Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 4
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“Those who have deconstructed their faith or significantly revised their sexual ethic seem to have one thing in common: They’re angry.” This was sent to me by a friend who knew I am reading the book by Tony and Bart Campolo, but I have to admit that Bart does not seem to match this description. He does not appear to be angry at all, but rather cheerful and downright chipper, despite that he has pretty much deconstructed his faith and significantly revised his views on sexual ethics. Perhaps he is concealing his anger, perhaps my friend is wrong, or perhaps Bart is, if not unique, at least anomalous. I am unsure, but he at least does not obviously fit into the category my friend describes.
I thought about this as I reread Bart’s opening salvo in the book, a chapter entitled “How I Left: A Son’s Journey through Christianity.” The chapter is characterized by none of the animus and stridency so often associated with those who vocally reject their faith. It is rather an eloquent, lucid, and engaging exposition of his trajectory first into faith, and then out of it. Growing up as Tony’s son, Bart makes clear, posed no obstacle to becoming a Christian. He always admired his dad, and thought that Tony made the Christian life seem like a huge adventure. The problem, though, at least until high school, Bart just didn’t believe in God. Since his mother and sister, during that time, had no faith to speak of, either, “In our family, the real religion was kindness. As long as I was nice—and especially nice to people on the margins—I was fine.”
Things changed in high school, though, as Bart became part of a dynamic Christian youth group. He enjoyed the fun and relished the fellowship, and before long, though he still didn’t believe in God, he really wanted to “because I wanted to become a full member of the most heavenly community I’d ever seen.” So when he was asked to receive Christ as Savior, he didn’t hesitate, and soon became active in evangelism and social outreach himself. From the start he saw following Jesus mainly about systematically transforming the world for the better. The new community helped forge his sense of identity and focused his energies. From the beginning, though, he struggled with the Christian narrative—from the creation story in Genesis to the resurrection of Jesus to the apocalyptic prophesies of Revelation. The supernatural aspects of the faith seemed to him the price of admission, not the attraction.
Tony Flew once said Christianity dies the death of a thousand qualifications. Bart describes his gradual loss of faith over the next three decades as dying a death of a thousand cuts—and ten thousand unanswered prayers. Seeing the hardships and sufferings of kids in a day camp in Camden, New Jersey was one of the first of those cuts. One encounter in particular stands out. Shonda, the mother of one of those kids, had grown up in church but was raped when she was nine years old. When she later asked why God had not protected her, her Sunday school teacher explained that God was all-knowing and all-powerful, so since he did not stop the attack he must have allowed it for a good reason. The real question, the teacher went on, was what Shonda could learn from the experience that would enable her to better love and glorify God, and it was at that point Shonda lost her faith.
Bart admits that, when he heard this, his own theology was much like that of the teacher’s. His view of divine sovereignty made God seem like a cruel tyrant, at least where Shonda was concerned. For his theology included both that God didn’t intervene to save Shonda from the rape and would relegate her to hell for her resulting unbelief. This led him to alter his theology, and this is, to my thinking, one of the most interesting and informative features of his story. For Bart’s alteration of his theology was perhaps justified; there are indeed, say, construals of divine sovereignty that stand in great tension with an essentially loving God. Tweaking one’s theology along the way can be an altogether appropriate and necessary thing to do, but Bart seems to interpret it as choosing to believe what we want to believe, rendering theology altogether malleable. In this case, he saw what he was doing as “dialing down God’s sovereignty” and “dialing up His mercy.” “For the first time in my Christian life, without consulting either my youth leaders or my Bible, I instinctively and quietly adjusted my theology to accommodate my reality.” I might suggest, though, that Bart’s interpretation of what he did is a bit misleading. What he did instinctively may well have been justified, and deeply consonant with the biblical depiction of God as wholly good and loving.
Instead Bart describes that event as the “beginning of the end” for his faith, which I cannot help but think unfortunate and needless. Because he thought that what he had been willing to do involved a compromise of biblical commitment, and unprincipled theological accommodation, it led to a slippery slope culminating three decades later, as he puts it, with “literally nothing left of my evangelical orthodoxy.” What I suspect happened is that some of the later accommodations he was willing to make were, indeed, from the vantage point of orthodox Christianity, unprincipled capitulations. But because Bart saw himself doing that from the get go made the subsequent steps easier to take, without realizing that along the way he crossed a line. His initial concession when it came to jettisoning a particular view of sovereignty did not qualify, as far as I’m concerned. As Christians we’re committed to the teachings of scripture as sacrosanct, not every last particular interpretation of such teachings with which we were raised or happened to acquire along the way.
Indeed, right after telling Shonda’s story, he talked about his friendship with two homosexual roommates at Haverford College, and how for a while he struggled to reconcile the Bible’s clear injunctions against homosexual behavior with his dawning realization that his gay friends’ “sexual orientation were no more chosen than my own.” In the end, he found that none of his interpretative solutions satisfied both his friends and his own evangelical sensibilities, and he concluded that he had to choose between them. The next entry will take up this issue in more detail.
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.
