Bekah McNeel - Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide for Parents Questioning Their Faith

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2022 Bekah McNeel

All rights reserved

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 221 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-8209-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For the Healers, especially Moira and Asa

You can go your own way.

Fleetwood Mac, Go Your Own Way

At least youre not pregnant.

Thats what my mom said when I called from college to tell her I was considering getting re-baptized.

While most parents worry about their kids getting hooked on hard drugs in college, mine were worried about a shift in my theology. My conservative evangelical college in California and my conservative evangelical home church in Texas differed on just a handful of doctrinal issues, and my parents worried about every one of them.

Theology was central to their parenting. So when I challenged one, I challenged the other. When I doubted one, I doubted the other.

As a baby, I had received paedobaptism infant baptism to those who dont like to sound pretentious. It was supposed to signify that I belonged to Gods family. As an infant, I had been completely unaware of what was going on. This invalidated the baptism, according to my new professors and friends.

The college taught that baptism was for people who were very much aware of what was happening to them. It was for those who could articulate belief in a handful of key Christian doctrines. Baptism was for individuals who identified as believers. Thats why its called a believers baptismor credobaptism to those who do like to sound pretentious.

My new professors and friends convinced me that only a believers baptism really counted. Counted for what? I have no idea. I just didnt want to be wrong in their eyes.

As far as my parents were concerned, my 1984 baptism, though inarticulate, had fully inducted me into Gods family. It counted. Wanting a believers baptism was like bringing my own fast food to a family meal. By getting rebaptized, I was rejecting the brisket of the covenant, which was served family style, and insisting I wanted my salvific cheeseburger individually wrapped. It wasnt hurting anyone, but it was rude.

Had I made this phone call five hundred years earlier, I might have been killed.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the paedobaptists were burning the other team, the Anabaptists, who were credobaptists, at the stake. Or drowning them and calling it, sardonically, third baptism. Even during the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther created an entirely new church to separate from the Roman Catholics, apparently believers baptism was a step too far for many.

If you hang out around a lot of conservative seminaries, this all sounds about right. If you dont, let me assure you that the debate is alive and well.

My mom wasnt going to tie a rock to my feet and throw me in a river, but we both catastrophized our familys first theological schism in our own waylots of hyperbole on her end, lots of milking for sympathy on my end.

I never went through with my believers baptism, but I had seen the merits of informed consent and was no longer certain about visiting such sacraments upon unwitting infants.

Three years later, I was twenty-three and still unsettled on the issue, along with many others. Id just come home from graduate school in London (a far more secular and eye-opening experience, detailed later in this book), and I wanted to devote my time and energy to exploring a Christianity independent of nationalism and colonialism.

I started my career in ministry at an infant-baptizing church that did not ordain women, not because the churchs theology aligned with my new passion in life but because it was the only church Id ever known. Without ordination there was almost no path to an actual career in full-time ministry in this denomination, but I was idealistic and certain there was a glass ceiling that could be graciously and submissively shattered.

My dad, despite raising me in this same conservative branch of Presbyterianism that did not ordain women, believed that I was going to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or the president of the United States. I had just gotten back from the London School of Economics, and he was ready to watch me take over the world. Instead I was wasting my twenties on what he knew was a dead-end road. Incredulous is a mild way to describe his initial reaction, though he did the supportive dad thing in the end.

My grandmother, who is nobodys feminist, took me to dinner one night to tell me she felt like the churchs leaders were taking advantage of me. They were exploiting my willingness to work for peanuts, raise my own salary, and run myself ragged, she said.

I ignored their excellent advice, interpreting it as some kind of persecution. Such was my insufferable self-righteousness.

My first boss, the pastor of a college ministry, played it cool at first when I expressed progressive political views on immigration and taxesor doubts about specific doctrines. Tim Keller was on the rise in New York, convincing pastors in our denomination and others it was counterproductive to be angsty about things like science and art, and that the way to college-educated, urban Americas heart was through some level of shared appreciation, not political harangues. If the nineties were about creating an alternative Christian world, the 2000s were about finding value in the previously scary secular world. After decades of Jesus being the mascot of the Religious Right, it was cool to say that the good Lord was neither Democrat nor Republican. Rigidity, in theory, was pass.

As long as we agreed on the very evangelical majorshomosexual marriage was a no-go, atonement was necessary, abortion was murder, the Holy Trinity was a mysterious yet inarguable fact, and so onmy boss assured me we could work through the minors, and I could keep my job befriending college students and mentoring them through disordered eating, exams, and other campus crises.

I was close to finding a restful place of ambiguity on infant versus believers baptism when my boss summoned me to his office.

Remember how I said I would tell you if there was ever a doctrine that you had to come to agreement on? (The or else youll be fired was implied.)

I nodded.

He held up a pamphlet. On the cover: a baby and a bowl of water.

This is one.

For me to work with college students, I had to affirm that infants should be sacramentally baptized. Because if theres one thing weighing on the minds of college students, its paedobaptism.

The list of minor theological issues we could agree to disagree on turned out to be very, very short. The only thing on it, in fact, was Why is masturbation wrong? It was definitely wrong; that was not negotiable, but we could debate about why, exactly.

For example: Is it wrong because Jesus said not to lust and its really difficult to masturbate without lusting? Or is it because sex is intended for the pleasure of your spouse, as an act of giving? Unsurprisingly, that second one mostly gets used on women. (If youre squirming already, I feel like you should know some form of the word masturbation appears eleven more times in this book. It is something I feel strongly about. We will revisit this exact argument, in fact.)