The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

I just finished up reading Sarah McCammon’s new book The Exvangelicals and I need to take the time to recommend it here. McCammon, a 40-something NPR journalist, has written a book that’s part memoir and part explainer on where Exvangelicals have come from over the past decade, and, more importantly, why.

When I reviewed Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory earlier this year, I noted at the time that he was joining a list of kindred spirits who I found online or by reading their books, and who turned out to be fellow devout homeschooled kids who grew into adults questioning evangelical distinctives and dismayed by the devolution of white American evangelicalism into Fox News-watching Republican sheep. I named McCammon at this point as another one of those people. Little did I know how familiar her story would be.

I first encountered Sarah McCammon when she was a host on Iowa Public Radio. Eventually I followed her on Twitter, and continued to read and occasionally interact with her as she moved from Iowa to the east coast, eventually to work directly for NPR. Her reporting during the 2016 presidential campaign was nuanced and insightful. In hindsight, I should’ve known why.

In The Exvangelicals, McCammon unpacks her own story and uses it to illustrate the Exvangelical movement. She’s a few years younger than I am, but our stories run parallel tracks: growing up in the Midwest, a devout churchgoing family, culturally sheltered, homeschooled, evangelical youth groups, marrying young, eventually finding her own faith torn as she experienced the wider world. Eventually she left the church and faith fervor of her youth, getting divorced, becoming an Episcopalian, marrying a Jewish man. Despite so much Evangelical rhetoric saying the Exvangelicals are only leaving because they want to be free to enjoy sin, McCammon recognizes that it’s actually really painful:

Leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life’s most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of “answers” - about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It also means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you’re sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It’s often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve that community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world and risking that loss.

She has summed up there in a single sentence my experience of the last dozen years.

It was interesting reading this book back-to-back with Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Lyz is another exvangelical, though I don’t know she’d describe herself that way, who writes with an acerbic fire about coming through her evangelical upbringing and a troubled marriage. (Lyz actually provides one of the blurbs on the back of McCammon’s book.) McCammon’s prose is more NPR, Lyz is more shock jock. McCammon makes me comfortably say “yes, this! Exactly this!”. Lyz makes me uncomfortably say “well, she’s not wrong…” They are both important voices whose words should be read and wrestled with.

The Exvangelicals is a book I would recommend for anyone outside the evangelical experience trying to understand where us weirdos are coming from, and for any one of us Exvangelical weirdos who wants to feel less alone.

Recommended Reading: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta

My first completed book of the year is one I can wholeheartedly recommend: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta. Subtitled “American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism”, journalist Alberta’s book details his many interviews with American Evangelical leaders since the rise of Trump in 2016. He interrogates their motivations, how their words align with their actions, and how those words and actions comport with the teachings of Jesus.

Alberta is uniquely positioned to write a book like this. A professional journalist currently with The Atlantic, he has also written for, among others, Politico and The Wall Street Journal. But, as he reveals in the book’s initial chapters, he is also a pastor’s kid. His father, up until his untimely death, was the pastor of a large Evangelical Presbyterian church in Michigan. Alberta grew up a devoted Christian within that church, and continues today as a professing Christian. The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory at places verges on memoir. But Alberta’s fluency with evangelical language, teaching, and culture give him an insight and authority that other journalists would lack.

If you have been following along in the Evangelical culture wars post-2016, most of the folks Alberta discusses will be familiar. He introduces them chapter by chapter: The Falwells and Liberty University, Robert Jeffress, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Firebrands like Greg Locke. Unabashed politicos like Ralph Reed. Fradulent historian David Barton. SBC stalwart-turned-outcast Russell Moore. Journalist Julie Roys. Pastor Brian Zahnd as a Midwestern prosperity preacher turned lonely prophet.

