Why a Whitworth Student Might Reject Christianity
There are a number of draws to a non-religious stance. Obviously, students can easily reject Christianity in favor of other religions, but I want to delve into the agnostic/atheistic/naturalist alternative.
Positivity I disagree with the very first premise of Core 350: that we live in a broken world. So in the first 5 minutes of class, I – and I’m not the only one – felt disconnected. Is the world imperfect? Sure – but not because it was once good and then broke. It’s because we live in a world of challenges and we constantly strive to make it a better and better place. Fallenness, sinfulness, Armageddon? These are delusions from an atheistic/naturalistic perspective. As college students and recent grads, we can be optimistic. There’s plenty of time for pessimism when we’re old.
Responsibility No one is guiding your life. There is no ultimate place in the cosmic storyline, no fate, no one holding your hand and helping you make the right decisions. It’s scary at first. But instead of wondering “What is someone else’s purpose for me?” you get to ask “What will lead me to a fulfilling life? What am I passionate about?”
Avoiding Distasteful People With the exception of a few bad historical characters, the worst atheists are people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. What’s wrong with them? They are wickedly smart and they can be insulting to religious people. Well whoop-dee-do! Compared with some of the unsavory religious people out there – Bush, Cheney, Bin Laden – those guys aren’t such bad company. It’s much easier to criticize the “God Hates Fags” church when you’re actually on the other side of the fence, and that can be an appealing and morally soothing perspective.
Moral Sense Ever feel bad about people being punished for “crimes” that don’t have any victims? Like homosexuality? Or not hearing the gospel? All the questions that begin with “How could God-” are easily answered from an atheistic perspective. All the atheist has to figure out is “What on earth is morality, and where does ethics come from?” And sure, that can be challenging. But rather than thinking of what we need to do to please a watchful deity in the sky, we think about how to make the world a better place. All we humans have is each other, and the world is a tough place. If we figure out a way to get along we have the best chance to succeed. Oftentimes, religious dogma is no help at all.
No Dogma or Rituals All the Creeds and This-We-Believes go away. No more reconciling ancient manuscripts with scientific understanding. No more arguments about which sects truly understand which sacraments the best. No more praying to the right saint. Nothing binds an atheist to a particular, unified set of beliefs. Nothing tears them apart and causes strife over interpretations or practices. Isn’t that nice?
A Lot of Tough Questions Start to Make Sense Why does the human eye have a blind spot? A vestigial tail? Why the billions of years of cosmic evolution leading up to the infinitesimal existence of the human species? Advances in neuroscience and psychology provide so many answers to so many questions. And that is not to say that atheism does not create its own difficult questions, but, generally speaking, the explanations all occur within the realm of the natural world. It makes everything seem less complex – at least to someone who holds that perspective, like me.
That’s all I can think of at this point. Anyone have any to add?
Whitworth, apostate generator
“I used to be a Christian.” A smirk. “Until I came to Whitworth.”
It’s a very common line at Whitworth. It’s graced countless opinion columns, each time pretending to be a shocking statement.
But it’s something that’s happened time and time again to Whitworth Student after Whitworth student. Some, to be clear, have gone the other way — actually becoming religious in college.
But most of the movement among students seems to be away from the religion referred to in their brochures.
Personally, I survived Whitworth with my religion intact (and, maybe, ultimately stronger.) . Still, my question is: How does Whitworth, a Christian university, end up creating so many non-Christians?
After processing for some time, I believe these are many of the factors. Naturally, I can’t — and won’t — speak for your individual experience. But this is something, I think, worth exploring.
College, where the parents aren’t.
College is a time of solidifying your own identity. Of separating oneself from your old life, your old church, your old parents, and, sometimes, your old beliefs.
So it isn’t surprising that college — even Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty College in all likelihood — leads to a certain percentage rejecting the philosophy they started with.
So much of the Christianity people come to Whitworth armed with is the flannelgraph kind. Fuzzy. Simple. And able to fall off under the slightest breeze.
The parental protection is gone in college. You’re out of the womb and the umbilical cord’s been cut. Instead, you’re in a world of questions, bright and scary.
Whitworth, to its credit, tends to encourage those questions.
But people begin to run into knotty questions about their religion, without having the theological underpinnings or confidence to answer them.
Questions like:
“If it was rape, it was good rape.”
The administration’s choice to allow a production of the Vagina Monologues on school grounds represents but one sign of Whitworth’s ongoing de-Christianization.
George F. Whitworth, when he first established the college back in 1890, envisioned a college where students would “honor God, follow Christ, and serve humanity”. By endorsing and condoning such an inherently anti-Christian and perverse play such as The Vagina Monologues on campus, the administration has violated, at the very least, the first two objectives of George Whitworth’s vision.
With its glorification of fornication and perversity, manifested in subject matter such as a dominatrix pridefully going on about the merits of her work, as well as its heaping doses of crude shock value (exemplified in the skit where the performers chant notable slang – sometimes ouright obscene words – for the vagina), it doesn’t surprise me that this performance was just barely allowed to be performed on university grounds [criticism of The V. Monologues from a colonial, heterosexual perspective can be found here].
