9 Numbers

So as I state on my “Why Blog?” page, practically everyone I know or ever come in contact with is very religiously and politically conservative. So how the hell did I get to be a dirty hippy liberal type? It’s hard to know how and why my brain waves evolved the way they did, as I can’t really step outside myself and observe how things progressed on the inside. But I’m certain it can be traced back to my education at the private, conservative, Southern Baptist-affiliated school known as Samford University. Samford is famous for producing graduates that end up as radical leftists. I kid.

I grew up in a very conservative Southern Baptist household, believing all the Baptist dogma: literal, inerrant Bible; wives submit to husbands; no sex before marriage; alcohol is sinful; Bill Clinton was the AntiChrist. Looking back on it, I’m shocked at how little I questioned. I just accepted absolute truth as dictated from the pulpit.

But a funny thing happened in college. I learned how to think. It’s strange and I’m ashamed to admit it, but before college I had virtually no critical thinking skills. That’s an indictment of my primary and secondary education and the way I was raised.

My college major was English, and I attempted but didn’t quite log enough hours for a minor in Religion. Of course at Samford, Religion = Christianity. My literature courses taught me how to critically analyze a text and see more going on than what seems obvious at first glance. But perhaps even more importantly, one of my religion courses did something I’m quite sure Samford’s Baptist forebears had never expected the school’s curriculum would do: it destroyed my belief in the “inerrancy” of the Bible. I can still remember almost the exact second it happened, in a course taught by this very brilliant man: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/theology/staff/paulholloway/ (who has obviously left Samford for a new gig). The details of how my belief crumbled are too complicated for this post, but in a nutshell it was a result of my exposure to objective, academic criticism of the Gospels. Which, BTW, is something very few Christians are ever exposed to.

So there I was, a senior in college, and the foundation of my entire belief system had been ripped out from under me. That was about 9 years ago. It’s been an especially difficult and complicated journey for me from a religious perspective. Via the internet I explored atheism at great length. I’m certain I now understand the atheist worldview better than 99.99% of Christians, and I flirted with taking that leap. But ultimately the sum of my life’s experiences kept me in the fold of Christianity, albeit with a drastically different perspective on it from the one I grew up with.

This had implications for my political belief system because I ended up questioning everything I’d ever been taught. This process was in its infancy in 2000. Not having progressed very far at the time, I must confess I voted for Bush that year. I had been deeply ingrained with the unspoken belief that Republicanism was ordained by God, and Democrats were the enemy. I was a Republican by birth, not by choice.

George W. put an end to that. Unlike my religious ephiphany on the nature of the Bible, I don’t remember the exact moment I realized I wasn’t a Republican; I spent a lot more time wrestling with spiritual issues than with political issues in the first half of this decade. But I understood that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and recognized the insanity of that war from the beginning. My growing sense of horror at Bush’s incompetence and Cheney’s evil nature gradually led to a comprehension of the systemic problems in Republican governance: supply-side economics voodoo, deregulation of industries desperately needing regulation (Fannie and Freddie collapse, anyone?), insistence on legislating morality, support of corporate suppression of unionization efforts… the list of course goes on and on.

Essentially, the more educated I became, the more I questioned what I thought I once knew, the more I thought things through entirely for myself and stopped relying on others to explain “truth” to me, the further I drifted from my conservative roots. Note that this is about my personal journey. It is not my intent to make universal implications about conservatism here, although I’m certain I will in a future post…