Fundamentalism | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Fundamentalism

4Jun

Village Appreciation Day

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Elementary schools are set up a little differently here in Italy than they are in the U.S. For one thing, kids here typically go to school six days a week but only in the mornings. This allows families to eat the main meal of the day together, and then children spend the afternoon doing homework, going to extracurricular activities, and living it up at the neighborhood playgrounds. There are some schools with a five-days-a-week, eight-hours-a-day setup to accommodate working parents, but most families still choose mornings-only and enlist grandparents to babysit in the afternoons if need be. (We don’t have the grandparent option, but since Dan and I both started working from home, family life has become about 2,089,573,101 times less complicated. And all God’s entrepreneurs said amen.)

Another significant difference here is that teachers are assigned to a class in first grade and then stay with that group of kids all the way through fifth grade. This can be wonderful and reassuring if you get good teachers.

…And if you don’t?

I devoted significant energy to worrying over this four years ago when Natalie was about to start first grade and again last year when it was Sophie’s turn. What if the girls ended up with someone calloused and grim, someone to whom children’s presence tasted like unripe lemons? Someone drunk on power or palest green with inexperience or prejudiced against foreigners like us? What if their teachers were the kind to tread on sensitive, creative little hearts? What if my girls had to spend five long years’ worth of school days in a classroom taut with tension and defeat?

I was reminded of these fears last Saturday morning at the girls’ school recital, but not for the reason you might think. Sophie’s first-grade class started off with a little skit about how they had once been afraid they’d get witches for teachers, and I laughed along with the other parents while reflecting that my own fears for my daughter hadn’t been so very different. I had gone into my girls’ school experience geared up to fear and resent their teachers, imagining the worst of them before we’d even met.

This was a sobering realization as I looked around the room on Saturday and saw the faces of the women who have guided and encouraged and invested in my girls over the school year(s), women who were every bit as proud of my children’s academic progress as I was. I kept sneaking peeks at the teachers during the girls’ performances, and the affection radiating from their faces was enough to untie a knot somewhere in my throat. Fear was a distant (and regretful) memory. All I had left was gratitude, so full-bodied and sweet it blurred my vision.

Gratitude for those who have made education their lives’ work.
Gratitude for the creativity and fun they bring to the classroom despite budget cuts and bureaucratic hurdle-fests.
Gratitude for the unique imprints they have left on my daughters through their insights, personalities, and talents.
Gratitude for their presence in my girls’ lives, every teacher a support column to their childhoods.

I once believed that “It takes a village” was liberal propaganda designed to undermine the family structure, and I’m sure that residual fallout from that belief helps explain why I was so afraid of the girls’ teachers sight-unseen. As I’ve experienced in so many aspects of my journey away from fundamentalism, though, fears lose their claustrophobic grip once I’m out in the spacious, grace-full open. I’m not saying that bad teachers don’t exist or that we haven’t been fortunate so far, but my mindset is coming from a different direction now—one of preemptive appreciation rather than preemptive dread. And as Saturday morning solidified for me, I am above and beyond grateful for this little village in which my girls get to grow.

21May

Choice and Effect

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

[Photo snapped at the running trail near our house]

I used to be a psychology major. Did you know that? I originally went into elementary education, but two weeks into my first education class, I knew I was headed down the wrong career path. (Out of all the homework assignments I completed at college, decorating a poster to explain number sets to first-graders was the only one that made me weep with frustration.) I then switched to psychology, much to the apathy of my department advisor. “I want to become a counselor who can help children and families out of abusive situations!” I announced with all the optimism of one about half a step into her own recovery. “Mm,” said my advisor, glancing at her watch. She clearly knew something about my future in psychology that I didn’t learn for myself until one day halfway through my junior year when I was tutoring a group of freshmen in creative writing and thinking that really, the school didn’t even need to pay me for it; I just loved working with the English language that much. In fact, I’d choose to read all thousand-plus pages of the Chicago Manual of Style over a five-page psychology case study any day.

“Wow, I’m so surprised you’re switching your major to English!” said no one. My parents kindly refrained from mentioning that every career test I’d taken throughout high school had told me I was meant for writing. My future husband, best friends, and liberal arts professors all took an it’s-about-time stance, and that was that. But what I want to tell you about today took place before the switch, back when I was still immersed in psychology coursework.

