CHRISTIAN SOLDIER IN A SECULAR CITY by John Pickering (originally published in the Washington Post, May 12, 1996, at C1) *Copyright 1996 by John D. Pickering (john.pickering@juno.com or jpickeri@balch.com) A few months ago, I finished the search for my first real job after law school. The best advice I received during the entire effort was quite simple: try to seem like "a normal person" during job interviews. A person, that is, who is easy to get along with, reasonably fun to be around, but also serious about work. To seem normal. To be honest, it wasn't too hard to pull off. I am, after all, a pretty normal guy: In college, I did a little student government politicking, ran on the track team, stayed up too late on weekends (and occasionally slept through class), wrote for the campus newspaper, made some good friends and tried to teach myself to play guitar. I stayed on for an extra year to pick up an M.B.A. because I knew it would benefit me down the road. Then I headed off to law school, where I made law review and also married my wife Jennifer. After law school, I took a one-year position as a law clerk to a federal appellate court judge in Washington, D.C., and now I'm working as an associate with a large law firm in Birmingham, Alabama. My background gives me everything I need to be perfectly at home in American culture. I follow political developments closely. I work hard but make time for social activities. I even watch "Friends" and "Seinfeld" on Thursday nights. And yet, there's something different about me. It's not something I keep secret, but it's something that people are surprised to find out. I'm an evangelical Christian. I believe the Bible to be the authentic word of God--from the Old Testament accounts of Earth's creation, Adam's fall and Noah's ark to the New Testament narratives of Christ's birth, death and resurrection. I even believe that biblical injunctions about moral behavior are binding on people today. But I've found that the more I progress intellectually and professionally, the more I encounter people--often friends--who find it a little odd, even threatening, when they discover my religious identity. I could therefore sympathize with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia when the media showed such surprise that he--gasp!-- spoke publicly of believing in miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I first realized how out-of-fashion and backward my beliefs were as a freshman at Vanderbilt University, when I attended a dorm meeting about sexuality, date rape and cohabitation. I quickly learned that the Biblical sexual ethics my parents had taught me had been replaced with what boils down to three less-than-demanding standards: (1) "No" means "no"; (2) Always be considerate of roommates; and (3) Always use a condom. In the classroom, I found professors who understood Christianity as nothing more than an outmoded, patriarchal system of oppression. With rare exceptions, those in the humanities found Biblical teachings hostile to a person's self worth and potential for achievement; those in the sciences thought Darwinistic evolutionary theory had proven man's independence from God. The professors tolerated students who thought otherwise, but only as a parent tolerates a child with a belief in an invisible playmate. Ultimately I realized that the university's only efforts to recognize students' spiritual existence centered on convincing the various religious communities on campus-- whether evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim or otherwise--that they really all believe the same thing anyway, so they might as well stop worrying about their differences and concentrate on peaceful coexistence. When I went to law school at the University of Texas, my Christian faith was greeted with a similar bemusement. Now, however, I was among older students who were getting married and starting families, and campus politics gave way to concerns about real life. At law firm recruiting receptions, students and lawyers would ask my wife, "So what will you be doing once John finishes law school?" When she replied that she wasn't looking for a job, but planning to care for the children we hope to have, questioners often didn't know how to respond. (Once, someone actually asked her why she had bothered to go to college.) As for our plans for a family, I heard discussions in the law review office about how global overpopulation made it "irresponsible" and "dangerous" for a couple to have more than two children. And when my classmates discussed children's education, they debated topics like whether public schools could constitutionally segregate boys from girls. Most of my peers weren't even aware of the Christian school and home-schooling movements. Although the disdain toward biblical Christianity may be most palpable in the university environment, it is by no means limited to that sphere. My wife and I go to movies and watch TV, only to be confronted with skillful artistic portrayals of people who lack any spiritual dimension in their lives. (About the only TV families to go to church and take it seriously were the Waltons, the "Little House on the Prairie" crew, and the folks in Mayberry. As warm