Christian Culture and Raising Kids

Richard, Michael, Jerid and I have been having an interesting discussion on the intersection of public schools and Christianity in America. (That discussion should be viewable by all, but when I tried to get to it while signed out, FB asked me to sign in. So I'd be curious to know of non-FB-contacts of mine can see/comment on that thread.) I just started rereading Resident Aliens (by Hauerwas and Willimon). I hit two passages in the short section I've read so far that seemed to hit on this topic, so I thought I'd share them here.

The second paragraph touches on raising children, but the first paragraph explains the context of the term "colony":

The image that evokes this adventure for us is, again, found in Philippians 3:20 -- "our commonwealth is in heaven." Moffatt more vividly translates this politeuma as "We are a colony of heaven." The Jews in Dispersion were well acquainted with what it meant to live as strangers in a strange land, aliens trying to stake out a living on someone else's turf. Jewish Christians had already learned, in their day-to-day life in the synagogue, how important it was for resident aliens to gather to name the name, to tell the story, to sing Zion's songs in a land that didn't know Zion's God.

A colony is a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another, a place where the values of home are reiterated and passed on to the young, a place where the distinctive language and life-style of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced.

The context of this second quote was the change in American culture between the days when everything was shut down on Sundays and "The church was the only show in town," to our present situation where there are many alternatives on a Sunday morning and people no longer feel obligated to attend a religious service of any sort on a Sunday. This change, by the way, is a repeating theme in our Sunday school classes and gals Bible study in our congregation and therefore one that is frequently at the forefront of my mind.

The demise of the Constantinian world view, the gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding "Christian" culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate. The decline of the old, Constantianian synthesis between the church and the world means that we American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.

There has definitely been a change in American culture over the past decades. It's a change that we are probably still right in the middle of. But to the extent that it has freed people to follow through on their beliefs, whether Christian, atheist, humanist, or some other system of belief, I think that's a good thing. I'm all for integrity and I see no integrity in a culture that encourages people to go through the motions of going to church and calling oneself a Christian if that doesn't match either your beliefs or the way you live your life outside of the obligatory Sunday morning service. I also think it's an important change in how kids grow up today. Rather than being raised in the heart of a culture that often said one thing and did another, the children of Christians are hopefully being confronted with the Scriptures in a way that makes it clear what encompasses Christianity and what has been tacked on by people and worldly culture.

In a sense, what we are living in the midst of is the fruition of the Reformation. In America, we have finally come to a point where we can separate "church" from "country" or "culture" and see it for what God has said it should be and not what we have said it should be. Of course you can't separate church from culture. But you can recognize a culture that is of the church and a culture that is not of the church and see that those are two distinct things, just as the culture of the colony will be different than the culture of the host country where the colony is located.

So what does that look like as we raise our children? Jerid's original post that got me traipsing down the education discussion road was this:

‎"Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree." -President Obama

This is little because the knowledge required has increased. It is mostly because schools, especially public schools, are spending more time teaching social agendas and less time demanding excellence in knowledge and ability.

I do think that schools teach social agendas, for good and for ill. I like the overall social agenda at our kids' school - one that encourages Independence, open-mindedness, integrity, caring, and community involvement. (Granted, how that plays out isn't always what I'd wish for. There's a curriculum, and then there's staff, and sometimes the attitudes of the latter overrides some of the positive aspects of the former.) Our kids perform well on standardized tests, so their knowledge seems to be proficient despite the social agenda. And I think that more often than not, the social attitudes and teaching of the staff mirrors our own beliefs, even though the teachers' spiritual beliefs might not align with our own. The difference doesn't lie in the what, but the why, and our children learn that through their interaction with our Christian colony.

(Completely tangential: Though we raise our kids in our colony, whether they choose to remain in our colony is a decision that we leave up to them. But that's a topic for another day.)

There's of course an implied "agree/disagree" question in this post, but I'd also be curious to hear of examples of social agendas in the school that hinder the ability of a colony (of any sort - Christian, Muslim, environmental, gay, Mexican, etc.) to raise their children according to their own colony's values. I don't think that being challenged on your beliefs is a hindrance. Harassment is. 

... because for some people, this is what it's all about.

North Point's iBand

Culture Shock - Life in the Christian Ghetto

Even though I've been attending "Evangelical" churches for the past 28 years, there are still times when I almost feel like I'm walking in a foreign country. I think this tends to happen more when I'm with a group of people who have grown up in the evangelical church and very likely their parents grew up in the evangelical/protestant church and so on. So there's a "church culture" there that these people have been raised in that's tied very closely with their understanding of Christianity (whether or not it actually is a part of Christianity as described by the Bible). 

