It's In the Code, Ep. 5: Wherever You Are on Your Spiritual Journey
“No matter where you are on your spiritual journey, you’re welcome here.” This is a slogan we might read on church flyers, websites, or signs. We might here it in the welcome given by the pastor of a church. But what does it mean? In this episode Dan decodes this phrase to find out if it delivers on the promise of acceptance and inclusion it communicates. He explores what kinds of churches make this affirmation and what the limits of acceptance might be on “wherever you are.”
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and the host of this series, It's In The Code, where we spend time basically deciphering and decoding some of the messages.
We'll eventually get to some of the images, some of the ideas, some of the slogans, some of the doctrines within American Christianity.
As always, Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center at UCSB.
We thank them.
I thank all of you who listen, all of you who support us financially or otherwise.
We can't do this without you.
This series has been building off of insights from you, and I want to thank everybody who continues to email me, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com, with your ideas and your insights.
I say all the time, and it's always true, that I do not get a chance to respond to everybody, and I wish that I did.
But please keep the ideas coming.
They're fantastic.
They're insightful.
I'm compiling them and sifting them, and there's no doubt I won't ever get to all of them.
But it's really helpful, especially as I hear, you know, four and five and six and sometimes a couple dozen people bringing up the same issue or the same idea.
So please keep those coming.
And today we'll be turning to one of the topics that you have raised.
So we'll just dive right in here, right?
And what I want to do, really, this is the first... this episode and next episode are kind of paired.
I'd hoped to do them in one, but as those of you who listen to me know...
It can be kind of long-winded, and it turns out that's just too much.
So we'll do it in two, two kind of paired episodes, looking at sort of contrasting slogans that, when we decode them, can tell us some really, really different things about American Christianity, and for me, even more significantly, present two really, really different visions of As cliche as it may sound, it's true.
Two very different visions of the human condition.
Two different visions of what it means to be a Christian.
Two different visions of what the role of religion in the world might be.
And again, that could be of interest to you because you're in that Christian world.
It could be of interest to you because you used to be, but don't want to be anymore.
It could be of interest to you Because you're just curious or maybe you're a journalist or an academic trying to make sense of the American religious scene, regardless of where you sort of live in those spaces, I think this will be, I hope this will be informative.
And so, An email I've gotten from a number of people is about a phrase that appears and this is one many of you know that I'm also a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I talk with people working through religious trauma on a regular basis.
I've heard this issue come up with them.
I've read the emails that you send and I can feel oftentimes The sadness, the anger, the frustration that comes through this.
And so this can be a big one.
And it's a phrase that if you're uninitiated, it may not sound all that strange.
If you are people involved in what is going to be known as faith deconstruction, it might be familiar to you.
But it's this slogan.
This goes something like this.
You are welcome no matter where you are on your spiritual journey.
Now where might you hear this?
Where might you come across this slogan?
You might be driving down the street and a church might have one of those big banners hanging across it that says, all are welcome or you're welcome no matter where you are in your spiritual journey.
Or maybe it's if you go into the church and they have like, you know, sort of a brochure Or a program that they hand out, or whatever.
It might be there, like, you know, under the church name.
Say, no matter where you are on your spiritual journey, you're welcome here.
Or, we welcome you no matter where you are on your spiritual journey.
If you were to sit in a service, probably the person leading it would stand up and give some sort of welcome and say something like this.
Certainly, if you go on a lot of church websites, and you were to click on the section, you know, about us, or who we are, or get to know us, or whatever the tab would be, it would say something like this.
It probably doesn't take anybody with specialization in American religion to know, first, that the first thing we're going to notice about this is it's coming from churches that are aimed at drawing in those who aren't already churchgoers, right?
In other words, when it says, no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, it means, yeah, if you're sort of advanced in your spiritual journey, by which they're going to mean You're a Christian, and you understand Christianity, and you're living the Christian life, there's a place for you.
But also, if you're not there yet, this is a place for you.
It is absolutely standard fare of the cool kid churches that we talked about in the last episode.
If you haven't heard that, just go back, give it a quick listen.
But it's also common among other kinds of churches.
Almost always, Protestant.
Very, very typically theologically conservative or theologically traditionalist, if you don't like that language of conservatism.
And in a few minutes, I'll talk about why that is.
And I think the fact that I can say that with such confidence will come out more in the next session.
Having said that, I should pause.
This goes for everything we talk about in the series.
I am making generalizations.
Are there exceptions to this?
Absolutely.
Will there be churches that might have a slogan that says, no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here, that don't model the things I'm talking about?
Yeah, absolutely.
Will there be individual Christians within those congregations who don't model the kinds of things that I'm going to be decoding?
Yes, absolutely.
This kind of cultural decoding we're doing, it's about pattern recognition.
We recognize these patterns, broad patterns, commonalities, typical cultural formations, but there can always be exceptions to those.
Okay?
But so this phrase is common among lots of churches.
Again, typically theologically conservative or traditionalist, Protestant.
I think, again, just following the demographics of American religion, they typically tend to be very white.
And if we're a regular Joan Q. public driving down the road, and we see this slogan on a church, or for reasons I don't know why they would be, but maybe whatever algorithm searching on your computer, puts pop-up ads for, you know, the faith community church down the road, or whatever, and it pops up there that says, no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here.
What might it communicate to us?
Right?
And no matter who you are, I want you just to imagine this sort of a, let's say, a neutral space, driving around, seeing this, hearing this, coming across it.
What can it communicate?
Well, it can communicate non-judgment.
It communicates that this is a church that won't judge us, right?
No matter where you are on your spiritual journey.
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