DAY 1--THE DISGRUNTLED SONS
There is among my circle of friends and acquaintances from Hillsdale a sub-category which Daniel Silliman has dubbed The Disgruntled Sons of the Moral Majority. They are those young (mostly) men who have rejected or drifted from the (usually) evangelical Protestant faith of their parents and instead embraced a variety of viewpoints, some more defined, some less. Some tend towards rejecting religion altogether, some only the Christian God, some only the particularly conservative stripe of Christianity in which they were reared (occasionally, though rarely, for an even more conservative stripe). I don't think I've encountered any exhaustive listing of their ranks, but Silliman's term makes me think of several by name: Daniel Silliman himself, Jonathan Metzger, Peter Krupa, Nathan Loizeaux, Adam Prizio, Sam Nicholson, and perhaps Will Farnham. Bob Golding gets a mention as well, although I don't think he was quite the son of any Moral Majority member.
I suppose I consider these fellows to be "Disgruntled Sons" because they are the ones who I expect will be least impressed with any argument I make in favour of Christianity in general, or Orthodoxy in particular. By least impressed, I mean either "ready to bust out the big guns to decimate my argument" or "couldn't care less about what I have to say," depending on the person.
But they are also the members of the Hillsdale Blogosphere whose opinions I most respect, whose blogs I most enjoy reading, those for whose comments I eagerly hope every time I post something theological/philosophical. These are the men with whom I most enjoy conversation--not the members of the Orthodox Blogosphere, as I should expect it to be.
I find this confusing. My faith, I think, is strong. So why do I not enjoy the company of those who share that faith as much as that of these who do not?
I suppose that, in a certain sense, I am as much a Disgruntled Son as the rest of them--I certainly struck out away from my parents' specific worldview in search of something better long before I got to college. But unlike the rest of them, I was never really even tempted to reject Christianity. When I saw problems in Christianity, I blamed them on myself or on the fallibility of other people. I have still seen nothing that discredits the essence of the Faith--unless it be the fact that I so often prefer the Disgruntled Sons over fellow Orthodox Christians. ;)
So what made these men, for whom I hold such respect, jump ship? Why does faith falter? Why do the Disgruntled Sons wander so far? And why am I content to remain?
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In J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish dialect of Quenya, Arandir means Noble Wanderer. Selected in my youth as I searched for deeper religious truth, this nom de plume remains apt--for I am still a pilgrim and sojourner in this world, truly a ''stranger in a strange land.'' It remains my purpose to record here whatever seems noteworthy of my musings and experience as I travel the way of life.
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8 comments:
The term's not mine, I just continued to use it after it was fashionable to do so. I would add to that list, but mostly people who came after you (the exception to that being Slater).
You probably overstate the "rejection" of the Sons. What they have in common isn't a "jumping ship," so much as a coming to doubt. The difference between "good Christian people," (Oh the O'Conner-ness of that phrase!) as our parents knew them and as you seem to see the Greek Orthodox has to do with certainty and doubt.
It was, if I recall correctly, a term Sam first employed, but that Metzger used heavily around the time he was writing a post called "praying for our parents." None of the relevant posts are currently online. This is a shame, because if they were, I could demonstrate that at least some of us claim to be disgruntled because of our own faith, rather than despite the faith of our parents.
I kind of agree with Silliman that you may be overstating your case about the rejection of faith, although when I look at your list of names, I think that it's something that has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. I am not offended if the language you use to encompass, say, myself, Peter Krupa, and Bob Golding fails sufficiently to express the nuances of my personal story.
Speaking for myself, I think in retrospect that my rejection was never of Christ but of a culture which fails to take seriously many of His words but speaks them anyway. There is a very real sense in which American evangelicals want to treat non-Christians as though they had simply backslidden, as though their objections were disingenuous and selfish.
There is a serious problem with any discourse which, for example, behaves as if it has introduced an argument against homosexuality when it points out that the bible says homosexuality is wrong. The gays already know this, believe me, and they don't care. We haven't given them a reason to care. (There is something wrong, for that matter, with the whole idea that one can argue against homosexuality.) You cannot behave as though you are going to inherit the earth, and still be meek.
I found that I could only draw close to Christ when I seperated Him from the culture which calls itself by His name.
Christianity in America has had material success. Due to what has been called the Protestant work ethic, it has known wealth. It has been a kingmaker many times over. It demands pride of place in the hallways of power. And as a result, it has forgotten that its allegiance is not to this world, that we are resident aliens in the land, that it is supposed to be difficult and dangerous to be God's chosen people. The culture with which I have had such problems cannot afford to hate its father and mother and sisters and brothers and its own life, because it has too much at stake in this world.
