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tealinLongtime readers here will be aware that I usually do something for Lent on this blog, the forty days leading up to Easter when Christians are supposed to brush up their souls a bit. Past incarnations of this have included 40 Days of Art and the introductory series to the thinking of Réné Girard.*
During the US election, I had a brainwave which I decided to save for this year's Lent Blog. It takes a little explanation before I throw you in the deep end on Day 1, though, so please bear with me for this post.
I grew up in a very conservative and religious family and, mostly, in a very conservative and religious state. There was absolutely no question that Conservatives (which in this case meant Republicans) represented decent Christian morals and that Liberals were a bunch of apostate libertines and godless socialists who were undermining the ethical fabric of the nation. The guy on the radio agreed with this, and he sounded very sure of himself.
I went away to college, got to know some apostate libertines and godless socialists, and discovered that they were, in general, at least as decent and moral as those who liked to bang on about morality, if not more so. In my early 20s, I was well situated to drift away from religion, as so many of my peers did, except that the CBC had given me Réné Girard, who turned my thinking upside down and, arguably, saved my faith. Just because the faith I was raised with didn't reflect the real world as I had come to know it didn't mean that faith, in itself, was misplaced – I just needed to reconfigure.
After a few years of feeling my heart glow whenever Rowan Williams talked on Radio 4, I started going to an Anglican church. As Anglican parishes go, it was extremely conservative, but the priest gave excellent and challenging sermons, and personal study was encouraged. Taking my faith a lot more seriously by diving more diligently into the founding texts, and devoting more brainpower to reflection, I started to see how very subversive and progressive Christianity was at its core, and how poorly it was represented by those who made the biggest deal about Being Christian.
Since leaving home, most of my friends have been areligious. Most of them don't know that I'm not. I get an outsider's view of Christianity through their eyes and conversation. The Republican Party is the loudest voice in American politics, and thereby the world, and for many people, the only exposure they've ever had to Christianity is through that lens. I can see why they think of it as they do, in that case. That is not the Christianity I have come to know, but I didn't know how to explain this without taking them through a course of study as I had done, and frankly, why should they be interested in that?
As I was sitting on my sun-baked patio last summer, dwelling on the latest blatantly anti-Christian thing to come out of a Republican's mouth, it hit me: Just tell the Bible stories as if they had been written about the version of Jesus that Republicans seem to believe in. How better to show up the gulf between their values system and the one in that book they keep flapping around? I lived in a Republican stronghold long enough, and have heard enough of their messaging over the years, to run the simulation in my head. I could write this.
So that is what I am going to do. 40 days, 40 Bible stories, probably mostly from the synoptic Gospels, but with a smattering from elsewhere just for fun. I will post the Republican one first, with the original under a cut below so you can compare. It's not a theology course by any means, but I hope it might at least elicit a tickling sensation inside some people's heads. It's a little uncomfortable at first, but if you sit with it a little while, it often becomes something quite enjoyable! Cognitive dissonance is telling you to resolve a paradox, and I have never regretted undertaking that mental exercise.
*Alas 2019 kind of blew up partway through that, and I am no better situated to finish that series now, as I've lost my notes somewhere in the move. They'll turn up someday. Sigh.
During the US election, I had a brainwave which I decided to save for this year's Lent Blog. It takes a little explanation before I throw you in the deep end on Day 1, though, so please bear with me for this post.
I grew up in a very conservative and religious family and, mostly, in a very conservative and religious state. There was absolutely no question that Conservatives (which in this case meant Republicans) represented decent Christian morals and that Liberals were a bunch of apostate libertines and godless socialists who were undermining the ethical fabric of the nation. The guy on the radio agreed with this, and he sounded very sure of himself.
I went away to college, got to know some apostate libertines and godless socialists, and discovered that they were, in general, at least as decent and moral as those who liked to bang on about morality, if not more so. In my early 20s, I was well situated to drift away from religion, as so many of my peers did, except that the CBC had given me Réné Girard, who turned my thinking upside down and, arguably, saved my faith. Just because the faith I was raised with didn't reflect the real world as I had come to know it didn't mean that faith, in itself, was misplaced – I just needed to reconfigure.
After a few years of feeling my heart glow whenever Rowan Williams talked on Radio 4, I started going to an Anglican church. As Anglican parishes go, it was extremely conservative, but the priest gave excellent and challenging sermons, and personal study was encouraged. Taking my faith a lot more seriously by diving more diligently into the founding texts, and devoting more brainpower to reflection, I started to see how very subversive and progressive Christianity was at its core, and how poorly it was represented by those who made the biggest deal about Being Christian.
Since leaving home, most of my friends have been areligious. Most of them don't know that I'm not. I get an outsider's view of Christianity through their eyes and conversation. The Republican Party is the loudest voice in American politics, and thereby the world, and for many people, the only exposure they've ever had to Christianity is through that lens. I can see why they think of it as they do, in that case. That is not the Christianity I have come to know, but I didn't know how to explain this without taking them through a course of study as I had done, and frankly, why should they be interested in that?
As I was sitting on my sun-baked patio last summer, dwelling on the latest blatantly anti-Christian thing to come out of a Republican's mouth, it hit me: Just tell the Bible stories as if they had been written about the version of Jesus that Republicans seem to believe in. How better to show up the gulf between their values system and the one in that book they keep flapping around? I lived in a Republican stronghold long enough, and have heard enough of their messaging over the years, to run the simulation in my head. I could write this.
So that is what I am going to do. 40 days, 40 Bible stories, probably mostly from the synoptic Gospels, but with a smattering from elsewhere just for fun. I will post the Republican one first, with the original under a cut below so you can compare. It's not a theology course by any means, but I hope it might at least elicit a tickling sensation inside some people's heads. It's a little uncomfortable at first, but if you sit with it a little while, it often becomes something quite enjoyable! Cognitive dissonance is telling you to resolve a paradox, and I have never regretted undertaking that mental exercise.
*Alas 2019 kind of blew up partway through that, and I am no better situated to finish that series now, as I've lost my notes somewhere in the move. They'll turn up someday. Sigh.