I was raised as a Catholic through a long line of Catholics (both Roman and Byzantine) and I suppose that's why these things sometimes come as a culture shock. Despite having been immersed in the Evangelical culture on and off for 28 years, my roots are different enough, and my study of the Bible has been compared to an alternate set of cultural understandings, that it's a bit jarring when I run into something from another culture that's called "Christian" but that's rather different than my own understanding of what the Bible says.

It feels like running into a wall. When I try to point out the difference between the Biblical statements regarding the topic and the cultural ones, that pretty much feels like backing up and running into the wall again and again. That's when it finally dawns on me that we're not talking about the Bible or what God has said, we're talking about the way people were raised and what they were told to believe growing up. It may very well have next to nothing to do with what the Bible says, but because it's a part of what they've always thought of as Christianity, it therefore is in their minds intimately related to Christianity. It's not really up for debate. 

My head hurts. 

You Shall Not Steal - A Shazam Moment

During our Sunday morning service this week, Kevin read another of the 10 commandments. (We've been hitting one a week.)  This week was "You shall not steal." That's pretty short and sweet. But it, and Kevin's commentary after reading it, and the Mountains Beyond Mountains book I finished recently, have all gotten me to thinking about myself and in what ways I steal from others. 

I suppose it was one of those moments when I had had have a concept sitting around in my head for ages and ages but suddenly that concept hit the reality of my life at a specific moment in time and it was suddenly like Gomer Pile had yelled "Shazam!" and little light bulbs started going off in my head. And I pictured myself filling my shopping cart with things at Target and each purchase being just one more way in which I've gathered resources to myself that weren't meant for me. 

The quote that I mentioned in my Mountains Beyond Mountains review is particularly what hit me. 

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb:"Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, "God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us."

And I realized that it wasn't just someone else buying something they didn't really need that was a problem. ME buying something that I didn't really need was a problem. I've tried to reduce our expenses before and buy things used and so on. But it has been more because I wanted to "reduce" or "reuse" than because I held clearly in my mind the idea that I needed to share the resources that God had given to us (us plural, as in, "us, the whole wide world").

Don't get me wrong. We give. We give to our church, to Compassion International, to the Door of Faith Orphanage, and to several other organizations and people. I feel like I have a grasp on giving. What I didn't have in my head was the picture of the person in need who will be missing out on something because of my purchase. 

I know, there's the whole, "But your purchase gave someone in that needy country a job (where they were able to make 6 cents an hour building that for you)." Yeah, yeah. My purchase isn't greed on my part, it's benevolence. Right. But really that's missing the point entirely. My hoarding of stuff doesn't benefit anyone (not even myself because then I have to find a way to cram that stuff into the house). I need to find a way to live not just with less, but more simply over all.  (And with less doesn't mean that I have less. Just that I buy less. There's the whole "Live Simply" movement that involves buying lots of stuff and then getting rid of it quickly. I really don't think that benefits anyone, even if it looks nicely austere.) 

It seems like I've tried spending less many, many times in the past and then the kids need clothes or I need a new bookshelf or.... Yeah. So, what's the trick to really making it happen? 

Objective, Absolute, and Universal Truth

“The idea of truth as objective is simply that no matter what we believe to be the case, some things will always be true and other things will always be false. Our beliefs, whatever they are, have no bearing on the facts of the world around us. That which is true is always true — even if we stop believing it and even if we stop existing at all.” -- atheism.com

“An absolute truth, sometimes called a universal truth, is an unalterable and permanent fact.” -- wisegeek 

It's popular in Christian circles to talk about Absolute Truth.  It's spoken of as one of those defining features that sets us apart from the rabble. While all the world is going to hell in a hand basket because they're a hedonistic bunch of Relativists, the Christians sit smugly upon their stack of Absolute Truths which, conveniently enough, can only be deduced directly from the their own religious text, the Bible. So if you were ever to come to the point that you agreed with Christians on their absolute truths, you'd have to first except the absolute truth that the Bible is the only source for absolute truths.  (This has been my experience, at least, when it comes to discussions among Christians on Absolute Truth.  I'm not trying to say this is absolutely always how the topic is approached.  I'm just giving a relativistic (and snarky) description based on my own personal experiences.)