Having said all of this, I don't think that any of us believes that we have the whole answer, but I think that we would all like to see the problem acknowleged a little more widely.
Also, it is worth mentioning that the disgruntled sons you have mentioned are (myself excepted) highly intelligent and articulate writers/thinkers who still treat religion as a serious or important practice, independently of their own personal experiences encountering or failing to encounter Christ. I, too, find their words to be of great value, for they come from rare and wonderful minds rather than common theological allegiances.
Good post. Keep it up.
-- Gauche
*sigh* As usual, the Priz makes me feel like a comparative illiterate.
I wasn't surprised to see myself listed among the ranks, albeit as a "perhaps," but I became surprised as I read your further characterization of us. I think Silliman summed up the real issue.
Something I often find myself saying is, "An unquestioned faith is no faith at all." Another is, "Anyone who tells you they have the answers to questions about the nature and existence of evil, the balance of grace, justice and mercy, or any such thing, obviously hasn't thought about any of them." The doubt is what makes us these Disgruntled Sons. Even in my rejection of the faith of my immediate fathers, albeit not those further back, I've discovered I'm far more evangelical than I ever would have imagined. It's just that the e is a lower case one, and it's not one that requires I do things like vote party lines, not have gay friends, or talk about "sola scriptura" like it's an a priori truth. It's an evangelical faith that sees where Ivan Karamazov is coming from in respectfully returning his ticket to God, respects him for that, but hopes he'll pick it back up again in the future. It's a faith that believes I can do more good for myself and for my fellow man by realizing that I am no better than the worst of these and doing all within my power to love them as I love myself. It's a faith that weeps in prayer that my love may one day reflect God's in such a manner that those who cannot see it one day shall. It's a faith that recognizes that my falling short makes me the least worthy judge of others, but that it also acknowledges that we do, in fact, fall short, and recognizes where we do. It's a faith that calls sin sin, but doesn't call one sin worse than another. It's a faith that believes being Christlike means bearing the burdens of all my brothers, not just those who believe as I do. It's a faith that knows I'll never be Christlike in this life, but exlaims "I'll be damned if I'm going to stop trying!" It's a faith that doesn't know what it means by "I'll be damned," but believes it has some kind of substantive meaning, but also hopes nobody ever finds out what that meaning is. It's a faith that sees the differences between heresy and orthodoxy, and can see that heretics and apostates exist for a reason. It's a faith that still tries to walk down paths that it knows are beyond searching out, because they cannot be saved who are not lost.
Rambling over, let it be known that there are those of us who would be unimpressed by your arguments in favor of Christianity not because we disagree, don't care, nor because we bust out the big guns, but because we've already stared down that pit, it stared back, and then it blinked and we kept walking. Some of us are unimpressed because we've probably wrestled with the demons you're fighting against, and it left us champions of the ideas you maintain, but with scars to the bone, scars always reminding us that the claws of such demons do, in fact, scratch, and we cannot fault those who yielded to them.
So much for my follow-up post explaining why precisely you gentlemen are my favorite bloggers.
If, in my future life as a clergyman, I can help any to care enough about the Faith to doubt it and to question it, then I will hold myself to have done well.
But the purpose of that doubt should be to shake us from our lethargy and rouse us from our sleep, to introduce us into the fiery reality of the Way of Christ. I live in fear of a doubt that admits no answers.
I admit that I painted with very broad strokes, drawing a line in the sand between "us" and "you" which may be more deceptive than helpful.
If I did, it is because I have always considered myself to belong on your side of the line, and am bewildered to find myself alone combining doubt with faith in submission to an ancient church.
Not that I find fault with those who have yielded, as you say, Will. I too, I think, have a share in the scars of which you speak. But may I not mourn those who have fallen, and wish for their wounds to be healed?
And is it not strange that I find more common with any one of you than with so many of those with whom I share the Cup of Christ week by week?
Perhaps it is because I know how you yearn for that communion, while so many of those born to it could not care less.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst...
Mr. Gugg,
Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. We say that every week, lest we forget that everything we believe rests on this great unnatural absurdity. Calling it a miracle only gives it a name: it does not answer the obvious question.
Let us consider for a moment the doctrine of the Trinity: how can one being be three? Does it shed any real light on the subject to say that they are three-in-one?
The person of Christ: all God and all man. Huh?
