So I’m over here in Northfield, Minnesota, doing research for my master’s thesis on Søren Kierkegaard, and I came across a section in one of his books that I’d forgotten about. As the title of the blog entry would indicate, it helps explain the love-hate relationship I have with conservative Christianity. See, I consider myself an Evangelical, but I cringe each time I say that because I know what kind of image it evokes for most people who aren’t evangelicals. They picture me standing on a street corner holding a sign and a bullhorn, or going to a museum that has exhibits of humans riding dinosaurs. They think of me as a young-earth creationist, a bible-thumper, [shudder] a James Dobson disciple or [bigger shudder] a Sarah Palin supporter. Well, maybe they don’t; maybe I’m just projecting. But the fact that I’m afraid of being seen that way shows you how I feel about stereotypical conservative Christianity. I’ve seen too much ignorance, insanity, and insensitivity to be comfortable with that label.
And yet, in spite of the previous paragraph, I’m usually reluctant to join in on bashing Evangelicalism. Whenever I’m around more liberal people who are criticizing Evangelicalism, I start to feel uncomfortable. I get the strange urge to come to its defense, sometimes over the very issues for which I criticize it myself. At first I thought it was the same kind of feeling older siblings get when they get protective over a younger sibling—you know, “No one beats up my little brother but me”—but yesterday I came across this passage in Kierkegaard that resonated very strongly with me.
In the book in question Kierkegaard talks a lot about how important passion is to finding truth—it’s passion, according to Kierkegaard, that makes you search for the right answer rather than the comfortable one. In one part of the book, he starts talking about “letter-zealotry” and “literalist theology”—this was in 1846, before terms like “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” were in use—and he says, “It’s merit was that it had passion. In another sense, it was comic.” It’s a good thing that these zealots had passion, he says, but it’s also very funny. He compares them to Don Quixote, who had great passion for chivalry but mistook windmills for giants came out looking ridiculous. When Don Quixote gets knocked off his horse by a windmill, we want to laugh. And many people want to laugh at the way conservative Christians fight for intelligent design and “family values” and whatnot. But even though Kierkegaard recognizes that these zealots are comical, he still has words for those who would laugh at them:
[Important note: Kierkegaard uses a term here that won’t make sense out of context, so I’ll need to explain it. If you remember the way the scientific method works, it’s actually a process of eliminating wrong answers, not finding right answers. When scientists have a theory, that just means it’s something they haven’t been able to disprove so far. Technically, though they don’t speak this way anymore, all a scientist can really say is, “as far as we know” or “we believe” or “evidence indicates” x is true. So when Kierkegaard mentions an “approximation-object,” he’s talking about something that is in the realm of science, something that is found through or subject to the scientific method.]
With what right one would laugh is another question, because the fact that the whole age has become devoid of passion does not entitle it to laugh. The ludicrous aspect of the zealot was that his infinite passion thrust itself upon a wrong object (an approximation-object), but the good aspect of him was that he had passion.~Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
What Kierkegaard is saying is that most people who laugh at zealots have no right to do so. It’s not enough to know the Truth—you also have to understand how important it is. Zealots have passion because they understand how important the truth is, even if they’ve misunderstood Christianity by taking it as a scientific assertion. They have passion but misunderstand the Truth; comic at times, yes, but still better than having neither passion nor Truth. No matter how critical I get of conservative Christianity, I am always reminded that they have at least one critical thing to teach me: passion.
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