This blog is different from any of my others. It reproduces an exchange of emails I had with Bart Campolo about my memoir, Where the Light Fell. Bart, son of the Baptist speaker and writer Tony Campolo, grew up in the heart of the evangelical subculture. He worked as an urban missionary and co-founded Mission Year, a year-long program in which Christian young people live in urban neighborhoods and find practical ways to love their neighbors. Ultimately, however, Bart declared himself an atheist and launched a new career as a “humanist chaplain” and podcaster. The book Why I Left, Why I Stayed, co-written with his father, explains his loss of faith as a kind of “death by a thousand cuts” over the course of more than thirty years. I’ve crossed paths with Bart several times, and recently sent him a copy of my memoir with a note suggesting that he would likely find much in it to identify with.
Bart:
Happily, newly-diagnosed Adult ADHD be damned, I read your book in a jiffy!
First of all, thank you for thinking of me that way. You were right, of course, about me identifying with some of your story, but honestly, given my impressions of our few conversations, I was surprised by how little our journeys have in common. Indeed, one might fairly say we are polar opposites: You’ve worked out and kept faith in a good, loving and distinctively Christian God in the face of a thousand and one life experiences suggesting no such person exists, while I’ve let go of that same story despite growing up with every emotional, economic, and spiritual privilege imaginable and having more than my share of moments when the Holy Spirit seemed to be whispering in my ear.…
Likewise, it isn’t very hard for me to understand and perhaps even admire your ongoing commitment to the best kind of Christianity. What I still don’t understand, however, even after reading your book, is why exactly you first chose towards the end of Bible College to undertake what anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann calls “the incredibly hard work required to make God real.” As far as I know, all you’d seen to that point was craziness, legalism, and the human fingerprints on every page of the Bible and its myriad interpretations. You don’t mention the influence of a compellingly loving mentor or a charismatic band of brothers who drew you in. Was it [your wife] Janet, somehow, that motivated you?
Please don’t get me wrong, Philip. I’m not suggesting that the Jesus you met as the Good Samaritan in that little prayer room wasn’t genuinely present to you. Rather, I’m wondering why, after all the terrible, ichthus-branded nonsense you’d endured to that point, you kept seeking out that experience, or even stayed open to it, even though you’d not yet seen any indication that Christianity was a sane or reliable pathway to love and happiness. In other words, I’m wondering why you cooperated with a worldview that hitherto had only let you down?
Philip:
What a great letter—one of my favorite responses to my memoir. My initial goal in writing was to try to capture the subculture in the same way others have captured the Orthodox Jewish subculture (Chaim Potok) and the Irish Catholic one (Frank McCourt). I sought to tell my story as truthfully as I could, without a hidden agenda or evangelical cover-up, and only a hint of a bridge between the person of my youth and the person I am now. I figure the 25 other books I’ve written, all idea-driven, speak for who I am as an adult.…
I’m sure you’ve heard dozens of dramatic conversion stories, in which one transcendent event changes everything for a prisoner, an addict, an Oxford don like C.S. Lewis, or a proud jerk like Chuck Colson. And similar accounts can be found in the Nation of Islam, Jehovah’s Witness, Marxism, and any other religion or quasi-religion. (As you know, there are conversions away from faith as well.) You ask how that one event could somehow overcome the toxic faith I grew up with and in. Well, that’s where the other 25 books come in.
I can envision an ironic God saying, “Philip, you’ve seen some of the worst of the church—let me show you some of the best.” While writing my first book, Where Is God When It Hurts?, I encountered Dr. Paul Brand, the closest thing to a saint I’ve met. He had the humble faith of a Mother Teresa, as well as a commitment to the lowliest people on earth, leprosy patients among the lowest castes of India. Unlike Mother Teresa, he was a modern scientist with laboratories full of engineers and computers.
We collaborated together for almost 10 years, at a time when my faith was just beginning to take shape, a kind of cocoon phase. He became a surrogate father to me. At his funeral I mentioned the exchange we had: I gave words to his faith while he gave faith to my words. Dr. Brand showed me, up close and in person, what I believe God had in mind with the human experiment.
Until the memoir, I rarely looked back on the mess of my childhood. I had moved away from the South, first to Chicago, where I finally found a healthy church that combined justice and grace, and then to Colorado, where I reveled in the beauties of nature, one of the places “where the light fell” for me. Tentatively at first, I started picking up the pieces of my faith, like smudged rocks, and in my books began cleaning them off, deciding what should stay and what should be discarded. We didn’t know the word “deconstructing” back then, but I suppose that’s what I was doing. My second solo book was Disappointment with God, and later many of my books asked questions—my questions: Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Church: Why Bother? and the implicit question in The Jesus I Never Knew. I tried to be honest in these books, picking up the pieces, sorting out what to keep and what to discard.
I greatly respect the path you’ve chosen, Bart, because I know of your devout and activist past and can only imagine the pressures you faced when you struck out in a different direction from your upbringing. My brother lived out a similar trajectory, and still does, and I honor that in my memoir. I love the book you did with your dad, and the pacific tone you both demonstrated.
