declare that you want to be baptized, then the concern the baptism of infants leads to a cheapened Christianity isn’t really a concern. There are plenty of adults who chose to be baptized who became the types of Christians whose lives are hardly distinguishable from who they would’ve been had they not converted. (In fact, sometimes becoming a Christian makes things worse because they can justify their bigotry by citing their religion.)

Does the current state of Christianity concern you?
Yes. As I said above, there’s been plenty of temptation to disassociate from Christianity. American Christianity is often downright embarrassing. But I think that’s because Christians are the majority here. When other religious groups are the majority elsewhere, they’re the ones abusing power, wielding the government to support their causes, oppressing the religious minorities in their midst, and behaving in ways that betray the highest moral and ethical teachings of their faith. I mean, even Buddhism, the enlightened, peaceful religion that many liberal westerners admire, has been less than ideal in places like Myanmar.

And I don’t know that other ideologies are innocent. Secular France seems intolerant of their Muslim minority; irreligious China has the Uyghurs. We know how Soviet Russia treated dissenters. It seems that power is the problem. I get that we can’t have a powerless world. It’s just that humans with power are almost always more immoral than humans without power. In the United States, Christians have power. Elsewhere, Christianity is sometimes the persecuted minority. So, I try not to decide my religious identity based on the worst bad faith actors.

Christianity is in decline in “the West”. Maybe this is bad; maybe it’s good. That’s to be determined. My understanding of Christianity, as I live it in real time, is mixed with philosophies like liberalism (e.g., John Stuart Mill), and a commitment to modern democracy with a hesitant acceptance of capitalism as a “given” economic system. I see my religion as part of my overarching, ever changing worldview. Where I think Christian tradition is weak (e.g., LGBTQIA+ rights), I appeal to other parts of my moral universe to make sense of how I should live in the world. Where I think other parts of my worldview are weak (e.g., as an American, I fear our current forms of nationalism are problematic, to say the least), I appeal to Christianity to find a new way to see things. I say that to say that yes, Christianity as practiced by most of my fellow Americans bothers me, but there’s a lot that’s mixed with my understanding of Christianity that makes it difficult for me to imagine just outright unrooting my religion from how I see the world.

Do you believe in the doctrine of “original sin”?
No, at least not as I imagine many people understand it. I do like the old G.K. Chesterton quote from his book Orthodoxy (p. 19) though: “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved”. Chesterton continued, “…they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.” If “human sin” refers to our perpetual inability to live up to our own ideals (and surely, if there’s a good God, then we’ve failed to live up to those ideals as well), and our urge to become more beastly and less angelic, then yes, there’s something to “original sin”. I reject the Augustinian idea that babies are somehow born evil, therefore in need of baptism to save their souls from hell. But I do think that as we age, we become more and more selfish, losing our purity. I read the “Garden of Eden” myth this way. We are innocent but with “the knowledge of good and evil” we become moral agents who can bring goodness or destruction and often, other than the saints in our midsts, we choose to bring destruction. Becoming a moral agent is a gift as we do become “like God, knowing good and evil” but it’s also the curse that removes our innocence forever. Not one of us does what we know to be “right” on every occasion.

Also, as the legend goes, when Chesterton was asked by a report, “What’s wrong with the world?” it’s said that he replied, “I am”. These sentiments resonate. I don’t think it’s valuable to go around thinking of myself as a “sinner” in the Puritanical, Jonathan Edward’s “sinners in the hands of an angry God” sense, but I do think there’s something to recognizing my own complicity in the world’s collective evil. In the Christian tradition, Jesus was “sinless” but submitted to John’s baptism because even if an individual is morally perfect, as a collective we are stained. I may not directly withhold a living wage from people or make children into laborers when I buy my iPhone or produce but that doesn’t mean that I don’t benefit indirectly from the possibility that this very thing happens in the supply chains from which I benefit. So, yes, even when I’m not a “sinner,” I’m a sinner, and the washing symbolism of baptism reminds me of my need to recognize that there’s dirt on my hands—if not blood—too.

I don’t want my son to embrace the self-hate of Puritanical Christianity. Neither do I want him to embrace to self-justification of modern meritocracy. There’s a middle ground and I think that the ritual of baptism reminds us of that. We can be good humans who are part of a very complicated collective humanity.

