Today I’d like to talk about what it means to be culturally Christian.

My Background

Christianity affected where my family lived, where we vacationed, what we did on the weekends, what we listened to, read and watched, how we dressed, with whom we were friends, and which holidays we celebrated and how we observed them. Yes, much of this was due to the fact that Dad was a pastor.   There were many other families who lived as strictly as we did, though. Some families were even more strict.

When I was a Christian I took it all very seriously. If the Bible taught X according to my spiritual leaders (even if X was only one of many interpretations, even if what we think of as X today was not what the original authors were thinking about when they wrote what they wrote), I believed it at that time.

No one in my immediate family ever went to seminary, but we studied and discussed the Bible on a regular basis. I knew all but the most obscure stories in the Old and New Testament before I learned to read them for myself.

In other words, our faith wasn’t just something we did once a year (or even a few times a week.) It permeated every part of our daily lives, as much so as us being Caucasian or living in a succession of primarily working-class neighbourhoods. It was part of who were were as a family and as individuals in a bone-deep way.

Culturally Christianity?

In the last few years I’ve become friends with various people who identify as Christian. They are wonderful, kind, amazing, intelligent, witty people who just don’t happen to seem all that interested in the particulars of their faith.

It puzzles me that they don’t appear to follow many of the rules that most of the Christians I grew up with knew almost intuitively. They drink alcohol (although not in a destructive manner), attend church sporadically, watch secular movies and television shows, read secular books and dress, talk and behave just like us non-believers.

I realize that there are many different degrees and expressions of the Christian faith out there and that the churches I grew up in came from a small sliver of Christendom. Part of my confusion is no doubt related to the different sets of rules that different denominations adopt, especially when one compares Christians living in a small, rural, midwestern town in the United States to Christians living in a large urban area in southern Canada. I’m going to assume that these are cultural (or even just family/individual) differences.

There’s something else going on, though: these friends don’t seem to know the Bible or church history that intimately. Sometimes Drew will make what I think of as a fairly common Bible reference or joke and they seem to don’t understand what we’re talking about. Spending time with them is no different than hanging out with our friends who are spiritual but not religious or atheist in the sense that their faith doesn’t come up as a topic of conversation.

This is all highly unusual to someone who grew up in churches that heavily promoted ideas like friendship evangelism and the importance of fellowshipping with other believers, to say the least!

Q&A

I fully acknowledge that I grew up in a family that encouraged us to read the Bible and ask intellectual questions and that not all Christians were raised in a similar environment or even are interested in the minutia of faith. Belief cannot be limited to what one reads in a book but this all still puzzles me.

How does one believe in God and identify as a Christian without wanting to know more about what it is that he or she is agreed to when he or she became a Christian? From my point of view this is like accepting a job (or moving in with someone you just met, or signing consent forms for elective surgery, or agreeing to any sort of business contract) without reading the fine print first to see what it is exactly that you are agreeing to do except that in this case one is deciding the fate of his or her soul for all eternity (assuming a traditional, Christian view of the afterlife.)

If there is anyone reading this who has ever identified with this way of thinking about one’s religious beliefs, can you explain it?

In the 6th grade one of my teachers decided to exercise our imaginations through guided imagery. With eyes closed and heads bowed on our desks, she asked us to imagine ourselves on a lightly scripted adventure that she read aloud to the class.  Sadly, I no longer remember all of the images with which she asked us to pretend we were interacting. There was a door, a being or guide of some sort, a message and a waterfall (or maybe that aspect was left up to our imaginations and I can only remember choosing the waterfall?)

One of the benefits of being a preacher’s kid, I thought, was that I knew how to avoid the the pitfalls of guided imagery. Earlier that year I had read a Christian adventure novel about demonic possession. One of the characters in the book, a young child, was asked to meet a special friend in his (or her?) imagination at school. Because this was a Christian novel, of course, the special friend turned out to be a demon and while I was fairly certain that my teacher wasn’t trying to incite a mass possession one could never be too careful. 😉

I decided, then, to only pretend as though the images flickering in my mind were being guided into any particular thought. Her voice carried us into a story; I followed as far as I dared, pulling back and peeking around the room every so often to see what, if anything, might be staring back at me. When the exercise ended I dutifully wrote and handed in a piece of dreck, careful not to believe a word of it or even to think about what I was writing any more than necessary.

For the rest of that school year I kept this incident in the back of my mind, watching and waiting for the teacher to bring up this exercise once again or to ask us to consult with our imaginary guide on other issues. She never did and I moved on to junior high the next year, quietly relieved, never to see or speak to her again.

After a time I realized that there weren’t any demons to worry about that damp, cold afternoon, that she was honestly just trying to stimulate our imaginations and that by making up a story I had actually fulfilled the criteria in her lesson plan beautifully.

As as adult I am grateful for this early infusion of skepticism, for getting into the habit of not automatically doing or thinking what everyone else is doing or thinking simply because an authority figures says it is a good thing to do. Sometimes, yes, there’s a good reason why everyone else is doing something a certain way. Not everything in life needs to be re-invented but that doesn’t mean I will stop considering the whats, whys, hows, and what ifs along the way!