Glennalicious

« Trouble with 'mos and 'tians | Main | One whole year with the one I lurve »

July 03, 2006

My very smart boyf opines on the 'mos and 'tians

He actually wrote in my comments, which he never does. I felt it a shame not to include it in my hard to read comments section. Here it is:

I hestitate to add to this discussion as it seems to be turning into a not very fruitful one, filled as it is with recrimination, projection, and generalizations in response to Glenn's attempts to thread his way through the labyrinth of religion in America. But Andy's recent claims that only Evangelicals are closed minded vis-a-vis Christianity, while all other religious sects under this broad banner are not so much (a wild generalization, if ever there was one) needs to be, as he suggests, "deconstructed" (the philosopher in me has many problems with this use of a very specific term).

I can only do it by use of a little story, maybe even a parable, from my teaching experience. I teach a course on the masterpieces of western literature in an Ivy League university and we do study scripture, both Jewish and Christian. This university attracts liberal students from all denominations, races, creeds, genders (but not classes--a whole other story!). Every time I have taught scripture, particularly the gospels, the Christian students are--and I am putting it mildly--reactive. They insist that, individually, they know what this text means (and only their reading has validity), that students of other creeds (or, I suppose no creed at all) cannot comment on this text. I had one student raised by parents who lived in Communist China--a totally secular family--and she had never read any scripture at all, and had little exposure to people of any faith. Her assessment was that the books we read were deeply illogical, uninteresting, and filled with stultifying prose (on all these points I think she lacks nuance). But so what if she dismisses a text that others find edifying? I love reading scripture and I didn't take it personally, although later I did ask her to bring up one point of contradiction so we could examine it as a class. Before I could do that, numerous Christian students very loudly denounced her, telling her she had no right to comment on this text as she was an alien to the faith, a reaction that defeated any notion of sharing opposing viewpoints. Not once did the Christian students pause when condemning Greek literature, like the "Hymn to Demeter," an explicitly religious text, that they found alien, uninteresting, or unengaging. It was hard for these students when I pointed out this obvious instance of hypocrisy on their part.

In another class, when a reading of Luke's gospel was not going the way one student wished, she began to loudly repeat over and over, "You just need to have faith," "You just need to have faith." Now, everyone reading this likely thinks these students were extremists, even fundamentalists. But they weren't. I knew all the students involved and I can say that they thought of themselves as open-minded, politically liberal, and knowledgeable of other faith traditions. It is worth noting that they were both Catholics and Protestants.

Obviously, their reactions to readers "not of the faith" created a teaching challenge for me (which I solved and continue to solve each time I teach scripture, something I love to do). Regardless, what I found most fascinating is that these normally very generous and open people rapidly hardened when faith became a question. Christianity was not an idea, or a system of beliefs, but an object, one they possessed; it was their property and for anyone to stray on it without permission could only be construed as criminal.

Lest anyone think my characterization is histrionic, let me affirm: these students often raised their voices, often repeated that it is faith and only faith over and over not to prove a point but to show that they no longer would listen to anyone else. And it was always behavior out of character. I found that most Christian students--of all sects--found it very difficult to be in a room in which their faith was subject to any kind of analysis, let alone outright criticism. Most of these students became "intolerant, paranoid, anti-intellectual, and ideological" when it was time to look at the texts that were the core of their religious belief system. But, that makes sense when I appreciated that their belief system was the dominant one, affirmed for them in many ways, both public and private.

What difference if Homer or anyone else thinks that the Judeo-Christian texts are simply a bunch of rule books? (To be clear, I don't know what of the Judeo-Chrisian texts Homer has read.) At worst, he could be judged as ignorant of their content, but is ignorance the same as "disdain"? If someone is not intimately acquainted with the details of certain books, has not ruminated over their meaning (and may not want to at all), then does that mean that he or she "disdains" those books? I don't think so.

Now, I am not doing justice to my students, of many faiths and no faith, who read these texts in new ways, challenging their own beliefs and finding truths. Sometimes, this did happen. Sometimes, Jewish students would work with Christian students, showing the Christian students how to translate the Hebrew of "Genesis" into English, demonstrating how difficult translating texts is and that no text is ever a perfect translation: words have many meanings and sometimes words resist transport to another language entirely. A lot of exciting readings came out of these classes and many of the Christian students taught me much about their different sects' strategy of reading certain texts.

In my opinion, no one needs to be circumspect in debating and discussing any faith; errors should be challenged with evidence, stories should be shared, differences should be honored, no matter how painful they might be to paricipants. If we are all to be so circumspect, then no one will learn, differences will not be aired, and change, for all involved, will not be possible. And without change, without growth, human life, in my mind, would be greatly impoverished.

Posted by G at July 3, 2006 07:52 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.glennalicious.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/521

Comments

Posted by: BJ at July 3, 2006 10:44 PM

Posted by: Chris at July 3, 2006 11:22 PM

Posted by: doug at July 4, 2006 02:22 AM

Posted by: Chris at July 7, 2006 01:07 AM

Posted by: goblinbox at July 9, 2006 12:22 PM