The Christian Counterculture

And with one touch,

You just rolled away the stone that held my heart

-- "Your Love Broke Through," by Keith Green, Phil Keaggy et al.

After getting wet again (in the name of the Holy Trinity), the next choice was which church to join. I regret to say that I’m very glad I didn’t join any traditional church back then. The church I did join had its share of peculiarities and errors, but the Christian disciplines and basics of the faith that I learned there are priceless. Besides, recall what I said before about the defective nature of the young-adult mind. Young men need a challenge and a sense of mission. I definitely got it. I doubt I would have received such an immersion in basic Christianity in a traditional church.

I went back to the campus group at the University of Maryland, earring, long hair and all. This time, however, I was not merely bowing to the intellectual pressure of evidences for the Christian religion. This time I had a sense that God was really alive, and working in my life.

Blessed is the man who listens to me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at my doorposts. Prov. 8:34

I spent as much time as I could listening to the preaching on the steps, and I picked up a lot of good stuff. After a while, I could predict the preacher's answer to most of the heckler's questions, which served me well in my personal evangelism. Most hecklers think they've come up with new and challenging counter-arguments to Christianity, but it's not true. The same, tired old arguments come out again and again, and once you know how to deal with them, you’re well-equipped for 95 percent of the objections you will hear.

As the weeks went by, my earring ended up causing some trouble. The pastors of this campus group -- who, by the way, had never darkened the door of a seminary -- were fairly strict about earrings. They bothered me about it for a few weeks, but I didn't see anything wrong with it. (Of course there is nothing intrinsically wrong with an earring, it's just a matter of cultural expectations. In my case, however, my earring had a strong association with rebellion. I got it shortly after my mother told me not to.)

The guy who preached in front of the undergraduate library was one of those pastors. One day while I was out listening, he was going on about this and that problem with the rapscallions at the University, and earrings came up. One of the hecklers pointed out that I, one of the preacher's oft-used examples of a recent convert from atheism, wore an earring.

That did it for the earring. No, there was nothing wrong with it, and yes, the preacher was causing his own trouble by making earrings an issue, but I didn't want to hinder his ministry, and, after all, my mom really hated the thing.

And so went the steady transformation into Evangelicalism. My listening habits changed (more John Michael Talbot, Phil Keaggy and Keith Green, less Jethro Tull), my drinking habits changed (more grape juice at the breaking of bread, less beer), my hair and beard got shorter, my language, which was never that bad, cleaned up, and, once again, I began that dangerous journey toward sanctification.

Thou hast ordained Thy precepts,

That we should keep them diligently. Psalm 119:4

The highway of the upright is to depart from evil;

He who watches his way preserves his life.

Prov. 16:17

Most people have a very strong, very dangerous delusion. They believe they are basically decent, honest and good people. But the reason they believe that is that they have never given a serious, deliberate effort to being good, including a close and careful examination of their actions and thoughts. When the standard for "good" is the milquetoast ethics of 20th century America, it is ridiculously easy to slide along as a paragon of “virtue.” A man who is raised in a decent, middle-class home would have to try fairly hard to end up anything but a "basically good" person.

But that's when we measure him against contemporary standards. Once God the Holy Spirit gets in on the act, it's a completely different picture. Attitudes and behaviors that might be regarded as something like civic virtue to the worldling are now sinful attitudes and lusts of the flesh that must be mortified. "Red-blooded American boys" act and think entirely differently from the standards of the Man who said, “whoever hates his brother has already murdered him in his heart,” and "whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart."

Those who laugh and scoff at serious, committed Evangelicals have no idea what they’re talking about -- and they will eat their words on the judgment day, because these are people who put effort into their godliness. I was in the company of men who woke up an hour early every day to pray and read their Bibles -- men who freely confessed their sins and kept themselves accountable to others for those weaknesses that still beset them -- men of whom the world is not worthy.

