Is there too little imagination on the Christian Right
Right, left, up, down, good, evil, or is there more than meets the eye?
My skin crawls when I write about my doubt, but it’s worse when I don’t write about it. Actually, it’s not the writing of it that is difficult, but the sharing of it. I could keep it to myself, but that’s never been the work or the point of Sayable. It’s to say it, all of it, or at least most of it, or at least some of it. This is some of it. Thank you for sticking around even if this isn’t the place you find yourself. I write and share it in the hope that it comforts some of you too.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a short bit about the ache I have regarding being mothered in these days. A few days later, someone shared a link to Liz Bucar sharing some of the same sentiments. I loved it. I immediately subscribed. Liz is a religious ethicist at Northwestern, “despite having no religious affiliation of [her] own.”
In her piece on her mother, Liz writes she is, “religiously curious,” a sentiment I share despite having spent all my life in the church. If anyone should have answers about being religious, it should be me and people like me. Raised with felt-boards and storybook bibles, creationism, James Dobson, Bob Jones, Vision Forum, among the Gothardites and religious right, but also Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames and a constant terror of dying before I ever got to live.
Weighing out an eternity spent singing How Great Thou Art on repeat in a crowd of white robed saints or burning alive in perpetuity, I’ve never been sure which seemed worse.
Judge me if you want, I’m just telling you continuing to stay curious about religion/faith is practically a miracle at this point.
A few days ago, Nate and I were in the car and talking about church, religion, faith, and prayer, and he said to me, “I think you have to be an incredibly resilient person to have stuck with it after [specific year’s long experience with a particular brand of faith], most people would have just turned their back and gone on their way.” I don’t know if I’m resilient but I don’t have a lot of quit in me and maybe that’s the same thing.
A friend told me yesterday, “Even if you become an atheist, you’ll still be my friend.”
“I don’t think I could ever be an atheist,” I replied. “I have too much faith to be an atheist and too little faith to not struggle with doubt all of the time.”
Staying curious about religion (faith, Jesus, God, etc.) is the only way I’m able to stay here.
Once I’d subscribed to Liz Bucar, I was happy to see this piece just a few days later. What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion? As of writing this, her post has 6k likes and nearly 800 comments. It is resonating with many people and it resonated with me.
The post is long and you should read it, but the salient point is that the Left lacks the tools and training for imagination that the Right has by nature of religious upbringing. Christians are taught to believe in someone we could not see, touch, taste, feel, etc., and taught to believe in the possibility of outcomes we cannot see, one terrible (hell) and one beautiful (heaven).
She writes,
“Faith gives you capacity to believe ‘this current state isn’t the end’ without needing a peer-reviewed study proving the future will be better. It’s not irrationality. It’s a different kind of rationality altogether, one that can juggle complexity and ambiguity and hope all at once without dropping any of them.”
I would add that we were always very clear about what hell was (hot, burning, flames, torment, very, very bad) and always very unclear about what heaven was (not cherubs; angels though? with many eyes, maybe? clouds probably. Jesus on his throne, definitely. singing, endless; white robes, something about being prostrate for eternity. how can we know? who can know? no one can know.). So while we may have had the training ground for imagination, the binary was very simple and also very lopsided: put yourself in a constant state of repentance that will render you anxious, ashamed, feeling unloved by God for the mere possibility of…something. Or, alternatively, HELL.
Perhaps some Christians can work themselves through the binary and find a mid space where hell is merely annihilation (you’re punished until you’ve paid your price for all the sin you did) and heaven is actually a new earth, this one here, but better (a la N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope). But, as children, when our brains are at their most pliable and when most core memories are formed, the nuance is nearly impossible. So I would agree with Liz, Christian kids are taught the impossible is possible and have it branded into them in such a way that they contain the “cognitive and emotional framework that lets you stare directly at how bad things are while still organizing toward how things could be.”
It’s true. And it’s in this exact place that my struggle with doubt was born as a four year old child and remains and why I am still curious about religion despite having had every reason in the world to forsake it and pursue reason alone.
It is a kind of near self-gaslighting that we participate in, right? We stare right at the badness and think, “But still! Good!”
I heard an interview with Alex Honnold a few days after he scaled Tapei 101 without ropes or harness on live broadcast. He was asked, “Don’t you have any fear?” And he said something like, “Of course I have fear. Of course I’m afraid of dying. I don’t want to die. I want to live. But I also want to climb really tall buildings without safety harnesses.”
You have to do some real mental gymnastics to acknowledge that fear, let yourself feel it, and then say, “I’m going to do it anyway.”
That’s what being a Christian is like for many of us. Not all of us, I know there are a lot of very good people out there who never doubt the existence of God, the goodness of God, or the love of God. But for many of us, our faith is not a happy-clappy kind of easy believism, our imagination is not exercised toward goodness, it is extremely occupied by how bad things are and then forcing ourselves to say, “But good,” despite still actually believing maybe not good [?].
I don’t know if the Left lacks imagination or needs more of it. I don’t even know where I fall on the political spectrum despite where I may have voted the last several elections. But I do know that the kind of imagination the Christian Right has is not the kind of imagination I want for my life anymore. Despite calling itself “imaginative,” it actually lacks imagination because it limits itself to mostly two options of everything: good or evil, red or blue, faith or doubt, friend or foe, heaven or hell, in or out, with me or against me, the list goes on. We see evidence of this binary everywhere on the Christian Right.
Someone will probably chime in and say the binary exists on the Left too, but I keep thinking about this thing Ezra Klein said in a conversation a few months ago. He said,