During class one afternoon, my professor handed out a questionnaire meant to help us discover how much control we felt we had over our own lives. I can’t remember the official terminology, but it was designed to evaluate in ten minutes or less whether we were fatalists or… uh, whatever the opposite of that would be. Controlists? (Psychologist friends, help!) That damn questionnaire ranks as second most overwhelming homework assignment of my college career. I could not figure out how to answer the simple multiple-choice, no-wrong-answer questions.

I believe that my success in life is:
A) Dependent on hard work and perseverance
B) Up to chance

When something bad happens to me, I:
A) Believe that I caused it by something I did
B) Believe other people or circumstances out of my control caused it

What I needed was an “All of the above” option because, as it turned out, I believed simultaneously that I was powerless to change my life and that every negative aspect of my life was my fault. Lord o’ mercy.

Discovering this about myself did absolutely nothing to fix it. Religious dysfunction runs deep, and my theology had taught me that even though God was Supreme Micromanager of the Universe, I could inadvertently sway his decisions by being too [fill-in-the-blank] or not [fill-in-the-blank] enough. The good in my life—and there was much good—made me feel like I was getting away with something, that some glitch in the divine system was giving me an edge I didn’t deserve. Meanwhile, the difficult parts of my life were proof of my own personal failure. The result was that I strove for perfection without ever seeing the correlation between hard work and good results. I had absolutely no concept of goal-setting.

Truth be told, I still didn’t have a concept of it last year when I started training for a marathon—arguably one of the biggest goals a couch potato like me could set. I find it notable that I signed up for the marathon to see if I could surprise myself; I put no real trust in my training program or the slow and steady progress I made throughout those five months. It all seemed up to fate until the very end, when I sank my jellified bones onto a bench in the finishers’ zone and considered what I had just done. What I had done. With willpower and time and action verbs and a very conscious determination to try, I had succeeded at a challenge. Fatalism could go stuff it.

I didn’t realize how profoundly the marathon had changed my thinking though until a couple of weeks ago. Sophie had brought home a poem to memorize for school, and I kept hearing snatches of it as I walked past her room. She even tried practicing it while she brushed her teeth. I was impressed to see a first-grader taking that much initiative, and it wasn’t a surprise the next day to hear she had gotten the highest possible grade on her recitation. “Great job!” I told her. “You worked so hard to memorize that poem, and it paid off!”

Perhaps that is a very normal thing for a parent to say, but the words felt shiny and exotic slipping over my tongue. Never before had I linked cause and effect so confidently, and it wasn’t limited to my daughter’s grades either. I realized that I was holding several challenging areas of life in my hands, weighing them and strategizing instead of just brooding over them from afar. For the first time I can remember, I felt like I had a say in the outcomes of my life. Not the full say, and probably not the final one either, but the power to chart new directions nonetheless.

I’m afraid that if I write any more, this post will degenerate into a vaguely formulaic, click-bait-style article (“How Running a Marathon Turned Me Into an Optimist!”), and the last thing I want to treat as trivial is my journey out of fundamentalism. I want you to know though that while claiming power over one’s own life may sound like an Oprah-ism, it’s really the rush of wind changing directions. It’s the glorious muck on your hands as you shape goals into being. It’s the crumple of a psychology questionnaire hitting the wastebasket because you no longer need multiple-choice questions to define (or upend) you. It’s the rhythm of running shoes on pavement, steady with the hope that you’re actually, finally going somewhere.

16May

Curse-Word Hymns

Posted by: Bethany in Non-Churchy Songs for the Soul 12 Comments

One of the best things about road-tripping with Dan is getting those long, uninterrupted miles of time to talk. Early in our relationship, I worried that we’d eventually run out of things to say to each other, and I suppose there’s some validity in that. After all, we live together and work together and can pretty much catch up on each other’s news over a three-minute espresso break. Our day-to-day interactions tend to cluster around the present though—how work projects are going, what to do about Parenting Challenge #5,000,008, which brand of toothpaste is on sale at the grocery store, who’s going to take one for the team and vacuum—and while these are all incredibly glamorous and sexy topics to be sure, they don’t exactly cover the scope of human communication.