Whether it’s on purpose or just so close to home (for both the author and me) that Alberta couldn’t avoid it, the theme of children of Evangelicals turning and becoming their parents’ reproof played over and over through the book. Nick Olson, the son of an early Liberty student who came back to teach, only to be driven away when his politics didn’t align. Rachael Denhollender, the conservative homeschooled gymnast who, after bravely testifying against her abuser, became an advocate for sexual abuse victims within her own denomination. Cameron Strang, CEO of Relevant magazine, the son of a religious huckster. Jonathan Falwell, at a crossroads after taking over leadership of the “family business”, Liberty University. Alberta finally questions his own actions and motivations. Would he have been willing to ask these questions, to write this book, were his father still alive and in the pastorate? That question remains forever unknown. I understand, at least a little bit, Alberta’s quandary.

Over the past decade a pattern has emerged for me. When I encounter someone from my generation, usually online, who speaks with a resonant voice of sanity about America’s religion and politics, it turns out they, like me, grew up evangelical, usually homeschooled, and have spent their adult lives forging a path out. I’m thinking of people like author Lyz Lenz, new NYT film critic Alissa Wilkinson, writer and editor (and Alissa’s former podcast-hosting sidekick) Sam Thielman, NPR journalist Sarah McCammon, and famous lawyer spouse Jacob Denhollander, kindred spirits all. I’m now going to add Tim Alberta to that list.

At the end of the book, Alberta expresses an uncertain hope that this younger generation is successfully turning the evangelical world away from the worst of its political debauchery. To my mind, that jury is still out. Leader after leader throughout the book express their befuddlement and confusion as to why so much of the Evangelical church has been willing to follow political prophets away from the call of Jesus. Like them, Alberta doesn’t have the answer. But with this book, he has done what he can: incontrovertably documenting the political corruption of the American Evangelical church for anyone willing to read it.

My 2023 Reading in Review

Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…

I read 72 books for the year, which feels like a nice even number. There’s still a lot of theology and science fiction in the list, but I read more science this year, along with several memoirs.

Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:

Theology

  • Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction by Bradley Jersak
  • On the Soul and the Resurrection by St. Gregory of Nyssa
  • Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair by Duke L. Kwon
  • Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture by Chris E. W. Green
  • The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics by Stanley Hauerwas
  • Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura
  • Not All Who Wander (Spiritually) Are Lost by Traci Rhodes
  • A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker J. Palmer
  • Trauma-Informed Evangelism: Cultivating Communities of Wounded Healers by Charles Kiser
  • Christ in Evolution by Ilia Delio
  • Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps by Richard Rohr
  • The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  • The New Being by Paul Tillich

Green is wonderful here. I posted a few excerpts while reading it that would be a good introduction.

Science and History

  • The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene by Jurgen Renn
  • Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price
  • Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards
  • Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel J. Siegel
  • The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey
  • Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis by George Monbiot
  • The Book of Genesis: A Biography by Ronald Hendel
  • Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon by Eric H. Cline
  • Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics by Mark Alan Smith
  • Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
  • The Book of Job: A Biography by Mark Larrimore
  • On the Origina of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog
  • Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert
  • The Talmud: A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
  • The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman

Memoir and Biography

  • Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons by Jeremy Denk
  • Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir by Wil Wheaton
  • Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy by Damien Lewis
  • Heretic: A Memoir by Jeanna Kadlec
  • Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
  • God on the Rocks: Distilling Religion, Savoring Faith by Phil Madeira
  • All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore
  • Mystics and Zen Masters by Thomas Merton
  • Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian by Ilia Delio
  • How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
  • Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann
  • Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

I posted some appreciation for Stewart before I got my hands on his memoir. The memoir did not disappoint. He’s an imperfect, lovely man. The book was a pleasure to read. Also, he’s a great example of why we need funding for arts and arts education. But I digress.

Other Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

  • My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
  • Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman
  • The Ultimate Quest: A Geek’s Gude to (The Episcopal) Church by Jordan Haynie Ware
  • Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges

Fiction

  • The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (re-read)
  • A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (re-read)
  • Dead Lions by Mick Herron
  • Don’t Cry for Me by Daniel Black
  • The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Bayern Agenda by Dan Moren
  • Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
  • Hunting Time by Jeffrey Deaver
  • Ordinary Monsters by J. M. Miro
  • The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
  • The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgard
  • Babel by R. F. Kuang
  • Translation State by Ann Leckie
  • Average Jones by Samuel Hopkins Adams
  • The Odyssey by Homer, trans. Emily Wilson
  • Red Queen by Juan Gomez-Jurado
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
  • Blackouts by Justin Torres
  • Starter Villain by John Scalzi
  • The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
  • Girl One by Sara Flannery Murphy
  • Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
  • My Old Home: A Novel of Exile by Orville Schell
  • The Helsinki Affair by Anna Pitoniak
  • Time’s Mouth by Edan Lepucki
  • The Collector by Daniel Silva

Schell’s epic story following a young man’s life growing up in 20th century China is beautiful and tragic and very worth the read.

Summary

One of my goals from previous years was to read fewer books written by white guys. By my count, 24 of this year’s books meet that goal… which isn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be. That science section didn’t help in that regard. I made a stronger shift this year, though, away from theology and to science. That wasn’t super-intentional, but just where my interest was at the time.

On to 2024! I’m nearly halfway through my first book of the year.

Supernatural love, found within human love

Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss:

It is not some meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.

This is why I am, such as I am, a Christian, because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people. I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.

> My Bright Abyss, p. 164

Beautiful, and it resonates for me with the stuff I was reading from Chris Green a couple weeks ago — that the world experiences God’s love through us in the way God makes space for them in our lives.

A little poetry for Monday night

I’ve done a lot of reading so far this year. Tonight I started My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman. I’m not too far in but the writing (prose, punctuated with poetry) is dense and profound.

In the opening chapter he drops this little poem that resounds with truth in my ears. I leave it here for you as a gift.

Into the instant’s bliss never came one soul
Whose soul was not possessed by Christ,
Even in the eons Christ was not.

And still: some who cry the name of Christ
Live more remote from love
Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.

– ‘After Dante’, Christian Wiman

Chris E. W. Green on the Beatitudes and Power

I’m still only in chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation, but this is too good to not share. Green takes a look at the Beatitudes and how Jesus embodies them. Then, he says, the Beatitudes show themselves to be concerned with power, though not perhaps in the way you’d think:

We can say that true power - the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom. 1.4) - is first and foremost the power of unanxious and reconciling presence, a power brought to bear on behalf of those who suffer in isolation, those forgotten or ignored by the powers-that-be, whose only hope is ‘another body that comes and stands beside and in the midst… and will not move’. As our lives are made in even the smallest ways to be like Christ’s, we become noticeably less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and increasingly determined for others to be treated with the dignity that is theirs as God’s delight.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 39

If there’s something the church today needs to learn, this may be exactly it: to be less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and more for others. What a word.

Green continues, drawing on Stanley Hauerwas:

To this end, the church must be ‘a body of people who have learned the skills of presence’, skills that are developed only in a community ‘pledged not to fear the stranger’, where the practice of being present with those in suffering ‘has become the marrow of their habits’…

Sometimes the Spirit limns [colors, like a highlighter] our actions so that they body forth the power of Christ’s compassion and wisdom in ways that we and others can sense. But whether we or they can sense it or not, our confidence in God leads us to say that he is always everywhere at work doing good. So, by being there, but showing up and staying put, we ‘present our bodies as a living sacrifice’ (Rom. 12.1-2), which, when all is said and done, is probably the only way that truly overcomes evil with good (Rom. 12.21). Thus, that is the sacrifice with which God is pleased.

