Читать книгу The Needletoe Letters - Robert M. Price - Страница 5

My dear Wiltwing,

See? I knew you’d catch on; all you needed was the right mentor! Your instinct is sound: the social context of your man’s conversion is all-important if one grasps the dynamics of it. And I do. So shall you, my boy.

Your description of the process is somewhat cursory, but I feel sure the case conforms to the typical pattern. Tell me if it does not. I gather that a classmate or roommate invited your charge to some lively church congregation on the edge of the campus, or perhaps some on-campus fellowship singing songs on a week night in a barebones meeting room in the student center. He sat through a series of choruses and testimonies, all couched in the same ornamental clichés (and don’t think I mean to complain!). And when some fresh-faced students approached him afterwards, during refreshments, he asked what it was they had “in their lives” that he himself lacked. Their answer: more of those valuable clichés. A sense of purpose, a relationship with Christ, the joy of the Spirit. You know them all. Little did he suspect that the single thing he lacked was membership in a congenial group. And that these formulae merely denote a set of passwords into the group. If he begins to say, and to think (as he soon inevitably will) that he, too, has a relationship with Jesus, and so on, he will belong to the group. It is the secret handshake. Different slogans would admit him to other organizations, and the common use of the shared language would conjure a sense of identity constituted solely by membership in that group. And should a member of one of our other sect groups approach him, he will almost certainly reject the overture because his own group will seem unique to him, and uniquely true. Why? Simply because it is his group. If he were to allow that any member of any such group feels the same way and for the same reason, he would have distanced himself enough, albeit momentarily, that logic would gain an entrance and inform him that his allegiance is in no way unique nor better founded than any other’s.

The fellowship group will become the atmosphere in which he breathes. While he is among other acquaintances, he may feel tempted to join in their activities (drinking, sex, drugs) in which they participate, and this is why his new group insists he substitute his loyalty to them for any and all of these “sinful” former associations. In class he may feel like a persecuted minority for he is threatened by the simple presence of those whose beliefs do not reinforce his own. Likewise, when surrounded by fellow believers, it is the predominance which makes it impossible for him to take seriously the doubts that so plagued him alone in the dorm the previous evening as he read his philosophy assignment. Here we are talking about (and using) simple peer pressure. The time will come to provide him with arguments to wield against non-believers, but those arguments never convinced him in the first place and would never suffice to keep him in the fold in any case. What cemented him to this group and keeps him there is the emotional identification.

At all costs, never let him recall the simple fact that he concluded the truth of the conservative Protestant theology not on the basis of examining its logical cogency or its evidence and credentials, but rather only because this group of bright-eyed college students offered him friendship! It is as if a physicist should embrace quantum physics just because he enjoyed going fishing with colleagues who advocated that view! And yet, standing thus in mid-air, your man is cocksure in his ignorance. It is glorious! It is delicious!

But do the little fleshlings not in fact acknowledge the emotional basis of their bond? You are right, Wiltwing, they do. But this does not mean they have ventured into dangerous territory. Here is one of many cases where we turn danger into its opposite. You will see what I mean presently. We have instructed them to rejoice in agape, a Greek word ostensibly denoting a special, transcendent kind of love. Humans may feel attraction to one another, romantic or erotic stimulation. That is called eros. They may be attracted to spend time together as comrades without romance, but simply as friends, and this they call philia, or brotherly love. We have taken an ancient synonym for either kind of love, the famous agape, and filled it with the denotation of a selfless dedication with no necessary emotional concomitant. We tell them that, as sinners, they were absolutely loathsome to God, a stench in his nostrils. He had no natural attraction to them, either eros or philia. But he determined to act on their behalf, sending his Son to redeem them anyway. By virtue of that redemption, he now regards them as being as loveable as his Son, even though in fact they are not. It is an act of faith (or pretense) on God’s part. Well, Wiltwing, the love they claim to feel for one another as members of their fellowship is this agape love. This is what they are proud of when one often hears them boasting how no two of them would have become friends in the first place if not for their common faith in Christ, their sharing of the Holy Spirit. It is Christ, and he only, who can bring together those who would surely otherwise ignore or even despise one another. Now they are something better, deeper, higher than mere friends. They are brothers and sisters in Christ. This is the line to pursue. Never let them suspect that what they call profound love is actually shallow—even fake. This will become clear as soon as one of them decides he no longer accepts the party line that provides their supposed solidarity: if one drops his or her faith, what reaction may he expect from his former “brothers and sisters”? You know well enough. The cold shoulder. Absent the one artificial thing they had lending them a paper unity, a unity based on common religious allegiance, not mutual affection and appreciation, the “bond of faith” dissolves like the mist it was, making it clear in retrospect that conformity had always been the price of (faked) affection.

You may think I am disparaging the illusory bonds of Christian fellowship to which believers cling. I am not! No, “the tie that binds their hearts in Christian love” is one of our most valuable resources, for it stokes those toasty feelings of solidarity against the sinful world that so nourish creatures like us. Thus it is worth every effort to keep the mortals firmly ensconced within these little bubble-worlds of faith. The pressure of faith and devotion is highest, strongest, when it must resist the crushing pressure of an imposing world (at least perceived as) hostile to it. We must encourage the believer to hold others (“sinners”) at arm’s length; otherwise our protégés might find themselves unduly influenced by outsiders, tempted to assimilate back into easy coexistence with “the world” and its values. It is not a slide into immorality that we dread. Rather, it is a lukewarm faith, a tepid zeal. Only strong feelings do us much good.

And if it is vital to keep our charge’s friendships within the circle of co-believers, it is doubly important to have him choose a mate from the same ranks. If we are not careful, our charges will find mates who do not share their faith, and then what do you think will happen? She may tolerate his faith without sharing it. They marry, and he soon feels self-conscious about engaging in religious behaviors his wife does not share. His faith becomes self-ashamed and lukewarm. No good for us. Or suppose your patient falls in love with a mate from a different faith community. Either spouse will likely switch to the other’s religion. If the conversion were a true one, full of enthusiasm, well, that’s no problem to us. Zeal is zeal. But how likely is that? You know as well as I do (and so do they, unless they are even more stupid than I blame them for), that no one who really cherishes a creed will be able to discard it like an out-of-fashion suit to replace it with a sharper-looking one. Such “faith” is so shallow as to do us no good in the first place.

Now I am far from retracting my opinion of a paragraph ago! The artificial “agape” bond between co-religionists is equally shallow, albeit in a different way. We want the believer (any of our believers, in any of our religions) to marry someone of common faith, and this for one simple reason. It is not so they may propagate their faith in the next generation. No, mere inherited faith tends to be taken for granted, too tepid a brew for our tastes. In fact, we would actually prefer the children to throw off the yoke of their parents’ faith and embrace another, since this “bold” act produces the convert’s zeal, precious to us, that is, to our stomachs.

No, the reason for marriages within the same faith is that it discourages critical thinking about that faith. If one begins to have doubts as to the faith he and his wife share in common, he cannot help but see it will threaten her as well. And then their marriage. He is just too close to her for her to disregard his changing his mind on such a fundamental question. I know what you are thinking, my boy: suppose the man dared speak his doubts aloud, and his wife fled his company. Would she not feel the resentment of the martyr? That would be good, yes, but the danger outweighs it. You see, the husband would in the same moment realize that if marriage no longer binds him to faith, nothing lesser can, and so he leaves us completely. We don’t want to risk that. Rather let him become so deeply invested in sharing a faith with his wife that it will bind them together, suppressing all doubts. You really should have learned all this from our Cupid class, but perhaps you went to the Infirmary with a migraine that day.

Your affectionate uncle,

Needletoe