All or nothing

In the youth group I grew up in, there was a lot of hand-wringing over that fact that so many teenagers grew up, went away to university, and 'lost their faith.'

Speaking as someone who's been through that, I'd like to point out that when we 'accepted Jesus into our hearts' as kids, we didn't just get Jesus. We were handed a whole huge set of cultural-ethical-religious-aesthetic-philosophic-doctrinal-'scientific' presuppositions. And each and every one was represented as somehow being 'God's Word,' and 'grounded in the inerrant Bible.' We were made to feel that you could not be a Christian without swallowing the whole thing. All the moral rules. All the theological/philosophic/'scientific'/etc. positions.

(Many of whom, frankly, are based on debatable interpretations of scripture. Look, almost every interpretation of scripture is debatable. It is just not possible to establish what 'God's word' says, definitively for all time).

The problem, then, is that if any part of that comes under attack — as it is almost bound to do in an environment like university — and we lose faith in that part, it's easy for it to become an 'all-or-nothing' thing. Because that's what we were taught! All or nothing.

So because some of us can no longer buy creationism, or innerrancy, or the idea that Christianity is 'the only way,' (etc.)... or because we don't see the harm in having safe sex with people we love, or gay marriage, or drinking or swearing, (etc.)... there are so many individual things that can go wrong, so many things we could reject... we walk away from the faith altogether, usually ignorant of the fact that there are other ways of being Christian, other ways of loving God.

That's sad. It's not sad that we walked away from a very narrow, particular interpretation of Christianity, grounded in the very specific moment in history, and very specific political and cultural movement. It's sad that we thought that was the only option where we could still call ourselves followers of Christ.