Self-Interview: Confessions (Part 1)

Religion/spirituality is on my mind all the time. I've been a Christian my whole life and I've given a lot of time and energy over to trying to understand what I think and what I experience as a Christian, especially in relation to the other world's religions that I spend a lot of time thinking about and teaching, one way or another, in my courses. I've been wanting to get my thoughts down. I've decided to interview myself and replicate the conversations I have with myself continually. This is, for the time being, my confession of faith.

You were born into the church, going to Sunday school, singing in junior choir, attending youth group, and have continued to be a part of the church, sometimes inconsistently, all your life. Is Jesus Christ your Savior?

I honestly don't understand what those words mean and I have never, except when participating in a liturgy, uttered them voluntarily. In fact, I'm distrustful of those words. Too often I hear them uttered as a line drawn in the sand, as a litmus test. When I was hired at Whitworth College on a temporary basis, full-time, in 1982, I had an interview with the college's president, Bob Mounce. The first thing he asked was whether Jesus Christ was my Savior. I answered in the affirmative. I knew it was President Mounce's way of asking me if I was a Christian, and I respected his way of asking that. But I felt uneasy. When I hear the words, "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior", I hear hubris. Maybe it's the word "my" that I resist. It's one of those conditioned responses to Jesus Christ that I just can't say. I want to speak my own language for how I experience Jesus Christ, and proclaiming Him my personal Savior just doesn't work.

Well, then, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?

I don't think so. I don't understand this concept. I respect, and sometimes envy, the many Christians I know who talk about Jesus being their friend or who claim a personal relationship with Him, but very little in my experience with Jesus Christ is anything like the relationships I have with my friends. I talk about books with my friends. I tell dirty jokes and laugh at theirs. I play cards with my friends, go on drives around the Silver Valley, talk about how to teach writing and literature, have coffee, tell tall tales, go on boat rides, talk about raising kids, reminisce. I don't have any of these experiences with Jesus. I have never experienced what many say they do, that Jesus Christ is specifically, uniquely, particularly concerned with what happens in my particular life. I don't think of Jesus in terms of me. I think of Jesus in terms of us, of the corporate body of Christ. The metaphor of personal savior or of personal friend doesn't work for me. I enjoy listening to others talk about how it does work for them. But, it's not my experience.

Well, how about the resurrection? Do you believe in it?

I don't think of the resurrection in terms of belief. In fact, I don't experience Christianity in terms of belief. To see the world through Christian eyes, is to see life as defined by resurrection. I do not have to make a conscious act of assent when it comes to seeing resurrection as the basis of the reality we live in. I do not have to say I believe in resurrection, or the resurrection. Resurrection exists. I don't say I believe in the concrete slab in my backyard. It exists. I experience resurrection in the same way. It's so fundamental I don't really ever get to the question of whether I believe in it or not.

But you've evaded my question. How about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It's the center of the Christian understanding of truth. To be Christian is to be constantly aware of new life, that what seems to be dead can be brought back to life again. I see it happen all the time and I experience it all the time. Nature most vividly illustrates resurrection in its cycles of life and death and the return to life again. Within the Christian world view, grace is the expression of resurrection. We forgive one another. Friendships, relationships at work, passages in a marriage, and other relationships can break, even die. When broken friends or spouses or colleagues find a way to forgive or extend grace, these dead relationships can be revivified, resurrected. Each of us can also die within ourselves. Passages of self-destruction, living out of harmony with the best ways to treat others and ourselves can drain us of life. But we can, as individuals, be forgiven, revived, resurrected. It's a kind of magic, the magic of the reality we live in that is defined by resurrection.

Regarding the Easter story, it's definitely an historical truth in the way that resurrection never stops. The story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ happens (although it is too often blocked by avarice, cruelty, lying, and other things we do that are not life giving). The story of Jesus Christ coming back to life from the dead is, to me, most important as a visible portrayal of an invisible truth in life. If someone came to me with undoctored videotaped documentary evidence that Jesus Christ emerged from his tomb alive, after being dead, I would be ecstatic. But, I don't think the fundamental truth of the resurrection changes because I think of the story as a profoundly enlightening fiction. The power of the resurrection, as we experience it personally and corporately or as we observe it in the natural world or in other aspects of life, continues whether Jesus walked out of that tomb literally or figuratively.

You know, there are those who would say that you aren't really a Christian. I mean listen to you. You don't experience Jesus Christ in a personal way, you experience the resurrection figuratively, and you can't bring yourself to say out loud that Jesus Christ is your Savior. Are you a Christian?