We often wrongly imagine sacrifice not as a gift but as forfeiture, not as self-giving but as self-destruction. Christ, however, reveals that God hates whatever destroys us, just as surely as he hates whatever we might do that destroys others. And, as the last sacrifice, his priestly ministry is the apocalyptic bringing-to-bear of the Great Commandment, which is why his sacrifice is the end of all sacrifice. Christ makes of himself a sacrifices, and so all sacrifices, if they are true to themselves must be what his was: a free and freeing gift of reconciliation and healing and blessing.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 40

I have felt both sides of this at times - the feeling that “showing up and staying put” is a sacrifice that is sometimes too much, to the point of my own detriment. Green says, though, that God wants us to stay put in ways that are reconciling, healing, and blessing to ourselves as well as those we are serving.

Chris E. W. Green on Christians as a temple for the sake of the world

Following up from yesterday’s post, here’s Chris Green again from chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation. In understanding our Christian vocation, Green says, we need to see our role as not against the world, but for the world. (Emphasis mine in the quote below.)

Often, when we are talking about the church as called out from the world, we imply a contrast between the humanity of believers and the humanity of non-believers. Truth be told, Scripture itself often seems to speak this way. For example, Ephesians 2 contrasts ‘the children of wrath’ - those who are ‘dead’ in sin, ‘following the course of the world’, dominated by the ‘passions of the flesh’ (Eph 2.1-3) - with the ‘one new humanity’, which is created in Christ’s body as the ‘household of God’ (Eph. 2.15, 19). If we are not careful, then, we leave the impression that the saints have a different humanity ‘in Christ’ than does the rest of the world ‘in Adam’.

But such a reading misses the point. The line of thought in Ephesians 2 does not end with the contrast between the family of God and the children of disobedience. Instead, Paul goes on to insist that this ‘one new humanity’ constituted in and as Christ’s body ‘is joined together and grows into a holy temple… a dwelling place for God’ (Eph. 2.21-22). What is this temple if not a holy ‘place’ set aside for the world to meet with its God and for God to act on the world? The church, participating in the renewed humanity created in Christ as a priestly people, opens a space in the midst of the world so that heaven and earth, the new creation and the old, can touch. We are made by the Spirit the temple for the sake of others, so they can encounter Christ in the room he has made for them in our lives.

–Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 31

That last sentence is a feast! It’s not a new teaching, or anything contradictory to things I’ve been taught before, but that particular color on it: that others would “encounter Christ” when they encounter me. Wowza.

Chris E. W. Green on Vocation

I’m just digging in to Chris E. W. Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, and while it’s a book I picked up because it was going to address Scriptural interpretation, I’m only two chapters in and blown away by his thoughts on human vocation. I’ve got several bits I’d like to share, but I’ll spread them out over several posts.

From Chapter 1, Green encourages us that the Christian vocation shouldn’t be distinguished too strongly from the human vocation:

I believe that a call to collaborate with God rests upon all of us just because we exist as the creatures we are. We are all of us as human beings made to mediate God’s holiness to the rest of creation, to work the works of God, to do what Jesus did, to be who Jesus is. To be human is to be burdened with this vocation. And in many ways - small and large, conscious and unconscious, intentional and inadvertent - all of us are more or less faithfully and lovingly in fact fulfilling our calling, although always only in part. In Christ, the Spirit places us under that burden, strengthening us for the bearing of it…


Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 20

I love this thought that humans, even unknowingly, are frequently ‘faithfully and lovingly’ fulfilling the calling as humans to bring healing and reconciliation.

Green goes on to talk about the purpose of Christian vocation as something clarified or revealed from within the human vocation (emphasis mine in the quote below):

Our broadest vocation is not so much given to us at our baptism as we are at last truly given to it. Baptized into Christ, we are awakened to and sanctioned for the vocation we always already were meant to bear. Our narrower vocation - the work we are called to do as members of Christ’s body (e.g. bishop, pastor, or deacon; evangelist intercession, or teacher) - comes to us in our call to believe or is imparted to us in the event of ordination, but always with a view to the fulfillment of the natural human call. Within such an account, those outside the church are recognized to have the same broad vocation we do. For now, however, we find ourselves called out from them, but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for them. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others - never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or submit to the call. The elect are always elected for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.


Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 21

This is such a wonderful perspective. Would that the church saw their vocation, their service to God, never instead of others or against others, but always for the sake of others. The picture of the church as a temple and priests to bring God’s presence and message to the world, and the world to God’s presence and message, is one I’ll be chewing on for a while.

My 2022 Reading in Review

Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007… argh, how did I miss some of those years?)

I got through 61 books this year, which feels like a bit of a down year. My “one book at a time” practice got me bogged down in some slow theology books, and then I got sucked into a cross-stitch project and a couple web projects at the end of the year which stole some of my reading time. (I finally came to grips with breaking up the long theology slogs with some fiction, and that helps a lot.)

Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:

Theology

  • Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church - Bridget Eileen Rivera
  • Happiness and Contemplation - Josef Pieper
  • The Aryan Jesus - Susannah Heschel
  • The Joy of Being Wrong - James Alison
  • Attached to God: A Practical Guide to Deeper Spiritual Experience - Krispin Mayfield
  • The Emergent Christ - Ilia Delio
  • The Beatitudes Through the Ages - Rebekah Ann Eklund
  • Let the Light In: Healing from Distorted Images of God - Colin McCartney
  • In: Incarnation and Inclusion, Abba and Lamb - Brad Jersak
  • Having the Mind of Christ - Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke
  • The Dark Interval - John Dominic Crossan
  • Love Over Fear - Dan White, Jr.
  • Faith Victorious - Lennart Pinomaa
  • History and Eschatology - N. T. Wright
  • Destined for Joy - Alvin F. Kimel
  • A Thicker Jesus - Glen Harold Stassen
  • Changing Our Mind - David P. Gushee

Dr. Ilia Delio’s The Emergent Christ is the one that had me thinking the most this year, and that will stick with me longer than any of the others. Her approach to thinking about God, evolution, and universal progress within a Christian framework blew my mind, and consistently challenges me to think about God and the universe differently.

Other Non-Fiction

  • Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
  • Music is History - Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
  • The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
  • How the Word Is Passed - Clint Smith
  • The New Abolition - Gary Dorrien
  • Reading Evangelicals - Daniel Silliman
  • Fearful Symmetry - A. Zee
  • The Joshua Generation - Rachel Havrelock
  • Belabored - Lyz Lenz
  • The Method - Isaac Butler
  • The Dead Sea Scrolls - John J. Collins
  • Strange Rites - Tara Isabella Burton
  • A Different Kind of Animal - Robert Boyd
  • The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow
  • Bible Nation - Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden
  • Protestants Abroad - David A. Hollinger
  • Do I Make Myself Clear? - Harold Evans
  • White Flight - Kevin M. Kruse
  • How God Becomes Real - T. M. Luhrmann
  • Salty - Alissa Wilkinson
  • Blood In The Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks - Chris Herring
  • Searching for the Oldest Stars - Anna Frebel
  • This Here Flesh - Cole Arthur Riley
  • The Invention of Religion - Jan Assmann
  • The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr
  • The Late Medieval English Church - G. W. Bernard
  • The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila - Carlos Eire
  • Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild

Three women’s books stand out here: Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, looking at how the current generation of young people are looking for religious experiences in places other than traditional religion; Cole Arthur Riley’s spiritual memoir This Here Flesh, and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, describing a sociologist’s quest to understand Louisianans who have been devastatingly impacted by environmental destruction and yet persistently support the businesses and political causes behind that destruction.

