In Defense of Christian Education, or, How CCU Broke My Faith

This is long. I ask you to read it anyway, and to tell me your own thoughts.

Andrew and I went to CCU together. Though he was a few years ahead of me, he lived in freshman housing at the same time I did, in a one-bedroom apartment awkwardly manipulated to accommodate the dorm’s laundry room on the reverse side. I knew him then only as the Art Garfunkel to his friend’s Paul Simon – they would leave their doors open and sing out from their subterranean home the beautiful tunes I knew by heart: “Many is the time I’ve been mistaken, and many times confused. Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken, and certainly misused…”

Four years later, Andrew and I share an apartment. He works at a company that runs background checks, and comes home with stories regularly resembling episodes of The Office. He plays jazz guitar, and is applying to various universities for graduate studies. I am now graduated as well, and we both find ourselves somewhat unfulfilled.

Andrew and I spoke the other night about something that puzzled us – namely, that we entered CCU as exuberant, conservative evangelical Christians, and left it in moral and theological confusion, with our evangelical drive permanently hobbled. I don’t presume to speak for Andrew on this, but there has not been any part of the faith I have not questioned either directly or indirectly, and if I believe any of it now, it is not from an evidence- or experience-based compulsion, but a simple, and seemingly arbitrary, choice.

I certainly don’t make the claim that our experience is the experience of small Christian colleges, or even that it is a general one. But in my circle of friends, it is one that I see more than any other: as the years of college go by and eventually become the past, so do all of our old ideas. Many of us don’t even go to church anymore. “Disillusionment” sounds too egotistical, as though everybody else remains “illusioned,” but it captures the feeling properly.

The tenets of the faith, the sanctity of all these many things, the truth of these occurrences, the validity of the bible, the moral imperatives scattered throughout – they all seem so optional. We’re not against them by any means – we just don’t know what to do with them. All questions, no answers, and in the end, just a decision to either continue or not.

This is certainly not unique to the small Christian college, but I began thinking about what would have happened had I gone elsewhere. I imagine that at a large state school, I would have shunned the overt partying scene. I would have shrunk away from those places that appeared to be dens of vice, because, aside from simply not being interested in them, I wouldn’t want to be associated with them. My friends would be of broad and various backgrounds, as they always have been, but my core friends, my best friends, would have been Christians. So far this is not any different from my time here at CCU.

This, I believe, is where the difference comes in: on a non-Christian campus, I and my friends would set ourselves up as specifically Christian; we would other-ize ourselves from the normal goings-on of campus life and set ourselves in opposition to them. In this state of opposition, we would hold to a sort of solidarity code – some unspoken idea of sticking up for each other, supporting each other’s faith, and above all, not undermining each other by focusing on prickly doubts or frustrating questions. (Also, we wouldn’t have any bible or theology courses, which do much to transform formerly vague feelings into glaring questions.) As with any self-styled rebel group, the cause/purpose of the group begins to fuse with the maintenance of the group itself, to the point where the good attitude, health, or growth of the group is equated with success, and low morale or shrinking numbers is seen as failure.

In this atmosphere, I would have gone on believing roughly what I believed when I entered. Not only would there have been fewer questions raised, but there would have been an active desire to suppress certain lines of inquiry. Any questions which were raised would tend to fit within the us/them dichotomy (questions from “them” being questions of supposedly deleterious nature), ensuring an easy answer and group solidarity, because given the options of A) making slight adjustments to one’s own belief or ignoring a few nagging feelings, or B) risking group fracture or possible dissolution by focusing on one’s own personal issues, people will tend toward the former. The feelings are swept under rugs or discussed in quiet sessions with close friends which end in everybody agreeing to pray for the doubter, reinforcing the idea that this person is in the wrong, and requires divine assistance to relocate the true path.

Simply put, I would have formed my Christian identity around my actions. I do these things, and not these; I hold to these classic beliefs, and not these watered-down, ear-tickling modes of modern thought. This identity would reinforce and be reinforced by a larger group of similar mindset, and upon leaving the university I would not easily break from these habits and beliefs, because they would have become synonymous with my very self.

Strangely, I found that attending a school entirely composed of a large group of similar mindset to my own had a much different effect on me. I’ll admit the possibility that I and my friends are flukes, aberrations in the system, but all the same I’d like to explore how we turned out as we did.

