Getting Religion | New York Times Magazine - September 18, 2005

Getting Religion - Mark Lilla

One of the special things about essays is that occasionally you find one where the author has written about an experience that you've had, too.  While the experience wasn't directly shared, there is a commonality, a sense of recognition, in what the author describes.  It connects you and makes you feel both validated and real.

Even better, is when the author goes beyond mere description and reveals his or her thinking about those experiences over time.  Here is where you likely depart from the author.  Whether you agree with this new insight or not, you have been exposed to another way of looking at the experience.  You've been given a different perspective on your life.

This is not too common.  For example, I've never had cancer.  I've never been threatened by a raging wildfire.  I'm not independently wealthy, and I've never had a Brazilian wax job.  But I have been through a late childhood, early adolescent religious awakening.

I did teach Sunday school to 1st through 3rd grade girls when I was only a 5th and 6th grader myself.  I dreamed about standing in the pulpit and preaching.  I figured the Moody Bible Institute was my Harvard, my West Point.  I won a new Bible for memorizing the books of both the Old and New Testaments.  My favorite book of the bible was the letter to the Hebrews.  I thought my life was figured out.

Then I fell.  And having fallen, I was not forgiven.  Everything was sham, a pretension to righteousness.

Then I started thinking.  By now I was 16.  It would take over a decade before I realized that nothing of what I knew was special or unique.  Religion felt like a lazy way to have answers about life's pressing questions.  Where religion was specific, it seemed based on superstition or the pragmatism that comes from living in a unscientific and primitive world.  I reread the New Testament and thought that maybe, just maybe, Paul was a nutcase.  I perused religions the way my mother used to peruse the Presidents Day sales at the mall, trying things on, buying, returning.  There was always a flaw, usually in the dogmatic teachings, that turned me away.

Now, I'm comfortable with who I am and what I believe (or don't believe) and then I read this essay and Mark Lilla brings my adolescence roaring back to me.  He, too, converted at a very impressionable age.  He, too, is not antagonistic toward his former beliefs and its current adherents.  Mr. Lilla tells a fine story.  He juxtaposes it with a visit to a Billy Graham revival in New York City.

What Mr. Lilla revealed to me, something that I hadn't given much thought, is his line: "Doubt, like faith, has to be learned."  I think it takes both to survive and thrive in the world.  Unlike the skeptics that Mr Lilla mentions, I think I am past the age of proselytizing for reason.  During your life, you'll either acquire it and use it, or you won't.  The best I can hope for is to demonstrate a reasonable life and have faith that someone will notice.