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There's an interesting wrinkle to being in seminary - your faith is pretty much out there for all to see, even people who really don't know you. Once it's discovered that you're Christian, assumptions are made about what you think, what you believe, what you feel. A co-worker of a friend back in Milwaukee, upon hearing what I was studying, said I'd become a "born again" Jesus freak. Sight unseen - the choice to return to church, and to then heed a call to ministry, immediately put me in the same box in which this person categorized all Christians. Amy has also felt a certain degree of other people's discomfort. She's a private person, but dating a seminarian pretty much tars her with the same brush. There's a conservative Anglican convention booked for the concert hall (where she works) at which the thrust of discussion will be how to combat same-sex marriage and ordination of homosexuals. Not understanding that Anglicanism covers a broad spectrum, some of Amy's co-workers have nervously attempted to figure out whether or not she shares these views. It's an understandable reaction - gay people have experienced a lot of hostility from under the Christian banner, and pro gay-rights heterosexuals tend to come from outside the church. Once bitten, twice shy and it's all too easy to lump every Christian into one big blob of bad guys. Heck, Christians have been doing it to other groups for years. This comes from within the church as well...a fellow classmate asked why, if I was Christian, I didn't support George W. Bush. (I'm happy to report that the question did not come from an Anglican.) Of course the truth is that faith in Christ does not equal participation in any certain human ideology or political stripe. Faith is something deeper than political alignment or a pet cause. I place a good deal of the blame on the mainline Protestant churches themselves, including the Anglican church. (Rome has always been good about defining where it is and what it stands for, primarily because it's such an hierarchical church.) For many years we've sat idly by as the public faith discourse was taken over by fundamentalists. If we measure influence over public perception in terms of ink, the fundamentalist religious right and the Roman church have certainly done a far better job of advertising their positions. As a result, many people think that those two viewpoints represent the entire Christian faith, that that is what Christianity looks like. A lot of people have been genuinely surprised to discover that I don't accept Genesis as a blow-by-blow account of creation, or that I strongly believe homosexuals have the right to marry. In a way I welcome these misunderstandings as an opportunity to open some minds and to educate...but it can be frustrating, nonetheless. And beyond assumptions about which political beliefs match up with Christianity, there's also a general discomfort (and confusion) around the issue of faith. People seem to think that you're about to turn to them and say, "So, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?" (I have to admit, that phrase sets my teeth on edge. It has so many bad associations, most of which revolve around literalist interpretations of scripture. Also, it claims as exclusive a relationship which is ultimately communal...but I digress.) There also seems to be a going assumption that my personality and behaviour is going to change radically, that I'm going to start wearing cardigans and saying "Swell!" all the time. Just to clear that one up...God created us with infinite variety and the free will to grow into our own persons. God likes who we are, and can work through us just as we are. If God wanted us to fit into a narrow set of behaviours, we'd have been created that way. I'm still digressing. I'm digressing from my digression. Oy. I'd best wrap up before I digress so much that I come around to my original point. |