Moreover, the fact that it managed to slide past the same people who thought the title “Free Beer” was an unacceptable name for an art show in which no alcohol was served, further proves that this university is beginning to compromise on its original message.
The very concept of The Vagina Monologues, with its focus on the female genitalia as the pinnacle of worth and pride among women, represents a naturalist and materialistic view of the female persuasion, which stands in contrast to the Judeo-Christian view of women, whose bodies belong not to them, nor their lovers, but to God, who warns against the misuse of His gifts*.
Men, in The Vagina Monologues, are shown primarily as hypersexual simpletons, (such as in “Because He Liked to Look At It”, in which a man stares infatuated for hours at a woman’s mid section after just meeting her at the grocery store), and sadistic savages (nearly every other story involving men).
Women (the play implies), are totally incapable of abuse, as can be seen in the case of”The Little Cootchie Snorcher That Could”, in which a woman fondly recalls being drugged and rape at the age of thirteen by a woman in her twenties. Although the Whitworth presentation changed the last few words, in the original script, the woman narrator ends with “If it was rape, it was good rape.”
Now, this critique is not, in the least, meant as a personal slant against those participating in the play. I’m all too aware that the actors, like those of every respectable performance, poured their time and labor into not only raising awareness of domestic violence, but making the show entertaining to all. Rather, this critique is meant primarily as an assault on the immoral content and anti-Christian attitude of the play in question.
If Whitworth still wants to call itself anything more than nominally Christian, it will have to play a more active role in keeping watch against, as well as actively banning, subversive performances on campus. With more prestige as the university grows, there will be an ever present temptation to be more open to “alternative views“, much like other once religious colleges have, selling their souls so that they might attract more students – and not tick off the PC police!
Although non-Christian views and ideas should not necessarily be shut completely out of the the picture, blatantly vulgar and ideologically flawed plays – such as The Vagina Monologues - should not be endorsed by a university that prides itself on solid Christian values. Especially not a play that arguably condones sexual deviance, much less assault.
*1st Corinthians 6:13: “Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body [NKJ].”
The Shack and Christian Pop Lit
A Couple Preliminaries:
It is my intention not to reveal anything about The Shack which would constitute a decent plot “spoiler.” I’m not going to tell you who kills Dumbledore in book six, all right? I won’t mention specific events. I’ll skirt around the heavy imagery. I’ll even try to avoid quoting choice lines, because you too want to stumble across them in the sand as unexpectedly as I did. Pearls make for poor deja vu. But if you’re like me and prefer to hear nothing besides Vic Bobb’s hearty “read this” prior to opening a novel, then… you’ve probably stopped reading this post by now anyway. Proceed, as always, at your own discretion.
If you’re still reading, here’s the reason why we can have a full-fledged discussion of The Shack without revealing even the premise of the novel: the novel is somewhat of a frame story. What happens in the plot is in some ways secondary in importance (at least, I imagine, to the author of the book, if not spiritually and metaphysically) to the conversations the protagonist has with God, which occur in the middle section of the book and most of which have frustratingly little correspondence with the plot and main problem of the narration. There’s plenty to be in suspense about, etc., which doesn’t bear all too heavily on what I want to discuss with you. There were even times when, reading, I would think to myself, “This is so scripted. William P. Young is just using this novel as a dispensing machine for his little theological nuggets of wisdom. I prefer to search for nuggets, but no! Young has dumped a whole box of nuggets right into my lap. I have nugget overload, and what’s more—some of them are a little hard to swallow.” (These are chicken nuggets, of course; I’m not mixing metaphors.) I even felt a little vindicated, when, upon reading the afterward, I discovered that the conversations came to Young first, followed by the process of constructing a suitable narrative in which to frame them.
This brings me to preliminary two: I will also try to take off my critical/editor’s glasses and not comment about those literary elements of the writing which caused me to squirm, occasionally reconstruct sentences in my mind, and generally miss the message of the novel (which, I labor to remind myself, has nothing to do with commas, sentence structure, or the per-capita quantity of similes). Yes, there were times when I literally closed The Shack on my bookmark and exclaimed loudly to everyone in general, “This is stupid.” But the things that bugged me are of far less cosmic importance than the things they distracted me from. So while this post could be titled “The Literary Gnats and Other Capital Annoyances of The Shack,” I’m trying out this new focus-on-the-important-stuff approach. We can all vent our grammatical angst elsewhere.
Enough for pre-lims. Now to the liminaries themselves. I want to talk about one of the things Mack (main character) and God (other main character) discuss: the distinction between forgiveness and relationship.
The Catholic Mystique
No one will deny that there are some blatant biases on the Whitworth campus. Some get talked about more than others. There’s probably been more discussion about the bias against gays at Whitworth than there has been about the bias against, say, smokers. On the whole, though, most biases seem allowed at least a modicum of dialogue. There is one in particular, though, that I haven’t seen discussed in a public forum at all.
