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For evangelicals and fundamentalists, faith in God is a communicable condition rather than genetic. It's passed through close oral contact, occasionally through the airwaves or a shared tract, but never via chromosomes (or baptismal water, for that matter).
Born Again |
The first time I met anyone who thought differently, I was a young teenager on a missions trip at Appalachian State University. My partner was a long-legged, long-faced man who carried a Bible the size of Moses' actual stone tablets. He had no college degree of his own, nor could he count on me for intellectual backup, but he wasn't a bit intimidated. "I'll do the talking," he said, "and you just watch and pray."
We cruised the campus and witnessed, ineffectually, to a sweet-natured hippie and then to a devotee of Transcendental Meditation. After an hour or so we came across a young man on the steps of the student center and asked him if he knew Jesus.
The young man smiled like we were long-lost friends. "I sure do! Known Jesus all my life. I was born a Christian."
"Son," replied my witnessing partner in a firm but patient voice, "weren't nobody ever born a Christian!" As arrogant as he sounded, he didn't mean to offend. He was merely echoing the teaching so dear to all fundo-evangelicals: that Jesus saves through his own blood, and not through the blood running in your veins, or your mother's veins, or even the veins of your grandparents who founded a mission in Argentina. Various groups may add nuances to this doctrine (covenantalists emphasize God's promises to children of believing parents), but the basic teaching stands: belief is a choice of the individual, offered anew to each generation.
Only now do I really see the poignancy of that theological stance. Consider the interconnectedness of fundamentalist/ evangelical culture. After so many years of shared church and missionary life, not to mention a mind-boggling amount of intermarriage, American fundo-evangelicals have become a quasi-ethnic group, much like American Jews. A child raised in that culture may not be able to claim he was "born a Christian," but he can make a pretty good case for having been born a fundamentalist. Thus the very people who cherish the idea of decisional faith, who cling to it theologically, actually live as if faith is hereditary, a matter of family and kinship.
I thought a lot about this contradiction after reading Jon Sweeney's new memoir, Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood. Sweeney's story will sound familiar to many. He came from a devout fundamentalist family: his grandfathers were both Independent Baptist preachers; his father worked at Moody Bible Institute. He grew up physically in the backyards of his small town (Wheaton, Illinois) but spiritually in the halls of his church—rededicating his life to God multiple times, dreaming of becoming a missionary. As a zealous teenager, he led school chapels and argued theology with friends. He seemed destined to be a preacher or evangelist, fulfilling his family's dreams of a third generation of full-time Christian workers.
Then, on a college missions trip to the Philippines, Sweeney's fundamentalism began to unravel. His group was assigned to evangelize Catholics, even though that meant asking them to turn their backs on long-held beliefs. Perhaps empathizing with others from a strong religious heritage, he felt guilty about the mission itself:
By the time that my summer was over, I was convinced that what we were doing was wrong in its disregard for the life, community, culture, and the faith of the people that we had come to help. I came face to face with a series of real, human examples of how the faith of my childhood might hurt others.
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