That's the good report, anyway, and it's true as far as it goes. These were good folk I was hanging out with, and that soothed my parents somewhat. They didn't like the religious views I was catching from these zealots, but they realized that a college-aged boy can do a lot worse than hang out with guys who wouldn't lay a stray glance, much less a finger, on a woman, and who reckoned singing, praying and reading their Bibles to be a good Friday night activity.

Again, that's the good report. There's another face to Evangelicalism that isn't quite as pretty. It is, in fact, a vice shared by virtually all who are serious about their ideology. James Carville summarized it nicely in the title of his book: "We're right, you're wrong." James Carville has captured the spirit of Evangelical Fundamentalism, he's just caught another version of the disease -- instead of seeking God's kingdom, James is looking for the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, or something equally stupid -- I think it's called liberal politics.

I don't know what has possessed Mr. Carville to become a Fundamentalist liberal, but I do have some insight on the Fundamentalist Christian mind. Evangelicals, you must realize, are beset on all sides by degenerate American culture, and the most handy defense mechanism is an ideological repudiation of the mainstream, which, of course, is happy to return the favor. To the Evangelical, if the majority believes it, it's probably wrong, especially if the majority is made up of the "elite" -- whether that elite rules social norms, "political correctness," mainstream religions, scholarly caste at the universities, or whatever.

This attitude allows the Evangelical to set aside the confident assertions of mainstream historians, scientists, Bible scholars, psychologists and any other profession that gets in the way of his world view. Such "scholars" are being led by the nose by the prince of this world. Their opinions aren’t based on facts and honest reasoning, but on prejudice and academic peer pressure.

Sure, it sounds paranoid, but anyone who has spent any time at all watching the behavior of a group -- especially a group that pretends to be expert in something -- can see that the Evangelical’s skepticism of the majority view isn't all that unreasonable. Despite pretensions to the contrary, so-called intellectuals often do not embrace their positions on the merits, but because of peer pressure. They don't want to appear to be behind the curve, holding to archaic, out-dated notions. To do so might ruin their career, or at least spoil their reputation with the other teachers.

The scandal of "political correctness" is an example. How did otherwise intelligent academics come to embrace oppressive "speech codes"? Was it because they had reviewed the evidence, studied the issue and found this solution the best option? Of course not! They were afraid of being called racists at the next faculty meeting, or of offending the cute new psychology professor who just might be available for lunch.

And so it goes. Every profession has its own "political correctness" that cultivates and maintains the received wisdom, and those who stray too far are shouted down, called names and not invited to Happy Hour.

Case in point: geology, my college major.

One of my professors told me that when he was in school, plate tectonics was laughed out of consideration. Now it is geologic orthodoxy, and those who oppose it are, in their turn, laughed to scorn. What changed? If you believe the scientist’s pretensions about their own profession, you may suspect that new data came along that proved the theory. But that’s not what happened. In fact, very few changes in prevailing scientific theory come from amazing new discoveries. Rather, some maverick intellect comes along who doesn’t care about peer pressure, and the new generation embraces it. (The young are always looking for a way to trash the older generation, and besides, they need fresh ideas for doctoral theses.)

So plate tectonics became the new orthodoxy, and those who had the audacity to dissent were silenced by the sneers of their colleagues. And by the way, this isn't just my perception -- that's how my professor explained it to us!

You can see this same pattern all over the place, like in the way social mores change. It’s not that new data comes along, or somebody has invented a new argument. There’s just a change in attitude.

The Evangelical, rightly or wrongly, has simply systematized his response to this phenomenon. He puts all the "received wisdom" of all the world's best and brightest in a large paper bag and stuffs it behind the old sofa in the basement.

Anti-Catholicism

I remember going to a funeral when I was a boy and being confused when all the Protestants recited that they believed one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, when it was plain that they did not. I figured all the Roman Catholics were hiding in the bushes, laughing at the joke. "Ha! They're still saying it! The dolts!"

