Change Comes in Phases

Change never comes easy. Our current hellscape of a political climate is a good case study of that. It makes me depressed for humanity to have a mountain of evidence available that police brutality against black people is a long festering wound, and yet people still, carelessly, cruelly deny that it’s an issue.

It makes me think about change. Deep change, and how it happens. My views on race started changing embarrassingly recently: within the last 7 years. The irony is that before my views on race could undergo a radical change, my particular views on religion had to change first.

Note here, that I am not saying one must change their religion in order to be less racist. But I am saying that many American iterations of religion are intimately married to racist viewpoints, and would require extensive unpacking to decouple the two.

So I began to think about what caused the first phase of my change.

Phase 1

The first time that I became actively aware that my worldview was cracking and changing, it was intensely disconcerting. There were many precursor life events that set the stage for the change, but I didn’t recognize those events as a tectonic shift in my foundation. When I finally started thinking about the growing earthquake in my beliefs, I definitely wasn’t ready for how deep the rumblings would go.

It was 2008, and I was in Tucson, AZ. I was in my 6th year of my active duty enlistment, and I had 2 classes left in my Associate’s degree. I was getting ready to switch over to the Air Force Reserve, and to start a civilian career.

The two classes that I had left were electives, so I decided on some classes that I thought would be no brainer, smooth sailing classes, so that I could cleanly graduate, separate from active duty, and walk into the next season of life with a decent start.

One of the classes that I picked was Intro to the New Testament. As a lifelong Christian, I thought I would easily sail through the class with an “A.” After all, I had been studying the New Testament almost daily for most of my life. And this wasn’t necessarily an unfounded opinion: I went to private, Christian school for 11 of 12 years of my primary school with many classes in various parts of the Bible, and I had even spent time learning from the owner of Christian Apologetics Research Ministry directly.

I got into the class, and the instructor was actually a full time Chaplain with the VA, as well as a professor. I was excited about the first class. The textbook for the course was New Testament: A Student’s Introduction by Stephen L. Harris. I didn’t read the textbook during the class. More on that later.

Each week, I was rapidly introduced to a way of thinking about the New Testament that two decades in the Christian faith had never talked about: historical criticism.

By the third week, I was beginning to get irritable. I couldn’t really articulate why, but I would make a lot of comments in the class. The professor would patiently respond by saying “Yes, that is definitely the traditional, devotional view on that topic. But let’s discuss why a critical view would see it differently.” I would sometimes be visibly flustered in the class.

I was “that guy”, to the extreme. You wouldn’t have liked me. I don’t blame you.

During classes, I would often attempt to resolve my frustration by thinking to myself, “this guy has got to be some liberal teacher that isn’t a real believer!” or “this is definitely the Devil trying to trick me!”

He would present a very specific, detailed point, about a passage in the New Testament. I would get frustrated because that point conflicted with how I had always been taught to think of that passage, but I had no counter argument. I would go seek out MacAuthor, or some other “approved” commentary to read up on the subject…and they would have some ad hominem, or circular argument that just fell flat.

As the class went on, more and more of those situations came up: brilliant, specific point, with amplifying details gets presented. I get frustrated and defensive. I go look to an approved Evangelical answer. The approved answer is just a mess of sloppy defensiveness and logical fallacies.

By the end of the class, I was growing quieter.

These weren’t the zingers that I was so used to hearing from Evangelical Apologists. This was beginning to be a mountain of examples, from multiple perspectives: inaccurate dates, inaccurate numbers from “eyewitness” accounts, central details that were completely missing from earlier texts in an irreconcilable way, etc.

I could deny one. I could even deny a couple. But an entire mountain of specific, detailed problems, across the entire NT, including different authors and regions?

After a while, I began to sink into this state of frustrated confusion. And the confusion wasn’t because I didn’t understand these technical details. It was because I did understand them. I understood their implications for my faith. Those implications were not comforting, and all of the Christian authorities weren’t truly addressing those implications. They were dodging them. And it seemed, in many cases, to be a knowledgeable deflection.

Before that class, I didn’t know these arguments existed. I just thought that people who “hated god” would come up with any lie they could to discredit something that was obviously true.

After that class, I realized that there was an entire discipline devoted to serious, scholarly study of this subject for which I only knew from the perspective of belief. I had spent on a lot of time with the text…but none of it was rigorous time. I read for comfort, for devotion, for motivation, for guidance…but never for detail, factuality and for historical accuracy.

This is an important point, so it’s worth restating:

I could plausibly say that I had spent time studying the Bible, but the kind of study I had done was still insufficient to make me an expert.

I got an A in the class. I was probably an ass to the professor until the very end. He was patient to the very end.

After the class ended, I cracked open the textbook for the first time, and began reading, cover to cover. I devoured it. It was exhaustively well thought out, detailed and calm about the assessments. No hyperbolic language to be found anywhere in the text.

It contrasted so sharply with all of the Evangelical attempts at rebuttals to those points.

I didn’t know it then, but the foundation of what I thought I knew was fatally cracked.

Phase 2

The reason why I started with faith, in a discussion about racism, is that faith was the pillar upon which I built the rest of my worldview. A lifetime of Evangelical thought on a variety of social issues pervaded everything I thought I knew.

Prior to my foundation in faith cracking, there would have been no reason to think that other parts of my worldview may have been wrong.

But boy, were they wrong.

One of the great Evangelical boogeymen of the early 00’s was the “homosexual agenda.”

I am still ashamed, to this day, for many of the things that I said to LGBTQ acquaintances when I was a Christian.

That was one of the first topics that I dove into after I had finished the textbook. If that much of what I had been told was wrong….what other topics could I have gotten completely wrong?

Needless to say, there are many, wonderful, scholarly books addressing modern expressions of LGBTQ love vs. what the Pauline epistles were talking about.

I’m being brief in this section, not because this isn’t important, but because I want to circle back to the point of this post.

My views drastically changed with a year of finishing that textbook. I couldn’t sustain the bigotry in good conscience.

Phase 3

Race.

I certainly didn’t think I was racist.

I saw my views on race as more of a reasonable expression of “common sense” that would apply to anybody. I had all of the classic cop outs that conservatives talk about:

• “I’m not racist, but…”

• “Well, it’s about personal responsibility…”

• “If someone is a criminal then…”

• “Well, there’s too many people that take advantage of welfare and don’t want to work hard….”

…and on and on.

That’s when I began to be exposed to people like Melissa V. Harris-Perry, LZ Granderson, and Ibram X. Kendi.

Because of the tectonic shift about faith, now the floodgates were open to the fact that I could be catastrophically wrong about things that are central to my identity.

I no longer got angry at being confronted with my wrongness. I welcomed the discomfort of realizing that I had yet another area to learn about. Another perspective to listen to.

In fact, I was starting to seek it out. I don’t want to remain in ignorance. I want to listen. I want to find ways to correct for the misguided arrogance that I once held.

Phase 4

So here we are, in 2020.

I still have a long way to go.

I’m listening as best as I can to the black community, and I want to follow their lead on what will make us better.

I’m also thinking as hard as I can about how I can possibly break through to the white people in my life that have never even gone through Phase 1.

I would be lying if I said that it didn’t feel hopeless at times.

But the thing is, when I look at my journey….that is 12 years in the making…and I’m still not where I need to be.

So I can’t stop having the conversations. I can’t stop. I won’t stop.

Our fellow, marginalized Americans, of all races, genders and orientations, deserve better.

We can’t stop.