What are the benefits of baptizing your son?
In January, I was in the hospital due to a serious medical emergency. My wife and I had discussed baptizing our son but that discussion ramped up when I was in the hospital. We knew that I was going to live, just not what my life would look like. Maybe it was the uncertainty of the moment that made baptizing our child more urgent. I don’t know why this was but it was.

Even as I had experienced what I would call “almost, almost dying” rather than plain old “almost dying,” I didn’t find myself worried too much about what would happen to me if I died. Maybe I’m agnostic about it; maybe my leaning toward Christian Universalism as the most reasonable “soteriology” if we’re going to take seriously the Christian claim to have a “Gospel” to be shared gave me confidence in a benevolent deity. I don’t know. I do know that what scared me was thinking about my wife and son having to go through life without me. My son was barely two months old at the time. So, maybe our choice to plan his baptism was our way of believing that there was going to be a future to be lived and we may as well get on with it.

The Episcopal Church
We chose to baptize him in the Episcopal Church. For all it’s flaws and decline, it’s the one American expression of Christianity that both (A) aligns with my values and how I imagine Christianity should be lived and (B) feels like a place where I can belong. (For example, we tried being [modern, progressive] Mennonites for about a year but the Mennonite Church U.S.A. definitely felt like something you had to have been born into. We joined the United Methodist Church for a time but identifying with them while they debated the basic humanity of LGBTQIA+ people felt odd and I think led to us slowly backing away, even if the church we attending was generally accepting.)

If I’m going to pass along a Christianity, this is the type of Christianity I feel like I can pass along in good faith. The “Baptismal Covenant” that we recited when our son was baptized contains many of the theological claims of Christianity, which as I stated earlier, I embrace loosely with an open hand. But at the end, the parents and god-parents answer “we will, with God’s help” to questions like “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” and “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” I can raise my son with those values. I may not need Christianity to teach my kid to seek justice and peace and to respect human dignity, but we all need a narrative to make sense of these sorts of ideals and I’m comfortable with the Christian one. As I’ve told students in the past, I won’t argue about the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the dual nature, or whatever else ended up in the major creeds. If someone doesn’t believe those things, it’s not my concern. Many days, I don’t believe those things (though many other days, I guess I do). But in Christianity, I’m told to worship God through the broken, crucified body of an oppressed Jewish man living on occupied Roman Palestine; I’m told that God-became-human not in an emperor like Augustus or a great general like Alexander or even a great philosopher like Plato but in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. At the very least, the humility installed in me by the demand to worship a homeless, state-executed nobody, makes Christianity transformative.

The Episcopal Church doesn’t have a spotless history. It hasn’t always looked “Christ-like”. Anglicanism, for all its strengths, has often been the religious justification for empire and colonization. But at this point in history, the Episcopal Church is one of the few denominations within American Christianity that’s trying to resist the gross perversions of our faith that we see in the news every day, and the dehumanizing use of power that’s become common place.

Belonging, Rootedness, and Tradition
I don’t think any of us have a “view from nowhere” (even if I think trying to be “objective” is a worthwhile exercise). We want a place from which we can see the world. We want a place where we belong, as a birthright of sorts, not depending upon meritocratic endeavors. We want a sense of rootedness that we “just have” and don’t have to earn. We want a tradition from which we can speak, that gives us a starter-pack for language about the world, and that we can critique from the inside (because let’s be honest, while many of us might admire the “independent” types, we also don’t pay much heed to their criticisms of our churches, political parties, or other institutions because we sense that their criticisms are void of any serious investment in a common cause).

My son doesn’t have to be a Christian, but it’s there for him if he wants it. He’ll never have to work his way into it. He’ll have roots in it. He’ll have the language it offers him for speaking about everything from meaning and purpose to justice to life and death and so forth. And at the very least, if it turns out that Christianity isn’t what’s best for him, it’ll give him something worthwhile to rebel against, a contrast or a foil for whatever view of the world he forms.

Multiple Identities
As I alluded to above, it’s a difficult time to be a proud American. I want my son to be proud of his country and his national identity in a patriotic way—in other words, here lies his citizenship, and his rights, and therefore as Simone Weil would remind us, more importantly his obligations. We may try to be obligated to all of humanity but that’s difficult, to say the least. Having a “people” to begin with (usually local city, county, maybe state and then nation) helps us know where we belong, who we are, who we can help, who can help us…all things valuable for being a human on this lonely planet. But I want him to have another identity that pulls on/against his national identity and against any type of sectarian impulse that will tempt him. When national and religious identities live without any tension (e.g., Christian Nationalism) both the nationalism and the religiosity are compromised, in my view. Having a national identity that can push against the weakness of one’s religious identity (e.g., American and even, dare I say, capitalist language around “freedom” making space for LGBTQIA+ inclusion where the “Church” was hesitant) and a religious identity that can push against the weakness of one’s national identity (e.g., Christianity’s universal identity resists [or should resist] xenophobic, anti-immigrant nationalisms) can be a good thing. When being a Christian is hard, maybe being an American will help. When being an American is hard, maybe being a Christian will help. I know this “balance of powers” has helped me avoid the pitfalls of religious fundamentalisms and fascist nationalisms. I hope it will offer my son something similar.