There are certain things an Evangelical is likely to pick up very soon after his conversion: a love of Scripture, a desire for reconciliation with/conversion of the Jews, a confidence that Jesus will return soon, a suspicion of denominations, and a hatred for Roman Catholicism. I had the last in extra portions.

Of course I didn't really know much about Roman Catholicism. The first time I ever went to mass was on Easter in about 1979. My mom, who was raised Catholic, took me, probably to cure me of my atheism.

I loved it! It was a bright, sunny day. The architecture was cool. The girls were pretty in their Easter dresses. But the best part of it all was when the mass actually started. Somebody was chanting over in one of the side rooms. That was cool enough. I liked medieval stuff, and chanting is about as medieval as you can get. But the best was yet to come. The chanters emerged from their hiding places ... and they were monks!

Monks! I didn't think there were any left in the world. I could have expected Robin Hood himself to come in and steal the gold censors they were swinging. The whole scene was like Dungeons and Dragons.

I didn't think much of the religious part of the service, but the props and costumes and things were extremely cool.

Other early exposures to Roman Catholicism usually involved art: people would put a shrine to Mary in their backyard, or a statue of St. Francis (who I called “the sissy”) in their garden. I don't recall having much of a reaction to those things, except to equate it with the road-side shrines to local deities that I'd read about in Europe.

It was all just superstitious, silly stuff to me.

But I remember a more visceral reaction to other art I saw as a child in a friend's or relative's home. The faded, cheap plastic statues; the bad paintings in ugly frames; the pasty white representations of the Virgin, stomping on a serpent; the effeminate portraits of angels. (How come they never had beards!) These things disgusted me, completely apart from my general disdain for knickknacks. For one thing, if God really existed, He was worth spending more than a dollar on, and these things couldn't have cost more than that. For another, it was completely inconceivable to me that this horrible-looking art made anyone believe that heaven was worth aspiring for. If I'd been raised among that stuff, it would have led me to sin: at least there would be real fire in Hell. And finally, the art was universally depressing stuff. Suffering and gloom. Agony and death. Wasn't there a good report too? Wasn't heaven supposed to be a nice place?

There were also the stray anti-Catholic comments from friends and relatives. “The so-and-so’s real problem is the Catholic Church.” I had no idea what that meant, but I got the general idea that there was some dark, mysterious, subtle evil oozing out of Rome.

Needless to say, Catholicism didn't leave a good impression on me, even before I became an Evangelical. But once I converted, the floodgates opened.

I've never tested this theory, but I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to find an Evangelical book or magazine of any size that doesn't take a direct or indirect swipe at Roman Catholicism. (Try it some time and let me know.) It's the same with sermons. It’s the same with Bible studies. It’s the same with garden-variety spiritual chit-chat. Evangelicals learn antipathy to Roman Catholicism with their peas and carrots, as the saying goes.

Much of this is, sadly, deserved. Your run-of-the-mill Roman Catholic doesn't know or care beans about his faith -- especially those who were unfortunate enough to have received their "instruction" in the 60s and 70s. (Who can reckon the toll those decades have taken on our culture?) Most of them believe that they'll get to heaven because they haven't killed anybody, which is not, of course, what Rome teaches, but it is the quintessential indicator of a "works righteousness" attitude to an Evangelical.

I've had plenty of personal experience with this. Your average Roman Catholic, when asked why he thinks he’s going to heaven, is almost sure to give you the "works righteousness" spiel -- "I've never killed anybody" -- or he might give you the God-as-marshmallow/grandfather routine -- "God is too loving to send anyone to Hell. God is a God of mercy." -- or, very rarely, you might hear the sacraments as magic bit -- "Sure, I'm a sinner, but I go to confession every Saturday night, right before I go out to the bar." Of course that last one is rare these days.

I now know that a well-informed priest would be just as appalled at these replies as I was as a feisty evangelist on campus, but at the time it simply strengthened my opinion that Roman Catholicism was a bad case of the blind leading the blind.

