I Went to Revival Tonight

Before revival tonight, or actually before dinner, a weird thing occurred to me as I was reading The Closing of the American Mind. I was thinking about "emotionalism" in revival settings, and how it's deplored by so many of those who were raised in revivalistic atmospheres. We don't want to be going to church or "committing our lives" because of emotions, but rather want all of our religious decisions to be somehow authentic. And we can only be authentic if we deny our emotions fulfillment through religion, if we completely abnegate ourselves and our needs and just let God work in a powerful way through us. The logical conclusion of this line of thought is that the highest form of religion is "just going through the motions," which is of course considered the cardinal sin in revivalistic circles. People of my generation and background don't know what they want. They act like they want to get the sacraments back, but at the same time many of them (including the early Catholic Adam) seem to think that participation in the sacraments will provide a more intense and more divinely sanctioned emotional experience. We want to get past emotions, but we still hold onto the idea of some kind of absolutely certain, experiential authenticity that is actually just like the emotionalism of the past, except slightly idealized.

The same thing applies in belief systems. None of us want to be fundamentalists: even those who are deeply uncomfortable with the Bible being "untrue" in any way are good sports about admitting that maybe evolutionary theory has something to say. This is just a further symptom of the "scientific apologetic" that was apparently so influential during the last century, which says that science is not authoritative in any way yet wants desperately to "prove the Bible scientifically." We try to hold onto the old authority without realizing that we've already cut the ground out from under it. None of us can be a one-book person anymore, because we've shorn the Bible of its authority, however arbitrary and unhealthy the exact expression of that authority formerly was, and we don't know how to go about establishing a new one. Because of course the whole point of an authority is that we don't establish it.

I wish I could go back to the innocence of fundamentalism. I wish that I could go back to the confidence that Dr. Dobson was the way of all truth, which of course totally misses the point. I never believed in the Bible, ever. I know it at least as well as any of my contemporaries, aside from the professional religious thinkers, and I've never had any confidence that I could come up with "the truth" if I just read the Bible hard enough. By the time I had given up my half-hearted attempt to convert my Catholic girlfriend and had decided to read Catholic apologetic instead, I had long before given up on sola scriptura and was relieved to find that there were Christians who didn't believe it. Now I'm Catholic, and I resent any attempt to prove doctrines from the scriptures. I am fondest of the most flagrantly non-scriptural doctrines, such as purgatory and Mary. At the same time, I love all the books on the historical Jesus that show me just how ridiculously complicated the scriptural witness is and allow me to entrust it, medievally, to the experts. I am now in the process of mentally undercutting the authority of the Church, which grounds those somewhat ridiculous doctrines, and I think I'll probably still hold onto them even then.

But why shouldn't I be a fundamentalist, either Protestant or Catholic? Why, since I'm there already, don't I just decide to allow the pope to speak and think for me on all issues? Or to make my parents happy, why don't I just go back to letting radio preachers and the editors of The Student Bible do my thinking for me? I must admit that I'm not happy in my skeptical intellectual freedom. I read about the past, when people actually believed things, and it seems like it would be so nice. Augustine read something, and that actually changed his life. He read it, and he believed it, and he lived by it. And what do I believe in? Nothing, or at least that's how it seems. Maybe I never have. I've never really been equipped to know anything, having been convinced from early youth that any religious controversy is unnecessary, that denominational loyalty is for the weak-minded, that everything that everyone says in class discussion is equally valid and good.

My earliest memories of theological debate are characteristic of my approach now: I would listen to my parents' or whoever's theological points, and I would always be able to find a verse somewhere that tore their whole thing down and left them speechless. Would I be happier if my parents told me to shut up and that I was abusing the scripture and that it wasn't up to me to decide what the Bible meant? I might be, because now I could read all this wonderful stuff I'm reading and see the light. As it stands, I can't remember ever seeing the light, ever reading something genuinely new that made me look at the world in an entirely different way. The closest I can come to that is reading The Trial and then being afraid to leave my bed, lest I acted on my new conviction that life probably wasn't really worth living. And at that point, it was over already: I was dating the Catholic girl, trying to convince her to believe things that I realized more and more that I had never believed and would never believe.

I never believed in the doctrine of "entire sanctification," and I never will. It seemed obviously ridiculous to me that anyone could ever reach a point where he would never sin anymore or that he would only sin by accident. Its ridiculosity was brought home to me by the fact that not a single one of the people who taught it to me had enough respect for the doctrine to really understand it. The only people I knew of who plainly claimed to have been sanctified were the richest people in the church, the people who paid the highest property tax in Genesee County. I only wonder the havoc I could have brought on that church had I been introduced to the concept of "sins of omission" earlier in life.

So I went to revival tonight, for the sheer, unadultured hell of it. They sang all the old-school songs I grew up on, including the embarassingly tacky "Wonderful Grace of Jesus." The preacher chafed a bit under the old-school doctrines, but the evangelistic form was still there: the arrogance, the chauvanism. I stayed the whole time, watched the obligatory altar call, sang the choruses and everything. I left with the same vague sense of disappointment with which I entered. There could be no going back, and the fact that the entire sermon was so perfectly like what I had grown up with emphasized that fact even more. I can't go back, because I was never really there.