Well, that’s all that I have to say on this matter. I wrote this for myself. I wanted to see my own thinking in textual form. Writing helps me “see” my thoughts so that I can know them truly. If these thoughts benefit any other readers, then that’s an extra bonus!

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Leaving the Educational Resources and Review Committee

In 2021, I received the news that I had been nominated to join the Educational Resources and Review Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature. While I enjoyed being part of the committee, all the personal and professional changes that have occurred over the past year have led me to the conclusion that my time is best used on other projects and that the committee would be better served by having someone on it that could give more attention to it. So, yesterday, I sent a resignation email.

I may or may not attend AAR/SBL this year, and to be part of the committee I should’ve already signed up for the annual meeting, which I haven’t. With biblical studies going from about 66-80% of my curriculum load to close to 25-33% now, I find myself reevaluating how I’m using my time and where I’m investing myself.

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No longer teaching the New Testament, kind of

A week or so ago the spring semester ended. For the past nine years, I’ve taught some sort of introductory course on the New Testament during the spring, and there were a few years where my school offered it in the fall at first. Last year, I proposed an overhaul to our religious studies catalog that was accepted. It included a mandatory course on philosophy (of meaning, purpose, values, and ethics) that all students must take before they graduate and then two other courses, one of which must be chosen: “Religion in Global Context” (basically theory and sociology of religion) and “Introduction to the Bible”. This means that we won’t offer two separate semesters of biblical studies—we’ve offered a class on the Old Testament/Tankah in the fall each year. Instead, we’ve condensed our biblical studies down to one.

This is the result, in part, of my own observations about how students have handled year-long classes on the Bible—since most students who chose to take one semester of on the Old Testament/Tankah usually chose to go straight into the New Testament in the spring—and what I’ve heard from my students over the years. What I’ve observed is that for whatever reason—I’ll share some hypotheses below—students struggle to remain engaged and take serious the biblical studies courses whereas the religious studies courses that I’ve offered, “Religion in Global Context” and the now (maybe temporarily?) retired “Religion in the United States,” usually retain student interest and engagement. This semester, I asked two of my students who really struggled to stay engaged, yet who professed to be Christians, what it was about the class that seemed to so disinterest them. They said, in gist, that it goes too in-depth. This may be correct. Why though? I think for some, the Bible is of symbolic value. I’ve talked about this before: see “The Bible is a talisman (for many). Reading it leads to deconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary.” The Bible is best left on a coffee table as a good luck charm, and left to a priest to read and interpret. Like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, you’re safest if you never open it.

For other students, they presumed that they knew the Bible already. They had checked that box in Sunday School or during confirmation classes. Even as new material was being introduced, or as I was unpacking further what they had learned only in the most shallow sense, their ears shut off because they had convinced themselves that this class was redundant.

Still others see all of their education as merely a means to a different end and that end is getting into a good college, getting a good job, and making a lot of wealth. They can’t see how studying the Bible helps them with these goals (or, in their words, “this doesn’t get me anywhere‘). Interestingly, when students take my comparative religion courses, they can see how, for example, not making a faux pas that offends your potential business partner of a different faith is a practical outcome to studying religion. Other similar justifications for my comparative religion classes, such as the need for a tolerant, pluralistic society, or to be aware of his religion intersects with say politics, or law, are also easier for them to embrace. While I’ve tried to make similar arguments for biblical literacy, those arguments are far less effective.

