In the Shadow of Fundamentalism

The Jello Mold, Final Chapter.

The Jello Mold, Final Chapter.

We had broken from the status quo-- some of us dramatically, some of us slowly and quietly. Some of us had been born outside the conventions created by and perpetuated by the social layers of Christian Hope Center.

What did that make us? I sometimes stared at the ceiling in my room in the dark and wondered if I was going to hell. How could I separate the action from the actor?

Those of us trained in the world of evangelical Christianity knew certain behaviors as sin, and unpardonable at that. Pastor Dave Hackett’s definition of sin was a blemish on one’s being caused by “missing the mark,” failing to meet the expectations God had placed on your life. This blemish was inconsequential in and of itself, and yet its existence as an imperfection would keep a soul from being able to enter the presence of God, an eternally perfect being.

And so we spent our days focused on failing and making up for those failures. My morning prayers in HCA chapel were filled with my searching my own heart for mistakes and flaws, and then begging forgiveness for those flaws. Never could I lift before God some success to be proud of, some achievement to applaud. I was constantly laying the diseased sheep of my life, as I saw it, on the Holy Altar and sacrificing it; knowing deep down that even the total sacrifice of my life could not atone for my daily failings.

What, I wondered in the inner recesses of my heart, about those who felt no shame or failure in their actions? Spike was sometimes quite angry and unapologetic. Steven spoke candidly about girls and being rich one day. Neither seemed afraid or ashamed of these thoughts, and yet they had stood by me as honorable friends, supporting me when no one else would. If I knew their hearts to be good and genuine, wouldn’t a loving God know as well?

Perhaps missing the mark was only sin if you knew what the mark was. Perhaps failing your own heavenly potential was only wrong if you had heavenly potential.

But this scared me more than the idea that I might go to hell. If this was true, it meant that there was no universal standard by which God operates; that heavenly laws were changing and flawed. The standards on my life would not be the same as those on Steven’s or Spike’s lives.

The Bible even said (and we heard quoted daily,) “to him who knows what is right, and does not do it, it is sin.”

And so, this made God a Being who punished the sin of knowing. Truly ignorance is bliss, as it can mean the difference between eternal damnation (or lifelong atonement) and eternal joy.

And for even thinking these thoughts I was condemned.
I’d like to say that one morning I woke up and let all this confusion go, but it was instead a very slow process of realization.

I remember sitting in a bar with my friends and several pitchers of beer. Stephen sat on my left, Matt Newcomb (a friend of Steve and Johnny who was studying to be a Catholic priest) to my right. Suddenly we sprang into theological debate. We talked about life and death, heaven and hell, and earthly purpose with absolute honesty. Over pints of beer we communed, and the image of the original apostles sitting and drinking wine with Jesus.

Yes, Jesus spent time with prostitutes and thieves and worse people yet; Jesus who turned ordinary healthy water into gallons and gallons of wine to get the people at a wedding feast drunk.

And though I had heard in my youth that He was exempt somehow from the rules that governed us, I was beginning to see all these exemptions for the dogmatic bullshit they were. Only in Bible times it was okay for Christians to drink alcohol? Only in the Old Testament could the faithful have sex outside of marriage, kill their enemies, have multiple wives, even fornicate with members of their own family (just think, who did Adam and Eve’s children have children with?)

Nowhere in the Bible does it explicitly say any of these behaviors is wrong, because if the Bible said this, we would condemn all of the founders of the religion to hell.

All the Bible says instead is “to him who knows what is right, and does not do it, it is sin.”

So what if “sin” was redefined for me?

Is it possible that a person with their own developed ideas on what is right and wrong has an internal moral structure, instead of an external one? In this case, jello mold or not, we remain strong. People whose morality is determined by external sources find themselves without identity when those sources are removed. They collapse. They degrade. They decompose into the pinkish mush that Pastor Dave saw in that unformed jello.

And yet, by imposing such strong external structure on us, the school doomed many of us to glean our morality from our environment. If the environment is amoral, then we too will be amoral. In the presence of drug addicts we would be drug addicted. In the presence of sexual promiscuity we too would be promiscuous. Never could we make our own decisions about whether these things were in our “character” to do. Never did we have our own personal reasons for participating or not participating in the behaviors of our peers.

Except those of us who had rebelled deep down, those of us who had questioned, and wondered if our teachers were honest and trustworthy. We happy few had begun to develop our own theories on how we should, or should not behave. And, in the years to come, those theories would become self development, and character.

When the mold was lifted, only those of us who had been in question already knew how to stand.

posted by NY Monk @ 1:00 PM