That, my friends, is the bias against Catholics.
Before you deny having any idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll admit it’s not just Whitworth. I’ve grown up going to various private schools. It’s always very heavily emphasized that there is no denominational favoritism. Yet, strangely, Catholics always seem to get left out from under this tolerance umbrella. “We’re all a big, happy family….except for the Catholics. They’re weird.” There is a similar attitude at Whitworth. Presbyterian-oriented as it is, I’ve never heard of any of my multidenominational friends have to deal with being told they’re “not really Christians,” having the tenets of their beliefs dismissed as being “outdated,” or having a sin committed by a miniscule amount of people associated with their denomination thrown in their faces over and over again. Except Catholics. Why is this?
There may be several reasons. America itself isn’t exactly geared toward Catholic friendliness, having been founded by low-church Puritans. And Catholic theology doesn’t really mesh well with our modern sensibilities. Nobody really listens to their parents anymore, so the idea of listening to some old guy in Rome who wears a funny hat is really out there. Accountability isn’t real big either. It’s a lot easier to just quietly whisper to a conveniently invisible and rather quiet God the fact that you totally blew it on keeping your relationship with your girlfriend pure for the third weekend in a row than it is to confess to a respectable priest you really admire, who’s probably going to give you a good telling off. But since when were our religious beliefs supposed to conform to what was fashionable, or even what was easy?
Then there’s the fact that Catholics and Protestants are supposed to be mortal enemies, religiously speaking – Protestants did split from the Catholic Church after all. Yes? So? One of the reasons there are so many varying Protestant denominations is splintering of the original movement away from Catholicism. Yet the only denomination that constantly has the others at its throat is Catholicism. Why?
Finally, I’ll address the issue I’m sure everyone has had in mind since I the word “Catholic” came up. Pedophile priests. Everyone knows priests are just a bunch of dirty old men, right? Ever since the abuse scandal broke in 2002, the Catholic Church has been up to its ears in bad press. And rightly so! Any organization that allowed such horrendous goings-on to fly under the radar for so many years should be inundated with nay-sayers! Except that a look at the statistics yields something odd. There are 11,000 cases of abuse by about 4,000 priests and deacons in the U.S. since 1950, about 4% out of the total amount of priests in the U.S. That’s five decades. Comparatively, 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from ONE DECADE —1991-2000. So where is all the outrage about pedophile teachers?
In my admittedly limited experience at Whitworth, I’ve found it to be a friendly environment without outright hostility. It’s that lurking under the surface that I’m worried about. Hopefully I’ve given everyone some things to ponder. And next time you feel like telling your buddy that absolutely hilarious priest joke you heard the other day…maybe you won’t.
Catholic Church announces 7 new deadly sins; Fincher, Freeman and Pitt gear up for sequel talks
In an announcement that feels like an Onion headline reject, the Catholic Church has revealed a list of seven additional “mortal sins” created to keep pace with the modern world’s wickedness. The Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, broke the story and the list, which includes (in layman’s terms):
- Polluting
- Genetic engineering
- Obscene riches
- Taking & dealing drugs
- Abortion
- Pedophilia
- Causing social injustice
Pardon my cynicism, but this list reads like the output of a particularly rushed and inept Core 350 discussion group. “Oh, oh, don’t forget section B of the scenario! His Holiness will totally ding us five points if we leave out stem cells.” “Right, right… Which issue of the KJV Researcher was that again?”
I don’t disagree with the relative seriousness of most of the issues on here — no one is going to argue against the inclusion of pedophilia on the list, for example. (Please, no NAMBLA apologists.) But… isn’t all of this sort of covered already? I mean, obscene riches? Awesome, your thesaurus has an entry for greed. Barring genetic engineering, these aren’t exactly new innovations in modern sinning. And speaking of genetic engineering, we owe our earliest understanding of the genetic process itself to Catholic priest Gregor Mendel. Modern genetic engineering is merely Mendel’s treatise “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” (or, in the much more fun original German, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden) writ large.
But getting back on track, for those of us who can’t quite remember who Kevin Spacey killed when or for what, here are the original “Seven Deadly Sins” as established by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century — along with their original prescribed punishments, courtesy the Times of London:
- Pride: Broken on the wheel
- Envy: Put in freezing water
- Gluttony: Forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
- Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone
- Anger: Dismembered alive
- Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
- Sloth: Thrown in snake pits
I’ve been having a lot of conversations about the nuts and bolts of humor lately, and a core element of its DNA is specificity. That, and the comedy rule of threes. But boy, oh, boy, is this new list a specificity goldmine. Social injustice? Pollution? Come on, Catholic Church, you used to be a badass.
In interviews about this new development, Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti has been quoted in multiple articles as stating that 60 percent of Catholics in Italy don’t go to confession. Is this all a plan to guilt-trip the priesthood back into job security, or is spelling everything out like this truly necessary for today’s modern Catholic?