Brad explains how evangelicalism destroys faith, because it destroys any sense of uncertainty and unpredictability. By working in a register of moral, political, and theological certainty, evangelicalism becomes the anti-thesis of faith. Brad calls this disenchanted theology. By contrast, he argues that as a secular person he has become a person of faith in ways he never experienced as an evangelicals. For him, even as a non-religious person, the world is enchanted--full of unknowability and unpredictability--in ways that mean the human condition is always marked by vulnerability and wonder. He goes so far as to say that inter-faith dialogue is possible among secular people and religious.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College.
I want to talk today about faith.
And some of you saw me on Twitter the other day, and I was reacting to a tweet by Greg Locke, who's a sort of infamous provocateur pastor, somebody who burned Andrew Seidel's The Founding Myth book on Twitter, on video.
And here's what he had to say.
He said, if you're preaching about faith in an empty auditorium because of COVID fear, you've missed the entire point of what faith is.
Fear and faith do not mix.
And, you know, I had a sort of strong reaction to that.
And one of the things that I said on Twitter was that I became a person of faith after leaving evangelicalism.
And you might say, well, Brad, you you identify as secular.
You don't identify as a Christian or another religious tradition.
So how is it that you became a person of faith after you left?
And my response is that Evangelicalism is about certainty in every sense.
Moral, theological, and political.
It eradicates mystery.
And so, in my view, it eradicates faith.
What does that mean in reality or in practice?
I remember, and I've shared this many times on the podcast, that in 2004 I was thinking about voting for John Kerry, and so many elders and so many people in my life told me that abortion was wrong, that there was just no mystery, no gray area, no fuzziness about the issue.
It was absolutely one or the other, murder or not.
And so to vote for somebody who was in some way pro-choice was to vote for murder, okay?
And so politically, I had one choice, and that was to vote for George W. Bush.
Okay, there are other examples, right?
Theological examples, that those who accept Jesus will go to heaven, and they will have eternal salvation.
And those who do not, will go to hell.
And there's very little gray area, there's very little sort of room to discuss that.
I remember having conversations near the end of my time in the movement where I would ask people, you know, it seems very strange that someone like Gandhi who dedicated his life to improving others, to freedom, to moral discipline is in hell.
And yet the real estate agent who attends our church one hour a week and otherwise is a very greedy and callous and shallow person.
And I'm thinking of a certain person here.
Is going to heaven and it's all because they have accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior and others have not and so there's this sort of moral absolute, right?
And there was never really good any good answers to that except for you know, Jesus is the way to forgiveness and so on and so forth So if Gandhi didn't ask for that, there's no way to he could experience that, right?
There's a sense of moral rights and wrongs that often don't make sense and some of these are very silly, right?
I remember so clearly that At church, the way that we would talk about using marijuana was that it was poisoning the body and therefore wrong and that other drugs did the same, right?
And we would often do this while sitting at a men's Bible study at a fast-food restaurant eating, you know, factory farmed meat and so on and so forth, right?
And so here's my point is Greg Locke is talking about faith and he's talking about faith in a way that is supposed to eradicate fear.
And my response is that what happens in evangelicalism more often is the antithesis of faith.
That when you want certainty in every regard of your life, when you want to go to bed at night knowing that every aspect of your questions about yourself, about your world, moral, political, etc., and your cosmos, your theological beliefs and system, Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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