Blast from the past: The Baptists and the rest of us

I've explained how Wife started attending Christian churches, and how she ended up at an Evangelical Baptist church. (OK, strictly speaking I don't have a story about how she ended up there in particular. But she was church-shopping, and that's the one she settled on.) I've told you a story which let you know that the Senior Pastor was willing to go out on a limb and try something unusual. How did the rest of us end up there?

[What follows is an account based on a long email I wrote to Marie in May of 2016, with minor additions or adjustments where suitable.]

Once Wife settled on a church, she started asking us to go with her. The boys had no special interest, but they were still little kids at this point. Clearly it wasn't up to them. I had no special interest either. Wife insisted that it made her look bad if we didn't come with her. I told her this was silly, but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that the whole idea was absurd. Really, Babe, it's not all about you.

Now, this was while I was out of work. [Let's call it 2003.] And Wife was being particularly unsupportive: indeed, it felt like not only did I have to be looking for work 8 hours a day but I had to be managing her anxiety (and her consequent shrewishness and regular threats to divorce me) something like 16 hours a day. It wasn't much fun. Anyway, I finally sat her down to talk earnestly, and made a deal with her: I would attend church with her (and put the boys in Sunday School) if she would commit to behaving in a Christ-like way. (And of course I meant this in the sense that her church was teaching her to understand the word "Christ-like": I certainly didn't want her to behave like the rabble-rouser who smashed up the tables of the money-changers in the Temple!) She said she didn't think she could possibly do that; I said "Of course not, not under your own power. So if you succeed in doing it anyway, that's proof that God is helping you; and in that case God must be real and I'm willing to go to church." Well, the bargain didn't hold forever—after a while she had started an everything-but-physical-sex emotional affair with the Lead Tenor in the church choir—but for a while it bought me a bit of peace. So sure, hell, why not? Besides, this gave me a whole new vocabulary with which to try to talk her out of her crazier and more destructive behaviors.

 [Now that I think about it, I give the details of the contract itself in this post here. Go read it. But I don't talk about the aftermath.]

Now, the Senior Pastor at this church happened to be a very smart guy. He had been an attorney before hearing the call to the ministry, and his sermons were usually interesting. That is to say, they weren't models of scholarship—that's not the target he was trying to hit. But they weren't stupid either. He'd go through a chapter of Scripture and then comment on it, and always found interesting things to say. (I remember he spent several months working his way through Ephesians, which he claimed contains all Christian doctrine in a nutshell.) So after a while I didn't really mind going. The boys didn't much care for Sunday School, but they basically tuned out during the lesson part and then had a blast during the free-play-and-snacks that came after. (And then there was the time that they ducked out of Sunday School completely, and spent the whole morning playing hide-and-seek in the parking lot! We found out about that only afterwards.)

After a while I was invited to join a home group, and did. (Wife was in a different one.) The fellow who had founded this home group also owned a tech company in town, and of course I didn't expect anything quite so bald as that I might get a job from him by joining his home group. But that year and a half was all about meeting people—the more people, the better. And if the home group was willing to pray for me to find work—well, it couldn't hurt, could it?

What I learned by watching the half dozen people in this home group was fascinating. They all professed to believe the most simplistic biblical fables—creation in seven days, and all the rest of it straight on down, even though none of them was stupid. But in practice none of these "beliefs" seemed to have the slightest impact on their real lives or real concerns. It was more like affirming these beliefs was a kind of password or shibboleth, a way to reassure each other that they were among friends and could afford to be vulnerable. When they brought their problems to the group to pray over, there was never anything about converting unbelievers or closing women's health centers. It was stuff like, "Dear Father, help my son get off drugs"; "Help me find the money for my wife's dental surgery"; "My daughter and her husband are in deep pain over their marriage and it's tearing the children apart; please bring healing and love to everyone in that house." And that kind of thing. I remember once someone asked for prayer because his kid—or maybe it was someone in his kid's family (they were mostly older than I was)—needed money for some kind of medical procedure and had no idea where to find it; after we finished praying there was silence for a couple minutes and then our host (the tech entrepreneur) said he clearly felt God was moving him to help out and would $2000 be enough?

Also during this time, I was having lunch once a week with my friend R— from my previous job: he was a long-time project manager who volunteered for a layoff (during our long, controlled crash that ended with closing our doors) because he felt the Holy Spirit calling him to do something else. I'd always liked R—, so when I asked him what he was up to after he left the company (he hadn't told any of us why he'd volunteered for the layoff) he invited me to lunch and spelled it out. He asked if I were a Christian and of course I said no. And he invited me to keep coming back to lunch while I was looking for work. I accepted because I liked him and because I wanted to force some structure onto my week; and he took the opportunity to try to convert me. After a while I started to make a list of all the arguments he used, and what was wrong with each one of them: and I turned that into an essay on everything that's wrong with mainstream apologetics. Then he let it go and suggested we read the gospel of John. Sure, hell, why not? So for a year or so we read the gospel of John.

Gradually all these things petered out. The Evangelical Baptist church hit a big rupture where they ended up firing the Senior Pastor and a lot of people left, so that was a good time for us to leave too. After I [finally!] found work again it became harder for me to meet up with R— regularly, so after we finished the book of John we kind of let the lunches go. But the result was that for some few years I had various non-stupid streams coming at me, all bringing one or another version of Christian doctrine. And, being a philosopher at heart, I found myself thinking about it all. So several of the private essays that I wrote over the years have been about Christian doctrine one way or another.  

That's what I wrote to Marie, with minor adjustments and clarifications. I suppose I should publish my essays on Christian doctrine over on the Patio. I haven't done so yet. But I could. Hmm. Interesting idea ….