In eleven years of marriage, we haven’t left many conversational stones unturned, but coming back to them is always a new experience. I’ve changed so much in the past decade. My views on any given subject are liable to be 180º degrees from what they were when we first talked through it, and part of me feels guilty over that, as if I got Dan to choose me based on false advertising. His love has proven to be expansive though, more than enough to cover all the different iterations of me. Through Dan’s unconditional fondness for me, I’ve been able to grasp the idea of a spacious God… and that’s where one of our road-trip conversations led us last weekend.

We were talking about how people commune with God, and I confessed that no matter how much I’ve tried over the last several years, I just cannot get my soul to click with religious music anymore. Christian bands, worship songs, pretty much any churchy phrases set to chords chafe at me like an outgrown hat. This makes me sad sometimes. I remember what it was like to agree with my heart and my vocal cords with the sentiments of an entire congregation, to float out of my body on the strains of communal devotion. I don’t have that anymore.

But talking with my husband about it helped me re-remember for the umpteenth time that I don’t have to fit in a mold to love and be loved by God. I don’t have to speak or think or vote like a stereotypical Christian (whatever that might be) in order to align my life with Jesus. I don’t have to accept traditional spiritual practices as the only way. And I don’t have to connect with “religious music” to have a religious musical experience. In the end, this thrills me far more than it saddens me. Finding God in unexpected places makes spirituality real to me in a way that predictable experiences never do, so if God is meeting me through rap rather than hymns, I can only take that as proof that my ever-changing self is still very much covered by love.

—

I haven’t done a Non-Churchy Songs for the Soul roundup in a while, but today feels just right for sharing eight more unconventional tracks that are pulling at my soul-strings these days:

1. Glósóli by Sigur Rós
I can’t watch this video without crying. I know that drum-beating rescuer with the kind eyes, don’t you see. This is the story of Jesus… and of the tremulous hope, the rag-tag trust, and the dizzying joy of freedom that have become my story too.

“And here you are, Glowing Sun,
And here you are, Glowing Sun,
And here you are, Glowing Sun,
And here you are…”

2. Rambling Man by Laura Marling
All of Laura’s songs are poetry, but this one in particular folds me into a higher mindset. It’s introspection and self-evaluation and a determined authenticity, and the video above should give you a clue as to how I interpret the rambling life.

“It’s a cold and a pale affair,
And I’ll be damned if I’ll be found there.
Oh give me to a rambling man,
Let it always be known that I was who I am.”

3. Starting Over by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
I have proven myself incapable of doing anything but sitting up to listen when Macklemore’s on the stereo. This track is one of the best biographies of grace I’ve ever heard, and it always makes me grateful for the hard, beautiful work of being human together. (Just a heads up that this song involves decidedly non-churchy language.)

“We fall so hard,
Now we gotta get back what we lost.
I thought you’d gone,
But you were with me all along.”

4. I Want to be Well by Sufjan Stevens
I’ve posted this song before because it so fully expresses my gut feelings/thoughts/prayers when PTSD yanks my breath out from under me. (Note: The following does not involve polite language either.) What comes to mind when I listen to it is a question from the Bible that Jesus asked a lifelong invalid: “Do you want to get well?” How many times had that man wailed to God, “I’m not fucking around”? And to learn, after all those years, that neither was God…

“I want to be well, I want to be well,
I want to be well, I want to be well.
I’m not fucking around, I’m not, I’m not,
I’m not fucking around.”

5. Me and God by The Avett Brothers
Now, you know I’ve got to love anyone who admits to using curse words when they pray. (See: previous two songs.) I can still remember what it was like to read in the Bible, of all places, that God just wanted our honest, simple selves—no church-sanctioned polish, no middle men on pedestals, just us. The relief of it still makes me grin wide.

“Well I found God in a soft woman’s hair,
A long day’s work and a good sittin’ chair,
The ups and downs of the treble clef lines,
And five miles ago on an interstate sign.
My God, my God and I don’t need a middle man.”

