How Skeptics and Believers Can Connect

Great article in the NY Times by anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann.  If you can get behind the paywall to read the whole thing, this is worth it.

I do not call myself a Christian. So maybe I should not have been surprised when I went on my first Christian radio show, a year ago, and the host set out to save me .... 

I was on the show to discuss my recent book, which explains the way evangelicals learn to experience themselves in conversation with God....  over a decade of research, I found myself more open to the idea of God, and more aware of the fragile human grasp on the real. 

So it was a shock to have my host grill me about the state of my soul. It reminded me that one of the things that makes mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers difficult is that there is a kind of line in the sand, and you’re either on one side of it or on the other. ...

The in-your-face confrontation makes it that much harder to connect. The more my interviewer pressed me, the more my faith — such as it is — grew strained. I had come to live (theologically speaking) in a messy in-between. My interviewer wanted clarity. The more he put me on the spot, the more I wanted to say that I shared nothing with him and that his beliefs were flimsy dreams. ...

Anthropologists have a term for this racheting-up of opposition: schismogenesis....

I think that schismogenesis is responsible for the striking increase in the number of people who say that they are not affiliated with any religion. ...We know that most of these people still believe in God or a higher power, whatever they mean by that. It’s just that they are no longer willing to describe themselves as associated with a religion. They’ve seen that line in the sand, and they’re not willing to step over it. 

Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another, news that is sometimes a surprise to both. When I arrived at one church I had come to study, I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me. People were willing to utter sentences — like “I believe in God” — that I was not, but many of those I met spoke openly and comfortably about times of uncertainty, even doubt. Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate. They keep journals. They go on retreats. They just don’t know what to do with their spiritual yearnings. 

 It's hard for those of us who live in the messy muddle of the middle, if those around us live by absolutes. I think there are a lot of people who are somewhat like me--more than you may think.