I practice Christianity. I am inspired and emboldened by worship from the Book of Common Prayer, by taking of the body and blood of Christ at the communion rail, and by my confession of sin. My Christian practice clarifies my thinking, informs my conscience, points me, delivers me from evil. I love the stories and poems of Scripture and am inspired by them to make my way in the world more sanely and wisely. I cherish the fellowship of the body of Christ. I've tried to give it all up, tried to pass off Christianity as rubbish, and I couldn't. I have experience God as a sparring partner and fought with God with all my might and I've also experienced God as the Great Shepherd, tirelessly in pursuit of me as a lost sheep. I experience what I understand to be the essential Christian experience. I am rather adamant, mostly within myself, however, not to let anyone define this experience for me and I will not hold my experience as a Christian up to anyone's litmus test. One person determining whether another is a real Christian or a true Christian or not is, to me, toxic sludge polluting the arteries of Christ's body. When I hear or read Christians engage in "he's in, she's out" talk, I shudder. I think an infinite God has infinite capacity to hold an infinite range of ways that people love and serve Him in His Bosom.

You just talked about God as a male. Do you believe God is a male being?

No. But, let's resume our conversation tomorrow and I'll tell you what I think about this question.

Jesus Camp

"Jesus Camp" is an illuminating documentary film portraying a Pentecostal youth camp, Kids on Fire, where children are aggressively instructed that they are the ones who will one day return America to righteousness and purity. They are trained to be soldiers of Jesus. At the camp, the children raise their arms in praise, weep over the depth of their hypocrisy and sin, speak in tongues, entrust their lives to Jesus Christ, and make covenants to bring others to Christ and to end abortion.

The images of these children experiencing such intense instruction are powerful. So are the interviews with the camp's minister, Becky Fischer, a single-minded, energetic, deeply devoted, passionate, emotional fundamentalist. Likewise, the interviews with parents help solidify the reasons and the emotions that undergird the children's involvement at the camp and their involvement in this particular expression of Pentecostal practice and faith.

"Jesus Camp" is directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, neither Christian. They entered this project curiously, wanting to learn more about fundamentalism and what this particular expression of Pentecostalim looks like from the children's perspective, juxtaposed with the adult perspective of the parents and of Becky Fischer.

I listened to an interview, here, with the directors a day or two before I watched the movie. They discussed how hard they worked to present a fair accounting of the camp and the social, political, and religious context of these Christians.

In part, I think they succeeded. The participants in the movie agree. Ewing and Grady screened the movie for all of them before it was released. The directors wanted to make sure that the people in the movie felt the film was just and accurate. No one complained, although there was some concern that the movie didn't go far enough in portraying these people's impassioned belief in the redeeming power of Jesus Christ and their vision for the future of the USA.

One thing about the movie bothered me a lot. I'm not a Pentecostal Christian: far from it. I belong to a staid and liturgical denomination as an Episcopalian.

That said, I was bothered by the film's soundtrack. Ominous music often accompanied the images of the children expressing themselves in worship. While the visual aspect of the film was generous and without judgment, most of the time, the music told a different story. The music made it very difficult to observe the church's practices with sympathy, or even with some sense of disinterest. The music always told the viewer that what we were seeing was frightening.

It's the one aspect of documentary filmmaking that bothers me. Soundtracks often provide a mocking or an undercutting subtext to what the film shows on the screen. Michael Moore is an expert at this. The same thing happened in another documentary I watched this past week, "Why We Fight."




I don't, and never have, expected documentaries to be objective or neutral. But in documentaries like "Jesus Camp" or "Why We Fight" when ominous or sarcastic music accompanies different scenes, the music dilutes the power of visual images to tell their own story and, in my opinion, insults viewers' ability to have their own experience and draw their own conclusions.

I thought the most effective music in "Jesus Camp" was the music the worshipers performed or that kids played in their bedrooms. In every case, the image of this music being performed and of one of the girls dancing to heavy metal Christian music, demonstrated the fundamentalist's appropriation of secular music to their own ends, and the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane in these scenes communicated much more about this world than did the soundtrack imposed upon the world of this film.

"Jesus Camp" has outraged many viewers, especially in the secular world. So be it. I understand why. Seeing Becky Fischer hector these children about their sin and laying the history of the USA upon their shoulders made me squirm. Watching the children weep and hearing them parrot the words of the adults made me think they were being as much brainwashed as being led to a rich spiritual life.

I didn't need ominous music to lead me my response or my conclusions. The images of the children and the words they spoke, as well as the words and deeds of the adults were sufficient.