Agnostic Christianity

Or How I Started Writing About Talking Snakes and Portals to Hell in the Choir Room Supply Closet

Can you be agnostic and religious? I somehow can’t help but identify as both.

I was listening to the Mormon Stories podcast yesterday, and my own post from a couple years ago came to mind.

If you don’t know about Mormon Stories, it’s a podcast started by John Dehlin, who wanted a place for LDS people to come to terms with their religion and their upbringing. As the internet offered more and more readily available information, that led many to doubt what they’d been told, often causing pain and disruption; these people needed a place to process and help others understand they were not alone. Most of the guests are LDS or former LDS who tell stories of their own personal journeys as they process what they were taught and what they may believe now. (Dehlin was excommunicated for the podcast).

Yesterday, the host of Hidden True Crimes, Lauren Matthias, already a frequent guest on the show, told her own story. Though she still respects and loves the religion and LDS community of her youth, she now identifies as agnostic. Her story is amazing and her guiding star was not a specific theological interpretation of the complex religion she grew up in. Quite the opposite. The central fact is love, for ourselves, and for other people. This is what helps us understand and make use of the stories and ideas central to religious communities. Religion is not the lens through which we understand love. Love is the lens through which we understand religion.

You can listen here.

Anyway, I think I’ve reached a similar stage in my own understanding. Or at least I’m getting there. Here’s the original post.

I was at a writing conference last year, deep into a bottle of bourbon with a couple friends, when someone asked me where I was—religiously speaking. I didn’t mind, because I write about talking snakes, and portals to Hell that open in church choir rooms, so I thought the question was fair.  When I thought about it, but not too much—remember, bourbon—I said I’m an agnostic Christian. I kind of surprised myself as I don’t think that’s a thing. But I guess it’s my thing.

Why agnostic? Because I’m in the same boat as everyone else on this planet. I don’t know why I’m here, don’t know the answer to the meaning of life (could it actually be 42 and Adams pulled that number from the quantum fields or the collective unconscious? If so, maybe, like everyone else, I just don’t know the question.)

I come back to this one fact all the time. From our perspective, no one knows exactly what this is all about or if something beyond us started it somehow. If you are religious, this not knowing is the basis of faith.

Do you believe in Jesus as a being who walks beside you, or that love is the central tenet of the universe, or the FSM, or nirvana, or whatever? You are still on this plane of existence where you can’t prove those things to other people. You don’t know. You have faith.

Is this existence a trial: is someone watching to see how we’ll act with no guarantees about the final outcome? Is it an experiment, some weird simulation? Do aliens watch us like a comedy show? Is is a drama? There are many possibilities if you let your mind wander. But it’s impossible to prove these things to other people. This seems so simple and yet we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time killing people to convince them that what we believe is right. (This technique isn’t convincing as far as we know, since we also don’t talk to dead people in any way that, again, we can prove to others.)

Faith can help make sense of the mystery. If you believe that this world is bigger than your own life, it might change the choices that you make. Ultimately, it shapes you, whether you want it to or not. It can lead to moral action. It often doesn’t. Still, faith isn’t the same as knowing. People who get faith and knowledge confused make a real mess of things for the rest of us. When you think you know everything, you’ll do anything (to the rest of us). Apparently.

And thus, the agnostic portion of my response.

So, if I’m agnostic, why the Christian? I guess in a way it’s a PSA. Something you should know about where my brain has been. Warning: this person was raised in white evangelicalism!

Honestly, in my formative years, I sat through so many sermons, Sunday school lessons, Vacation Bible School talks, revivals, etc. that the stories of Christianity kind of sunk down into my brain and bones. They’re in there, kids, and they ain’t coming out. That doesn’t mean I want you to believe these stories or even that I worry now about whether I myself am a believer or whether I’m interpreting them correctly (more on that later). They’re just there. Foundational. If you hear a story a couple hundred times, it becomes part of the mind whether you accept or reject it.

I don’t resent that. I don’t mind acknowledging how I was shaped even if I have to acknowledge that it left me twisted up in some ways. I still love some of those stories. I still  find meaning in them.

Probably becoming an English major was my downfall when it came to keeping the stories under the control of the church—only meaning what certain people wanted them to mean. The Bible is a book of stories written by certain people for certain people in specific times and places, and like all stories, they have themes and outcomes. But they also have tangents and threads that can be pulled. The Bible is, by and large, not a rule book at all—although there are some exceptions—long boring exceptions. Stories are meant to be interpreted. They can only be seen through the lens of life experience of the person hearing them. They sometimes require research. They always require an empathetic understanding of the characters. Even “true stories.”

