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I
AM NOT AN EVANGELICAL . . . NOR AM I LIKELY TO BECOME ONE
For most of my life I have known very little about evangelicals other
than that I was not one and did not want to be one. My encounters with
them accustomed me to disliking them. They were people who sat beside
me on buses and wanted to talk about Jesus. They were people I met through
work who wanted to talk about Jesus. They were people gathered on city
centre street corners declaring themselves saved by the blood of the Lamb
and telling me that my worthless life was leading me only to Hell. I do
not believe this, and I doubt if the most reasonable or persistent evangelical
could persuade me of it. I regard proselytising as an impertinence and
people who would proselytise me as a nuisance. Those who befriend me only
because they want to bring me to Jesus are not welcome in my life. I have
more time for those who would befriend me and bring me to the pub.
Those who understand
their own truths to be the only truths which are appropriate for me are
dismissing me as a person, denying the possibility that I live a life founded
on my own valuable insights and experience. They may want to love the holy
spirit in me, but I do not feel that they want to love me.
Yet I have a growing
interest in the culture of evangelicalism, and I have been almost startled
to find in this book that many of the perceptions which I have about evangelicals
are honestly considered by many evangelicals themselves. Some, at least,
are not ignorant of how they are perceived outside their culture, but we
on the outside have been ignorant of the questions they ask themselves.
What I did not expect
in this book was that an evangelical writer would acknowledge the problems
that arise from evangelicals separating themselves from the world or that
they would be asking the same questions about their positions that the secular
world asks of them too.
Not Of This World explores
the fracturing of evangelicalism, fundamentalism, the subculture, the disaffection
with politics, the suspicion of Catholics and their church. Jordan has a
detached ethnographer’s eye for the diversity within evangelical tradition.
One interviewee frets over the attitude taken by him to fundamentalists:
‘It makes me angry that these people are taking the place of God in judging
me’ - yet that is what even the liberal evangelicals quoted are doing with
people that they do not class as Christians. For people of other Christian
traditions, the most offensive thing in evangelicalism, by the way, is the
appropriation to themselves of the term Christian and the right they claim
to deny that title to others.
I found the author difficult
to locate within the factions of evangelicalism that he describes, until
I came to his personal disclosure in the Epilogue, but took him for an inclusive
evangelical. I was shocked however by some of his remarks for example, the
assessment that ‘unthinking ecumenism is as hazardous … as unrepentant sectarianism’.
I cannot believe that any effort to mingle with people of a different spiritual
tradition can be as hazardous as any refusal to. Occasional remarks like
that reminded me how far removed my own thinking was likely to be from his.
The book describes a
culture which is constructed around the conviction of being right. What
evangelicals might learn from Catholics, if they thought about it, is how
they made their own transition from being ‘the one true faith’ to accommodating
pluralism and dissent. The remarks quoted about the Catholic church, however,
betray a complete obliviousness to any such transition having taken place.
This, as the author says, is probably because evangelicals are learning
about Catholicism only from other evangelicals. This is one of the core
areas where the author wants change.
Evangelicalism appears
to be an isolationist culture within which at least some people are becoming
aware of the contradictions and stresses their aloofness from the world
creates. As people affirmed by their inner experience of grace and their
communities, that they have nothing to learn about faith from anyone outside
themselves, they appear to the outside world as smug and small minded. Yet
this book questions whether evangelicals stand on sure ground. One man tells
the interviewer that he has experienced the whole Trinity, yet gives no
plausible account of awe-struck enthralment. There are far more plausible
accounts of epiphany from many secular writers than from virtually any Northern
Irish Evangelical testimony that I have heard.
The author finds many
evangelicals who simply don’t want to take any interest in political problems
or accept any responsibility for them. ‘It is surely inexcusable that young
people can be allowed to grow up in a faith context and be completely illiterate
about the realities of community division …’
The exploration of this
phenomenon reveals that evangelicals do not want to see themselves as part
of that community division, declining labels like Protestant and asserting
that their problems with Catholics and the Irish Republic are only theological.