How about some of the stickier old chestnuts, like the existence at once of both an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God and human suffering.
The point being, I take great comfort in knowing that I serve a master whose ways are too subtle and complex for me to understand. It allows me to proceed in faith when I hear Him speaking and I do not know why He asks the things He asks. G.K. Chesterton talks in his book Orthodoxy of how the church has had to be dogmatic because of its peculiar and contradictory mission. "Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage.... Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.... A soldier surrounded by his enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. he must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying."
And later, he writes, "It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is — can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved."
Still later, "It is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch, but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideas and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world."
(My apologies. It is difficult for me to know when to stop quoting Chesterton.)
The point being, what if "I don't know" is not always an admission of doubt but sometimes the guiding certainty of one's faith? I don't know how to be all for Justice and all for Mercy, as my Father is all Just and all Merciful. But I know that I am called to try my hardest to be wholly on the side of both.
It is hardly strange that you find these things in common with those of us who still wrestle on occasion with guilt or nostalgia over the faith we were raised in. You were not raised Orthodox, and that your own transition was relatively short and (from what little I saw) painless does not make it any less of a transition. But tell us, noble wanderer, in what ways do you feel your kinship to us outsiders, and for what reasons, and perhaps it will not seem so strange to you.
It does not seem strange to me at all.
Yours as always,
-- Gauche
Regarding doubt...
Dogmatically, the Church to which I submit answers that "I don't know," is enshrined in its mystical tradition under the name of Apophaticism.
Personally, I answer that I fear the stagnation of utter certainty--in the moment I assert that I possess the ultimate answer, and can articulate it, I have placed an idol between myself and the God Whom I seek. Chesterton's dilemma as experienced by the Church as a whole is, I suspect, experienced personally by each individual within Her.
As for what kinship I feel to you--it is precisely because of your doubt and your skepticism, your unwillingness to swallow unexamined the pat explanations of the great dilemmas, your willingness to say that you don't know.
It is only when I categorize the world into those inside the visible Church and those outside that it seems strange to me at all. And while I must retain that line in the sand, yet also I must repudiate it. Salvation comes to those who seek it, not to those who believe they possess it. And in that subtle distinction, I think, is found my kinship with you.
Though I would give a great deal to be considered intellectual company with Nicholson, Gauche, et. al., I'm not entirely sure if I fit into this category.
Scratch that. I don't fit into this category, period.
Almost everyone Gugg mentioned, with the exception of Krupa, is still fighting and wrestling with faith, whereas I had given it up entirely. And I still stand by the conviction that it was the best decision I've ever made - the very next morning I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and it still hasn't returned.
Since then, I've given up waxing poetic (with no offense intended to Gauche, since he could kick my ass in that category any day), taken up smoking, kept pursuing music, continued reading history, and in general been very surprised that precious, precious little has changed about me at all. Perhaps I never believed it in the first place. Or perhaps there wasn't much there to begin with.
I don't know. But now that I don't have to know, I'm a helluva lot more comfortable.
I still think you belong in the category, Wazoo. At the very least, you were foremost in my mind as I wrote the post.
It seems that there is requisite to any doubt at least some potential for abandonment of the Faith. That you actually abandoned it only bears witness to that fact.
I may be projecting myself on the rest of you, but seems to me that all the struggles of these "Disgruntled Sons" can be distilled to a basic search for something fulfilling, something that simply rings true. Every man and woman, it seems, has been by some inner need to find a worldview that feels right to them. Perhaps I have so much respect for the Disgruntled Sons because they are so unwilling to put up with imposters and cheap imitations.
Your struggle always seemed unique to me--the questions you asked seemed subtly different from those of others. You certainly had different criteria by which you judged the answers I or anyone else gave, criteria which I don't think I ever understood. In retrospect, your need to discover the truth of Christianity seemed almost forced on you from outside. Thus it is no wonder you felt liberated when you abandoned the whole mess.
You seem still to be searching for something. What that is, I don't know. We haven't really talked since I graduated. My impression is that you're trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be, and have decided to tell those who think they know the answers where they can shove them.
For which decision I take my hat off to you (while regretting that you seem to categorize me with those who would like to force answers on you).
I do of course hope that you will eventually find your way back to Christianity--but that you do so because you find that you need Christ to be fulfilled. That is the only reason to approach Him at all--certainly the only one He will accept. If you don't need Him, why bother faking it?
I personally would much rather talk to you as you are than force you to pretend that you feel something you don't.
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