The Seven Deadly Fears: Pride

The biggest lesson I learned through the evangelical culture was one of fear. Everything was scary. Everything outside of the narrow way of Zondervan and Focus on the Family was going to get you. If not in this life, then definitely in the next. These things were not taught to me by stupid people. The people I grew up with were very well-educated, and very well-read. Several graduated from Princeton, Stanford, and similar schools. Ignorance and narrow-mindedness is not a symptom of stupidity. It is the consequence of fear. These people were scared, and passed on their fear to me through the concept of the seven deadly sins. And, because they were intelligent and well-educated, the arguments for living in that fear were quite advanced and usually very subtle. I still haven’t unraveled all of them, and the chilling effect they had on my life.  I don’t believe in the concept of sin, but if I did, I would say acting in fear was the cardinal one. Here’s the first reason why.

The founding story of the Christian faith is the story of the Garden of Eden. Man and woman, the latter created from and for the former, lived in harmony with each other and the natural world. Their one job was to stay away from the tree of knowledge of good and evil* One day, a serpent enters their paradise. He tells them that God is holding things back from them, and that they deserve to know all that God knows. Eve is the first to literally bite at that forbidden fruit, and then encourages Adam to join her in her quest. God becomes angry at Adam and Eve’s disobedience and exiled them from the Garden forever. I am sure most people have read or heard this story before. Depending on who is tell the story, the reason why God gets mad changes. Now, in many Christian denominations and for many Christians, the reason is simple disobedience. It doesn’t matter why God told them not to eat that fruit, and it doesn’t matter what the tree is for. They disobeyed, they get exiled, the end. Some denominations focus on the knowledge that they gained. Adam and Eve were punished because they wanted to know something. Other sects focus on the part where Adam and Eve learned about good and evil, and became ashamed. Regardless of the specifics, all of these versions focus on one main sin. Adam and Eve were guilty of Pride. They thought they knew better than God what they needed and wanted.

The Evangelical version of this story focuses on the curiosity of Adam and Eve. They were punished because they were curious, and sought knowledge that God said they did not need and should not have. Like many of the premises underlying evangelical culture, this isn’t usually stated directly. But it was unmistakably there in the tone with which my teachers used to talk about the real scientific method. I was taught to be afraid of and distrust any actual authority on science, sex (especially sex!), health, and any other subject. The only sources praised by most of my peers and their families were explicitly Christian ones. Everything else was dismissed as a tool of the devil. The implication was pretty clear.

Sometimes the anti-intellectualism was more forcefully stated. Sometimes I was told that God “didn’t want us to have that knowledge” when I asked philosophical questions about the contradiction between free will and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. I was told that people who accepted that the Earth is millions of years old were being duped by Satan’s tool of carbon dating. When I pressed for an answer beyond that, the most-oft quoted scripture verse to me was “Trust in the Lord with all of your heart. Lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).” This was usually followed with “the heart is deceitful beyond all things” (Jeremiah 17:9) and “The wisdom of the world is foolishness” (1 Corinthians 3:19) if I kept asking questions. And, when I just wouldn’t quit asking, I was told that I was being prideful. The ability to think, to reason, to follow an argument from the beginning to the end with careful questions was considered a manifestation of the cardinal sin of Pride. After all, God knows best what is going on, and my reason will lead me astray, so I should never trust or use it.

Now, all that said, there are Christians within the evangelical culture and without who reject this in action if not stated belief. And I believe that what a person does shows their character more than what they say. I had people around who encouraged me to ask questions, and read whatever I could get my hands on. Both my parents, to their credit, were the first to teach me how assess a source and decide if it was credible or not. They never limited what I could read based on whether or not it was “secular”. This doesn’t change the fact that the culture, and many other people (including teachers!) were staunchly anti-intellectual. But, being taught how to think was what ultimately how I was able to reason my way out of the toxic culture altogether. I grateful for that. Ultimately, the sin of Pride was my salvation, and I take no small amount of pleasure in that irony.

*Some traditions refer to this as simply the Tree of Knowledge. Some traditions refer to two trees, one of Good and Evil and one of Knowledge generally.

A Daughter of Eve

I think too much. Or rather, I think about the things that many people wish I didn’t think about. Especially when I say my conclusions out loud. And the conclusions I have come to lately are ones that I am sure many people would wish I didn’t say out loud. For a long time, I didn’t. My religious education included all of these points in Neil Carter’s excellent list of harmful religious practices. In my case, I grew up with sexism laced dampening of critical thinking skills.

For the most formative years of my life I was raised in the evangelical sub-culture. This culture is pervasive, and goes by many denominational names - including “non-denominational”. In my case it went by the name of the Presbyterian Church of America. It’s a small sect of American Presbyterian belief that holds fast to a literalist Calvinist view of the Christian faith. To a Calvinist everything is pre-ordained. Every choice, every action, every decision you think you make is already planned for you. And, it’s either in service to God or the Devil. But, really, all in service to God because he will redeem whatever evil we do for his glory, anyway.

Most dangerously, Calvinists then and now believe that their ideas are internally consistent, inherently logical, and the only intellectually honest way in which to think about the Bible. Unless you question their assumptions, of course. One assumption is that of strict gender roles. Its more subtle in the PCA than it is in something like the Quiverfull Movement, but every bit as sexist. Women are allowed to go to college...but only approved Christian colleges, and only so they can be a better wife and mother. Women’s knowledge and understanding of the Bible and of Christian behavior is always going to be inferior to men’s because that’s what God says. This was never stated out loud, but it was absolutely shown when I was a student.

My science classes were filled with references to the Bible myth of creation, not the science of evolution. My history classes were, by and large, a history of how Western Christianity was the driving force behind of all innovation, morality, and stability. There was no mention of the Eastern contributions to knowledge, at all.  So, at best, it was an incomplete historical education. Our religion classes were similarly limited. As far as my church school was concerned, church history started with Martin Luther. Little mention was made of the previous 1500 years of church history, except to point out how misguided everyone before Calvin and Luther were. I could go on and on, but I think these examples are sufficient for now. And of course, my teachers in the important subjects such as science, Bible and math were men.

I did try to speak up in classes. I would challenge the teachers on their premises with questions like “If the Creation story is literally true, then how come well-documented scientific discoveries date the Earth to millions of years old?” I always got some rushed answer about how we can’t trust our own intellect, and how modern critical thinking is antithetical to Christianity. This begged the question of why we were in a school where they were teaching us religion using the veneer of logic and reason at all, then. I never did get a good answer to that question.

And, eventually, the teachers stopped calling on me. My questions were too much of a stumbling block to others. And, though this wasn’t stated, it was a threat to the male Bible teachers that a female student was questioning their authority. I was told that God’s purpose for me in those classes must have been to strengthen the faith of the professor by challenging them. The only “godly” reason why I would be saying those things would be that, as a woman, I was there to help and support men in their faith. The Bible talks about people questioning and doubting, so the Calvinists had a frame of a reference for that. But, they couldn’t bring themselves to really address my questions and concerns. They couldn’t hate me, either, or ignore me. So they had to fit my questions into their paradigm. Of course, they never said this out loud. But looking back, it’s so clear. It’s one of many of ways I was whispered down. And I’m only just starting to see it.