Disclaimer: This post is not aimed any one person, or group of people. I have written it first person to second person because it felt appropriate for what I wanted to say in the piece. The 'you' in this piece is a representative figure, and I understand these generalisations may not be representative of you and your beliefs.
It's been a good evening so far. We're at a house party, probably, or maybe just all out together for coffee or drinks or a film, and chances are we've probably had a drink or too (caffeine or booze). Conversation is flowing and everyone is getting on well, and somehow, we find we're talking about religion. It gets dropped in by accident, and you all say ordinary, acceptable kind of things about rationality and reason and tolerance, about it being very well in its proper place.
You almost certainly know that I'm a Christian. You probably know that I'm a Catholic because I like to joke about it, and you also know that on most things I think the same way as the rest of our set. We're casually left-wing art students with casually left-wing views. So you're not expecting it when I tell you that I'm pro-life (even though I give it heavy disclaimers, mostly so you don't associate me with extremists). You're not expecting it when I talk about living in a world with a real, tangible devil, or when I describe a book I'm reading for class as blasphemous. You can't believe that I'm saying these things because somehow these aren't the views of our set, our world, our friends. And yet I'm sitting in front of you. I'm drinking real ale, we've been talking about how to make the socialist utopia come about for the last half-hour, and I have just casually mentioned believing in the Immaculate Conception. Way to make things awkward, I can see you thinking.
There's a particular look in people's eyes when you mention these things. A kind of embarrassment, sometimes with a flash of anger, sometimes disbelief, but mostly just confusion. If you're clearly too embarrassed to talk about it, I make a joke about it and steer us back onto safe waters. But sometimes we do talk about it. And here things get interesting.
The first thing I want you to know, in this conversation, is that I am a rational, thinking person who has arrived at her faith logically and constantly evaluates her beliefs. This is probably the reason why I have started gabbling on about Canon Law or the schisms of the Early Church. You probably don't care, but please bear with me. I'm attempting to prove that I don't live on cloud cuckoo land, and that we can have a rational debate about this where I will understand your points and respect them. One thing I have found is that a lot of people assume that as a Christian talking to a non-believer, my initial response will be judgement, or attempted conversion. They assume that I cannot imagine a world beyond my brainwashed ideology and will not be able to talk about my faith on a theoretical level. I hope very much that they are wrong, because talking about my faith theoretically seems to be the only way to get people to respect it. The language of faith is increasingly alien, and the only way to make headway in conversations, like this one we're having now, is to translate it into academic concepts that we can detach from our instinctive emotional reactions. This also means that we're less likely to ruin our friendship arguing over determinism at 2.30am.
The problem is that I'm trying to prove myself by presenting faith in secular terms for a secular world, and increasingly, I feel that as a person of faith, I am living in a different world to people without. The mechanics of my world are different; yours runs on 'Science', whereas 'science', in mine, is just a part of the machinery, a descriptor of the divine whole. Last term I took a module on one of my favourite types of fiction, Gothic Literature, and in class we had some fantastic and broad-ranging debates about interpretations and world-views, of ideologies and sub-text, but somehow there was one ideology that only seemed to be visible to me: the idea that the monsters could be real. Even though you can discuss this as a theoretical concept, you can't really imagine it, because in your world God is dead. But not for me. For me, we are in the middle of a cosmic battle between good and evil, a battle declared won in the transformation of bread and wine where times touch and the victory is at hand. I live in a cyclic time marked by festivals moving us through the journey of our faith, through the agonies of sin and pain to redemption and glory. I believe in miracles and angels and visions, and even though I can discuss rationally the influence of medieval superstition or pre-Christian thought on the development of my faith I am still an alien to you when I talk about this world.
Alien. Aliens, especially religious ones, threaten you and the secular balanced world you believe in. The game at the moment seems to be divide and rule; turn us against each other, especially minorities or people whose lifestyles or beliefs go against the cultural norm, wait for retaliation, then play the blame game. So we're fighting on two fronts; we're fighting against the extremists who give faith a bad name at the same time as fighting for our faith to be taken seriously. And this is terrifying. If a commentator risks telling you that they cannot say #JeSuisCharlie because they find Charlie Hebdo's disrespect towards Islamic beliefs callous and offensive, then they risk being identified with the evil committed on that day. It's like this on a smaller scale when we talk. I want to prove that I am rational and intelligent, but I also want to stand up for my faith, which in your eyes, does not belong to the rational and intelligent world. How can I do both? In the end we drop the conversation and go home, wishing it had never been mentioned.
I want you to understand how much it hurts sometimes, trying to be a person of faith in your world. When you take the name of my Lord in vain, it's like you're using the name of my kid or one of my parents as a slur, except it's worse, because you are being offensive about someone I love more than I will ever love any person. I want to stand up for my faith and tell you to stop, but I also want to let you say what you will because I don't want to suppress your rights to free speech. When I was in my teens I thought that any conversation on faith could be 'won' by just providing better and better arguments, but these days, I'm more convinced that the only victory is that the conversation ends on a note of respect. I've acknowledged that your beliefs have a sound basis, and that I can respect your right to have them, and you have done the same for me. It's not exactly Preaching The Gospel, but I don't believe that anyone ever comes to faith through arguments. If we're arguing, I am not trying to convert you. I just want to talk.
Yes, I do want you to become a Christian. It would be strange if I didn't. But in this conversation I just want to talk honestly about faith. If we're in a seminar I want to show you an academic perspective that it has opened up for me. If we're talking teleology in the pub or 17th century politico-religious symbolism at 2am, then I want to talk about teleology or religio-politico-symbolio-ism. Just that. But more than that, I don't just want your tolerance of my faith, your awkward permission to believe it ('But...'). I want your respect.
