It's a Religious Apologetic, Charlie Brown

I love Charlie Brown holiday specials. Maybe more than I love you, so don't make me choose. I like the Halloween one especially because its message is so unclear. Linus spends all his time and effort on an unrewarded act of faith. He misses all the Halloween fun and receives much mocking. When the Great Pumpkin fails to show, he is unfased and plans to wait again next year, in an even more sincere pumpkin patch. Is his faith beautiful or absurd?

For a class in college, I wrote an Intro to Philosophy cirriculum based on feminist pedagogy. For unknown reasons it was not immediately embraced by faculty. Hmm. The course I created used most of the texts original to the class, including Sire's so-so Universe Next Door, as well as a number of outside readings and films. For Sire's treatment of Christian Existentialism, my imaginary students were forced to watch me weep copiously during It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and then discuss. The show, not my tendency to cry over certain cartoon characters.

A modernist argument for faith I've never quite bought is Pascal's Wager, the argument that what can be lost if one chooses faith is insignificant compared to what can be won if one's faith proves well-founded. In Linus'example, his loss of trick or treating--or as the Peanuts childrens insist on saying "tricks or treats"--and a Halloween party ought to prove insignificant if the Great Pumpkin arrives and brings toys and candy to the sincere boy waiting in the sincere pumpkin patch. Pascal's system, at least from what I remember from college and that episode of Dougie Houser, MD, seems to suggest that nothing much is lost or that what was lost is insignificant. Initially this proposition seems to suggest that the faithful ought to wager as little as possible in order to, say, hedge their bets. I'd like to give up as little of myself and my habits as possible and still gain the Kingdom. This hesitancy seems somewhat intellectually and spiritually disengenuous and all too human. I like to hope for something better, for some great, glittering faith that transforms me into a better human being with higher standards, a friendlier disposition, and clearer skin.

Perhaps a more stoic approach was Pascal's intent. Physical pleasures are fleeting. Riches can be stolen or lost in a bad turn of the stock market. So what if you give up your life for your faith? You had to die sometime anyway. In the example of the Great Pumpkin, Linus gives up only a little of his pride--probably not the most philosophically appropriate virtue anyway--and the opportunity for candy and social interaction with mean-spirited children with outsized heads for the chance of meeting with the Great Pumpkin. He might not've gotten candy anyway: Charlie Brown got a bag of rocks. His losses were of fleeting, insignificant things, weren't they? That line of reasoning takes us to a rather bleak spot I think is more in line with Pascal's argument as a whole.

But the Great Pumpkin never shows up. Nobody but Linus thinks he even exists. I think it's herein we encounter a uniquely postmodern set of difficulties with Pascal. Charlie Brown believes in Santa Claus as fervently as Linus does the Great Pumpkin and claims they're suffering from "denominational differences," but their disagreement is based much more on a question of ecumenicism. Are they both right? Is one of them wrong and going to get no presents at all? In the economy of their respective faiths, Linus emerges the clear loser. Charlie Brown needs only embrace the culturally approved and rather nebulously described choice of nice over naughty. If the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus offer roughly equivalent rewards to their faithful, perhaps it's wiser to make the wager of faith that causes us to give up the least. Without particular garauntee of being right or wrong, it makes great sense to select the religious option that allows us minimal inconvenience and discomfort, in case, this world is all there is--or in case there is no mystical giver of holiday gifts.

Let's add an additional dimension: the Easter Bunny. Imagine for a moment that Peppermint Patty and Marci reject both the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus in favor of the Easter Bunny. My initial response would be one of cost benefit analysis: what does the Easter Bunny bring me? Hardboiled eggs, which I hate, various candies, and, once, pink and white plastic pearls. I love Easter candy more than all other holiday candy. Cadbury cream eggs. But no one gets a bicycle or tap shoes or a, dare I say, a pony for Easter. If we assign the world's religious and spiritual systems analogous holiday gift givers, can we pick the "best bet?" for ourselves and thereby arrive at an authentic, appropriate faith? For that matter, can I privelege my love of that strange, egg-colored filling inside chocolate eggs above rollerskates and eggnog and ignore the hardboiled eggs or throw them away or give them to my sister who for reasons clear only to her and God eats tons of them and so find a religious system that works? Shall I stick with Santa because the Christmases of my childhood were mostly ok and because I don't feel much like addressing the issue? Can I work it somehow to get gifts all year long, or shall I hold out for my birthday?

The problems Christianity encounters in the face of postmodernism are instant and obvious. Christians are right: Christ is God incarnate. Humans are irrevocably broken save for the messy and confusing work of that God-Man on the cross and in the tomb. You're wrong if you think otherwise. You might have pleasing manners and a history of kind deeds. You might be smarter or taller than I am. But you're wrong. Postmodernism, of course, de-emphasizes authority both textual and otherwise, emphasizes personal experience, and claims the intellectual necessity of relativism.

There are a number of responses to this encounter. An obvious one is a particular breed of Caucasian, middle class niceness in which my denomination specializes: smooth over the problem with a lot of polite assurances about culture, respect for others, and the grace of God. That particular portrayal of grace always makes God sound to me a little like some heavenly playground monitor assuring that everybody gets a chance on the slide. This issue gets a lot thornier when we apply it to questions of missions and, broadly, that most human of questions "who's in and who's out as far as heaven is concerned?" What about people who grow up in outer Mongolia with no access to the Gospel? What about dead babies who don't live long enough to get invited to Sunday School? What about Ghandi? Good questions. Good questions I don't have the time or wisdom to take on just now. The question I'm dealing with now is personal: how does my faith meet postmodernism?

Despite various conflicts, I mostly place my faith squarely within orthodox Christianity, largely because of my affirmation of the role of scripture and of the necessity of Christ's death and resurrection as the only method to restore depraved humanity to relationship with God. But why should I believe any of that stuff?

Certainly I've read a fair amount of Aquinas and even more Augustine. I can make a good, old fashioned intellectual argument for God and, to a lesser degree, for Christ. I once read the back cover of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. I even took an entire course in Christian apologetics, a subject, it turns out, that bores me terribly. I believe I have personal experiences that affirm my belief system. I believe the testimony of others and assign a fair measure of importance to historical Christianity and the saints that have come before me. I took some classes dealing with those subjects as well.

But none of that matters, really. As previously discussed, postmodernism discards much of the intellectual legacy of previous generations based on some very viable complaints of bias as well as a simple desire to be more inclusive and less absolutist in viewpoint. Duns Scotis was many things including dull, friends, but none of them were relativistic. While these writings ought to be considered valid, there's no particular reason to consider them more valid than the writings of Najib Mahfuz or Shirley McClain. The experiential argument is an additional wrinkle: while I believe my own religious experience to be factual, I cannot deny that other people have had contradictory--and, in some cases, much more dramatic--experiences. Within that context, by what criteria can we distinguish between the voice of the Holy Spirit and a little pink light in the upper right hand corner of Phillip K. Dick's kitchen. Or should we?

Linus waits and waits for a Great Pumpkin that never comes. I think there's something there that resonates with Christian experience. Certainly God has answered my prayers, and sometimes those answers have come in beautiful and unexpected ways. The presence of God has sometimes filled me with an assurance that I am beloved and somehow held trembling but secure, like a pet mouse in a wide, warm palm.

But sometimes faith is waiting for something that never seems to come, for something that never happens. I pray for healing and the people I love stay sick. I pray for faith, for myself and for others, and we all continue on, racked with doubt. I pray for delivery and continue to struggle. And sometimes all the business of Christianity seems chiefly designed to keep my Friday nights as dull as possible. Linus waits in a pumpkin patch all night long to no avail. At the end of their lives, John the Baptist and Therese of Liseux found themselves quite unable to experience the nearness of God after a lifetime of fellowship. Do their experiences or ours discount the reality of our belief system?

Someone once wrote that the opposite of faith is not doubt but rather certainty. I believe that quote is most valuable when taken within the broader context of the author's statement: that having perfect certainty, a closed worldview in which you claim to understand the ways and means of God is something not at all like faith. But faith, the mad act of believing in a God of grace and of peace and, most importantly, of love is certainity. The certainity of things hoped for, of things not seen.

The experiential proof of faith is a difficult proposition given the very definition of faith offered by Scripture and given the experiences with doubt and disappointment in the lives of otherwise "faithful" Christians.

Perhaps we have arrived at a faithless point now, a point without any reason to believe in the Jesus or God or the Great Pumpkin at all. Perhaps all belief is an absurd proposition, or an intellectually untenable one. Of course, there's the simple fact that my beliefs are no less absurd than yours. I may as well stick with the Jesus thing one way or the other. It makes me happy enough, I guess. I mean, I'd like a religion with a little less history of oppression, more free tampons in the ladies, and occassions to eat cake. But this one is good enough.

I can never get away from absurdity in my personal life or in my philosophical life. Sometimes I think all this Waiting for Godot bullshit is one of the results of the Fall, that no matter how carefully we work out the details, the bits of human existence always itch us like a bunching, badly-made blazer from our twitching shoulders. Perhaps our knowledge, experience, and logic only carry us so far. Perhaps everything must fall to pieces.

I believe anyway. Not because all my questions were answered in my apologetics class or because Aquinas solved all my quandries. Not because I can feel God's constant and, I might add, charming presence each morning when my alarm goes off. Not because I understand the Bible perfectly or teach Sunday school or was baptized as an infant. Not because I'm smarter or dumber than you are. Certainly not because I really like all the moral restraint and waking up early on Sundays for church. When I close my eyes and ask what's real and what's sure in my world, Jesus and all of that stuff is the answer I get, in a voice as small and sharp as that of a young boy, waiting alone in the dark for something he cannot see.