Beliefs about the World, in Medias Res
Yesterday, I invoked Call the Midwife to reflect on a kind of storytelling that is difficult to pull off, in fiction and real life. How often do we manage the feat of living fully in the moment, while also remembering that the future could bring all sorts of new beginnings to our doorstep, just as “the future” has surprised us in the past?
But buried in yesterday’s theme was also an easing-in to today’s piece, for paid subscribers. This past week, I found myself chatting with an Evangelical, after he started mass-posting apologetics on some of my older pieces at OnlySky—or more to the point, after he responded well to me pointing out that mass-posting other people’s words wasn’t conducive to a fruitful conversation, and I encouraged him to share his own words instead. He did! And on that constructive note, a dialogue could ensue.
Chatting with Evangelicals is occasionally a fruitful experience—and not because any “de-conversion” is afoot, but because we’re all human beings, and because the same behaviours that can lead an Evangelical to proselytize with great determination are present in us all. Who among us can truthfully say that, upon experiencing delight at a newfound hobby, lifestyle choice, media fandom, relationship, baby, furry familiar, or drug of choice, we didn’t try to sing its praises to the hills, and impress upon others how they must try it, they really must, as well?
Granted, not all of us are going around trying to legislate others into follow in our footsteps, but still, sometimes it’s nice to remind oneself to avoid being “pushy” in other parts of our lives, no matter how fervently we believe in our way of doing things—so thank the Great Old inDifferent universe for Evangelicals, I suppose!
There are, of course, conditions to my enjoyment of occasionally chatting with proselytizers. The first comes from the fact that I don’t start these conversations. Evangelicals usually reach out because they are trying to convert me—and yet, I have zero interest in de-converting them. This means that they’re usually “going into battle” in our chats, whereas I see conversation as an opportunity to deepen in mutual understanding. Sometimes this difference in aims is untenable, but so long as everyone’s polite and respectful and honest, it can be a very good thing for people with different beliefs to share a pleasant conversation from time to time—not because we’re going to convince one another of anything, but because chatting contributes to overall conviviality, and re-humanizes people so easily dehumanized in our discourse.
However, I’ll also pull back from a conversation when Evangelicals start to tread into areas that I’ve historically seen cause crises of faith. The world is a rotten place sometimes, and atheism can be a tough business. I know to my core, for instance, that humans are failing to address the greatest problems in our world, and that, because of these failures, many will needlessly suffer. In my cosmology, though, there will never be any “wiping away of tears”, no grand balancing act in a life beyond this one—and that’s fine for me, because I never had any expectations to the contrary.
But when someone’s cosmology comes with promises of something more, and when their faith relies so strenuously on their ability to convince others to take up the same spiritual practice, that faith can be… pretty fragile. By pouring everything into trying to prove the inerrancy of the Bible, for instance, such a person can very easily go into crisis when faced with errors and contradictions they can’t rationalize or pray away.
So, I give gentle warnings when we enter terrain that could cause problems for their faith; and even though some are very confident that they can survive any new intel, I’m thankful that some Evangelicals do to take me up on my cautionary notes. Often, once they realize that I’ve read more of the Bible than they have, and that I know more about church history and the Bible’s production context than they do, and that I have a stronger background in scientific histories as well, they drop off—and ideally, go back to lives where they do no harm with the faith that brings them so much.
(Yes, yes, we can dream.)
But one of the biggest challenges I have when talking with Evangelicals is the same I have when chatting with language purists and dogmatists in other fields: there’s no delight in variation. As much as they claim to celebrate whatever has their passion, they have very little interest in seeing different ways that it might be done. And so, as with people who believe that there is One True English and go around condemning any deviation from it, so too do many Evangelicals (think: the type that believes even other Christians need to be saved into their version of Christianity) play out an unfortunate human tendency toward acting as if the mere existence of legitimate difference would make their own beliefs “meaningless”.
And the practical consequence of this rigid thinking is that, whenever I discuss different interpretations and textual histories, they’re all just seen as threats—and thus, a much richer conversation is denied us all.
That conversation is the one I want to have today, though: a reflection on people who held such strong beliefs in cultural contexts that differ greatly from our own. And although I’m going to be pulling from religious history, the aim with these examples is to think more broadly about all our deeply held convictions today—so I do hope fellow secular readers will still join me down this meditative lane.
We belong to a distinct temporal context. Tomorrow, people might use similar labels to describe themselves, but the underlying literary traditions, historical touchstones, and current events informing how they live out those labels will have changed—just as they already have, many times over, from one era to the next. The Canadian of today, for instance, is not the same Canadian of 1867, or even 1967—and there’s something quite useful about making the effort to imagine what the concept might have meant to our ancestors, in their own time.
US citizens are of course more familiar with this exercise, because it crops up every time the courts are asked to be “originalist”: to deliberate around cases drawn from elaborate new technologies and political contexts based on what the Founding Fathers might have been thinking, when they wrote the Constitution ~240 years ago.
But there, too, the exercise is a bit too purpose-driven—and easily made polemic.
We’re going to be more openly reflective today. We simply want to sit in wonder at the certitude felt by people who had different information about the world, and ask ourselves about our own certitude today, in that wonder’s wake.
So if you’re not a paid subscriber: thanks for sitting in wonder for this long—and take good care of yourselves when wading into conversations with anyone who views the complexity of a given topic as a mark against it. Don’t waste your time on insincere discourse, either, and choose your battles wisely. May your cosmology serve you well.
As for the rest of you?
Well, let’s dive in—
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Better Worlds Theory to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.