Lao Shi

My last day in China a colleague said to me: “I haven’t gotten a chance to read your blog yet, but I’ve heard you have a problem with Christians.”

Is that what comes across here, that I have a problem with Christians?

I don’t have a problem with Christians per se, and I stick by this. I was raised Roman Catholic (RCs are the OCs: the Original Christians), am fairly well-versed with the seminal Biblical stories, and am familiar with Christ’s parables and the underlying tenants of Christianity. However, even as a student in a Catholic Middle School, I found two principles in particular problematic, and still do today: the belief that any one faith, Christian or otherwise, claims legitimacy over another, and the belief that people must proselytize in order to achieve salvation or make it to paradise. Since then, I have also developed deeper social and political reasons to oppose the general Christian message, which I’ve touched on in the past and won’t go into in this post.

For whatever reason – family background, my avid and wide reading, or just plain old genetics – I never felt with any surety there was an omniscient God who was looking out for me as well as all other faithful Roman Catholics. It didn’t seem right that God would look out for me simply because I had the good fortune of being raised Catholic, as opposed to being raised Jewish, or Muslim, or some other religion. Some members of my family are devoutly religious – I have an aunt who is a Catholic nun – but I never really bought the idea that you had to believe in Jesus in order to find salvation.

At my Catholic school I stood out by not following the Catholic herd, being one of only a handful of boys who didn’t become an Altar Boy. Though I had devoutly religious friends who prayed and went to mass regularly, I tried to skip church whenever I was able, and if I couldn’t, then sneaking out early was a must. Even lying to a priest didn’t faze me; during confession, I followed the three sin rule, in which I confessed only three sins: lying to my parents, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and a wildcard sin that I would decide on beforehand, usually something venial like skipping church or being greedy. Didn’t matter what I actually did, those were always the sins I used. Afterwards, I would lackadaisically rush through my penance, speed-praying, half the time daydreaming. The rituals of the Church were, like those of school, just another set of hoops to jump through in order to get back to doing my own thing: reading, writing, drawing, daydreaming.

My feelings about religion only became more critical from there on out, and my decisions about how to live took me further and further from the Bible Belt mentality and expectations that prevailed at the school in Shanghai, where I heard colleagues talk about “personal” relationships with Jesus, or God as a “loving, forgiving father,” or the “miracles” they experienced in which they felt God’s presence in their life. This is such an utterly foreign feeling about religion than that which I hold, I sometimes felt like a sane person locked in the loony bin. (I truthfully felt more at home walking around downtown Shanghai then I did the school’s Living Quarter!)

Looking back on my writing, I recognize that I weave a Christian conspiracy theory, as if every educator at the school actively tried to spread Protestant Christian beliefs to the students. This is not true. I think most teachers just implicitly spread the Christian faith, and only a few of the more extreme individuals aggressively, explicitly tried to win over converts.

By implicitly spreading the faith, I mean that teachers allowed prayer groups to exist in the school, or the Bible study groups to advertise in their homerooms, the students seemed unfamiliar with directly discussing religion from a sociological perspective as a human construct, giving me the impression that teachers did not expose them to this type of analysis. Other teachers were public about their Protestant beliefs either by talking about them, decorating their desks with religious material, publicly wearing crosses, and/or belonging to the church at which many students practiced, thereby further legitimizing the church in their students’ eyes. (I know of only one educator who sought out a different faith community rather than join the company sponsored Thanksgiving Church.) These teachers sent their students the message that they endorsed and belonged to the Christian community at the school; whether deliberate or not, they were a factor in the spread of the religion within the school.

I also found that, whether Christian or non-Christian, the majority of teachers allowed the Christian mono-culture to exist at the school without any question, opposition, or critique, thereby enabling the more explicit proselytizers to work unfettered. Most teachers were, at best, silent collaborators to the mission established by the Godfather at the beginning of the year: to spread the gospel. Because the students learned no other means of thinking about or discussing religion than as a personal, Christian belief, the students’ awareness that there are other ways of believing, and, I think, their level of acceptance or tolerance towards those who hold non-Christian beliefs, were hindered. While in the short-term these attitudes may be good when preaching and spreading the gospel, in the long-term this will have detrimental effects on students’ ability to socialize, think critically, perform in school, and live as global citizens.

I don’t have a problem with Christianity in theory, or as a set of moral guidelines for living. Christianity, like all of the world’s religions, stresses thoughtful, compassionate living, and has produced some of the most beautiful works of art, and some of the most powerful and compelling stories, known to humanity. My problem is when any ideology – political, social, or, as it was at the school, religious – dominates to the exclusion of others and exists without critique. This creates a bubble cut off from the rest of the world, a perfect medium for delusion, corruption, hypocrisy, and fanaticism to breed. In a school the situation is even more disturbing, as it doesn’t best serve what should be the goal of every educator: raising the skills and abilities of students to exist in the real world. And that I have a big problem with.