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After twenty years of listening to the punk band Bad Religion, I sent the group's front man a note. I greeted Greg Graffin, told him that he had fans among Christian college professors, and I asked about his doctoral work at Cornell University.

I was surprised to get a note back—and then another. After a few months I printed our emails. They came to over 100 pages.

Very little of the written conversation between Greg and me concerns the music of Bad Religion. He gets enough fan mail. Instead, we discussed what my students would call the "big questions." What is life for? What are people for? Why do people think God exists? If you listen to Bad Religion's lyrics, you know that these kinds of questions are important to Greg, who is an atheist.

In time, Greg turned his focus to recording another Bad Religion CD, and I had to face the mounting number of students in my classes. Our correspondence became casual and remains that way. But I learned a lot in those intense months.

For one thing, I realized that the kind of sustained written conversation Greg and I had is rare. It's rare because it takes time and mental energy. It also takes a commitment not to let the discussion turn into a debate. I've held to this commitment through radio interviews that followed the publication of Greg's and my correspondence. I've tried to resist the construal of our correspondence as a "debate." Yes, we disagreed and went at each other, but we didn't debate.

Debate is about winning, and that's important in many contexts. But I didn't care about winning. Nor did I care about "listening" in the gushy, politically correct sort of way associated with people-friendly evangelism.

Mainly I cared about learning. I wanted to learn how Greg sees the world, and I hoped that he learned about a Christian vision of the world.

In the process I found my relationship with Jesus strengthened. Not because I was stretched intellectually by the challenges of atheistic materialism, in which (it seems to me) there's a lot more bark than bite. Rather, my relationship with Jesus was strengthened because my conversation with Greg led me to see some things more deeply.

Sometimes I'd hear radio preachers, and I'd wonder to myself what Greg would say if he were listening. "No wonder Greg thinks the way he does about Christians," I'd say to my wife, as we listened to a grown-up sermon that rehearsed things we'd heard since the third grade.

But then I remembered the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, where wacky people become vehicles for grace; and I thought about Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited (which Greg and I discussed), and the way God drew troubled people to himself; and I recounted the people who've had the greatest Christian influence on me—among them, a tobacco-chewing janitor and a patient in a psychiatric ward. And I remembered that Jesus said that only the sick need doctors. I remembered Paul saying that, whatever an evangelist's motives, it's good for people to talk about Jesus. So I concluded that I didn't need to worry about the preachers; I just needed to ask Jesus to find a way to meet with Greg. 

In those months of dialogue I also saw the devastation wrought by the passion for pseudo-scientific theories on natural history among some Christians. Many of my students believe that six-day creationism is an essential Christian belief—that if the first chapters of Genesis can't be taken literally, then the whole Bible is a fraud. What tragic nonsense!

Before Greg and I corresponded, I didn't care. "You wanna believe the earth was created six thousand years ago? Whatever." But Greg helped me see that this kind of gaping ignorance promotes the perception that theologically conservative Christians are the enemies of learning.

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September (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50