Some Evangelical authors try to identify Rome as the antichrist, or the beast of Revelation, or the world system that will prepare the way for the beast, or something along those lines. I think this is mostly because there aren't a lot of options. For those who fall into one of the typical Evangelical schools of eschatology -- and as an Evangelical I was steeped in that stuff -- what else can you do? What other organization can meet the kinds of requirements mentioned in Revelation and Daniel? It has to have roots in the ancient world. It has to be world-wide. And most of the language hints strongly at Rome anyway (which is no surprise, since Daniel and John were referring to the Roman Empire).

Anyway, all those reasons to hate Rome had some effect on me, but my chief problem with Roman Catholicism centered on the central part of Roman Catholic faith; the mass, which I understood to be the most extreme blasphemy against Christ. In the mass, so I understood, the Roman Catholic says that what was bread is now Christ, and that He is sacrificed again on the church's altar, by the priest, as a propitiation for sins.

Nothing made my blood boil more than the mass. Didn't Scripture say that Jesus had died once for all for sins? That "having been justified we have peace with God"? The mass denied all that, and I hated it with a passion -- to such an extent that for a time I refused to buy any more music from one of my favorite singers, John Michael Talbot, who had the bad taste and judgment to be a Catholic monk. (I remember once, at a Catholic wedding, taking off my shoes so that I wouldn't make too much noise when I left before the blasphemy started.)

Little did I know what God had in store for me much later.

‘Dem Bones

There were lots of intellectual and spiritual issues that I faced in those years, but of course evolution loomed large.

Although my transcript didn’t reflect it, I majored in Evangelicalism and minored in geology. I didn't study geology to convert the heathen or to get a degree so I could write the magnum opus on Creationism. Back when I thought it was a hard science, I was genuinely interested in it. I liked the idea of saving Californians from mud slides, or finding more appropriate ways to convince energy out of the planet and into our kitchen stoves.

Geology seemed like fun. It was an outdoorsy kind of thing, and I liked that. But as I learned more about geology and discovered how soft a science it really is, I became less and less interested. Unlike chemistry, where you can put things in a beaker and measure results, most of geology is more guesswork than anything else.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but take a few geology courses and you'll begin to see what I mean. It's not at all clear where all the critters came from in the Cambrian explosion -- there simply isn't any evidence to deal with. But you must believe that they all evolved from soft-bodied Pre-Cambrian critters or else you're a heretic. Also, geology was still fairly stuck in “uniformitarianism” when I was in school, and “catastophism” -- the idea that some significant geologic features are better explained by radical, rapid change than by slow, easy, cumulative effects over millions of years -- was too closely associated with creationism. You dared not speak in favor of catastrophism or you’d sound like a creationist, and that’s like going into an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in an orange shirt.

I would have liked geology if it could have been stripped of the doctrinaire attitude -- if uncertain things were left uncertain. I didn't have the patience for the “we don’t really know the answer but we have to say something confidently or else the creationists will think they have one on us” attitude.

My fundamentalist friends wanted me to believe that the earth was created in 144 hours about 6,000 years ago, and my geology texts said, "Boy, are they wrong." That's when they were being nice. In fact, they usually tried to present the history of science as a journey from darkness, suspicion, paranoia, superstition and, of course, religion, to enlightenment, technology, blue skies and pretty finches on secluded, tropical islands with no churches.

The ideological agenda was thinly veiled when it was veiled at all. Nevertheless, despite the obvious bias of my geology texts, the idea that the earth was less than 10,000 years old seemed horribly unlikely. Even if you buy everything the creationists say about radiometric dating -- their favorite whipping boy -- you still have a long history of research on relative ages, and it seems impossible to fit it all into 10,000 years.