So, for my own sanity as the primary biblical and religious studies teacher, and I guess in a sense for the well-being of our students who have sometimes shown and other times stated outright that the biblical studies classes aren’t what they want/need, we’ve condensed our offering. I think it’s the good and right thing to do but it’s bittersweet for sure. It brings to an end a major stage of my life that has lasted about two decades. As I ended college and prepared to go and complete a MA, ThM, and PhD, I had in my mind that I was preparing to teach the New Testament, possibly as the graduate level at a seminary or maybe at a Christian liberal arts college. Then reality hit. The job market changed. Biblical studies jobs disappeared and my pedigree wasn’t competitive in the arenas I sought to play. Fewer people are going to seminary to train for ministry anyway. And the church is shrinking rapidly in the United States. Where it continues to thrive, e.g., the Assemblies of God, theological education is valued only as denominational apologetics. So, about a decade ago, I off-ramped to teach biblical studies (primary) and some comparative religion to high school students. This wasn’t the demographic that I wanted to teach or planned on teaching but it was were I could teach while also getting paid and having benefits. It worked out and now I have a hard time imagining myself as something other than a high school teacher.

During my MA, I loved studying Hebrew and Greek, and taking electives on topics like a deep exegetical dive into the Epistle to the Hebrews. During my ThM, I thought that I was going to become a “Paul guy” focusing on Pauline Studies. I wrote a thesis on Romans 8 and the renewal of creation. As I entered by doctoral program, I decided that I was going to be a “Gospels guy” instead. I wrote a thesis on John the Baptist in his historical context. And then the years passed, and I taught a small handful of students, out of the hundreds that crossed my path, that would’ve been remotely interested in doing a deep-dive into anything related to John the Baptist. The lack of reciprocity with regard to passion for the topic that I was teaching slowly drained me. Simultaneously, the demise of American Christianity over the past decade has made me second guess that value of what I spent years studying in hopes that I could one day serve “the Church”. The realities on the ground drove me to put more effort into understanding comparative religion, since that was resonating a lot more with my students, and it drove me to read a lot of philosophy, since my theological adventures have mostly left me feeling like I’ve come up empty handed, unsure that I have the emotional interest to continue pouring myself into topics that matter less and less to the world in which I live, including to the very Christians that I imagined my education would serve.

The new “Introduction to the Bible” class will cover the New Testament, in brief. It will take up maybe a third of a semester rather than a whole one. So, I’m not completely abandoning all the work that I did for the past two decades. But I’m clearly saying goodbye to the vocational identity that I thought I was building over those many years. Not only will I not be a “Professor of New Testament” somewhere as twenty-something me imagined but I won’t even teach a class solely dedicated to the New Testament, maybe ever again.

That said, I’m excited about my new philosophy class. The first run begins this Monday with my summer school students. As they say, “every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end”.

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Brief comments on Tamler Sommers’ “Why Honor Matters”

As a long time listener of the podcast Very Bad Wizards, I purchased Tamler Sommers’ book Why Honor Matters with a positive disposition toward the author but a negative one toward the focus of the book: honor and honor cultures. My moral/ethical leanings are shaped by a “dignity framework,” whether that be because of my upbringing as a Christian and the explorations in Christian theology that have indoctrinated me, or (and?) because of my attempt to develop a rational basis for my moral and ethical beliefs that don’t appeal to divine revelation (often a secular derivative of Christian morality, if I’m honest). Right or wrong, Christian morality is presented as emerging from the example of a man, Jesus, who appealed to dignity (by way of the imago dei) in the honor/shame culture of the Roman Empire, with obvious favoritism toward the former. Jesus suffered because of an honor culture (i.e. his Passion) but the Kingdom of God that he preached imagined the world as a dignity utopia. This paradigm makes honor cultures look archaic and unevolved.

Sommers’ book doesn’t abandon the value of dignity-based morality but instead sheds light on the strengths of honor-based morality that we have lost in societies that have abandoned an honor-shame structure. He doesn’t ignore that weaknesses of honor culture—for example, honor killings, cyclical revenge, and such. He builds a steel man for the values of honor culture that I found at time convincing and at other times at least worth pondering further. And this book knocked me off my high horse by putting a spotlight on where dignity culture has failed (e.g. the American justice system and our world’s largest prison population).

I was attracted to the book for a negative reason: I’ve begun to think, contrary to some, that we’re not a society that needs less shame but one that may need more of it. I don’t mean old school, religious, Puritan-style shame. But I do think that social media has revealed a side of us in “Western” culture that’s gotten very ugly. It’s individualism taken to its most absurd extreme. We do what we want and we don’t care who it impacts, as long as we enjoy it. I think there should be some shame in that. The flip side of this is that there needs to be more people who want to live honorable lives: who care about their name, their reputation, and that of those closest to them. (For example, I want the name “LePort” to mean something that it definitely hasn’t mean in previous generations, and I want it to be a good name that my son can proudly own.) If you’re generally interested in a philosopher making a defense of the strengths of honor-based morality, or if you’ve had a concern similar to my own, then I highly recommend this book. It’s well-written and its case is argued as about as good as anyone can argue for honor-based morality in our current context.

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The appeal of the papacy

Today, I watched ABC News as it live-streamed the selection of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to become Pope Leo XIV. As he was being introduced, and the audience was being read to in Latin, I wouldn’t say that I was in “awe” of the spectacle, but I did admire it. A short while later, I was talking with a colleague who is Catholic. We were surprised to see that an American been chosen. As our conversation preceded, I said something to the extent that even many of us Protestants, if we’re honest, look to whoever the Pope is to be an exemplar and we may look to him even for some form of moral guidance. Not on all things, obviously, but on many. (Even Benedict XVI, the only Pope that I’ve seen live in person as he spoke from a window into St. Peter’s Square when I was visiting Rome, was a man whose scholarship and theological intellect was worth hearing.) We pay attention to who the Pope is. We have preferences. And as I told him, I don’t pay attention to or care about whoever the Southern Baptist Convention elects to lead them. If I’m honest, I have a marginal interest in who the Episcopal Church choses. But the Pope? Well, he’s the Pope!

I don’t know why this is the case. Why do I, a Protestant with an affiliation with the Episcopal Church, care who the Pope is? What is the appeal of the papacy for a person like me? (I’m sure Catholics have their take!) It’s kind of like Americans who care about British royalty. Similarly to such Americans, most who probably wouldn’t want their to be a “King of the United States” (though many of Trump’s supporters seem open to the idea), care about who wears the Crown in England. If we didn’t, why did we watch Netflix’s drama, The Crown? Why did we care about Princess Diana or Prince Harry? Why do I as a Protestant, who wouldn’t want to be part of a theological tradition like Catholicism (I had my flirt with Catholicism briefly in the early 2010s), be invested in who the Catholic Church elects? I’ve shared some thoughts on this already (see “Why the next Pope matters”), but I think there is something about the majesty of it all that resonates with human nature, even humans like me who tend to be suspicious of hierarchies or at least see hierarchies as purely functional and acceptable only because society needs them to survive (I presume).

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Nothing mundane

One of my favorite parts of fatherhood thus far has been observing how new, interesting, and exciting everything is for my son. He will stare at a ceiling fan, an exit sign, or a baseball game on TV, taking everything in. He’s basically a phenomenologist. Most recently, as he nears being able to eat solids, he watches every movement my wife and I make when we eat. Though I try to remain a curious person, seeking newness where it can be found, like most adults, it can feel like life is cyclical and mundane.

For my son, there’s nothing mundane. In the “philosophical novel” Sophie’s World, a mysterious letter writing philosopher says this of children:

To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course.

He goes on to write that, “This is precisely where philosophers are the notable exception.” The implication is that philosophers try to preserve something of the curiosity of children (p. 19). As much as an enjoy philosophy for this very reason, it doesn’t impact me the way that just watching my son does. As he lives this new life, it makes my life feel new again.

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Why the next Pope matters

Pope Francis died last night at the age of 88. As a non-Catholic, some may think that this is irrelevant to me, or relevant only in the way that news of the death of any major world leader is relevant. And I can see why, especially if you know me. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more and more classically liberal Protestant. I’m more aligned with the theology of say a Paul Tillich than a Pope Francis.

“Il Presidente della Repubblica Sergio Mattarella incontra Papa Francesco” via Wikipedia

If I’m honest, as I’ve watched Christianity devolve and degenerate in the United States, I think less and less about my religion, period. I used to think about it all the time. I thought theologically consistently. I’ll confess that I’ve become disillusioned. What passes for Christianity today is an embarrassment. The past ten years have been nothing short of disheartening for me as an American Christian. I prefer not to think about it all that much if I don’t have to. Why waste my time on such a depressing topic?

But Pope Francis was a bright spot especially during this dark decade. Not because I agreed with him. Not because he was “liberal” in any sense of the word that aligns with what I think of when I think of that word. (Maybe he was “left” of Pope Benedict XVI but that’s not saying much.) He was a bright spot because the Catholic Church exists and will exist past my life time. There will be a Pope. Someone will be the Pope. The best that someone like myself can hope for is that whoever the Pope is, they’ll be pastoral, advocate for peace, care for the poor and the outcast of society, and try to model the type of Christianity that I would like to see exist in the world. Pope Francis was that type of Pope. While I may have disagreed with him on matters like gay marriage, there’s no denying that he was a man of compassion and love that far exceeded anything I’ve exhibited in my life. For that reason, he was a Pope that I admired, respected, and dare I say, even “followed” looking for him to provide us wisdom on topics ranging from the climate, to the economy, to war. He was a moral exemplar, through and through.

The next Pope matters because we needed and continue to need a man like Pope Francis in our world. There will be a man in the Vatican who will have influence over the world’s nearly 1.5 billion Catholics. If a man like Pope Francis is at the helm, it’s better for all of us, whether you’re a liberal Protestant like me, an atheist, a Buddhist, or whatever. His leadership helps make for a better world in ways that I know we can’t objectively measure but surely can feel. So, my hopes and maybe even prayers are with the Catholic Church as they choose their next Pope. Their decision impacts all of us.

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Authenticity, Bad Faith, and Bad Authenticity

A year or so ago, I heard a talk on authenticity. The speaker told the audience that they knew that they had acted in ways that were disappointing to the community, that they had caused unnecessary trouble, and that they had hurt and offended people but that ultimately, they would do it all over again because they were being authentic to themselves. Some of the people in attendance applauded this speech, affirming this definition of authenticity: being true to who one is. I was appalled by it.

For one, I reject the idea that there’s an essential “I” to be “discovered”. This is why I find personality tests to be meaningless. I don’t agree with the presentation of selfhood that suggests that we’re a fixed self that we need to discover/understand to be happy. While there is much about ourselves that remains consistent over time, there’s also much that remains in constant flux, and we choose (however strong or weak you want to define that word) who we want to become. We don’t discover who we are already. I’ve been influenced by Buddhist and Existentialist accounts of personhood to the point where such ideas about the self—that we are who we are and the best that we can do is discover it and better understand it—seem insensible to me (see “Buddhism, Existentialism, and the Enneagram”).

I find what that speaker called “authenticity” to be contrary to authenticity; I find what that speaker called “authenticity” to be what Existentialists call “Bad Faith”. In her book, How To Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment, Skye C. Cleary defines “Bad Faith” this way (p. 253):

“Self-deception which involves denying our own or others’ freedom. We are in bad faith when we avoid the truth of our life and situation, when we deny we have choices, or when we reject responsibility for our actions.”

The speech that I heard fits the definition of “Bad Faith” ala Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The speaker denied their freedom to reflect and change. They chose to “avoid the truth of” their “life and situation”.

So, what then would I say is “Authenticity”. I return to Cleary (pp. x-xi):

“To become authentic means to create our own essence. It’s the creation that is vital here. We don’t discover ourselves, we make ourselves. Authenticity is a way of expressing our freedom: to realize and accept that we are free; to be lucid about what we can and can’t choose about ourselves, our situation, and others; and to use our freedom as a tool to shape ourselves. Our selves are not the product of a chain of impersonal causes and effects. Creating ourselves is an art form—the act of intentionally choosing who we become.”

Existentialist thinkers say “existence precedes essence”. We exist but we’re not defined yet. We’re born with certain characteristics, yes, and Existentialist call this our “facticity”. But what makes us different from say a rock or a cactus, is that our “facticity” doesn’t completely define us. We can experience “transcendence” as humans where rise above our facticity to give ourselves greater meaning, or to create our “essence”. This “creation” is what makes us authentic.

This is contrary to the talk I heard, or personality tests that help us “discover who we are”. For Existentialist, there’s no permanent “I” to be “true to”; there’s an “I” that continues to create itself. So, when this speaker said they recognized all the wrong they had done but then chose to double-down on it rather than confessing the wrong and declaring a desire to do better, they weren’t being authentic at all; they were acting in Bad Faith thereby creating “bad authenticity” or “authenticity” as it’s understood in the crudest and laziest way possible. If we reject our responsibility for ourselves in the name of letting our “true self” shine, then we’re being inauthentic because we’re denying that we’re making a decision to remain who we’ve been in spite of our awareness of ourselves and how that awareness demands that we change for our sake and the sake of others. We’re being inauthentic in that we’re (in the words of St. Paul) thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, not recognizing that as humans we’re categorically no better than other humans even as we convince ourselves that we are and that we have the right to act in ways that we would never accept from others if they acted that way toward us.