A View from the Bridge

I move between cultures that rarely mix. Not cultures marked primarily by ethnic or geographic differences, but cultures marked by differences in belief: atheist and theist, Jewish and Christian, Republican and Democrat, Trump-voter and Trump-hater, secular academic and fundamentalist Christian, fundamentalist Christian and liberal Protestant, radical feminist and conservative Christian stay-at-home Mom. Education and profession landed me in liberal academic and religious circles. Then I married an evangelical man and began practicing my faith in his community, after eighteen years as a liberal Protestant. As a feminist English professor from Connecticut, I never imagined marrying an evangelical. (And my husband certainly never thought he’d marry a feminist!) Before this rather mixed marriage, I stayed in my own tribal territory--liberal, secular, academic. Now I travel regularly between cultural territories, aspiring to bridge them. The view from the bridge offers an extraordinary perspective: I hear how liberals think about conservatives and how conservatives think about liberals. In any stereotyping process, members of one group imagine members of another group not as individuals but as particles of some awful, monolithic Other who is ruining the world. There’s an “us” and a “them.” A “we” and then “those people who . . . ” Those crazy white evangelicals. Those liberal college English professors. Few on one side of such a cultural divide really know anyone on the other side. Traversing a divide like this provides vigorous spiritual and intellectual exercise, like traveling in a foreign country with minimal skills in the local language. Difficult, but fascinating. My personal writing is a kind of travelogue. Not about traveling around the world, but between sides in what we call the “culture wars.”

I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa less than ten years after apartheid fell, as part of a Fulbright educational exchange. The exchange, optimistically entitled “Sharing Cultures,” aimed at cross-cultural understanding. Our American team included one black man, one Jewish man, one Jewish woman, and me, an Italian-French-American Quaker woman. We drove, appropriately enough, down the Cape of Good Hope, and across the southern tip of the continent to the eastern cape, to work at what was then the University of Port Elizabeth and is now Nelson Mandela University. The University had begun consolidating three institutions into one mega-institution and integrating South Africa’s three previously segregated groups: “white,” “black,” and “colored.” During hours-long meetings, we discussed the apartheid experience with our South African Team--three Afrikaaners, one Xhosa woman from an Eastern Cape township and, later, three Zulu men from a Johannesburg township who spent years imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. We discussed race in the United States, which our black South African colleagues imagined as a multiracial utopia. Conversations were difficult, unsettling. Heart-breaking at moments and, at other moments, exhilarating. I think we achieved better understanding. I believe some bridges got built.   

The conversations necessary for that cultural exchange were not more complicated than the conversations I have while trying to bridge cultural divides that separate people who all identify as “American.” Even when people share similar ethnic or class identities, religious and political orientation make them members of different tribes. Three educated, affluent people of Sicilian descent living on Taylor Street in Chicago are members of completely different tribes when one is an atheist poet, one an observant Catholic engineer, and one an evangelical Christian homemaker.  They might share an ethnic and economic identity, but they live in different cultures, even if they live on the same block. Cross-cultural communication and understanding among these three will be as difficult—and as valuable—as any Fulbright exchange.

Because my intellectual and spiritual travels led from atheism through the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and the United Church of Christ to a nondenominational megachurch, I have become ideologically multilingual, multicultural. The suburban megachurch my husband and I attend could be described as “liberal evangelical,” which will sound like an oxymoron to many. Unlike many evangelical churches, this church encourages women to teach, lead, and occupy senior positions. At 40% non-white, it’s more ethnically diverse than the two mainline Protestant churches I attended, which were nearly all-white. The megachurch also has greater class diversity than what I’ve experienced in mainline Protestant churches. While my support for marriage equality and other liberal goals make an evangelical church an imperfect fit for me, the congregation reflects my values in other respects; in terms of ethnic and class diversity, it achieves the liberal ideal of inclusion that eludes my previous church homes.