This is not to say that the creationists are all wet. They have found their share of anomalies in the prevailing view. For example, the Atlantic Ocean is said to have formed when North America separated from Europe about 220 million years ago. But there are problems with that idea. If you calculate the concentration of minerals in the water that flows off the continents and into the ocean and compare that with the concentration of those minerals in the ocean itself, the ocean doesn't have anywhere near enough of those minerals in it, so it seems that it can't be anywhere near 220 million years old. So what's the deal?

Nobody has a decent explanation, but just try asking your geology professor about that! You won't get an honest answer, but you will be branded a creationist heretic for asking the question. The atmosphere on campus was us versus them, and neither side offers any quarter.

But the age of the earth is only one part of the debate. What about the origin of life? What about biological evolution?

Some things about evolution are clearly true. Plants and animals clearly fit themselves into very specific niches, and those niches haven't all been around since the beginning of the world. In other words, sometimes a change will occur in a natural environment and some of the animals that lived in that environment will adapt, evolving characteristics suited to that new environment. Maybe the beak on a particular species of bird will get longer so that it can dig critters out of the sand. And this isn't just the speculation of some old guy last century whose beard desperately needed a trim: there are plain examples of the phenomenon. Lakes that used to be connected, and whose populations used to mingle, but were subsequently separated, are sometimes populated by different species of fish. The fish from the original lake have adapted to changed environments so that the fish in one lake are different than the fish in the other lake.

There's no question that evolution happens at that scale, and creationists have no qualms with it. Creationists believe that all the existing land animals came from a male and female representative of that "kind," so the creationist model, just like the evolutionist’s model, relies on descent with modification. There are two key differences.

The first difference separates some forms of creationism from most other theories, and that is the idea that animals only adapt within set "kinds" -- that there is a limit to the amount of modification that an animal can undergo. In other words, a bird might grow a longer beak or a shorter wing, but it’s not going to grow antlers. Ever. No matter how many generations go by. The code that makes up that bird allows for change up to a limit, but not beyond.

The second key difference is the role of chance, which separates secular evolution from both 6-day creationism and "theistic evolution" (and related ideas).

Both of these ideas address the central problem of the whole discussion, which is the secular evolutionist's philosophical commitment to atheism.

Science as World-View vs. Science as Method

The secular evolutionist wants you to believe that all the diversity in every form of life on this planet can be explained by small changes, accumulated over the long history of the planet. But it's not an idle proposition for him. He has bought into the ideology that "science" requires him to assume a materialistic, non-supernatural origin for everything. If that's the case, there can't be any design, intelligence or purpose inherent in the history of life. It all has to have happened by “chance” -- meaning that there wasn’t any design, intelligence or purpose.

Perhaps you've read news reports about scientists who say that there is evidence of design in living systems, or in the formation of the universe. Those poor souls are shouted down, booed off the stage and black-balled. The very idea of purpose and design is anathema to “science” according to the ideologues (who are either in the majority or control it by shouting the loudest and longest).

But is that really true? Is science a method we can use to examine the world, or is it a creation myth that's supposed to explain the world? The bad news is that modern scientists have adopted the latter explanation. They have committed themselves to a rejection of God. (They will say they have not, but the only “god” they will tolerate is one who is unable to do anything in the real world.)

The problem is a confusion between method and philosophy. The scientific method does no good if there are miracles in the equation. To illustrate this, imagine the difficulty of testing various theories of gravity if God was always doing miracles and making things fall unnaturally fast or slow.

Methodologically, science assumes that things follow laws. And that's exactly what science ought to do. Science is a method we use to investigate the world when we can safely assume that no miracles are going on.

The fatal error occurs when someone believes that all of life can (or should) be explained by science, because this imposes the "no miracles" methodology on all of reality. At this point, science is not a method, it's a world-view.

Take the Shroud of Turin as an example. Science as our moderns would have it -- science as a world-view and creation myth -- will start with the assumption that there is a naturalistic explanation for the image on the shroud, and that all other explanations should be rejected out of hand as "un-scientific" -- and therefore untrue.

