Three Epiphanies Concerning Religion – Two
(The first is here.)
The second of these epiphanies occurred within a couple of years of the first. I had two friends who had joined the Episcopal Church around the same time that I did. One of them, a very close friend, had in fact been an important influence on my taking this step and would precede me into the Catholic Church. The other, as I soon discovered, had a rather different view of things. I’m not entirely sure what his view was, actually, as it always seemed pretty vague. He later became an Episcopal priest, and while I have no doubt that he is in every personal way an excellent pastor I also have no doubt that we disagree about a great many important things.
It was this second friend who inadvertently gave me a major insight into what my conversion would mean, henceforward, for my sense of where I fit in society. Or, as it turned out, where I didn’t fit, and never would fit.
We were chatting (if I remember correctly) one Sunday morning before church. He had just heard on the radio or seen on tv a preacher of the sort who was very common in the South thirty or more years ago and is in fact still not hard to find if you browse low-power AM stations at night or on Sunday morning: a fire-and-brimstone ranter, long on passion and short on reason, a walking inventory of Bible verses disconnected from context and tradition. He was denouncing sinners and consigning them to hellfire in the most un-nuanced manner imaginable, and screaming that only JAEEE-sus offered them hope of escaping the fate they deserved.
My friend was as outraged by the preacher as the preacher was by sinners, so much so that he seemed to believe that if the preacher was a Christian then he was not, and vice-versa. “I have nothing in common with a man like that, nothing whatsoever” is the comment that sticks in my mind from all those years ago.
I don’t remember what response, if any, I made, but I do remember thinking about the matter. And the conclusion I reached was the opposite of my friend’s: that the preacher and I had in common a conviction about the most important question in life, that of God and our relationship to him. As much as my friend, I had always sneered at fundamentalist Christians, especially those were both uneducated and aggressive in their proselytyzing. But however much I may have disliked the radio preacher’s manner or deplored his ignorance and clumsiness, I was fighting on the same side as he in the spiritual war which defines human life, the battle between God and Satan for the souls of mankind. Whatever I might think of him personally, whatever I might think of his theology, I had in some way bound myself to him. We were now brothers in arms, and brothers in Christ.
This moment brought home forcefully to me that in claiming the title “Christian” for myself I was making myself one with all sorts of people whom I did not much like but with whom I agreed about the one thing needful. I wasn’t especially happy with that conclusion but it seemed unavoidable. As long as he was willing to say “Jesus is Lord” and mean by those words more or less what I meant, which was what the Church had meant for two thousand years, I could never repudiate the hick with the microphone and the Bible, never say that he was too crude and unpleasant to be included in my definition of the word “Christian.” I was not entering a society that I should expect to give me a comfortable home in this world. I should not expect the word “Christian” to imply “someone I like.”
Conversely, I was putting myself on the other side of a very clear line from people with whom I had far more natural sympathy and far more in common. I soon found that this would be not just a possibility but a pattern. More often than not, the people with whom I agree about the most important thing in the world are not the people to whom I feel a strong natural affection and sympathy, or who share my interest in things like literature and music. This can make for a difficult social life; with people of either group there are important aspects of life that are not shared and must be discussed cautiously, if at all.
There was one sort of person that I did, and do, repudiate, though, and consider an enemy: the one who speaks the language of Christian faith but means something else, who empties the faith of its objective content and makes it a literary or psychological artifact. I have no choice but to stand, proudly if not happily, with the redneck preacher and the televangelist against that man or woman.
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