Fiction

  • Unthinkable - Brad Parks
  • Lent - Jo Walton
  • The Last Commandment - Scott Shepherd
  • When We Cease To Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut
  • Everything Sad Is Untrue - Daniel Nayeri
  • Once A Thief - Christopher Reich
  • A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik
  • The Blue Diamond - Leonard Goldberg
  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers
  • The Coffin Dancer - Jeffery Deaver
  • Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel
  • Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
  • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers
  • A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers (re-read)
  • Slow Horses - Mick Herron
  • The Last Agent - Robert Dugoni

Here the standout was author Becky Chambers. Her little Monk & Robot novellas sucked me in and made me happy. That prompted me to purchase her Small Angry Planet series and start in on a re-read. Chambers works in the best tradition of science fiction pushing for inclusion and acceptance of The Other and in using the exploration of a very different universe to make you think about how our own could be improved.

Coming Up…

I’ve continued to log on Goodreads this past year but I get the feeling it’s spooling down as it gets absorbed by Amazon. I’m working on a self-hosted book logging site - it’s actually live online right now if you know where to look but I’m going to do some cleanup on it before I publicize it. I’ll post here about it when I do!

Stanley Hauerwas on sin, character formation, and fear

From Chapter 3 of Stanley Hauerwas’ book on Christian ethics The Peaceable Kingdom, this wonderful insight into how we can think about sin as interacting with our own power, control, and self-direction (emphasis mine):

We are rooted in sin just to the extent we think we have the inherent power to claim our life - our character - as our particular achievement. In other words, our sin - our fundamental sin - is the assumption that we are the creators of the history through which we acquire and possess our character. Sin is the form our character takes as a result of our fear that we will be “nobody” if we lose control of our lives.

Moreover our need to be in control is the basis for the violence of our lives. For since our “control” and “power” cannot help but be built on an insufficient basis, we must use force to maintain the illusion that we are in control. We are deeply afraid of losing what unity of self we have achieved. Any idea or person threatening that unity must be either manipulated or eliminated…

This helps us understand why we are so resistant to the training offered by the gospel, for we simply cannot believe that the self might be formed without fear of the other.

This gets to the heart of a lot of the discussions I’ve had with my Dad lately about the first step in making a positive spiritual change (which might be what Hauerwas here calls “the training offered by the gospel”) is to be freed from fear. One needs to be secure in their standing with God and with their community to be able to change and grow. (The counter-example here is frequently seen: spiritual communities that make any interest in ideas outside the accepted orthodoxy grounds for exclusion and expulsion.)

Hauerwas continues:

Our sin lies precisely in our unbelief - our distrust that we are creatures of a gracious creator known only to the extent we accept the invitation to become part of his kingdom. It is only be learning to make that story - that story of God - our own that we gain the freedom necessary to make our life our own. Only then can I learn to accept what has happened to me (which includes what I have done) without resentment. It is then that I am able to accept my body, my psychological conditioning, my implicit distrust of others and myself, as mine, as part of my story. And the acceptance of myself as a sinner is made possible only because it is an acceptance of God’s acceptance. This I am able to see myself as a sinner and yet to go on.

This does not mean that tragedy is eliminated from our lives; rather we have the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence. For finally our freedom is learning how to exist in the world, a violent world, in peace with ourselves and others. The violence of the world is but the mirror of the violence of our lives. We say we desire peace, but we have not the souls for it. We fear the boredom a commitment to peace would entail. As a result the more we seek to bring “under our control”, the more violent we have to become to protect what we have. And the more violent we allow ourselves to become, the more vulnerable we are to challenges.

This is growth toward wholeness: “the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence”.

For what does “peace with ourselves” involve? It surely does not mean that we will live untroubled - though it may be true that no one can really harm a just person. Nor does it mean that we are free of self-conflict, for we remain troubled sinners - indeed, that may well be the best description of the redeemed. To be “at peace with ourselves” means we have the confidence, gained through participation in the adventure we call God’s kingdom, to trust ourselves and others. Such confidence becomes the source of our character and our freedom as we are loosed from a debilitating preoccupation with ourselves. Moreover by learning to be at peace with ourselves, we find we can live at peace with one another. And this freedom, after all, is the only freedom worth having.