To the secular eye, these people have found a comfort zone within which
they can absolve themselves of responsibility and criticism with the fantasy
that they are the only people who know the truth.
Yet other evangelicals
wrestled with their consciences. Some were appalled to find themselves less
concerned about the murder of Catholics than about the murder of Protestants.
Some few were pure pacifists and some wanted a strong security crackdown,
primarily on the IRA, and had contemplated arming themselves for Loyalism.
The author, as a former
Roman Catholic, speaks of the sense of awe which he experienced in the religion
of his childhood and, pointing to flaws in modern evangelicalism, declares
that it fails to recognise its own history and that it lacks the sense of
mystery that ritual and symbol would give it. He wants evangelicals to form
a new sense of community, to relate to evangelicals internationally and
to learn about Catholicism from Catholics rather than from other evangelicals.
His description of the
fracturing of evangelicalism gives me more hope than I think it gives him,
for it is always good news when people have begun to think for themselves.
The human imagination grapples everywhere with the idea of God. Different
religious faiths are different attempts to imagine an infinite, indefinable
God. All can only ever be wrong, but when they assert that they are right,
and that they can comprehend the Infinite as a person, they risk persuading
themselves that an infinite consciousness is only a little more interesting
than their own grandfathers. This is what shocked me most about what evangelicals
said to Glenn Jordan, how low and mundane their expectations of God are.
The question that remains
to puzzle me is the validity of the transformative experiences which people
declare. Were evangelicals really given a new life, a new perception and
a new love of God and neighbour, would we not see the fruits of this in
their conduct and their culture?
The author accuses fellow
evangelicals of a ‘flight from mystery’. He says he wants evangelicals to
awaken their imaginations. I wonder if they would continue to be evangelicals
if they considered that many wonderful things can happen in the imagination,
that are healthy and within the natural range of human experience.
The evangelical is ‘born
again’, sometimes by a sudden and specific memorable moment of grace which
affirms the centrality of Jesus and the Bible. From within the evangelical
culture as described by Glenn Jordan, there seems to be a wide range of
experiences which can be accepted as manifestations of that grace. These
range from a conscious decision to accept Jesus, to a palpable and critical
intervention in a person’s usual way of thinking and feeling.
It may be that people
who experience these interventions are really discovering depths of emotion
that they had not considered possible from within their restricted experience.
It may be that they are undergoing a genuine expansion of themselves, their
thinking and their perception, a sudden step forward in their development
as people. Or perhaps they are having a good idea that illuminates how conflicts
in their lives and relationships might be resolved and integrated.
I have had such moments
in my own life and I believe that most people have. Some of us are so taken
by the import and suddenness of the moment that they attribute it to God.
Perhaps in a sense they are right, if God is a metaphor for the healing
power of Nature that restores us in other ways too.
It seems a pity that
some who are shaken in this way immediately conclude from the experience
that they now know all they need to know about life and cut out the possibility
of undergoing further radical upheaval again.
At the time that I was
reading this book, I came across a line from Ted Simon in his book, Jupiter’s
Travel, about his journey round the world on a motorbike. Simon wrote of
a moment of insight that overwhelmed him: ‘As I think about (distance travelled)
I have a sudden and extraordinary flash, something I have never had before
and am never able to recapture again. I see the whole of Africa in one single
vision, as though illuminated by lightning.’
There are several such moments in the experience of a traveller who has
lost his bearings among familiar things and opened his mind to infinite
possibilities.
'There are in me,' he writes, 'the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe
could be reconstructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and
a holograph of the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than
trying to discover these secrets.'
Half the evangelicals
interviewed in this important book need to be thrust out into the world
they loathe, to learn how to feel and think like this. Some of the others
appear to be inching towards realising that.
Malachi
O’Doherty is a freelance journalist.
www.malachiodoherty.com |
