In 2006, I was invited to be a weekly columnist for UPI (United Press International). I wrote for the Religion and Spirituality section of their website. At the same time, I was studying Christian theology in a Masters program at Xavier University. It struck me that this particular column (my first one) mirrors the awakening happening right now in the aftermath of the Shiny Happy People docuseries and the Washington Post article about the Beall family. The issues that are being called “fringe” by defensive viewers and readers are articulated right here as ordinary points of discussion in the early days of homeschooling discussion boards in the late 1990s. I thought you might like to read how things looked to me back then.
Please remember this is a time capsule. My own beliefs and ideas have continued to evolve since then and I don’t provide answers. Instead, I live the questions.
February 8, 2006
Free Fall of Faith
The damned Internet. It nearly ruined my faith.
I used to know what I believed. I used to believe.
After twenty years of evangelicalism, through the World Wide Web, I discovered that even in my tiny puddle known as Conservative Evangelical Homeschoolers, no two denim-jumpered mothers could agree on what the Holy Spirit had to say about almost anything.
To control conception or not? That was one question.
Should the husband run the home or should the wife guilt him into it?
Head coverings? Long skirts? Spanking?
I consoled myself. These were pretty peripheral to the core message of the Gospel. Surely we’d agree on the big stuff: like who gets saved and how, the point of missions, the role of the Holy Spirit, how God created the world, and whether the Bible was God-breathed or inspired or inerrant.
Nope.
The more we talked, the more we fought. We tried to argue in a Christian way, you know, with polite phrases and clenched teeth. Just where the heck was that Holy Spirit, anyway? Too busy with Bono’s mission to save Africans from AIDS?
These troubling conversations sent me on a full-scale search for the truth… reading, studying, conversing, even entering grad school to earn an MA in theology. Each argument for a theological position had merit, and followers, and scholarship, and some relationship to Scripture and Tradition. The only problem? No singular answers. No one could agree on what the Spirit was clearly teaching the church.
My search for truth left me with something else instead: uncertainty—a lack of confidence in any one theological position I had held previously, and as a result, a loss of confidence in God.
Still, though I lost faith, I never lost interest.
That interest has kept my theological and spiritual coals warm, even when I could no longer believe. Then just the other night in grad school, a little flame leapt into view. We were talking about Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and the Council of Trent. These “Christians” slaughtered each other over the doctrines related to the sacraments. Luther rejoiced when Zwingli was put to death by Rome for being a heretic. Hundreds of thousands of Christians were killed by other Christians in defense of doctrinal purity.
Could that possibly have been the Holy Spirit guiding Christians into all truth?
I shudder to think so. Literal and virtual violence cannot be what Jesus had in mind when he comforted his followers, assuring them that the Holy Spirit would be their teacher once he was gone. In class, at that moment, I knew that I wanted no part of a heritage that put definitions of terms over the lives of human beings.
To exercise faith in the midst of so little clarity related to the things of God, I have discovered that I must leap into the unknown with humility, trusting that truth has less to do with propositions and more to do with dispositions. Interest has changed me. I am open to people and how they understand the world, rather than defending myself against them. I want to know why certain beliefs are meaningful in one context and not as meaningful in another.
In fact, without presuppositions and doctrines to support me, I feel a bit like I’ve jumped from a plane without any parachute at all. The view is gorgeous, though, as I look at the world from above, rather than defending one bit of turf as my own, as God’s own. I don’t know where I’ll land. I don’t know how fast I’m falling. But the air is chill and exhilarating, I sense the Spirit in the wind and I feel caught in a process of discovery that feels something like truth.
It’s a free fall.
I call it faith.
Thanks for reading.
Curious: are you interested in reading other previously published columns from UPI?
I would love to read more of what you wrote during this time. This was lovely!
Julie, I love this piece!!! You are amazing ❤️