So does that mean that a believer in the Shroud can't use the scientific method to examine various supernatural theories about the origin of the image? Of course not. The believer imagines what may have happened to Christ's body when it came back to life, and then uses the scientific method to see if his theory is a reasonable explanation.

In other words, science does not have to pretend that God doesn't exist, only that he doesn't interfere with our experiments.

Back to biology. A secular biologist has been told that he has to assume that there is no plan or purpose to life. He isn’t even supposed to consider the hypothesis that living systems were planned or designed. But is that a necessary assumption? Of course not. He could just as well allow for the possibility of design, make predictions based on that assumption, and use the scientific method to see if the facts fit with that theory. There is nothing "unscientific" about that.

Secular scientists often say that creation science is a contradiction in terms, since Creation assumes a miracle and science rules them out. But that is only true if you redefine "science" to be a world-view and creation myth. So long as science is seen as a method, there is no problem with creation science. A creationist might, for example, have an idea about the effects of the Flood. He can then use the scientific method to determine if his hypothesis fits with observable facts. That's creation science, and that's exactly how science should operate. Hypotheses come from the imagination, but they are carefully tested against the facts.

So, one creationist hypothesis is that God created animals with only a certain amount of flexibility in their genetic make-up -- that you can stretch them so far, but no farther. That hypothesis is as reasonable as any other, and responsible people should use the scientific method to see if it explains the facts.

Another creationist hypothesis might be that life presupposes intelligent design, but that the code is more flexible -- that descent with modification could account for all of life. Such a hypothesis might assume that there is a "code within the code" -- something deeper and more complicated than DNA, which itself directs the development of genetic modifications in the DNA.

Again, this hypothesis could be tested scientifically, and there is no reason to reject it out of hand for philosophical reasons.

If we allow ourselves to abandon the presumption against design, it seems to me that an animal's ability to adapt seems, in itself, tremendous evidence of design. If creatures couldn't adapt to changes in a changing world, they wouldn't last long.

Consider this. Imagine you worked for a stock brokerage just when computers were first coming out. You purchased a spreadsheet program to keep track of your accounts, but, because it was a primitive computer system, every night you had to print out the computer code, shut down the machine, and have the code typed in again the next morning by your secretary. (This retyping would correspond to the reproduction of an animal -- the code is reproduced, but there is a possibility of error.) Sometimes the secretary makes a typo, so some days the program doesn't work right. (These are mutations, and most of them are fatal, or at least bad.) It's possible, although ridiculously unlikely, that a typo might make the program better. On those days, instead of fixing the error, you keep the better version -- i.e., the version that is better suited to your work load for that day.

Suppose this process goes on for a long time. Is it even conceivably possible that the Apple IIe program you started with would become, through the random typos of a secretary, Microsoft Excel 7.0 for Windows 95?

Of course not.

In fact, if your program began to adapt to your changing business needs, "evolving" new abilities, like making charts and graphs in color, there isn't a chance in the world that you would ascribe this phenomenon to chance. You might suspect your secretary of being a closet programmer, but you would never in a million years assume that it happened by chance.

This is a very rough sketch of the problem, of course, but I hope it illustrates the silliness of the bag of goods the evolutionist wants you to believe. The idea that horses and whales and mice descended from one primitive mammal -- completely by chance -- strains credulity beyond the breaking point. But don't tell your zoology teacher that. He's committed his career to the idea that this really happens.

Note an important distinction here. Animals have parents, and it's not unreasonable to look at the natural world with that as a presumption -- creatures have ancestors, so let's find out what was the ancestor of this particular creature. Fine. But it's one thing to say that creatures have ancestors and another thing entirely to say that the change in creatures over time is the result of blind chance and random mutation. (Yes, I know, there’s also “selection,” but selection doesn’t make anything, it only determines which things that have been made will thrive, or survive, in a given environment.)

