Passing through the "membrane of belief"

The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose

“Religious conflict may be a basic human instinct,” says Kevin Roose in his wonderfully engaging book The Unlikely Disciple, “but I have faith, now more than ever before, that we can subvert that instinct for long enough to listen to each other.”

What he does, borders on the unethical. Indeed, in many ways, I regard fooling people to learn about them as somewhat ill-advised, but I cannot honestly say that to listen can ever be unethical. My hats off to Kevin for the service he has provided. Whatever he did and whether it was right or wrong to do so, I believe “twas a good person did it” as Goody Proctor says in Henry Miller’s play, The Crucible.

By way of introduction, Kevin Roose was a young college student at Brown University when he decided to spend a semester under-cover at Liberty University in Lynchburg Virginia. With a little help from a few books and a former evangelical friend, he manages to write a passable application essay and gets accepted despite his profound lack of “Liberty Way” faith. “To put it in Quaker terms,” he confesses, “my inner light flickered a lot, like the overhead fluorescent in a Motel 6, and sometimes it burnt out altogether.” Over the course of the semester, he learns to keep up his “Christian signifiers” as he puts it – often at significant cost to his integrity but never surrendered easily. “This made my consciences usually swampy morass a little swampier” he writes at one particular juncture where his “calling” as a participatory “listener” puts him in the position of beach evangelist for a faith that he does not own.

What is refreshing about the book is that it does not savage its subjects like one might expect if Richard Dawkins were to have infiltrated the Vatican. “The satirist P.J. ORourke once compared making fun of born again Christians to ‘hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope,’” writes Roose,

“That was a few years ago, before names like Ted Haggard and movies like Jesus Camp came on the scene. Now it is more like hunting the ground with your foot.”

And yet the memoir of his semester at Liberty constantly resounds with learning, affirmations where deserved, and honest humility. Ironically, young Christians are often instructed to “love the sinner and hate the sin” and in a weird twist on that council, Roose seems to gently come to actually like “righteous people” while never really ascribing to their code of righteousness (The Liberty Way, etc..) In some ways, he is sympathetic with them, commiserating with them in the “trap” they find themselves in, unable to maintain a faith in core beliefs without being entangled in the associated peripherals of it.  “What holds me back, ultimately, are all the disappointingly predictable things,” he writes:

“As I said a while back, the all-or-nothing approach to salvation is prohibitive for me. I could never become an evangelical if it meant condemning homosexuals or proselytizing aggressively to non-Christians or believing that the Bible is infallible. And although I know that many, many evangelicals don’t condemn gays or “go fishing” in Daytona Beach, that’s the way Christianity has been presented to me this semester, and I haven’t been convinced by it.”

“I hope Jesus was resurrected from the dead because I have a couple hundred friends who have oriented their lives around that story.”

“For me to become a creationists,” he explains, “I’d have to pass through a hundrted intermediate steps of belief. And even then I don’t think I could do it” . . . and yet he comes to enjoy the company, vitality, and joy of those who have. There were many passages where I found myself laughing out loud. Others that stuck me as wise beyond the author’s years. For example:

“In a faith system as rigorous and all-encompassing as this, severe doubt is paralyzing. Better just to keep believing, keep living life, and take up the big questions later, when not so much is at stake.”

Clearly, he recognizes the way that religion forms the foundation and substructure of a life … and that the prospect of rebuilding from the ground up is altogether prohibitive for most people. “I suppose it is weird that I am more attached to my social and political views than to my religious beliefs” he says, recognizing a similar phenomenon in his own psyche. In the end, few of us have the courage to tear an entire house down simply to remodel a bathroom or den. “William James said that the value of a religion lies in its usefulness to the believer, not in the truthfulness of its supernatural claims,” Roose notes.

Frequently, he speaks of the relational impact that his conversion would have on his family - even if he were to conceive of converting - and draws back, in much the same way that a Liberty student might hang on the precipice of a “deconversion” for fear of its impact on family ties. “Each world is getting a partial story,” he writes of the growing divide between his real and adopted personas. “I’m somewhere between the prodigal son, who ran off to squander his inheritance money, and Absalom who formed an army to rebel against his father’s empire.”

In one chapter, the author points us to the work of anthropologist Susan Harding, who believes that conversion is a two-step process.  In the first step, you pass into the "membrane of belief," she writes, and then in the second, you pass out of the "membrane of unbelief." First, you "absorb the language and mannerisms of a religious community and begin to frame your thoughts and actions the way the community does."  But that's not the end of the process.  Then, "you decided to abandon your skepticism and make the community's creed your own, becoming a true believer." The first step often happens without knowledge or even permission, Roose paraphrases. The second step is a conscious choice.

It is an apt description of the psychological process by which we swing from assumptional branch to branch, like monkeys in the high trees, grabbing one vine before we leave the last.

Of the many questions that Kevin Roose’s experiment inspired, I think I like this one the best.

“This conversation brings up a question I have been thinking about a lot today. Namely what happens when a Liberty students instilled values clash with his personal experiences?” What happens when the moral system we are taught in our classes - a system in which everything is clear-cut, black or white, good or evil – comes into contact with the messy complicated world?”

He worries that Liberty students may suffer, just as Brown students suffer, from a lack of direct experience with each other.

“For Liberty students who have spent four years hearing from their professors about how unfulfilled, relativistic, flimsy, and hedonistic the real world ismeeting hordes of happy, principled, morally sound non Christians will come as a shot between the eyes. And to be honest, I am not sure how they’ll take it.”

I am reminded of something Jean Jacques Rousseau writes in Emile:

“You wish to teach this [student]  geography and you provide him with globes, spheres, and maps. What a lot of machines! Why all these symbols? Why not begin by showing him the object itself so that he may at least know what you are talking about? . . . “I do not like verbal explanations. Young people pay little attention to them and hardly retain them. Things! Things! I cannot repeat it enough that we give too much power to words. With our babbling education we only create babblers. . . . I hate books. They only teach us to talk about things that we do not know.”

Question for Comment: Kevin Roose has started something called the Jonah Project. He asks people to read the book with someone who they are on opposite sides of a political or religious spectrum with. An enemy so to speak. A person from Nineveh. Who would you regard as someone in that category with relation to you?  

Comments

[Gina Ottoboni]

OK, so here's the question: Are you going to participate in the Jonah Project, and if so, who are you going to read the book with? ;)

[Philip Crossman]

I have a number of candidates. Care to nominate someone?