Oh, do I know the craziness you speak of. However, I’ve managed to avoid most of it in my adult years. Indeed, in my travels to some 87 countries I deliberately seek Christians who act out their beliefs with compassion and selfless love. The finest people I know are Christians who have done great things: Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, Gary Haugen of the International Justice Mission, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, not to mention many others who serve on the front lines of human suffering. In my writings, I try to highlight those who act on what Jesus called for in his first sermon (Luke 4) and his last (Matthew 25). You don’t have to be a Jesus follower to take up those causes, of course, but I’ve been privileged to shine a light on those who are. My book Soul Survivor profiles the ones who became my mentors.
I can’t take credit for how my career has developed. So much of it happened through serendipity or grace, depending on one’s perspective. For whatever reason, I’ve been able to look forward rather than backward most of the time—until Where the Light Fell. To my surprise, writing about those painful days didn’t cause much “phantom limb” pain. I view my past through a redemptive lens, and feel liberated from the shackles of fundamentalism. At the same time, I see the damage in those whose faith doesn’t survive, such as my brother, and easily understand why so many choose the path of rejection.
At the core, we’re both “bridge people,” I think. We start from opposite banks of the river, and perhaps we’ll never meet in the middle. But we understand that, and still share the goal of finding a way across. Make sense?
Bart:
You already know I think you’re the cat’s pajamas, so I’m cutting right to the chase: You still haven’t answered my question.
I haven’t read most of those 25 other books, but I’m pretty sure I understand how you overcame the toxic Christianity you grew up in after your dramatic conversion. Certainly Dr. Brand, a healthy church, the Rocky Mountains, Tutu, Gary Haugen, and Bryan Stevenson (you can’t have Mandela; he falls on my side) would all be great mentors in opposite-of-toxic Christianity, and like me, you’re naturally gifted at the kind of theological gymnastics necessary to wrap that kind of goodness around a fairly bloody atonement story.
What I’m still wondering about is your conversion itself, or to be more specific, what caused you to open yourself to that transcendent event before you met all those good people and had all those good experiences and worked out all those work-arounds to useless suffering and unanswered prayers. What made you so desperate to become a Christian when you’d not yet met one you could fully identify with? Why were you praying with those fellows in the first place when, at that point at least, you knew better?
We are indeed both bridge people, I think, but I suspect that most of the bridges we’re building are about helping people move from less hopeful and loving versions to more hopeful and loving versions of whatever worldview they’re stuck with.
Philip:
It took me a while to read your email, because I got distracted searching online for the origin of cat’s pajamas. What a strange phrase.
I don’t know how to answer your question in a way that might make sense. The conversion story happened at a time when I relished being a cynical renegade. I attended the weekly prayer meeting only because it was required and I would have flunked the graded assignment if I didn’t. I had never initiated a prayer, and have no idea why I did then, other than perhaps to get in the lick that “I don’t care about all those people going to hell.” And the vision or epiphany or whatever one might call it took me completely off guard. I left the room unsettled and disturbed.
On reflection, the school had a regular parade of folks who did good missionary work in medicine, justice issues, poverty work—much like the ones you encountered in Mission Year. And I had read a bit of C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, W. H. Auden and others, enough to convince me there must be some reasonable Christians out there, though I’d not really met one. So I hadn’t outright dismissed the possibility of some Christian truth.
What else can I say? The power of that experience came from the fact that it felt like something that happened to me rather than one more expression of fake spirituality, which I had long forsaken. I was not desperate to become a Christian—indeed, almost the opposite, hence my sheepish response.
Good questions, Bart. I think I worded things pretty carefully in the scene in my memoir, trying to say no more and no less than I can vouch for. But, as I say, conversions only make sense from the inside out (like conspiracy theories?).
Hey, here’s an idea. Would you be open to me running some of our dialogue in a blog, much as you did in the book with your dad? I’m always looking for ways to help people relate to those who see the world differently, in a healthy and respectful way. I wouldn’t add commentary, and I’d run everything by you in advance. Think about it.
Bart:
Ahhh…I very much appreciate these details! In very different ways, both your prior exposure to good and reasonable (or, to my mind, less unreasonable) Christian voices and your impulsive, somewhat defiant first prayer in the presence of that handful of sincere believers give me a clearer picture of the powerful moments that followed. Obviously, I’m bound to see that picture differently than you do, but I’ve seen [the movie] Rashomon enough times to know that doesn’t mean we can’t both be right.
Even so, you of all people should know better than to say conversions only make sense from the inside out, since you’ve surely seen more than your share of them carefully engineered by skillful, charismatic folks like Marjoe Gortner, the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, Carmen (remember him?), my father and me, with assists from various musicians, lighting coordinators, and youth retreat cooks.
Of course you can edit this dialogue for your blog, and add commentary as well if you’d like. I trust you and I know from these past ten years how valuable it is for people to see everyday examples of that too-scarce commodity I call “worldview humility.”
Philip:
Thanks for your trust, Bart. I see that you turn 60 this year. May your remaining years be characterized by the same fierce search for truth and demonstration of compassion that have always defined you. And, by the way, I’m happy to learn that the work of Mission Year continues, under the good auspices of The Simple Way, led by Shane Claiborne.
I’ll close with a paragraph from What’s So Amazing About Grace?, a book I wrote two decades before I got around to writing my memoir:
Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people. I think back to who I was—resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace learned from family and church. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I yearn for the church to become a nourishing culture of that grace.
:
https://bit.ly/PhilipYanceyBlog
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