6. When Death Dies by Gungor
I’m fudging my own rules to include this self-proclaimed Christian band on the list, but I’ve never heard a beat-boxing cellist at church, so I think you’ll forgive me. This song is everything I believe about heaven, everything I believe we get to dream of one day.

“Where it comes, poor men feast.
Kings fall down to their knees.
When death dies, all things live,
All things live.”

7. Bible Belt by Dry the River
This is another one that speaks directly to my experience growing up under fundamentalism. It’s sad and beautiful and ultimately shining bright with the hope that comes of bravery and companionship. And if I said that Jesus was the one waiting for me on the 5:45 to whisk me away from the Bible Belt, would you believe me?

“Cause we’ve been through worse than this before we could talk.
The trick of it is, don’t be afraid anymore.”

8. Take Up Your Spade by Sarah Watkins
Sarah’s always had a way of making life sound uncomplicated and pure, and this little hymn to new days and new grace helps get me out of bed when the morning dawns heavy. Plus, that’s Fiona Apple singing with her. Perfection.

“Shake off your shoes, leave yesterday behind you,
Shake off your shoes but forget not where you’ve been,
Shake off your shoes, forgive and be forgiven;
Take up your spade and break ground.”

What about you? Any songs been tugging at your soul-strings lately?

—

Previous roundups:

Sweaty Horns, Cracking Voices

Reggae and Redemption

Upside-Down Art: Jaw Harp Jam

30Apr

The Spiritual Practice of TED

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

I was not born with the gift of waking up. During the night, sleep clots in my veins while my eyelids turn into miniature lead aprons, and while I might be able to force uprightness on myself the next morning, I can guarantee neither alertness nor attractiveness. (Ask Dan sometime how he feels about The Walking Dead as a reality show.) However, as much as I may rage, rage against the dawning of the light, my best days are always the ones that start an hour or two before I absolutely have to be up.

I call that hour or two my Spiritual Recharge Time (SRT) for lack of a better term. I grew up calling it Quiet Time, but that now reeks of obligation and guilt to me—falling asleep over Bible pages I was too tired to make any sense of, Psalms about morning prayer wagging their fingers at me, preacherly voices admonishing, “You don’t love sleep more than you love God, do you?” Give me a break.

I do sometimes read The Message for SRT, but I might read something else or journal or listen to music while the first cappuccino of the day warms my brain back to life. I have to figure out on a trial-and-error basis which practice will work for me on any given morning, and that’s not always easy. One morning, perusing the Bible will make my mind glow; the next morning, it will make me feel like stabbing something. Same with music and journaling and reading. I wake up (which in my case is always a euphemism, but still) with expectations of connecting with God, but sometimes trying to find the right spiritual practice feels like combing through a wardrobe of ill-fitting clothes. The frustration of this can leave me further from God and closer to zombiehood than I was upon “waking.”

I recently found a solution to this nothing-fits scenario though: TED Talks. It’s not that I’m just now discovering these “ideas worth spreading;” they’ve been on my radar since Liz Gilbert’s brilliant talk on genius in 2009. However, I never thought of them as spiritually relevant until one morning a couple of months ago when I gave up on SRT in frustration, opened my computer, and landed on Louie Schwartzberg’s presentation about nature, beauty, and gratitude:

“When people see my images, a lot of times they’ll say, ‘Oh my God.’ Have you ever wondered what that meant? The ‘Oh’ means it caught your attention, makes you present, makes you mindful. The ‘my’ means it connects with something deep inside your soul. It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And ‘God’? God is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we’re connected to a universe that celebrates life.”

I felt it. Watching his stunning time-lapse photography filled me with the Oh my God that had been so absent from my other meditative attempts that morning. It rescued me from the confines of my own small mind and replaced my frustration with wonder. Wonder. That was the missing piece, the perspective I hadn’t had the strength to conjure for myself.

The talk finished, and I clicked to another one. I watched Paul Nicklen befriend a dangerous leopard seal, Sue Austin go deep-sea diving in a wheelchair, Amy Cuddy prove that we can change our internal chemistry with body language, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discuss the power of our stories. Their innovations and perspectives helped me sense the scope of the universe a little more clearly. It felt like tapping into an existential undercurrent, one powered by creativity and open-mindedness and awe… and what was that undercurrent if not God?

Watching TED Talks has become my go-to spiritual practice when none of the conventional ones seems to fit, and I’m sharing this because I know I’m not the only who struggles to connect with God. Religious institutions have worked a number on many of us. The Bible has been used so often to manipulate and oppress that its words wound rather than heal some of us. Faith traditions straight-laced with rules and shoulds and penalties have convinced some of us that they control access to God, and why even bother trying when it’s all so hard and heavy, when all our attempts at devotion seem to turn our souls industrial grey?

This is why: Because God is bigger than the walls put up to safeguard religion. This I believe with all my heart. If we’re not finding God within other people’s traditions, that’s okay. In fact, there’s an expansive kind of joy in brushing up against the divine where you least expected to find it—in the zombie hour following dawn, for example, when all the usual spiritual channels have failed and all that’s left is the entire wonder-full universe.

8Apr

Upside-Down Art: Jaw Harp Jam

Posted by: Bethany in My writings elsewhere, Non-Churchy Songs for the Soul 2 Comments

From the time I stumbled across D.L. Mayfield’s writing a couple of years ago, her perspective has intrigued and challenged me. Her blog was the first place I came across the term “downward mobility,” and her conviction that Jesus’s teachings and the American dream might be at odds has set off powerful ripples within my own thinking. Through her writing, she draws those on the margins of society into the middle of the picture, over and over until readers can’t help but start to see the world differently. In short, she’s a game-changer. I’m honored to be sharing her space today with a cross-cultural redemption story that has become my favorite earworm; join me there for the rest, would you?

~~~

When Marcus Mumford and his band of indie folk-farmers hit the scene back in 2010, I had never heard the term hipster. I didn’t know suspenders were the new rubric of cool; I just knew that their music spoke to me, that Mumford’s “newly impassioned soul” plucked the strings of my own longing for a full-volume life. I queued up Sigh No More and played it on repeat for the next six months. Chances are, you did too. The album peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200 and was the third most downloaded album of 2011. Everyone, it seemed, was getting his or her British bluegrass on.

But this story isn’t about Mumford & Sons. It’s about an almost impossibly obscure group of musicians from rural India who recorded an untitled EP with them.

Image from last.fm user rahsa

They went by Dharohar Project (pronounced “Dah-RHO-har”), and the only thing I knew about them was my own disappointment. I’d been hoping for a fresh dose of the barn-dance rock I’d been cycling through my stereo—not the wailing and twanging I associated with traditional Indian music. I gave the MP3 samples a once-over, but they only confirmed what I already knew: Jaw harp just wasn’t my jam.

…

{Continue reading over at D.L. Mayfield’s place}

27Mar

I Am Not an Abomination, and Neither Are You

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 9 Comments

When I was a girl, I believed I was fundamentally wrong. The exact term that rings in my memory is “an abomination to God.” An abomination. I didn’t have any context for that word outside of the Bible—in fact, I’m not sure I do even now—but I understood that its five syllables shook with the intensity of God’s disgust.

I gave proud looks.
I was deceitful.
I pushed back against rules.

I’d memorized verses declaring each of those things an abomination, a detestable affront to God, and over time, the word worked its way past my actions and straight into my identity. I didn’t try to be proud, see. I couldn’t help it; my entire theology was based on micromanaging myself toward perfection, and any time that I succeeded, my natural reaction was pride. I didn’t have many grounds to feel good about myself, but if I was managing more holiness than someone else in a certain area, my mind latched onto smugness like a drowning cat to a piece of driftwood. Pride wasn’t my choice; it just was. And that made me an abomination.

The same went for my deceitful and rebellious streaks. Lying and hiding were coping mechanisms for me, my body’s only strategy for self-defense. Rebellion was likewise instinctual; I never flouted rules, but I endlessly wrestled with the ones that suffocated me, trying to find loopholes through which to breathe. I was born with a question mark tattooed on my soul, and I believed the only reason God didn’t smite me for it was because Jesus had him on a choke chain.

There is a fiercely painful dissonance in believing that the one who made you is repulsed by who you are. I don’t think this is a sensation unique to my experience either. Mainstream Christianity teaches that we are born with a “sin nature” that God cannot abide, even though God is the maker and creator of all, and that we must perform series of steps to effectively hide our depravity from him before it is used as grounds to condemn us. I have heard thousands of sermons over the years to that effect.

