This is going to be a bit
helter-skelter, so bear with me. I'm here rearranging the words in my
review of David Bergen's The Matter With Morris
— the single most pleasurable
read for me this year, and my current Favourite Novel From A Member
Of My Tribe — when the randomizer of our household music machine
spits out this chestnut:
Sally's into knowledge
Spent her years in college
Just to find out nothing is true
She can hardly speak now
Words are not unique now
'Cos they can't say anything new
You say humanist philosophy is what
it's all about?
You're so open-minded that your
brains leaked out!
Some Christian Rock
lyrics for you, courtesy of a young Steve Taylor, circa 1983, which, in their blunderbuss way, take aim at the heart of The
Matter With Morris.
I cringe to admit
it, but at the time I thrilled to hear (young) Steve Taylor's droll delivery of those particular lines.
I was 18 years old,
getting ready with the rest of my buddies (Mennonites, with precious
few exceptions) to begin post-secondary education. I was also an
earnest Evangelical — ditto, my mates. And we were aware that one
of the risks attending post-secondary education was getting too smart
for Church. Through the past 13-plus years of Sunday School we'd
taken note of all the surly older brothers and sisters who left for a
semester, then returned at Christmas with a dark new energy and a
poisonous contempt for the Gathering of Saints. Surely not I,
Lord.
Taylor's derisive
snort didn't so much address the issue as turn tables on the
stereotype — which, for a nervous 18-year-old, was good enough.
"Next stop: Bible College!" |
Thirty years later,
I remain a church-goer. And I call myself Christian, even if some in
the flock would dispute the claim. The young Steve Taylor might not
go quite that far, but he'd probably consider me deeply entrenched in
the “Brainless” end of the spectrum.
Converting from one
seemingly definitive state to another — even Apostasy — takes a
lot of work, and I've better things to spend my energies on. I say
this as someone who, briefly, in my 20s, considered converting to
Judaism. The fact that I'm still a spineless1 Mennonite probably
reveals just how seriously I applied myself to that particular
thought experiment. It struck me as a staggering commitment of
energy, for limited returns.
Prior to this, a
zen roshi I'd been spending some time with (Whisky Prajer, ever the
dilettante — and why not?) suggested, “Stick with a religion for
as long is it's useful.” I took her to mean it might be time to
shed the old wineskin, but as I considered Judaism I began to
comprehend the flip-side of the koan: I still needed the eggs.
Better, then, to apply those qualities I found admirable in the
alternative religion to the one I had grown up in.
So: brainless as
charged — but sincerely so.
This is why I pay
attention to conversion stories — the more dramatic, the better.
What prompts a person to reboot into a seemingly alien Operating
System? And does it take? How, and how deeply?
I tend
to think there is less change happening than is being proclaimed, and
religious history is liberally peppered with rascals and knaves keen
to prove me right. Sergei
Kourdakov is one such: a
Russian defector who went from Communist-trained heavy, groomed to
persecute hapless Believers, to penitent Believer himself. The
Persecutor,
Kourdakov's “memoir,” was a staple in the libraries of
Evangelical churches, including the one I grew up in. I read the book
when I was 10, credulously swallowing his sordid stories of rounding
up furtive fellowships and subjecting them to all manner of
humiliation and indignity. So promising a persecutor was our Sergei,
that he was duly summoned to Brezhnev's high command, where he
witnessed first-hand Empire-sanctioned orgies. The book's end-note
indicated that Kourdakov had told his American friends that if he
were to die in mysterious circumstances, they would know his former
overlords had caught up with him. Needless to say, Sergei was dead at
the time of the book's publication.
When
I mentioned my reading material to my father, he took a deep breath,
then said he had serious misgivings about what was being . . . sold
here.
I'm not sure what led my father to think he smelled a rat,2 but some
three decades later an independent documentary, Caroline
Walker Pallis' Forgive Me Sergei,
lays
out a damning counter-narrative to the one I read as a child. In her
review of the film, Katherine
Jeffrey writes,
Ultimately
[Walker Pallis] is forced to confront the overwhelming evidence that
the central events of The
Persecutor are
not merely embellished but completely fabricated. No corroborating
witnesses can be found anywhere Sergei lived, though physical
descriptions of the cities are accurate and personal names are real.
Christians in Petropavlovsk deny that the violent purges the book
describes ever happened. Some of the villains of Sergei's childhood
turn out to be ordinary or even admirable characters. Among Sergei's
military acquaintances and childhood friends whose names and
photographs appear in the book, and to whom passages of The
Persecutor
are read on camera, some react with shock or indignation, others with
simple incredulity. The idea that one would lie in order to get ahead
in America is unsurprising to them, but they resent having been used
as (typically repugnant) narrative props for an outrageously
fraudulent story.
It
seems one needn't be predisposed to “humanist philosophy” to be
so open-minded as to allow one's brains to fall out.
"Oh for T-shirt with witty caption!" |
Speaking
of humanist philosophy, now's a good time to give a shout-out to the
Poindexters at The Christian
Humanist.
Although I'm predisposed to playing gadfly and leaving snarky
comments on their blog and Facebook page, and they are predisposed to rapturous declarations common among academics and
serious-minded religious types, my admiration for their attention to
the apparatus is genuine. They take seriously the Protestant
Imperative, which I enjoy and commend them for. Excelsior,
dudes!
1 “No brains, no spine, he's much too shy!”↩
2 Possibly
the fact that Sergei was shacked up in a Colorado cabin with a
17-year-old girl when it happened, and that the gun that killed him
belonged, like the cabin, to the girl's father.↩
4 comments:
Thanks for the link and (what I take to be) the compliment!
--Poindexter Gamma (NPG)
You're welcome -- and thanks for dropping by!
I enjoyed this post. My own journey is different than yours, but I enjoyed reading your take on it nonetheless. As you say, it is important to pay attention to conversion stories--and spiritual journies--to try and map out where other people are in relationship to ourselves, and how they got there.
Thanks Joel. I suppose most of us are in the process of converting, if only into our "adult" selves (he types hopefully).
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