Monday, July 21, 2014

Leaving Christianity Behind at 25

I recently read a post from one of my former students. Here is what she said about marriage:

"Realizing you have spent your life believing a lie and based the majority of your choices on that lie is a big deal. I cannot believe that it took me so long to undo the brainwashing of a Christian school. I still find remnants of manipulation within my thoughts. Today, I realized how much I am opposed to the confines of marriage and most aspects of monogamy. ..Painfully liberating."

Fascinating!

Here is a 20 something year old young woman, whose extensive life journey has led her to the conclusion that "marriage" and "monogamy" are both "lies." More than that, they are manipulations of her Christian school. Of course she never suspects that her rejection of marriage could itself be the result of a manipulation, but that aside...

Sometimes I hear stuff like this and can't frankly figure out how exactly to respond to it. It is so alien to me; probably as alien to me as I am now to them. I would even fully expect her to be a bold advocate of gay marriage. On the one hand, marriage is so crucial that it is unfair to exclude gay people from the right to participate in it, but on the other hand marriage itself is a freedom-limiting manipulation of the Judeo-Christian ethic.

I suggested to this former student that perhaps God designed us for a deep spiritual immersion into one other person's life. She responded that we can have that with any number of people and that we shouldn't make vows that artificially confine people. In other words, we are to be free to evolve beyond people when necessary. This is all the gilded rhetoric of animal promiscuity, even homosexuality, bisexuality, any sexuality really. Her philosophy is that our natural impulses are to control us and not the other way round because then we are truly free, which is a terribly new insight (sarcasm font).

Again, this coming from a 20 something year old young woman living on the frontiers of discovery in Santa Cruz, California.

I wonder how she would feel about this after she has been with someone for a few years (if that is even possible given her philosophy) and she has a child, and her partner says, "You know, this is keeping me from evolving as a person, so I must find a deep spiritual bond with another." And why can't we say the same thing to our children for that matter? Really it is not marriage that is the "lie" she hates; it is the moral duty of constancy!

Or I wonder how she would feel about this if, God forbid, she should contract some deadly disease, and her partner says, "Caring for you is diminishing my life force, so I must go forth into the woods."

And of course her position is fully consistent with Aldous Huxley's vision of total communal sexuality (where no one "belongs" to anyone else) and government farms raise children. But none of this can be what she meant, right?

It is utterly unsurprising that a young person, enamored by the world and all of its brazen ridicule of Christianity, would say such things. Reject Christianity and you reject any philosophical foundation for a lifelong commitment to anything or anyone except yourself. What on earth can be the purpose of hesed (loyal love, or relentless love) if we are merely products of nature or if we are indistinguishable from nature? On the one hand, if I am an animal, then I can surely behave as one and pursue whatever instinct pushes me in any direction to secure my own comfort and survival. On the other hand, if I am equal with all of nature, then my preference for one natural being is purely subjective, and I am free to choose whatever I want if my preferences drift.

Strangely she is, to some real extent, stumbling upon an important truth. If she rejects Christianity, marriage is a meaningless delusion.