As I mentioned above, many of us have emerged with a faith battered and scarred from our time at CCU. Our faith has been praised, questioned, evaluated, stuffed into half a dozen different containers, lost in the waste, found among the garbage, and hung on a line to dry while we figure out what to do with it. I’ll mention once more, just to be sure I’ve covered myself enough, that this happens to any number of people in all sorts of places. But how did it happen in a hothouse of “faith and learning,” in what seems Freshman year to be a utopia of common belief?

I believe that the answer lies in our lack of the obvious common enemy of open disbelief and hedonism. In another place, our Christianity would have been forged against these most pernicious evils. At CCU, our Christianity was a given. If we were there, we were Christians (at least, we all signed the same statement of faith), and instead of a single unifying front, we found ourselves at odds on countless smaller fronts within the faith.

Only gradually did the significance of this become clear. As time passed, we were confronted with different faces of Christianity, different approaches to it, different conceptions of it. Differences which would have been eclipsed by a state of war against the “secular” were thrown into relief on this campus, and instead of mingling only with those who attended the same church, we found ourselves daily with Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, a few Catholics and even an Orthodox believer, high-church people, low-church people, no-church people, people and professors who believed every literal word of the bible and people and professors who believed the bible to be a collection of good ideas with a number of human mistakes. And in the right places at the right times, you could find discussions on any of these topics and more, including Calvinism/Arminianism, post-modern approaches to faith, the effects of culture on the writing and reading of the bible, and feminist interpretations of God, Jesus, and the bible. To name a few. The choices were not between Christianity and Secularism, but between 200 different versions of Christianity with a friend’s face behind each.

Truth be told, I wish I had seen ten times the amount of discussion that I did – I make it sound like these debates were ever-present. They weren’t, but the differences were. And for many of us, the exposure to all of this caused our perfectly-sculpted Greek statues of faith to melt. Just melt. Where a different environment would have hardened our ideas into permanent thought, a Christian environment caused them to lose all shape and form. Frankly, the experience was, for me, terrifying.

And for this, I realize, I reluctantly thank God. Reluctantly because I am uncertain of how to approach this God, uncertain what attributes I can expect of Him/Her and how these will be manifested. In some ways, I feel like the first pagan, trying blindly to ascertain the qualities of a perfectly separate being. And yet I thank God that my sculpted theology of old was destroyed, shattered like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. It was only ever an idol before.

I leave the university not with answers but with questions. Now, it is a struggle, as I believe it ought to be. It is the search for balance between the desire for objective knowledge of God and the subjective pursuit of God. As long as I am struggling, I will call it faith. As long as I settle complacently into either a questionless faith or questionless atheism, I will call it evil. I do not propose, exactly, to question all things at all times – who can live in such a state of flux? – but to leave all things open to inquiry. I have spent too much time disengaged lately. I choose now to re-enter the faith.

Shall I commit to being interesting?

I found myself last night in conversation with one of my close friends, to whom I began to attempt to explain (justify?) this past year of my life. Variously, I said that I had moved out of a sort of existentialist phase and into an unwelcome nihilism. Or I had been depressed. Or I had been removed from established social structures that kept me healthy and thinking. Perhaps my focus had moved outward. Or inward. Or I had lost it altogether.

I gave up trying to explain as I realized that all of these were part of the truth, none were themselves the truth, and that I couldn’t parse out exactly what was the source of my languid, reclusive year. I could, however, say rather firmly that I don’t want next year to be the same.

At the end of the conversation, I found in myself a sort of recommitment to the old existentialist struggle. Mind you, I’ve a fair bit of cynicism and more than a sense of embarrassment attached to this (I can only take existentialists seriously for so long), but while I’m searching for a larger meaning, I’ll continue to create my own.

More basically, I am recommitted to life – to being and doing and interacting, to working, to thinking, to all of the things I have put off for a whole year now. If you are reading this, give me a call – let’s go do something.

I’m not sure whether this blandiose “commitment” will amount to anything, but we will see. One of the things I would like to do is write more, which means both blogging more and writing more on my own. Writing does not develop on its own, and it does degrade through lack of use; looking back on papers written in a flurry of activity last year, I am reminded what I can do when the stars are properly aligned. They have not been so aligned lately.

I will force them into place.