Why Christianity?

I grew up in a fairly homogenous community. I assumed that everyone went to church, except for people who had to work on Sundays, and I assumed that everyone was a Christian the way I assumed everyone thought in English. The words coming out of your mouth might sound different than the ones coming out of mine, but inside, we're saying the same thing. We think the same thing.

I remember asking my Spanish teacher in elementary school why Spanish-speaking people didn't just speak English, if they were all thinking in English in their heads and I was really frustrated when she didn't just answer my question directly. I also remember the first time I met a real Democrat, someone who genuinely disagreed with certain Republican ideas. I thought he was just some smartass making a joke but then I realized, with all the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, that he really believed what he was saying. Those two moments are connected in my brain as times when the world broke in, letting me see that there are different people out there with different ideas from me and that those different people are real.

I say all this because if I'm going to talk about my current faith, as I intend to do this semester, I need you to see where I started. It was a journey to see that there was even a real choice between Christianity and anything else. I made a Jewish friend in college. That's the first time that I met a living, breathing person who adhered to a different religion than me, other than people who said they didn't believe in anything at all but still celebrated Christmas. Well, okay, I also had a Catholic friend growing up, and for us, that was basically like having a friend of a different religion, but I jumped over that hurdle early on- we all believe in the same Jesus. For the majority of my life, Christianity was the truth, the only thing we could know to be true. The only thing that varied was how true you personally found the truth to be.

But meeting people different from me has made all the difference to me. It's, I dunno, it's like seeing Saturn through a telescope for the first time. Little kids, all the time, they'll run around to the front of the scope to see if there's a picture taped on there because they don't believe that they're seeing a real planet with their real eyes. Or it's like seeing, like, an elk out in nature. Sure, you've seen pictures, you have an idea of what an elk is, but it's still going to be abstract in some way until the living thing is in front of you. Or, you know what, even better, it's the difference between having seen Aladdin and having a roommate whose family is from the Middle East. And that's just a baby step.

As soon as you start to see the crack in the concept that was your complete view of the world, you have two options. You can superglue the crap out of it (because we build up our model of the world for very valid reasons of safety and comfort and our first impulse is to keep that safety and comfort) or you can start to pick at it. And me, I pick at things. You can ask my mother. Once I had it in my mind that people genuinely believed something different from me, I needed to know... everything. I needed to know why people had different ideas about different issues, why there weren't clear correct answers to every question, why there might never be clear and correct answers to every question. At eighteen, I had the world figured out. At nineteen, I realized that everyone else had too, but that we had come to different answers. I needed to know why that was and what it meant. For me, pursuing that question meant looking into other religious faiths.

I was still a physics major, so I didn't have time to take every class available, but I took a Hebrew Bible class and class in Biblical Hebrew, I took an Islamic studies class, I took an Evangelicalism in America class because I honestly didn't recognize that part of my religious heritage as mine until I came into class one day not having read the assigned article but being able to summarize and cite all the Left Behind books. My philosophy credit was in the Religious Studies department, a class called Heaven and Hell that talked about the different ideas of the soul and what happens after we die and it's probably the closest thing I got to looking into any non-Abrahamic religions. Like everything else in education, classes like this really only taught me how much I didn't know, but with each experience, the crack grew an inch or two and more light got in. Meanwhile (and afterwards), I was realizing how wonderful and beautiful the lives of other people who had different views of the world were and I ate up their experiences like the storybooks and novels I read as a kid. It was life-giving.

This kind of autobiographical tale usually ends with some kind of revelation, with the author realizing that everything they knew was a lie and abandoning the faith of their past and, I would argue, putting a new one in its place, either self-reliance or some other new religion, but I didn't do that, not exactly. It's true that I have much more difficulty relying on Jesus than I once did, but the church, man, the church was always there for me. It was the place I felt at home. And I know the church has hurt other people and I know that we need to own that and that we need to be better and I feel deep down in my soul that the only way the church can grow is by holding its community accountable to the standards of radically loving our neighbors and our enemies alike and giving selflessly to the world our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our service without asking anything in return. That is our witness to Christ and I know sometimes we live it poorly, but it's the witness we have.

The thing is, I broke my little model of the world, the one that told me that the church had it together and no one else did. I don't believe that anymore. I can't. I know too many other people with too many other stories. When my model broke, my understanding of Christianity broke with it. The church should be a glass shard, slicing open my hand when I go to pick it back up and look at it. But it isn't, not for me. It's a leftover bit of convex glass that, in the right light, helps me see myself the way I want to be- loving and loved. All the colors of the world can still be seen through it, just focused differently. If I hold it right, I can see something that looks like heaven, a heaven I want and a heaven I want here, where no one hurts anyone and no one's hurt.

That's worth holding onto. It might be naive and it might not be true, but if it reminds me to be kind to other human beings, if it dares me to care about somebody besides myself, if it helps me frame every action with a view toward the redemption of the world rather than its destruction, then it's worth it to me.

It's a big if, but I'm dumb enough to hope for it.