OpenChristian

My experience is that I was raised in a “conservative” Christian environment, which I rejected vehemently upon coming of age. Then I spent about 15 years as an outspoken atheist. And then about 10 years ago I found a home in a “progressive” congregation of the United Church of Christ.

I mark the words “conservative” and “progressive” with those quotation marks because, on the meanings of the words, they do not really make sense to me in the contexts where they are used. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity is really a modernist reaction that is only about 150 years old, so not really “conservative” in a sense that I find coherent. While “progressive” is one of those silly, broad words that comes with all sorts of baggage and expectations that do not fit together. My church today is more rooted in the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition than where I came from.

All of which is to say that I don’t quite match the parameters of your question, in the sense of coming to Christianity from some unrelated elsewhere. But I did experience a total rejection of Christianity followed by a return.

And I use those words carefully, because I would not say that, in my return, I was “convinced” to “accept” Christianity. What happened instead is that I committed to participate in Christianity. And to participate is, in my view, almost totally antithetical to being “convinced”: to be convinced, in my experience, is to imagine that one has reached an endpoint; while to participate is to recognize that one is always beginning again, where one is. It is the same with “accept”: I would not say that I “accept” anything of Christianity, in the sense of just receiving it uncritically. This, too, is what it means to participate—or, to use maybe a more spiritual-sounding word, to partake. To partake in the Christian tradition is to engage in a dance or a relationship—to be the bush that burns without being consumed, as Moses encountered. There is always a tension, which is the same tension of being fully alive.

So to me the better question would be why did I commit to that participation?

And the answer, to try and keep it short, is that I recognized my deep heritage, which had been cut off from me both by the fundamentalism of my youth and by the atheism that was really just a reflection of the fundamentalism. One way I have put it before is that I was in search of meaning, and I realized that what I had lost from, and then found in, the Christian tradition was a great storehouse and library of meaning-making. Not only that, but it represented ways that had affected my formation as a person over generations before I was born. And what I had been attempting in my atheism (and what before that had been the institutional and ideological foundations of the fundamentalism in which I was raised) was what I would now call the quintessentially modernist fallacy—maybe the primary defect of the modern approach: the idea that one can purport to disconnect from one’s roots and history. It is the illusion, as I have sometimes put it flippantly since, that the life of faith is just a matter of character design and inventory stocking, as though one were fitting out a character in a game. That is not how life works.

Rather, life works in commitment to the reality in which one is formed, which might actually be the reality that extends far earlier than the reality that one has experienced within one’s own life. It is to recognize that truth and freedom are never unmoored from contingency: who and what and how and where and why one is are things that extend far past the limits of what one imagines to be the choices that one has made.

So I returned, and continue returning, in participation with the Christian tradition, which is both broad and deep, and filled with diversity and conflict, but also meaning.