Believing this way, that God considered who-I-was an abomination, stamped the dark impression of guilt onto my every waking moment. Not even those times of smugness when I was particularly rocking at righteousness could blunt my impression that God was gagging in my direction. I ricocheted endlessly between self-loathing and pride, my psyche working overtime to protect me from my theology. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out that this was a nightmarish way to live.

All the same, I had it easy in one regard: Nobody ganged up with God against me. If anything, I was praised by other Christians for striving so hard after holiness. Not once in my life has a group of people discriminated against me over those parts of myself that the Bible calls abominations. If I have ever defended my identity, it’s because I’ve wanted to, not because I’ve been under attack. I find instant acceptance in most Christian circles despite the ways in which my habits diverge from accepted biblical standards, and fellow believers’ open arms have strengthened the faith that I might have abandoned long ago without their support.

Not everyone is so privileged.

Among all the “abominations” listed in the Bible, from telling lies to eating shrimp to stirring up conflict to shedding innocent blood, the evangelical Christian community has picked out one on which to concentrate its outrage. You already know which one. You can’t help but know it. It’s on Saturday night’s news and on Sunday morning’s PowerPoint and on legislative drawing tables around the world. It’s the mountain on which we are willing to let others die.

This week, evangelicals became so incensed over World Vision, a humanitarian aid organization, expanding its hiring policy to allow married gay Christians that thousands of children lost their sponsorships. Let me put that in other words: People who claim to follow Jesus stopped providing nutrition, education, and health care to impoverished children in order to make a theological point.

Just before getting into bed last night, I saw that World Vision had reversed its decision, caving after two short days of uproar. The news settled on my heart like a boulder, and I lay awake for a long time exploring the contours of that weight. Being a Christian has never made me so sad.

I know what it’s like to feel that God despises my identity but not what it must feel like to have millions of fellow humans joining in. I can’t imagine having even just one person so repulsed by who-I-am that he or she would withdraw help from a child and call it my fault. I can’t imagine trying to reconcile my faith with my orientation only to have a nation of heterosexuals shouting from every available platform that I was choosing deviance. I can’t imagine having my heart and soul and talents rejected outright by the Christian community due to an inflexible interpretation of a few select Bible verses.

Can you imagine it?

I’m positive that the sorrow I feel today is a pale shadow of the pain my LGBT brothers and sisters are experiencing this week… this month… this lifetime during which they will be dragged again and again into a religious culture war in which everyone loses. Other writers have already made the points that bear repeating this week (see Rachel Held Evans, Jamie Wright, Jen Hatmaker, Erika Morrison, Nish Weiseth, and Kristen Howerton), and I know better than to think I can singlehandedly change popular doctrine. I do think it’s important though that I lend my voice to the discussion—if nothing else, so that my own LGBT friends will know that they’re not the brunt of every Christian’s theology.

I am grateful all the way to my bone marrow that my view of God did not stay rooted in that oppressive past. I still read the Bible but with very different eyes. Jesus is real to me now—unconditional love is real to me now—and through the clarity of that love, everything I once thought about religion is up for grabs. Except the view of a single human soul as an abomination. That’s not up for grabs. That’s just straight-up gone.

6Feb

Two-Part Answer

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

I went through high school in a sort of homeschool/private school hybrid where I would go to certified teachers’ houses to take courses with a handful of other students and then continue my coursework during the week at home. This setup allowed me to get a solid academic education while still sheltering me from the much-feared religious and pop culture educations I might have gotten at public school. At least, sheltering was the idea. I still learned the Salt ‘N’ Pepa lyrics, and my theological doubts only chafed more the longer they were constrained, but I kept it all in a sound-proof vault as if my authority figures were the ones needing sheltering from all that I knew. However, the academic side was everything I could have asked for. Between Shakespeare and AP English, I established my permanent love affair with this language of ours, and I learned more in my ninth grade biology class than in three semesters of science electives once I went to university.

