Your response to Faith in Reverse has been great. Thank you. I’m continuing the series for paying subscribers, and if you’re new to the series, you can catch up on all the parts by starting with this link.
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Preface: The second segment of this piece will sound familiar. I’ve repurposed some old material that seemed to fit. Thanks for the artistic license.
If you could swab the inner-cheek of my spirit, if you could send that swab to Anscestry.com or 23AndMe or some other DNA sequencing factory, here’s what you’d find: I am a Christian mutt.
My mother’s parents were Northern-Louisiana Episcopalians who enjoyed the jitterbug, lawn parties, hors d'oeuvres held together by toothpicks, and the cussy phrase “Dammit… ‘scuse me Lord.” My father’s parents were tea-totaling Church of Christers who were scandalized by a National Geographic article about the frescoes of Pompeii and who joined the Hilltoppers retirement ministry for monthly potlucks consisting of Ritz and cream-of-whatever casseroles.
My grandparents’ forms of faith did not stick to my parents’ bones. Instead, my folks were both swept up in the spirit of the Charismatic Renewal of the 1970s. For the uninitiated, the Charismatic Renewal was the name given to the post-Woodstock time period when ex-hippies caught the Holy Ghost, spoke in tongues, and sang Kumbaya. Anyway, my folks left the Spirit-filled Episcopalians, where they’d first appropriated the Holy Ghost, and they joined the Spirit-filled Evangelicals, which is to say they joined the church of the famed televangelist Robert Tilton, who’s now known in some circles as “The Farting Preacher.” They suffered The Farting Preacher until he rolled a Cadillac onto the podium one Sunday as a gift for his wife, which they found a mite ostentatious. So, the Haines clan set sail and found safe harbor in a less Spirit-filled church, which is to say a church that didn’t believe in tongues or lady preachers. Sometime in the 1980s, though, my father could no longer abide the Southern Baptists—I do not know why except that they weren’t big fans of Michelob—so, he started monkeying around with the Catholics. And much much later, in my adult years, my mother could no longer abide by the Baptists, so she linked arms with some do-right Presbyterians who were not known for monkeying around with or about anything.
The diversity in my Christian DNA is a bit of a cluster (if you know what I mean). The cluster was all the more complicated by the fact that approximately all of these Christian traditions made some claim of exclusivity. The Baptists caricaturized the Episcopalians as mostly gay-loving hippy universalists and opined the Catholics were the Babylonian whore of the book of Revelation. The Church of Christers believed they were the one-and-only-great-sheebang of the Christian faith, and that the only baptism the Episcopalians, Catholics, and Baptists would experience was baptism in the lake of fire. The Catholics touted their bona fides—they’d existence from the days of Peter and the gates of Hell had not yet prevailed against them, so, they must be the One True Church™. The Episcopalians’ exclusivity claims related more to lawn parties. They excluded the Baptists or Church of Christers from those parties because no good Episcopalian suffers a buzzkill.
The denominations represented in my spiritual DNA were all at odds, so my spiritual genetic material was all discombobulated. But this is not to say there wasn’t a scarlet thread that ran through the center of that DNA. The scarlet thread was named Jesus, and though each of my family traditions interpreted his life differently, they all claimed him as their leader. This central and shared claim posed a unique quandary, though: If Jesus was the leader of each of these movements of Christianity, why was there so much division instead of an abundance of peace?
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