I was reading Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con blog and came across this post he put up yesterday. By the way, if you're not reading Crunchy Con, it's time to start. He's got a very interesting political and cultural point of view that has influenced me a lot, it's a type of conservatism that is largely unnoticed in the modern conservative echo-chamber, it's closer to a traditional conservatism and smacks of distributism, moral environmentalism and cultural regressionism (my words, not his) that is totally unique and remarkably refreshing for a person who's tired of today's talk-radio zeitgeist conservatism. But I digress.

He excerpts a story of a woman who converted to Orthodox Christianity from Hinduism. The original post is a long and interesting story of the woman's wandering and struggling to make sense of life and religion, it's a worthy read if that's your sort of thing. But this snippet is really good stuff for believers who try to tell their story to non-believers:

Christians claimed that Jesus was God, was the Son of God, and all this stuff about a trinity, which really I had no idea what they were talking about. They claimed this resurrection, which made no sense to me - not that I didn't believe Jesus couldn't rise from the dead if he were God, but I had no idea what possible relevance that could have, since I didn't know/understand about the Fall, sin, the Final Resurrection - I assumed these were all myths, with no more relevant deep meaning than a fairy tale, except maybe metaphorical spiritual meanings. I wasn't even interested, because I never understood what importance that event should have to me. No Christian had ever explained that to me - they'd just say crazy stuff like, "I've been washed in the blood of the Lamb, and now I'm saved! Jesus died for your sins! Don't you want to be saved?" then they'd paint portraits of Hell - it all made zero sense to me, just as though someone said, "My red balloon popped and then candy canes fell out of the sky, your rabbit is winking at me, doesn't all this make you want to buy a new Nissan??" I am not exaggerating - this nutshell "Gospel message" makes absolutely no sense to a non-Christian, no real meaningful sense, anyway. You just have no idea what they are so excited about - so Jesus rose from the dead, big whoop, so what? Good for him, but....so what? He healed people...he was loving, kind, innocent, born of a virgin, sinless.... so what? I didn't even grow up with same concept of sin as Christians do, so "sinless" vs. "sinner" didn't mean the same things to me as to a Christian anyway. In other words, we lacked the same language/doctrine/context, so the whole message was being lost in translation. The same things happen when Americans decide they are interested in Hindu things - I am always suspicious when I hear people throwing around words like karma and dharma, etc. Do they really understand what they are talking about? It also makes me suspicious that I here more Americans talking about tantric sex and other exotic things, whereas the Indian Hindus I knew were just taught to be devoted to God and pray and go to the temple. Sex was a taboo topic, maybe too taboo. Anyway, the point of this tangent is, I always felt very misunderstood by Christians who had these wild orgy type images of what it must be like for my family to be Hindu, and I felt almost equally misunderstood by Westerners who rejected their Christian upbringing to come to Hinduism thinking along similar lines.

I took a different impression than Dreher did from much the same excerpt. He, as an Orthodox Christian, was interested in her relationship between Hinduism and Orthodoxy as well as a reminder that we take a Christian vocabulary for granted in America.

And he's right, but he paints with a broad brush. I don't think it's uncommon at all for a person to be raised in the USA-- the place that Republicans like to call a "Judeo-Christian Nation" (whatever that means)-- and still not have a Christian vocabulary. I mean, there's a lot of people of my generation that are Christians and have a poor frame of reference for Christianity. Hmm. Let me clarify that: I'm not talking theology, which is just about as easy or as hard as you want to make it-- I mean Christianity as a culture, subculture, set or subset in America. If I can overgeneralize, our parents were the generation that stopped going to church on Sundays, so we're the generation that were never taken. So we don't have that cultural vocabulary or that metaphysical tool in our metaphysical toolbox.

I remember as an adolescent Boy Scout, I was working on meeting the requirments for the "Ad Altare Dei" religious emblem award, (which is something like a Catholic Merit Badge, basically one exists for every major and most minor world religions) and the handbook talked about "witnessing" to people who had no religion. I don't remember exactly if it was a call to witness to other faiths and non-Catholic Christians, but thinking back-- I kind of doubt it. It wouldn't have been very PC to drop that on a 13 year old kid... but I can't recall that part exactly. But it's beside the point.

I do remember being pretty confused about the term "witness" as an activity that people did voluntarily. As far as my world understood, a "witness" was someone who saw a car accident or a mugging or something. There were no other ways to use the term, it wasn't like I had to disambiguate between the terms. And because 13 year old boys don't like to admit that they don't know something-- I didn't ask. It'd take me years to figure out the context of the word, I'm still figuring out how to live the verb.

But we're living in a world where people take their moral teachings from the History Channel, so it's no surprise that people have a stunted view of morality, religion and Christianity in general. And though I don't really call up all the names in my contact list and talk to them about the differentiation between the Heresy of Donatism and the Heresy of Novatianism, sometimes I forget that even some common terms like "chastity" or "celibacy", which are words that are distinguished and confused by the secular world-- even though we might somehow use them in a totally neutral conversation, they have implications for clerics and lay persons in a religous context.

Am I sounding like a smartypants here? I promise that I'm not trying to do that. I also solemnly promise never to call anyone in my contact list and talk to them about the differences between condemned heresies unless it's really really important that we talk about it right then. You have my word.

What I AM trying to say is that sometimes anyone who studies and works any discipline can get carried away with the lingo. And in whatever your interest is, there's probably things that you presume of people to have a working knowledge. I think that everyone should be able to use their google with profeciency; when I'm with my mother, I've got to walk her through step-by-step. Yes, with google. Even though there's only one entry box and two buttons. Yes. It's true. No. I'm not kidding. I love my mother. But daaaaaaaaang.

Anyway, my point is that if you ever meet some Hindu who's converting to Baha'i, telling her "I've been washed in the blood of the Lamb, and now I'm saved! Jesus died for your sins! Don't you want to be saved?" isn't going to get you very far. You sound like you're speaking crazy talk. Likewise, if I'm going to tell a disinterested non-Catholic that I've got to go anonymously talk a celibate man about struggling with temptations against chastity before I can eat some Jesus, I run the risk of the same kind of crazy talk.

Heh. You know what? Catholicism is kind of crazy if you're not in on the schtick. I mean, if I knew that I was an hour away from death and I had some undisputable realization that the whole God, heaven and hell stuff was a crock and a lie-- I'd be pretty mad at myself. Why would anyone choose to live a Christian life if it wasn't true?! I'd sleep in on Sundays and have a whole lot more fun on Saturdays. But again, I digress.

I guess that when it comes up, I just need to all be more thoughtful about how I talk about God and religion. Duly noted.

So now I've got to pray a few decades with my missal. You understand.

Right?