From Dissent to Divinity School
ELLINGSON, NEIL
Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 25 PARTY OF THE FUTURE From Dissent to Divinity School NEIL ELLINGSON How does a young acolyte of the secular Left find his...
...I felt reverence, gratitude, and awe for the mystery of existence, and the question of what to call this mystery or how it mapped onto a metaphysical system seemed beside the point...
...they are places where people come together in the name of loving their neighbor and maybe even their enemy and are concerned for “the least of these...
...Reading James made me entertain the possibility that religious experience could be something nondelusional that did not necessarily need the conduit of a specific religious tradition...
...The Greek for “changing one’s mind” is metanoia, translated in the New Testament as “repentance...
...John Updike, a churchgoing Episcopalian, once wrote of church that it was “the most available SPRING 2010 DISSENT 25 Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 26 PARTY OF THE FUTURE democratic experience...
...I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, womenwhipping, cradleplundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” he wrote in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave...
...It took my own variety of religious experience to change my mind...
...But happily there are others who are convinced of religion’s potential to be a tolerant force in the creation of a freer and more equitable world and a meaningful, healing resource for our fractured selves and splintered society...
...Talking about how I got here is awkward for someone of my thoroughly secular upbringing and education...
...I had been struggling with anxiety since my sophomore year in college, and living back at my parents’ house after graduation with no clear sense of what to do next had only intensified my feelings of selfdoubt...
...My previous concept of myself as a completely autonomous agent who was supposed to be in charge of my own destiny was seriously put into question...
...That integration did not occur until, just like my uncosmopolitan Lutheranfarmer forebears from the Midwest had done, I started attending a Christian church...
...Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 25 PARTY OF THE FUTURE From Dissent to Divinity School NEIL ELLINGSON How does a young acolyte of the secular Left find his way to divinity school...
...they have public relevance as well...
...26 DISSENT SPRING 2010...
...In my judgment, even more than the affirmation of democratic souls, churches can and have been springboards for political activity in service of social justice...
...There are times when, walking to my “Introduction to the New Testament” class in the cold Chicago morning, I ask myself that question...
...At Judson I began to discover an affinity for Christian theology and philosophy and realized that Eastern spirituality didn’t have the monopoly on meditative and contemplative practices...
...If the civil rights movement or community organizers from Saul Alinsky to the young Obama have anything to teach us, it is that religious communities can be powerfully effective places to organize...
...Frederick Douglass, faced with the hypocrisy of a Christianity that sanctioned slavery, is just one great American critic who embodied that role...
...Everybody worships...
...Mine was a peculiar form of conversion...
...The value of religion, he claimed, resided not in the ultimate veracity or literal truth of its dogmas and creeds, but in the practical, lifeaffirming perspective it garnered for the believer...
...The only choice we get is what to worship...
...I now saw that religious experience did not have to mean blind devotion...
...We vote less than once a year...
...To claim that people who don’t identify as religious can’t care as much about these things is absurd, but from my own experience, religion allows for a deliberate site in which to express and nurture care...
...The refrain from many on the Left these days is that without a grassroots popular movement to push Barak Obama, we cannot expect his administration to pursue genuinely progressive reforms...
...According to a 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than half of people who were raised without any religious affiliation now claim involvement with a religious group...
...James distilled what he thought was common to religious experiences of all kinds—the reorientation of an individual’s life from one ruled by anxiety, fear, and egotism, to one filled with peace, courage, and compassion for others...
...After my New Testament class, I see them at our Chicago Seminarians for Justice organizing meetings...
...At Judson I witnessed firsthand how churches can be places not only for spiritual growth, but also for civic participation...
...There is no such thing as not worshipping...
...Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soulunit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one...
...Part of what makes it difficult to answer is that the path leading me to the University of Chicago Divinity School began in an experience I don’t find easy to communicate...
...A graduate of Harvard and former editorial assistant at Dissent magazine, he is currently a student in the Master of Divinity program at the University of Chicago Divinity School...
...NE was born in Minneapolis in 1981...
...Whether teaching about religion, working in a church, or helping to organize a church, I hope that I will become a “connected critic,” Michael Walzer’s term for the person who critiques his society and institutions from up close, while speaking to their values through a common language...
...It is not just that they are convenient sites where people congregate...
...religious” boundary maintained by some who equate religion with erasure of the individual conscience...
...The church I eventually joined, Judson Memorial Church in New York City, was admittedly not typical—it had been a gathering place for Greenwich Village artists in the 1950s and 1960s, proudly welcoming of the LGBT community, and is now a leader in the movement for immigration reform...
...My sacred text was not the Bible or the Upanishads—it was William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience...
...I didn’t become a convert to James’s brand of natural theology upon first reading his book...
...As David Foster Wallace, one of the most brilliant writers of the generation just preceding mine, said, “[I]n the daytoday trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism...
...It wasn’t simply that I changed my mind about religion—my mind itself changed...
...When I walked into Judson and no one tried to brainwash me, and I did not have to disavow the individual and heterodox nature of my own spiritual experience, I became less protective of the firm “spiritual vs...
...In fact, after a few chapters I put it down, intrigued and envious of the experiences he discussed, but mostly baffled and doubtful of their actual existence...
...It could mean enlivened consciousness, a source of both greater intellectual clarity and deepened ethical conviction...
...The term that best captures what I experienced is, however, a religious one: conversion...
...Although James’s pragmatism helped me to see the value of personal religious experience and initiated me into a new way of being, it didn’t offer much in the way of practical guidance for how to integrate this experience into my everyday life...
...My partial apostasy from the secular world is not, I have come to realize, as unusual as I once thought...
...If I were the only one with these kinds of ideas about religion, I might have kept them to myself...
...But how and where do we build a movement...
...I think there is a growing awareness among my generation that, despite what the selfassured clamor of the “New Atheists” might lead us to believe, spiritual and religious questions are as important to our time as any, and are not just a private matter...
...I didn’t convert to any religion in particular...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