The creation-evolution debate has lots of twists and turns in it, but as an Evangelical college student, a few things were quite clear to me: (1) Scripture teaches that God created the world, (2) the secular evolutionists weren't fooling me with their fish stories about blind chance and random mutations, and (3) neither side had answers to all the questions.

Evangelism 101

Do you see, do you see,

All the people sinking down?

Don't you care, don't you care,

Are you gonna let them drown?

How can you be so numb,

Not to care if they come?

You close your eyes and pretend the job's done.

-- "Asleep in the Light," by Keith Green

The evolution-creation fight was forced upon me by my choice of studies, but it was certainly not the main issue in my life. The college group I had joined was deadly serious about reaching the world with the gospel, and I was shoulder to shoulder with them in that cause.

As I said before, one of the pastors preached in the open air in front of the undergraduate library. I took my turn at it a few times as well, especially when my "testimony" as a convert from atheism, and a geology student at that, seemed useful to the assembled throng. But preaching was only a small part of the program. We had regular Bible studies, regular, planned times for evangelizing on campus, and, of course, there were innumerable opportunities for informal ideological struggles -- like virtually every time I went to class.

The campus organization I was with was like the Navy Seals of the Evangelical world. Everybody knew his Bible and had key verses memorized. Everybody knew how to share his faith. Everybody kept a sharp eye on his own life, and knew that if he slipped a brother would step alongside and give him a loving rebuke.

Years later, when I decided to get official and earn a seminary degree, a friend was surprised at my course selection. "You're taking a course on evangelism?" It was not unlike a duck taking quacking lessons.

Woe is me, for I sojourn in Meshech,

For I dwell among the tents of Kedar!

Too long has my soul had its dwelling

With those who hate peace.

I am for peace, but when I speak,

They are for war.

-- Psalm 120:5-7

I never realized how deeply I hated the University of Maryland until, years later, I visited the campus library. I hadn't been on the campus in years, and coming back I felt like a prisoner of war returning the place of his internment. This was occupied territory. Every sight, every building reminded me of uncomfortable confrontations with professors or students.

I've never been one to shy away from a good argument, but the confrontations in college were ridiculous -- and unavoidable. Even the logic professor insisted on making fun of the Bible. Of course he misquoted the passage in the process -- biblical literacy is atrocious, even among professors -- so I had to correct him, which branded me as a Christian, the only species on campus that is fair game all year. The English professor, likewise, said blasphemous things about Jesus -- things that she wouldn't dare have said about Martin Luther King, but of course it’s not politically incorrect to say bad things about Jesus. And so it went.

It is not easy to be a serious Christian on a secular college campus. The ideological conflict doesn't let up, and that's saying nothing about the constant sexual temptations.

But we fought back. On all fronts. In retrospect, I'm sure I wouldn't have survived otherwise. Everything on campus was against us. The professors, the administration, peer pressure and the libertine social ideas. It was an ugly thing, but we grew and prospered because we didn't take it lying down. We outdid them in evangelistic zeal. And the surplus of attractive women? Well, you couldn't look if you were busy memorizing a verse.

The Dark Side of Spirituality

I never did believe in the ways of magic,

But I'm beginning to wonder why

-- "Miracles," by Fleetwood Mac

Earlier I tried to relate the philosophical commitment to materialism that I had when I was an atheist, even though that commitment wasn't always wholehearted. From time to time I flirted with the idea that there was a "spiritual" world out there. Usually I tried to justify it within the confines of my materialism -- "untapped, natural powers of the mind," and that sort of thing -- and sometimes I just wondered and didn't worry about making all the eggs fit in the carton.

One of the significant struggles I had as a young Christian was a kind of foreboding presence of witchcraft, spiritualism and that sort of thing. Especially in the fall. I felt a kind of tug towards spooky spiritual stuff. I felt like Frodo under the gaze of the Lord of the Nazgul. There was something in me that attracted the evil eye. It repulsed me, and yet something in me wanted to yield.