And yet, if there is objective truth, shouldn't those truths, by definition, be evident, not only to Christians, but to all people? For example: “All people will die.”  This is a basic and objective truth that I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who would disagree with you on. (Of course, Rob's answer was a prompt, "But you can't prove that." I suppose that just because everyone that's gone before us has died doesn't mean that everyone now or to come will also die. So yeah, I can't prove that. Ironic, isn't it? Something that I'm pretty sure everyone would agree to as an absolute truth can't be absolutely proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. No wonder discussions of truth often end up sounding more like squabbles than revelations.) Though the Bible addresses the mankind and death issue ("There is a time for everything... a time to be born and a time to die..." -- Ecclesiastes 3:1a, 2a), I think you can find those who have never once read the Scriptures who would also agree with this truth. In my mind, the fact that you could find people of all ages, cultures and religions who agree with this statement is a strong indicator that the statement is a universal truth (even if you can't prove it). 

In fact, as much as Christians love to try to prove that there is absolute truth (even to the point of proving that what someone hasn't said is wrong), I think the real heart of the matter is not that there are those who believe absolute truth doesn't exist, but that there are those (most of us, in fact) who simply forget these absolute truths.  

And so, when someone comes along and reminds us of some of those absolute truths, their words have the ability to strike us at the core.  They resonate with what we have already experienced to be true, and they spur us on to remember and live by those absolute truths. 

A friend of mine recently posted Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, which resonated with me not only because I think it was a well written and organized speech (and because I think Jesus would use a Mac (a computer that Steve Jobs invented)), but because it jived so well with the book that several gals and I have been reading and discussing in our Bible study group on being peacemakers. Here was a man who attributed nothing to God, who very well may never have read the Bible, and who didn't in any way claim to be a Christian, and yet what he said struck me as being true.  It agreed with beliefs (I think of them as "truths.") that I have found in the Bible.  It agreed with experiences I have had in life. In my opinion, Steve Jobs struck upon several Absolute Truths in his speech. 

He had three main points: 

1. The dots will connect.  Trust that and it will give you confidence.
2. Crap happens. Use those times to start over - to redirect yourself again towards what you love. 
3. We will all die. So choose well how you will live and don't get caught up in silly fears and pointless worries. 

OK, so point number one is the most shaky in terms of being "absolute."  Though many people believe in "destiny" or "karma" or "predestination," there are also many that believe life is random.  As a Christian, however, I find it interesting that Jobs would hit upon this point. Proverbs 3:5 says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."  In Steve Jobs-ese that would read, "Trust that something -- your gut, destiny, life, Karma, whatever -- is connecting the dots in your life.  Looking forward, you won't see how these dots are going to connect, but looking back, it will become clear." (That's not a direct quote from Jobs.  It's a rearranging of things he said into an approximation of the Proverbs 3:5 format.)  Jobs added that, "Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path. And that will make all the difference."  

Jobs' second point, that loss can bring you around to seeking after what you love, is also something that can be found in the Bible.  Paul wrote that "when you put a seed into the ground, it doesn't grow into a plant unless it dies first." (1 Corinthians 15:36) The bounty doesn't come until after there's been the struggle that the seed must endure - burial, death, and new life from the husk that's left behind. Jobs also hit upon several other ideas under this second point: "Keep Looking, don't settle," "Sometime's life's gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith," and "You've got to find what you love." In other words, persevere, keep faith, and don't forsake your first love.  (Jobs sounds like a 21st century echo of Saint John as he wrote to the church in Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-7)).

Steve Jobs concluded with the point that I've already addressed above: We're all going to die. He says, "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." This is wisdom.  Steve Jobs has stated quite eloquently here what even Saint Paul struggled to get across to the early Christians living in Rome -- "We were therefore buried with [Jesus] through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life." (Romans 6:4) 

When Saint Paul entered a new city and started speaking to the people there, he often began not by pointing out all the ways in which he disagreed with them, but by pointing out a truth that they could all agree upon. For example, in talking to the men of Athens, he referenced one of their own poets, giving support to his words not by sourcing his own religious text, but by referencing something of theirs. (Acts 17) I can only imagine what our own society would be like if Christians stopped trying to prove that they had the corner on the market for truth and rather started reminding others of truths that we all agree upon (as I feel Steve Jobs has done, heathen though he might be). From there could spring other discussions, such as trying to determine the source of those truths.  But rather than pushing a cultural debate founded upon disagreement, we'd be beginning from a point of unity.  How different would our conversations be then?

Absolute Truth shouldn't be a dividing point used by Christians to attempt to chasten the world.  Rather, Absolute Truth should be that which breaks down the boundaries between us and others and enables us to speak with thoughtfulness, respect, and well... truth.