The megachurch also contains more diversity of political opinion than I expected to find, and more political diversity than what I found at liberal churches. Despite media narratives to the contrary, evangelical voters span the full political spectrum. The congregation I attend includes Trump-voters, but I’ve never met one there. We agree to refrain from “divisive” speech and action at church, so most soft-pedal their politics, at least in person. I’ve heard that online, we can sling mud as well as anyone. Despite the much-mentioned white evangelical support for Trump, the hundreds of white evangelicals I know are praying for leadership change and urging other evangelicals to vote for candidates whose policies would protect vulnerable people and combat racist hate. 

I find exchange across social boundaries like black/white, blue collar/white collar, Jewish/Christian, Christian/Muslim easier than exchange across demarcations like liberal/conservative, secular/religious, Democrat/Republican, Trump-voter/Trump-hater. Ideological differences can be even harder to bridge than ethnic, class, and religious differences because ideology often operates unconsciously: it affects your assumptions and thinking. Without your awareness, it shapes how you interpret your experiences. The ideological divide between “evangelical” and “mainline Protestant” feels wider to me than the divide between atheist and theist. Some of my United Church of Christ friends actually gasped when I told them our family would attend my husband’s megachurch. “But they believe in headship and submission!” some of them exclaimed, horrified. “What are you going to do with that?” My response lost me some friends: “Practice it.”

Varieties of Christianity differ tremendously, and depend largely on how people approach the Bible. Evangelicals typically favor what Bible scholar Marcus Borg calls “literal-factual” reading and mainline Protestants favor what Borg calls “historical-metaphorical” reading. Because I teach the Bible as literature while attending an evangelical church, I move between these communities of readers. Many of my reading companions approach the Bible as historical-literary artifact; many of my reading companions consider the Bible to be the “inerrant Word of God.” Reading with both kinds of companions has certainly improved my linguistic code-switching skills. Some of my secular reading companions consider the Bible to be anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda, opposed to science and democracy. Some of my evangelical reading companions are “those people” my liberal friends lament—the people who, based on how they read the Bible, consider homosexual love offensive to God. I notice that both liberals and conservatives vilify each other’s views, and vilify each other’s ways of reading the Bible.

I have certainly done my share of vilifying people whose sociopolitical attitudes differed significantly from mine. As a Quaker, I served on a Ministry and Counsel committee that “cleared” two men for marriage and then married them. I could not understand how anyone could not understand that marriage is a civic institution to which all Americans deserve equal access. Nor could I understand why anyone would reject the fundamentally American principle called “separation of church and state.” Didn’t the colonists leave England to escape the interconnection of church and state? I still don’t understand the roots of such ideological differences. Disgusted by the partisan rancor of the 2014 midterms, however, I decided to stop Republican-bashing. I decided to avoid vilification and practice curious listening instead. I wish more Christian Bible-quoters would start circulating Galatians 5: 19. “Now the works of the flesh,” Paul says, “are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” Christians who express concern about “fornication” should be equally concerned about “party spirit,” a spiritual danger that the original Greek text reveals not to be an enthusiasm for “partying,” but “factionalism,” an over-attachment to a sociopolitical faction. “Bible-believing” Christians, it seems, need to avoid making Republican/Democrat a central pillar of identity and also need, presumably, to avoid inflammatory rhetoric.

In addition to abstaining from party spirit, ideal Christian practice also includes crossing cultural boundaries, an action the Gospels show Jesus doing frequently. Jesus talked to people outside his group: privileged priests who collaborated with the despised Roman occupiers of Judea, tax collectors working for Rome, disreputable women, women who weren't kin, Samaritans. Following Jesus, I assume that crossing cultural boundaries is worthwhile spiritual exercise, a necessary part of world redemption. 

Want to understand how those liberal college professors could possibly think like that? Stay with me. Want to understand how anyone with an ounce of intelligence could believe in God? Keep reading. Wish you could make those people understand that the Bible is not literal?  Or wish you could help those people see that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God? Stick around. Let’s cross some boundaries. Let’s build bridges.

Sources Used: Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time

Eugene Cho, Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk