What does it mean to claim to be a Presbyterian, or a Protestant, or a Christian?…What if we were to walk through the Protestant churches of the United States today, especially the centrist-to-liberal churches, and ask such questions of every member? How many would be left in the pews if all had to profess a belief in the supernatural claims about God and Jesus? I won’t venture an estimate, but my hunch is that the collection plates would be considerably lighter if churches were to expel all the skeptics and all who held non-orthodox views.
If there existed a huge, neon yellow highlighter for computer screens, I would have taken it to this passage from “The Inquisition,” an essay by Robert Jensen that I read yesterday on Killing the Buddha. The piece details Jensen’s removal from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas after fellow parishioners read some of his writing on “radical Christianity,” the label Jensen has taken on to describe his agnostic/atheistic faith.
The essay immediately captured me because I’m used to hearing stories like his concerning Catholics (both of the present and past), not Protestants (at least not Protestants who lived after the Salem witch trials). What’s more, the quoted passage really captures the spirit of many of the questions and ideas I explore in my academic research, and I’ve realized that I haven’t shared much about that with you in the blogsphere.
As an undergraduate I was drawn to various forms of identity theory explored in Postmodern (and post-Postmodern) thought. The more I considered these explorations of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, etc., I more convicted I became that identity is much foggier than most individuals and institutions acknowledge, and that there are serious consequences to overlooking the reality of how people make sense of themselves and their communities today.
In the case of Robert Jensen, his Christian identity did not match that of many in his congregation, so they used the pre-established power structures in the church to remove him from a community that is both life-giving from him and central to his religious identity. My point is not to make a judgement about the moral “rightness” or “wrongness” of his church’s decision, rather I want to highlight how this situation exemplifies observations I commonly make about religion today: First, there is a great diversity in Christian (and generally, religious) identity, and both individuals and religious institutions struggle and/or refuse to acknowledge this reality. Second, situations like this beg the question–Who/What gets to decide individual and communal religious identity? Doctrine? Past or Present doctrine? Tradition? Which tradition? Current Authorities? Which authorities? The Bible (or a particular interpretation of the Bible)? The individual, him/herself?
I find that contemporary theories of gender and sexual identities are extremely compelling when it comes to questions of communal and individual identity, and the battling power structures that delineate these identities. I want to bring these theories into conversation with theological understandings about religious identity and belonging, with hopes of generating a more accurate landscape of Catholicism, and religion in general.
I’d love to know what you think!