Recent events have stirred up a memory from that ninth grade biology class, and I wanted you to know about my educational construct at the time—strong value on academics, strong fear of secular influence—so that you can understand the weight of our final assignment for the year. Our biology teacher, a pragmatic woman with a twinkling sense of humor, decided not to teach the unit on earth’s origin directly. Instead, she had us pick teams and spend our home study time preparing a debate on evolution versus creationism.

I, being a ridiculously earnest pupil who hadn’t yet developed a sense of humor, picked creationism. Obviously. I’d already read Ken Ham’s “The Lie” about how families were being destroyed by false scientific theories, and it was perfectly evident to me that Darwin’s followers were sponsored by Satan himself. If you believed in evolution, you were against the Bible—God’s encyclopedia—which meant you were against truth. I’d been to Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum and seen a human footprint alongside a dinosaur one. I’d freaking memorized Genesis 1. Armed with so much truth and the absolute assurance that God was on my side, I looked forward to crushing the “evolutionists” in our class debate.

And here’s what happened: The evolutionist side (made up of homeschooled teens, remember, who were probably loving this chance to play devil’s advocate) pulverized us. They presented scientific facts that left us creationists flipping through our notebooks, “ummm”ing in panic until we had to admit that we had absolutely no rebuttal. How do you argue against photographic proof of genetic variation using the Bible? Where are the verses that debunk carbon dating? Why wouldn’t the other side just accept the biblical account of God’s six-day creating spree? It was bad.

And all the while, a quiet smile grew on the corner of our teacher’s mouth. I didn’t think much of it then; I took it for granted that she, as a Christian, would be a young earth creationist. In retrospect, however, I suspect that she was brilliantly directing us to discover what she wasn’t free to say out loud in our circle. She never did summarize her stance on the creation vs. evolution debate. She simply smiled, and that smile stands out to me today as the first glimpse I ever had of someone at peace with both God and science.

I’ve had the privilege of knowing many other Jesus-loving scientists in the years since, and it no longer seems the least bit strange to me that someone can think deeply and believe deeply without the one contradicting the other. True, if you’re going to accept that God created life millions of years ago by means of biological evolution, then you have to read the Bible differently—not as an encyclopedia but as a literary compilation full of allegory and poetry and various writers’ experiences. I don’t see this is as necessitating a crisis of faith however.

I remember one afternoon at a fundamentalist apologetics camp in my teens, the speaker pretended to be a theistic evolutionist arriving at the pearly gates of heaven. “Well gee, God!” he blustered in a hillbilly accent, “When you said ‘day,’ I thought you meant four billion years!” God was having none of it. Straight to hell went the hillbilly who had dared to read Genesis 1 figuratively. And there, caught up in the theatricality of the moment, were hundreds of kids absorbing the message that our God would condemn us if we believed the wrong brand of science.

(Which appears exactly nowhere in the Bible, just for the record.)

That moment still makes me heartsick… for all the kids who have been terrified out of [using] their minds, for all the bright thinkers who have been convinced that faith is incompatible with fact, for a love-starved world that sees Christians get publicly bent out of shape over issues more appropriate to a lab than to a Bible study. I have to ask—Is it worth it? Is dogmatizing one interpretation of a Bible story worth driving a wedge between others and God?

I am more grateful than ever for my ninth grade biology teacher who chose not to attack our beliefs but instead guided us into challenging them ourselves. That experience helped loosen the tight, terrified fists clenched around my mind, letting it slowly expand toward a view of reality in which soul-truth and science-truth can be a two-part answer to the same question.

I’d like to hope that by the time my girls are grown, science vs. God will no longer be a source of strife. However, considering that Bill Nye this week earned himself the same label applied to Galileo by Christians four centuries ago (rhymes with “shmeretic”), I’m not sure we’re any closer to unity on the issue. What I can do, however, is try to raise my girls with active minds and open hearts to the world around them—both the spiritual world and the natural one—and trust that the God I know will be watching them research and question and make mistakes and learn with a smile ever growing on the corner of his mouth.

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