I remember spending an entire day in the woods reading a book about a woman who'd been into weird spiritualist stuff, including psychic healing. You know, that stuff where rich people go down to Mexico and expect the spiritual healer to pull the tumor right out of their stomach. (I hear the Amazing Randi, a psychic debunker, can do a bang-up imitation of the whole spiel.)

It's hard to know why I read the book, except that it was a way to flirt with that secret, hidden longing without doing something positively wicked. Reading the testimony of a Christian who'd been rescued from that nonsense provided the perfect, wholesome excuse for dabbling in what I knew was wrong for me. I told myself that I read the book so I would know how to witness to the gullible folk who were into that stuff. (Equipping oneself for witnessing is the favorite excuse in the Evangelical world for doing questionable things.)

But investigating that kind of stuff always had the same effect on me: it made me question my faith.

I can still remember sitting on a big rock near the old mill in Adelphi, wondering if I really believed all these ideas about Jesus. After all, there were all other options. Maybe Jesus was just one manifestation of ... oh, whatever.

Part of me wanted to yield. I wanted to cast off the shackles of the divine will and do my own thing, my own way. (I still had a lot to learn about whose way was really better.) The only thing that saved me was my firm grounding in Christian apologetic. Eventually, every time the spookies would tug at my heart and urge me to some kind of apostasy, plain sense would come hammering down on my empty skull.

"I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me."

Those are not the words of a "manifestation of the Christ spirit," or some other goofball nonsense.

The Lord, Liar, Lunatic argument would run on a continuous loop in the back of my brain. The arguments for the historicity of the resurrection would parade before my mind's eye. It seemed that every chapter of Who Moved the Stone? would come clearly to mind at times like these, and eventually, after the evidence conquered my silly excuses, I had to 'fess up to the fact that I was an inexcusable wretch. I didn't have any real doubts, I just wanted to flirt with sin -- and with some cute spiritualist somewhere.

Reluctantly, compelled by the simple truth of the matter and not by any emotional attachment, I would pull out the Psalms and start reading.

In my trouble I cried to the Lord,

And He answered me.

Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips.

-- Psalm 120:1-2a

Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord.

Lord, hear my voice!

-- Psalm 130:1-2a

This was a recurring struggle, and I'm not really sure why. The allure was quite real. I can remember trips through the mountains where I felt as I was walking into temptation, like a man who rents a movie he knows he shouldn't see.

I am long since over it now. My recovery was very much like when you suddenly realize that the toe that had been bothering you isn't bothering you any more. The spookies just went away, for whatever reason.

Is Faith Naive?

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

And with fear and trembling stand,

Ponder nothing earthly minded,

For with blessing in his hand

Christ our God to earth descending

Comes our homage to demand.

-- "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence," #241 in Lutheran Worship

My spooky experiences also shed some light on the relationship between motives and belief. Whenever you discuss evidences for the Christian faith (and I suppose for other faiths as well), there is often an assumption that the objectivity and credulity of those who are advocating a position of faith should be questioned, while the objectivity and credulity of those who are against a position of faith is not so questionable. It's more objective. More "scientific."

My experience teaches the opposite. Maintaining faith is a struggle of adherence to the facts against the pull of my desire for rebellion, for doing things my own way, for giving in to sin. In my life, my motives were questionable precisely in those times when I was too ready to believe the arguments against faith. This is something that unbelievers simply don't recognize, because they've never felt that struggle. The flesh wars against the spirit, and it is more than willing to accept whatever thread-bare, intellectually questionable argument it can find to justify its desires.

Of course this is not always the case. There are some believers who have powerful emotional incentives to believe, and perhaps their objectivity should be questioned. But it is ridiculous to think that unbelievers don't have powerful emotional incentives not to believe. They do. They don't want to submit to a God who demands their loyalty and service.