Like all stories, sometimes a biblical narrative forms a lens through which you see can interpret some unrelated or tangential theme—not a problem if you can acknowledge the peripherality of your interpretation. Some stories make you feel empathy for the characters, sometimes even the villains. A good portion of the Bible, unlike the ten commandments, is not a list of dos and don’ts. It something you have to think about. To sit with. Narratives threads are all part of the great circle of life and death. (Say that last sentence in an Inspector Clouseau accent. You’ll get more out of it.)

To get the good out of a story—the truth of it, I suppose you could say (but also, I don’t know if I’d put it that way exactly)—you don’t have to take it literally. (The sheer impossibility of “literalism” as a way of understanding story is another can of worms. And I don’t mean literal worms.) In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t take religious stories literally. Most Christians don’t look at Jesus parables and go, “this says  if I lose a sheep I should go find it. Does this mean I need sheep? Hey honey, let’s get sheep! The Bible says so.” They interpret the story as a metaphor.

For instance, I still love the story of the feeding of the five thousand, where the willingness of one person to share helped feed a whole crowd. Whether you believe in the miracle or not, the moral of the story seems to be that Jesus—with the help of some kid who was the only one who remembered to pack a lunch, or at least was willing to admit it—fed a whole bunch of hungry people, even those who’d followed him out to the desert to figure out how to backstab him later. Even those who just came to the event on a lark. The poor who maybe didn’t have a means of bringing food. Those who did have means but didn’t realize the sermon was going to run through lunch and dinner. Whether or not you believe in the miracle, the point is the same. God has the power to use us to feed people, to turn a pittance into plenty. And when it came to feeding people, Jesus fed them all with no moral judgments.

The power of God + power of people willing to help = problem solved. That was what I thought as a child anyway. That’s been my takeaway from that story, miracle or no. And maybe even if you leave some sort of powerful supernatural being out of the equation: when people use their resources together, it means everyone can eat.

I tried to bring this up with some (non-agnostic) Christians who were freaking out over immigrants coming to the US to seek asylum. We don’t have enough resources they said. What about our homeless vets they said. (I have never known any of them to vote for anyone who would help homeless vets, nor largely to help homeless vets themselves. A tangent for another time.) At that time, I’d  taught ESL to immigrants, refugees, and asylum speakers, and I knew their stories of hard work, sacrifice, and the many reasons they came here. They were people, who needed to make a new life. By and large good people in bad circumstances. Also, the kind of people who will ultimately make this country a better place.

“Hey Christians,” I said. “You believe in a literal interpretation of the feeding of the five thousand, right? Miracle and everything?”

“Indeed,” they responded. (This conversation has been condensed and heavily edited for your more rapid edification, but I assure you they assented to this interpretation.)

“So, God has the power to make food guys. Literal food. Like one person says they’re willing to share then, poof! God makes food, right? What do you have to worry about. Welcome these people in in the name of Jesus, that’s your deal right? God will certainly feed them.”

Guess what I found out? No, really. Guess.

God doesn’t do that anymore.

According to certain theological interpretations outside the scope of the actual story of the feeding of the five thousand, it turns out that God does not have that kind of power anymore. Or at least he’s not going to use it for a bunch of poor people who desperately need our help. Or something. Score: theology one; story zero.

The sad fact of the matter is, that in the churches I attended, we were taught to throw out the narrative aspects of the Bible, to kill the story and pick over the bones. With the broken stories we forged weapons. We constructed bone houses to live in, to keep others out. Bone fences. Bone cages. All bits and pieces we’d torn out of the scriptures to use for ourselves. The stories, the part I cared about, were dead or on life support as we parted them out to build fortresses for our tribes.

At some point, I walked out of my fortress and threw down the weapons I’d made out of pieces of scripture, partly because I’d fallen in love with stories, and I didn’t want to torture them anymore.  I put down the scalpel. And I realized that I needed to listen to a lot more stories from a lot more people before I was capable of even beginning to understand my own story or the stories I grew up with. Because stories, it turns out, are more than individual narratives. They’re knotted together. They weave us together.

I also needed to start building stories of my own. To play with narratives. To think through things without constantly running into the walls that had been built to contain and shape the stories. I let go and the images started to come together into stories of my own.

Before long, my own story and the stories that formed me conjured copper colored talking snakes, portals to Hell, imps in the church graveyard, and why sometimes the scariest things you’ll find are hiding in the basement of a church. Maybe most of it makes more sense to me than to anyone else, after all they’re created from the flotsam and jetsam of my own life, the dust left behind when I pulled down the false front of faith masquerading as knowledge. But until I figure out a better way to handle things, I’ll keep making stories out of the wreckage. And seeking out other stories, as many as I can find.

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