I like the phrase, “Christian shaped-mold” when Green breaks down how religions were historically categorized. As we noted before (in episode ), not only do the categories reveal a Christian bias but there are a lot of religions that don’t fit the “founder/sacred text/clergy/place” categories . And admittedly, these categories and this whole approach to understanding other religions wasn’t created so that we could appreciate these other religions as equals, but as a way just to understand these other cultures. And then, during the colonial era, to subjugate these other cultures. That the cultures or religions of Asia, the Americas or Sub-Sahara Africa had anything to offer European Christianity was unthinkable to them. 

When I began my religious education in the 1970s and 80s I knew nothing beyond the practices of my local Roman Catholic parish church and the weekly catechism sessions we had that were led mostly by concerned parents. So, even though I went to church every Sunday of my life growing up, I was a complete illiterate when it came to the Bible. And then I became a Jesus freak in the mid-1970s and proceeded to try to read the family bible, beginning with the Book of Genesis and immediately felt lost. It probably didn’t help that our family bible,  the Douay-Rheims version, chose to spell “Noah” as “Noe,” and used stilted English, similar to the Elizabethan English found in the Protestant King James Version of the Bible. One of the teenage leaders of our prayer group laughed when I shared my confusion and got me a copy of “The Way,” a paraphrase version of the Bible that was popular in the 1970s. And so my journey began, but it was still very limited to my Catholic upbringing with a layer of 1970s Jesus Freak Biblical Fundamentalism on top. 

My world expanded tremendously during my two-years as a religious studies major at Loyola Marymount University, where I had a head up on many of my contemporaries because I had actually read my bible cover to cover many times by this point, but needed the missing church history and academic approach that I hadn’t been getting from my local Calvary Chapels. I began to appreciate that there was a lot that I did not know and that I couldn’t get just reading my bible. But there was a problem in that I couldn’t see what kind of job or career I could get with a degree in Religious Studies from a Catholic university, especially given that I no longer identified as Catholic. Transferring to Biola University as a Biblical Studies major was actually a bit of a step backwards because they were very much in the rote-memorization fundamentalistic approach to biblical studies and I had already seen the limitations and inconsistencies to that approach. But being something of a completionist, I finished my degree program and started to work on a Master’s degree in Theology at Fuller Seminary. 

I went to Fuller because one of my professors at Biola was working on his doctorate there and he seemed to have the kind of academic, do the research approach that I appreciated. But I still didn’t know how I was going to translate all of this education into a career, given that I was moving further away from the bible-only Calvary Chapel environments that I was familiar with. So, after one year that effort came to a sudden and unplanned conclusion. I’m reminded of a Mark Heard song, Stuck in the Middle (1981) that goes:

It’s a weird world that we live in,
It’s funny every day,
Half the world prays like the preacher
And the other half don’t even pray.
So no one understand you, if you pray in your own way

Now I’m stuck here in the middle,
Everything is in a jam,
Stuck right in the middle, 
Doors on both sides seem to slam,
No one seem to want me,
Only God would take me like I am.

Well, my brothers criticize me,
Say I’m just too strange to believe,
And the others just avoid me,
Say my faith is so naive. 
I’m too sacred for the sinners,
And the saints wish I would leave.
by Mark Heard, "Stuck in the Middle" (1981)

I started a second bachelors degree program as an anthropology major, but a conversation with the department chair about how the work was about collecting cultural data led me to believe that this information was being largely ignored by decision-makers (we were in the Reagan/Religious Right years), so I switched majors to print journalism. There’s a joke in here somewhere…1 Almost Forty years after leaving Fuller, I’m still fascinated with the study of Religion and the Bible, and Culture and what makes us organize our world and ourselves in these ways. 

In a meetup group about religion and the Bible that I attend, someone shared a story about traveling more than halfway across the world to spend three days helping someone share the gospel and pray for and with people who didn’t speak any language in common. The people he visited were desperately poor and the government officials he encountered appeared to be hostile to Christian missionaries (though officially they have no sanctions against any religious practices). Most of the people in my meetup group are not into organized religion and are somewhat post-Christian in their thinking, but here was this guy, taking time off from work, paying to fly around the world, to share Jesus and the gospel with strangers. An amazing story, but at the same time I could see that there was a heavy Christian-centric layer or “mold” being applied that the storyteller fully believed in, that could easily have been interpreted differently by someone coming from a different culture or with less of a faith expectation attached. Also, one person in our meetup group who was closer to the speaker’s faith grew frustrated that this person’s story didn’t melt the hearts of those of us on the more skeptical end of things. 

Speaking for myself, it’s not like I thought that the storyteller was lying or hallucinated the event(s), but that his own expectations were naturally going to influence what he remembered and how he would interpret what he experienced and saw. In comparison, I remember what it felt like as a young Jesus freak to speak in tongues, but how I would interpret that experience now versus I how thought about it back then are quite different. And at the same time I maintain that I wasn’t faking anything or “acting” but what I felt was spiritual or “from God” back then, I understand as being more psychological and letting go of internal inhibitions that would normally prevent me from babbling gibberish in public (AND without the benefit of alcohol). 

Just as much as preachers and critics would like to claim that religion is an either/or proposition, reality would appear to be much more complicated, layered and nuanced than that. I believe that studying religions to see their similarities and differences as a cultural and anthropological exploration into human cultures is valuable and fascinating. It would seem that what we are most comfortable with in terms of religious or non-religious practice is heavily influenced by the culture(s) we experienced growing up. And it would seem to be foolish to pit one religion against another to determine the “best” in the same way that it would be foolish to attempt to decide what language is the “best.” It’s all about humans trying to survive on this planet given our limited lifespans but endless curiosity and creativity. 

For those wanting to torture themselves a bit more exploring world religions, I found a two-hour video that goes through the “family tree” model of studying world religions2. Enjoy.

Finally, while writing and researching this article I found the family bible that gave me so much trouble when I first became a Jesus freak (the Bible was gifted to me after mom passed away).

Noe Builds the Ark – Douay Bible Genesis 6-8

Sources:

Tags: Crash Course Religions, defining religion, in bad faith, personal religious history, religion

Creative Commons License

JosephBruceBustillos.com (website) by Joseph Bruce Bustillos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

FOOTNOTES:
  1. After finishing that degree program I pivoted again (for reasons that seem to have escaped me, and I’ve thought a lot about this) to spend the next 28 years as a teacher, 20 years teaching in public schools in California and Las Vegas and 8 years teaching at Full Sail University in Florida.[↩]
  2. I haven’t gone through the whole video, but I just noticed the absence of pre-Columbian religions of the Americas or Sub-Saharan religions… interesting.[↩]