Image by Djuliet via Flickr
My older brother is one of the nicest, kindest people I have ever known. He is over a dozen years older than me, so he grew up in the pre-counterculture era while I came of age in the middle of it. This may be partially responsible for the way our lives took such different courses. Until recently, I would have said also that it may be responsible for how our world views differed significantly. Now I find an interesting convergence coming on, especially in terms of our views on religion.
Without going in to great detail, and greatly simplifying things, Fred has always been what I would call a mainstream, middle-class, salt-of-the-earth member of society. He was a teacher and a coach. He lives in the mid-west, he married his high school sweetheart while he was still in college, has three grown children and a bunch of grandchildren, and has resided in the same little town for almost fifty years. He was never particularly interested in political issues, unless it intersected with his job security, and has been what could be called a pillar of his community all his adult life. He is the kind of guy everyone calls 'Coach'. He has been a respected member of his mainstream Protestant church since he was married in it, and until recently attended services every Sunday.
Over the last decade, particularly since he retired, he has started paying attention to things a little more closely. As I said, he was never particularly political, but he had an inherently conservative world view, and voted Republican most of the time. The only exception would be if the Republican candidate for governor in his state said anything negative about teacher's unions. We have lived in different parts of the country, or even different countries, for many years, and our phone conversations usually avoided talk of politics and religion and concentrated on what our families were up to and other such things, as he knew I was politically more left-wing than he was and also that I was an atheist.
As I said, recently he has changed. He started getting interested in politics. At first, he started talking about how his opinion of conservative commentators has changed. Before, he was the type of guy who would listen to Rush Limbaugh and get a kick out of him. Then he started really listening and discovered he did not like what the man was saying. He turned against Fox News, which used to compete with ESPN for his TV's default position. He started out just disliking the negativity of the commentary, then he started to question the whole conservative ideology. Now he calls me to ask if I saw the Rachel Maddow show the night before. With religion, he started to talk to me about some of the discomfort he felt with conservative christianity. He had some personal encounters with more fundamentalist and evangelical members of his community that made him a bit angry. He started to side with me against the religious whackos, whereas before, he was like the mainstream christians Harris and other rail against for failing to call these folks on their radical ideas. His church is, as I said, more mainstream Protestant. He has always believe in the god of his church, but has never been prone to thinking too deeply on theological issues. He believes in god, he goes to his church, and he has always enjoyed the church community.
Last week he called me and said that he has started to change his ideas of even mainstream christianity, due to an incident that happened in his church. His pastor invited a young woman, who had been an active member of the church's youth community for years until she went off to college, to speak to the church during its regular Sunday service. This young woman had graduated from college and had gone abroad in a humanitarian service role for an international non-profit agency, and was visiting her home town for a while. During her talk to the congregation, she made a point of mentioning she was a lesbian. Many members of the church were outraged, and it led in the end to the pastor's removal. My brother was outraged. He started to look at his fellow church goers a little differently.. His conversations with me now sound like someone starting to question the whole thing. He says he doesn't attend the church as much anymore, and when he does, he feels uncomfortable. I think he is just showing his face there occasionally because he does not want to make a statement with his total absence. He is not the kind of guy who makes statements. He has generalized his doubts from his own church to all churches. He is starting to question whether organized religion is a valuable thing for society. He says he still believes in god, that he won't change that, but he is more and more seeing my point on religion. He was defensive with me about the god thing at first, wanting me to know he hasn't come all the way over the fence to my side. I explained to him that I was not opposed to the belief in god, it was actions like the one his church took with the pastor, and the knee-jerk opposition to a homosexual woman even speaking in their church, that I objected to.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves. He has climbed to the top of the fence to see what the other side looks like, and he sees that it isn't the wasteland he had always thought it was. In fact, there are a lot of familiar looking things over there, as his little brother has always told him there were. Whether his next step is to sit on the fence for a while is something I don't know, but I know that even if he decides to stay on the side where he has always lived, he won't look at it the same way from now on.
Mims
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