Fundamentalists and Unitarians
I just got off the phone with my sister. It all started innocently enough - she had been beside herself with glee when I let slip in an earlier conversation that I have accumulated some fundamentalist Christian friends here in Tulsa. Let me backtrack a bit. I come from an exceedingly religious, fundamentalist Christian family. I tend to avoid religious people as a general rule, because I always have the sneaking suspicion that they're secretly trying to convert me. You know, the fear that I'll go innocently to a barbecue, and it turns out to be a discussion group on "Intelligent Design" or something. Anyway, I have faltered recently because everyone in this town seems to be religious, including most of the people in my graduate program. That means that if I want to have friends, I have limited options. Mostly, I can choose between Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentacostals, and Unitarians (I draw the line at Baptists). Plus, I have a lot in common with the people in my program, and if they happen to be religious, well, maybe I can overlook that and hope for the best. I am weak.
So, back to my phone conversation with my sister, I had recently discovered that one of my "fundamentalist" Christian friends wasn't as fundamentalist as I had initially thought. That is, although she had been raised Southern Baptist, her father had left the Southern Baptist faith and started his own Unitarian church. Now, according to many Christians, including my sister, being a Unitarian makes one not only not fundamentalist, but also not very Christian. Which is a pity, since the Unitarians seem like a rather more forgiving bunch than your average gathering of Christians.
Anyway, we got started on the Unitarians, and I mentioned that C.S. Lewis (one of my sister's idols) has a lot of Unitarian-like themes running through several of his works. For example, in The Last Battle, a book in The Chronicles of Narnia, there's a scene in the afterlife when a character who has been following another god turns out in heaven after all because apparently in seeking the other god, he had, in fact, really been seeking the One God. And so forth. Basically, the principle is that rather more people end up in heaven than you might think, and they come from multiple directions. I've always thought this was kind of a nice concept.
Somehow, from Unitarianism and C.S. Lewis, we got on the subject of how she had decided that there was, in fact, a God, and that Christianity was the only way to heaven, and that the Bible is, in fact, entirely correct and infallible. I mentioned that I was rather in the beginning stages of trying to decide the possibility of god actually existing. Having ruled out atheism as being impossible to prove, I lean rather more toward agnosticism. Recently, however, I've been leaning slightly more toward the probability that god does exist; but if god does exist, I'd prefer it if he were a Unitarian, and even more if he were a she.
Anyway, this is the sort of conversation that is exactly a fundamentalist's wet dream, and I could smack myself for allowing myself to become embroiled in it. And worst of all, I invited the whole thing.
P.S. The following joke, besides being funny, should illustrate the general attitude of mainstream Christianity toward Unitarians:
What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian?
Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no particular reason.
So, back to my phone conversation with my sister, I had recently discovered that one of my "fundamentalist" Christian friends wasn't as fundamentalist as I had initially thought. That is, although she had been raised Southern Baptist, her father had left the Southern Baptist faith and started his own Unitarian church. Now, according to many Christians, including my sister, being a Unitarian makes one not only not fundamentalist, but also not very Christian. Which is a pity, since the Unitarians seem like a rather more forgiving bunch than your average gathering of Christians.
Anyway, we got started on the Unitarians, and I mentioned that C.S. Lewis (one of my sister's idols) has a lot of Unitarian-like themes running through several of his works. For example, in The Last Battle, a book in The Chronicles of Narnia, there's a scene in the afterlife when a character who has been following another god turns out in heaven after all because apparently in seeking the other god, he had, in fact, really been seeking the One God. And so forth. Basically, the principle is that rather more people end up in heaven than you might think, and they come from multiple directions. I've always thought this was kind of a nice concept.
Somehow, from Unitarianism and C.S. Lewis, we got on the subject of how she had decided that there was, in fact, a God, and that Christianity was the only way to heaven, and that the Bible is, in fact, entirely correct and infallible. I mentioned that I was rather in the beginning stages of trying to decide the possibility of god actually existing. Having ruled out atheism as being impossible to prove, I lean rather more toward agnosticism. Recently, however, I've been leaning slightly more toward the probability that god does exist; but if god does exist, I'd prefer it if he were a Unitarian, and even more if he were a she.
Anyway, this is the sort of conversation that is exactly a fundamentalist's wet dream, and I could smack myself for allowing myself to become embroiled in it. And worst of all, I invited the whole thing.
P.S. The following joke, besides being funny, should illustrate the general attitude of mainstream Christianity toward Unitarians:
What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian?
Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no particular reason.
posted by jessica rabbit at 7:58 PM
2 Comments:
Unsolicited prayer is a sure sign that someone loves you, for if you had solicited it, then someone might pray for you out of sympathy, obligation, or condescension...There is no (real) reason outside of love that any one being should pray for another, especially one that they do not know. You may find in your investigations that there are more people who love and care for you than you imagine.
Huh. That is an interesting post. I've just finished with all of my semester projects (ahead of time, as usual :-), so I'm looking for new reading material, and this sounds like it's going on the list.
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