Pastor Scott's Thoughts: Lost Faith in Mayberry - Reflections After Reading Meghan O'Gieblyn's Interior States

I recently finished reading Interior States- a series of beautifully written and thought-provoking essays from Meghan O'Geiblyn. The title of the book is a reference to the two locations that unify her fifteen diverse essays. The first location is the Midwest. Meghan intentionally lives and writes from a social location that not only gets treated like "fly-over country" by those who live on one of the hipper and more progressive coasts, but from a place that is struggling to know how to re-narrate its existence in the midst of rapid cultural and economic changes that seem to be leaving its way of life behind. As Meghan writes, "What unites the states of the Midwest - both the ailing and the tenuously 'revived' - is a profound loss of telos, the realization that the industries and systems that built the region are no longer tenable."

The second "interior state" that Meghan writes from is the loss of faith. After growing up in a very evangelical family and attending Moody Bible Institute for a time, Meghan experienced a crisis of faith that led her to walk away from the Christian convictions of her upbringing. Yet in her writing she can’t help but return – both critically and affectionately – to the religion she spent her early adulthood “trying to escape.”

I found myself drawn to her book not just because I enjoy good writing, but because I think it is important for folk like me, who (although with great struggle) hang on to an evangelical Christian identity, to listen to the voices of those “we” raised who have walked away not out of rebellion but out of an inability to stay. Meghan’s voice is not the voice of an angry child of the Church, but of a heart-broken one. Those are an important set of voices the Church needs to have the ears to hear and take seriously.

Having made the move myself, from ministry in a coastal, urban, diverse, and politically liberal setting to a more interior, rural, agrarian, mono-cultural, and politically conservative locale, voices like Meghan’s are helpful for those of us discerning and still learning how to do faithful ministry in Mayberry. There is so much that is beautiful and good about life in a place like Nampa, Idaho. There are lots of good and noble reasons why “interior” places like Idaho’s Treasure Valley are growing so rapidly. However, one can also sense some of the fears that easily foment an ugly and anti-gospel spirit in the various hamlets that make up fly-over country. Ministry in Mayberry has never been as quaint and picturesque as the fictional town of Mitford in a Jan Karon novel, but it is especially difficult among the faithful who are shaped by – to borrow a phrase from Meghan - the “politics of nostalgia” that Mayberry is being lost (or worse, taken away).

Here are three random thoughts after finishing Interior States:

Bad theology is destructive.

It’s clear as you read Meghan’s essays that she loves her family and has deep affection for the Christian people who raised her. In fact, one senses in her essays a struggle to find the kind of community of care that can replace the church for her. But at some point, the anti-intellectualism of the faith she was raised in became too much for her to embrace. In particular, she names the usual suspects - young-earth creationism, premillennial dispensationalism, fundamentalist views of the Scripture, opposition to egalitarianism, blindness to racial justice, unthoughtful and judgmental views of other faith traditions, and the merging in America of nationalism and Christian faith - as reasons for her departure from church and faith. It is not unusual to find people critiquing these aspects of American evangelicalism. However, there is something painful when those critiques are made not by an “outsider” to Christian faith but from someone who used to be an “insider.”

I couldn’t help but hurt and wonder if things would be different for Meghan, and many of the young people like Meghan I have known, if they had encountered a more thoughtful and intellectually honest faith along the journey. I don’t sense that what Meghan wants is some kind of Kantian faith within the bounds of reason only or even some “faith of her own” that she self-selected from various options. She seems to recognize the emptyness of a religion of reason with no transcendent mystery worth dying for. But at the same time, she cannot remain at home among people who will not be honest about or come to terms with what she calls “inconvenient truths.”

The church’s attempts at “relevance” are often a double-edged sword.

Meghan was raised in the last couple of generations of the church during a time when “we” have desperately attempted to keep kids present and active in the church by attempting to be both aesthetically cool and culturally relevant. To use the language of Andy Crouch, the church in these generations largely abandoned the posture of “condemnation” toward culture for new postures of “critiquing” and especially “copying” of culture. My favorite essay in the book is a wonderful and affectionate take-down of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry. Here is my favorite quote from the book…

Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that, because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition (p. 152-153).

It is hard to live without a story.

The most painful and poignant part of the book for me was Meghan’s honesty about what the loss of her Christian story has meant for her, and how difficult it has been to find a replacement story of equal meaning and signficance.

In a very interesting essay on the doctrine of hell, Meghan writes, “Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue” (p. 47).

In a very honest critique of the emptiness in the culture of sexuality, she lands on this quote from John Updike, “It’s about sex as the emergent religion, as the only thing left” (p. 53).

In another utterly profound essay on the “vacuity of niceness,” Meghan ruthlessly critiques “niceness” as the “article of faith among young Americans on the left.” She critiques it as a virtue that does not require the active engagement of kindness or the vulnerability of compassion. It is a surface virtue that lacks the conviction of a story or the convictions that lead to sacrifice.

But the consequences of not having a story are most apparent in a fascinating essay on transhumanism – the belief or theory that human consciousness could evolve or exist eternally through connection to technology. Meghan for a time felt drawn to the hope she saw in the technological speculation involved in the transhumanist movement. But she gave up on it and fell into a new form of despair. She writes this about her search for transcendence,

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse – drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate – were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the over-whelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the Holy Spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it... if anything had become clear to me, it was my own desperation, my willingness to spring at this largely speculative ideology that offered a vestige of that first religious promise. I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I’d spent the past ten years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future or fixating on the optimization of my own body – a modern pantomime of redemption (p. 186, 198).

It is painful to read her honest quest to find a story meaningful and purposeful enough to replace the significance of the Christian story she left behind. It is a potent reminder that people cannot live without a story, and it is very hard to find, among all the various idolatries in the world, a story worth living and dying for.

I hope for all the prodigal Meghan’s out there searching for a truth-full story worth living and dying for, that the church might learn to not only offer but to also embody a thoughtful, faithful, loving and authentic “home” worth coming back to; a home rooted in Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In the meantime, thanks for your honesty Meghan. We are trying to listen.

7 Comments

I've been having a fascinating conversation with a mostly-atheist doctor who no longer holds to Christianity because he was taught adamantly that if you let go of a historical Adam, you could no longer have a historical Jesus. He just can't disentangle the two.

Posted by: Jim Miller | February 06, 2019 at 09:33 AM