I had a scary moment a few days ago. On Monday nights I go to a Hungarian conversation group run by my church here in Budapest. It’s good language practice and good fun. I met a new member of the group this week, and after chatting a bit I realized I had set off this fellow American ex-pat’s fundamentalist warning bells. This was strange because I usually find myself on the liberal end of the spectrum of American Christianity, and I tend to interact with people who are more fundamentalist than me. I even try to eschew the term evangelical, though I know it probably describes me pretty accurately. For the first time in a while (about six months) I was meeting someone who was at the same place I am on this “spectrum,” if not farther left, and I was coming off as a dreaded “fundi.”
It got me thinking. Since we make these judgments so quickly, categorizing other Christians in a flash, they must be based on the language we use to talk about faith. Looking back over the short interaction I had with this person I realized I had used some evangelical buzzwords. Initially I was embarrassed for using them, but then I got upset that a certain group of Christians has commandeered some otherwise useful vocabulary. Take, for example, the words “born again.” I remember first hearing them in Sunday School when we heard the story of Jesus and Nicodemus. It was this kind of strange (but useful) analogy that Jesus makes between becoming a Christian and actually starting life again. I assumed that “born again” was synonymous with “Christian.” Later in life I learned that some use the phrase to describe only a certain type of Christian, not all of them. Language can, of course, be a bond that ties groups together or a barrier that keeps outsiders away (usually both), but does it determine my identity in the context of believers? Simply because I know these words does that mean I really am an evangelical? Or do I know these words because I’m an evangelical in denial?
3 comments:
I am just having so much fun commenting on your blog instead of writing my paper on the Arcades Project. Anyway, re your post I have a relevant quote from Wendell Berry that i read recently: "If you are a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless." Ok, not perfectly applicable to your situation, but interesting, nonetheless...
I think almost any group has a particular vocabulary (think of how quickly Jazz Vespers invented our own lexicon) and, indeed, the evangelical vocabulary is one of them. And I think the words you choose do bring connotations with them whether you prefer to use them purely in their denotational sense or not. I have a hard time landing on a religious vocabulary that serves my actual position. I don't want to sound too conservative evangelical, but often the alternatives end up sounding too relativistic or even meaningless.
I was thinking about fundamentalism. Sure, they have cookey views on the Bible and the end times, but at least their reading and waiting (probably more than their lefty counterparts, too) ;)
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