Doubt About One's Doubts

GQ magazine has an article from John Sullivan about his visit to the Creation Festival, an annual "Woodstock" style outdoor festival featuring Christian rock bands. It's largely an entertaining glimpse at the evangelical youth subculture with a snarky take on the Christian music industry thrown in (not completely undeserved).

But deeper in the article, Sullivan explains his own passionate immersion into that subculture. As a high school student in the late 70s and early 80s he was plugged into a Bible study group and did his share of one-on-one witnessing. He feels he's not alone in going through this "phase":

Statistically speaking, my bout with Evangelicalism was probably unremarkable. For white Americans with my socioeconomic background (middle to upper-middle class), it's an experience commonly linked to one's teens and moved beyond before one reaches 20. These kids around me at Creation—a lot of them were like that. How many even knew who Darwin was? They'd learn. At least once a year since college, I'll be getting to know someone, and it comes out that we have in common a high school "Jesus phase." That's always an excellent laugh. Except a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.

Bless those who've been brainwashed by cults and sent off for deprogramming. That makes it simple: You put it behind you. But this group was no cult. They persuaded; they never pressured, much less threatened. Nor did they punish. A guy I brought into the group—we called him Goog—is still a close friend. He leads meetings now and spends part of each year doing pro bono dental work in Cambodia. He's never asked me when I'm coming back. (webpage)

Sullivan would like to say he's past this phase now. Except for one thing:

My problem is not that I dream I'm in hell or that Mole is at the window. It isn't that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn't even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It's that I love Jesus Christ.

"The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose." I can barely write that. He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read The Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read The Logia of Yeshua, by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There's your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what's fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. "Let anyone who has power renounce it," he said. "Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be." That's how He talked, to those who knew Him.

Why should He vex me? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can't I just be a good Enlightenment child and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?

Because once you've known Him as God, it's hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won't slacken.

And one has doubts about one's doubts. (webpage)

I talk with guys like Sullivan a lot. A few of my conversations about faith have been with those who had no prior background in Bible study or church attendance, but most have been with people who, like Sullivan, had some exposure earlier in life and passed out of that phase--or so they thought. They are haunted by Jesus, and, in Sullivan's words, they have "doubts about one's doubts."

In the Fall semester of The Anchor Course, our group is at Week Three tonight, and we're at the longest statement from the Apostle's Creed--the one about Jesus. I'm looking forward to our discussions.