I have been going to an Episcopalian church every Sunday for the past few months. This confession of sorts has elicited worried remarks from my mother, who is very wary of anything liturgical. I’m not sure she knows why. She grew up in a non-religious household and was saved after her mother died and became part of the Mennonite Church. Later, after I was born, she and my father became part of a nondenominational church. Therefore, I grew up in a church which lacked tradition. The closest thing we had to tradition was having a missions festival every April. I grew up in what could be described as the most disconnected church body that is possible. Their doctrine was fine, and I probably still agree with most of it. I’m actually still a member of this church; I became one when I was baptized when I was 16. But doctrine is not the foremost problem of my current religious life. Sure, doctrine forms the basis for the problems that I face, but it is not the foremost problem. Protestant religions of all denominations share the same basic beliefs: the physical and historical death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the belief that the Bible is the word of God and is at least authoritative (if not inerrant), that God created the world by his own hand, that salvation is for those who believe in Christ, etc. The difference is in the emphasis of these shared truths. Also in the experience of salvation. So, despite all of these shared beliefs, why is it that my mother becomes worried for me when I tell her that I am going to an Episcopalian Church? Why is she afraid of liturgy? Why do I think that Episcopalians think me odd when I tell them that I go to Evangelical Institution and not Secular Woman’s College? Why are Evangelical Churches so ugly?
I think this has a lot to do with how they look at the self.
I don’t know much about the Evangelical tradition in an academic sense. I don’t know much about its history or reasons for existence. I do know my own experience within the Evangelical Church, both in my nondenominational church growing up and my experience at Evangelical Institution, the bastion of the Evangelical movement within the past 30 years. While I do not think that personal experience or small and personal encounters with other Christians should determine my beliefs in God, I do think they determine my religious experience, and thus, the church tradition I choose to align myself with. For example, I would not reject a belief in God based on a specific church (not Church, capital “C”) or a specific person or specific life experiences. I believe deeply in certain transcendent truths which mean more to me than experiences. But I would reject certain ways of believing based on experiences with a church and its members and leaders because the Church is part of the religious experience. What I see on a day-to-day basis affects how I experience religion, and the way I choose to worship is part of my religion. Thus, there are certain truths that unite the Church, but the experiences are widely different and the emphasis placed on each is different. I don’t think that certain ways are more right or wrong than another (I don’t think that Catholics aren’t true Christians, as many Evangelicals seem to believe; I remember a missionary coming to my church to explain how to evangelize Catholics, which now strikes me as very odd and divisive) but I do think that emphasizing religion one way or another can be harmful to the religious experiences of many Christians, causing them to leave the church. I don’t think that I can say with any authority here how things should be done, but I can say how they could be done.
My own experience with Evangelicalism has been both ardent and cynical. Growing up, I was a “good little Christian” girl, and I was pretty conservative in my religious practice. At least Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on a “personal relationship with Christ” and its insistence on the God-You bubble, can be beneficial for teenagers, who are trying to forge their own path through everything anyway. But once you get past that teenage fervor, what is there to lean on? If the self loses its faith and passion, what do you have to lean on? Of course there is the rest of the Evangelical Church, but it seems that this church is just a bunch of selves getting together with each other, and so there’s still not much to go back on. The other thing that Evangelicals seem to hold onto is the “reasonability” of their faith. They all need a reasonable explanation for what they believe. I think this has something to do with the reactionary nature of Evangelicalism. The “Culture Wars” and whatnot. This also has a lot to do with the extreme focus on the self and the independence that Evangelicalism has. We have the Bible, but interpretations of that text can differ from generation to generation. This focus on the self has a lot to do with the scorn of liturgy and tradition. The reason why my mom is afraid of tradition and liturgy is because she thinks that it steals the self-determination from religion, as if reciting liturgy is something that will prevent me from thinking on my own and make my religion become routine rather than meaningful. I’ll answer this shortly. The other problem I have with Evangelicalism is its insistence on pulpit politics. I don’t think that my worship experience in the Church should be muddled and adulturated by discussions of politics. Yes, my political decisions should be based on my religious beliefs, but my pastor shouldn’t be the one who is telling me who I should vote for. Those three things are the main problems I have with Evangelicalism as it exists today: its reactionary nature, its extreme emphasis on the self (which causes the reaction), and its insistence on telling me who to vote for. These things may work fine for other people (mainly the people of my parents’ generation), but they don’t work for me, and I suspect, many other people who are also struggling religiously.
The lack of tradition in the Evangelical Church is frightening to me. Growing up in a nondenominational church, I knew absolutely nothing about Church tradition, which forms the basis for the beliefs of Christianity. I had no clue why, during lent, there are crosses with purple cloths draped on them which turn white on Easter. I had no clue what all those weird letters on banners in front of the Church are or what they mean. I didn’t know any creeds. I knew hymns, but they were largely replaced by sappy choruses by the time I was a teenager. But my understanding of this lack of knowledge didn’t come about until I came to Evangelical Institution (EI), where I saw many of these things and started learning about them. I was out of the nondenominational bubble which took pride in its independence from every single tradition that ever existed. I’m not kidding about that. Symbols and traditions that exist in other churches were not found in mine growing up. You can’t learn about these things from the Bible. So, I came to EI and was confronted with tons of experiences that I was not prepared for, because my church based everything on the self. So when I started having problems, I reacted to those by distancing myself from the church and becoming cynical about it. I had nothing to fall back on. But now I realize how incredibly important these traditions are. I don’t think that knowing what the color purple means will somehow prevent me from rejecting Christianity, but the way of religious experience which emphasizes traditions and symbols allows the individual Christian to cope when there are questions. It also adds to the richness and meaning of the religious experience. I remember that, after communion every first Sunday of the month, everyone in our church joined hands and sang the third stanza of “How Great Thou Art.” The beautiful organ swell of the music and the human contact and sense of something bigger than myself always made me cry. Every single time it happened. It was the same every single time, but each time it made me cry. Each time was meaningful to me. When they stopped doing that, I felt a loss. I’m sure that if that could happen again, I would still cry. There was no other tradition in our church.
When I go to the Episcopalian Church, I feel both bewilderment and a sense of belonging. I feel bewilderment because there are so many things that happen which I don’t know the meaning of. People wear robes and they say things every week that everyone except me seems to know. Luckily, I know the Lord’s Prayer, but that’s about it (although I am learning). People kneel on little benches that unfold from the bottom of the pew. There are symbols all over the place that I don’t know about. But in this way, I feel belonging because of these routines. They are deeply meaningful, even because of their mystery to me. I know that people have recited these prayers and sang these songs for hundreds, even thousands of years before me. And in that recitation, their truth is confirmed. And every week, the priest says the same things, which remind of what it means to be a Christian every week. I don’t have to rely on myself for everything, because I have time-confirmed tradition to remind me that I am not the only one who is having these struggles and that I am not the only one who has been a Christian.
