Rearticulating Humility with Christianity

Underlying Agenda, Part II:  Rearticulating Humility with Christianity

           I’m directing this blog at an audience of tolerant American Christians and secular activists coming from a mixed Christian background. The message is this, that self-defense against a supposed enemy (for example, Muslim war targets and proselytizers) only serves to undermine Christian agape and further contributes to the loss of compassionate Christian identity. As I see it, the more that louder “strong-arm” Christians claim institutional identity for themselves, the more compassionate, open-minded Christians quietly pack up their humility and bail on Christianity altogether.

          Since when was religion about streamlining? Making faith about literal translations from a wildly assorted spiritual text has the effect of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: the precious, mindful element takes off, and nothing of the original revolutionary caritas remains. Without humility, Christianity is nothing but false triumphalism. Into the oppressive Roman Empire God sent His Messiah, as a baby, not a warrior, who preached (among other anti-intuitive points) that the meek will inherit the earth, whose most violent act was throwing a hissy fit outside the Temple, and who was executed in humiliation. Even the Resurrection didn’t set the repressive conditions right (the Romans destroyed the Temple a couple of decades later), for the point of salvation is internal transformation. It’s not about forcing others to live by an inflexible code; it’s about internalizing the message of Christian love, which leaves one aghast in gratitude, searching for ways to show that same unmerited, unconditional love to the most different of others.

Thus the Christian’s struggle in the world becomes ever more complex, in the effort to distinguish between the reassuring appearance of propriety and actual expressions of love.

It’s a shame that people comfortable with complexity think they have to abandon their Christian heritage, whether elbowed out by the effects of “streamlining,” or by prioritizing complexity for its own (empty) sake.  Where families’ traditions diverge, it may seem narrow-minded or arbitrary to commit to one denomination (or religion) or another, but opting out entirely rationalizes a lack of commitment. Likewise, deferring the decision to attend church (synagogue, mosque) until the children of a “mixed marriage” are “old enough to decide for themselves” usually results in their lifelong agnosticism. I’ve even known people who attempt to keep their children from becoming indoctrinated in a single ideology, but that’s just trusting popular culture (i.e. watered-down, sometimes warped Judeo-Christian morality) to provide their children’s foundational ethical narrative. Rationalizing and delaying commitment are simply easier routes.

 However, there are those who consciously lead their children into rechanneled commitment to worthy activist causes. In fact, I suspect that there is a lot of latent Christian motivation in the secular antiracist, green and Occupy movements, and how can that be bad? Indeed, it is very good when people are advocating on behalf of the disadvantaged. I would go so far as calling that Christian, not to force a necessarily self-professed allegiance onto people, but rather to recognize that their actions may very well spring from Christian compassion.

But why label it? Because dissociating humility from Christianity cuts people loose from their innate spirituality, and it robs them of the rich historical allusions present in the Christian narrative of redemption. I’m sure that I could find some statistics (if I took stock in statistics as a method of proof) on the high percentage of non-practicing people with a Christian heritage who say they are “spiritual.” Let’s say it’s a trend, rampant in Europe, too. By separating their good deeds from their spiritual impulses their ethics become subjective, they are cut off from corporate worship, and religion becomes so private as to be embarrassing.

Thanks to Freud and Alfred Kinsey we’ve brought sexuality partially out of the closet, so why would we shove the equally basic human instinct to worship a Creator back into it?

No doubt faith is unintellectual. Yet my “intellectual” reason (there are other more primal reasons) for not converting to Islam is that I view religion as deeply embedded in culture. I’m Christian partially because it’s inscribed into the language I speak and read, and comprises the cultural stories of redemption that I encounter again and again. I’m Christian because I think in trinities and dozens, and because “The Shawshank Redemption” and other Stephen King stories echo through me. Some people are spiritual seekers looking for new experiences with the divine, whereas I groove on the deep resonances I find between Charles Wesley’s lyrics and the early Church fathers’ writings. Religion’s more than a subject of study, though, for I’m embroiled in uncovering layers and making meaning for my own life.      

It could be argued that all Americans with a Christian heritage have access to these layers of meaning inscribed in our very way of thinking—or that alternately, am I arguing that people without a Western heritage cannot be Christian?—but the point is depth of investment. Christians coming from non-Western backgrounds are actively making connections between their cultural wisdom and Christian tropes, whereas secular Westerners have available the history of Christianity but lack the holistic investment needed to completely appreciate its legacy.

But I’m not defending Christianity’s track record, which is abysmal. I’m not staying with Christianity for its anti-Christian abuses throughout the past 2000 years (although I am implicated in those abuses and need to work within Christianity to atone for them), but for its revolutionary compassion that quietly emerges from time to time. Humility may not only spring from the Christian narrative, but the story of Jesus, God’s living message on earth, provides a clear model to follow. It’s a model that undergirds much secular American activism. I choose to dig into my tradition, seeking awareness rather than alternatives.

This blog will attempt to re-articulate humility and Christianity in both senses: to speak anew about the largely abandoned concept of selflessness, as well as to attempt to rejoin the two, the way a limb is rearticulated after being severed from the body.