What about love?

I heard something frightening today while watching an hour-long television special I StumbledUpon online called “Evolution: What about God?” Most of the video referenced a particular Christian college – they explored some of the students there, a little of the history, and on-campus controversy, among other things. In 1961 something happened that brought about likely the most controversial change to Wheaton College. A product of “secular” schooling until attending Wheaton (but still a Christian), in talking about Christianity and human origins, Walter Hearn announced that the same chemical processes that bring each of us into existence today could have produced Adam and Eve. Wheaton – while maintaining the status of a Christian college – now teaches evolution, but at the time it stirred up quite the political and religious controversy. The mother of one of the students at that time wrote one of hundreds of protest letters to the college (and this is what I find so frightening):

“Twice I have heard that the college is growing liberal; that they teach evolution at Wheaton. What grieves me most is that our daughter may lose her faith at Wheaton. Is this possible? If her faith should be shattered or even shaken, I’d rather see her dead.”

The rest of the show had a great many more examples of “conservative Christians” and their outright fear of anything that threatens their comfort bubble. One student of Wheaton that they focused on, Nathan, talked about his struggling transition from creationism to evolution while keeping his faith, and showed him debating/conversing with his dad about it, his dad being the unyielding defense of a 6-day, young earth, biblical creation. What stood out to me was Nathan’s testament to growing up as a Christian, where evolution wasn’t even talked about – it was evil, it was wrong, it was the work of the devil, and that’s all anybody ever needed to know about – and his seemingly exhausting attempt at explaining to his dad that people ordinarily fight against evolution without ever actually understanding what it is. All his dad had to defend himself with was something to the effect of, “so basically evolution says that one slimy thing created Adam, and another slimy thing created Eve.” Then when Nathan tries to defend that that’s a “GROSS simplification,” his dad retorted that it’s all that’s important about it, completely proving Nathan’s point.

The reason why these things frighten me so much is that there are people living in this world with such self-destructive fear. They are taught to avoid at all costs anything that threatens their faith, which promotes unequivocal misunderstanding under the guise that they can have a perfectly accurate opinion about it without knowing anything more about it than “it’s evil” or whatever else other “properly” prejudiced sources tell them about it. Nathan’s father even says during their discussion, “No matter how much science discovers, God tells us – and I believe it – that man’s wisdom is foolishness.” And as the concerned mother of the Wheaton student clearly shows, goodness forbid anyone’s faith be tested, because they’d be better off dead. That these people raise children is the most frightening of all.

Let me make this clear: creationism is not the problem here; faith is not the problem here; Christianity is not the problem here; pride, self-confidence and/or conservatism may not even really be the problem here. Extremism, xenophobia, ignorance, and the downright FUCKED UP idea that somehow fear has any place within a system of love (God is love; love thy neighbor; love thy enemy; etc.), THOSE are the problems here.

If you are/not this, you’ll suffer for all eternity.
If you don’t/do this, you’ll suffer for all eternity.
If you don’t/believe this, you’ll suffer for all eternity.

No matter how you slice it, how you read it, how you interpret it, or what context you put it in, there is NO love in any of those statements. Lots of fear – no love.

Now, if even just to make myself feel better, this sounds more like love to me (quotes from some of the Wheaton students they interviewed):

“I want to be educated, I want to be intelligent, I want to have answers that someone could say, ‘I can respect that.” And also to be able to argue some answers without God. I mean, that sounds almost sacrilegious but I want to be able to reason some things, without necessarily having to bring God into the picture, and I want my life and the way that I live it to reflect God.”

“When I hear a God-fearing man say, ‘I hold to the evolutionary theory,’ that worked wonders for me. It gave me a little bit of a freedom to say, ‘Wow. God is bigger than the box that I put him in.'”

Love is immeasurable, limitless, and unconditional.

I’d like to leave you with this closing quote from one of the professors at Wheaton:
“Are we placing students’ faith at risk by examining these hard questions? Absolutely. But I would add, additionally, that there is no such thing as a safe place from which to hide from these issues. If we engage in the most rigid biblical literalism, the fact that our students live in a real world indicates that their faith is always at risk. Christians believe that our faith is rooted in real happenings in a real world, and so to try and structure a place, or a way of conceptualizing our faith that insulates us and isolates us from risk, is to rob Christianity of its very essence.”