and strong as these characters were, they obviously don't fit the Hollywood image of modern humanity--or mine, for that matter.) Finally, in case we somehow missed the point, Jennifer and I were taught during our university experiences and through our consumption of mass media that we're not supposed to let any "religious" ideas influence our political views. The message comes through loud and clear that we are outsiders whose opinions on important matters are quirky at best and dangerous at worst. To be sure, friends who don't share my faith are often stunned to discover my Christian commitment. But there is also a surprise in store for those who think that I'm as abnormal as the general culture says I am. For, throughout my education, I have always found others who, like me, worship a God who instructs His children instead of asking them what they want. Furthermore, these people have educational and professional credentials equal to those of their secular peers. They are doctoral candidates in competitive national programs, they are working in the country's top businesses and top law firms, and they are even Supreme Court law clerks. Of course, if all evangelicals were simply intelligent people with spiritual inclinations, our religious identity would carry little significance. But as evangelicals gain access to different worlds of influence, we bring with us a biblical worldview that will not change to conform to the predominant cultural norms. We reject the harsh distinctions our culture makes between the private, sacred portions of our lives and the public, secular portions. While we don't seek to force everyone to convert to Christianity, we do proselytize and attempt to bring biblical truth to bear in every part of public life. This means that when we think about political issues, we seek to "think Christianly," to borrow the phrase of British literary scholar Harry Blamires. This is a difficult endeavor in a modern world unfamiliar with the concept. It demands an intellectual commitment to mastering revealed truths about God, human nature and good and evil, and a careful application of these principles to the problems of society. I came to understand the importance of such thinking in my study of constitutional law. Unlike many other students, I found myself deeply troubled by the tendency of modern constitutional law to seemingly ignore what the Constitution says and what it meant to those who wrote and ratified it. Such an approach is necessary if one is to justify Supreme Court and appellate court decisions purporting to apply the Constitution to strike down state laws regarding suicide or abortion, or to order busing of schoolchildren to achieve racial balance, or to order the exclusion of valuable evidence in criminal trials on technical grounds. Whatever the merits of these decisions, they obviously weren't dictated by what the Founders wrote in our Constitution. The vision of a restrained judiciary, construing and applying the Constitution but not rewriting it, and sticking as close as it can to the Constitution's original meaning, goes in legal circles by the name of originalism. Not surprisingly, liberal law professors and judges hate it. In fact, the legal academic community is almost monolithically united against originalism in a way that it is not united for or against anything else. As University of Virginia law professor Lillian BeVier has said, originalism is to constitutional law what abstinence is to public school sex education --a completely alien concept. But originalism made perfect sense to me, and now I understand why. It wasn't because I'm conservative (although I am), and it wasn't because I think judges should avoid legislating from the bench (although I do). It was more fundamental than that: I believe that words carry with them the meaning imparted to them by their speaker. I derive this belief from my approach to Scripture. Specifically, I read the Bible as having an articulate and unchanging meaning. I therefore reject biblical interpretive methods that subject the text to the scalpel of higher criticism, seeking to blow away the supposed dust of human error to reach the "real truth" that lies outside the miracles of Jesus and the alleged myths of creation, fall and resurrection. When I read the Bible, I expect to learn what God has to say, not what I'd like for God to say. In the same way, when I read the Constitution, I try to discern what the Framers had to say, not what I might wish they'd said. I therefore can't accept the mainstream legal view that the Constitution is a "growing document" whose meaning develops over time, even if doing so would justify some outcomes I might find appealing. A Biblical worldview has many other obvious applications in public life. The Bible presents religion not as a private affair that belongs only in the prayer closet, but as a force that encompasses families, communities, and, yes, even the state. For the evangelical Christian, this proposition carries with it the serious duty of bringing Christian truth to bear on matters worth contemplating and discussing, including worship, child rearing, music, education, federalism, welfare reform and tax policy. But to develop a "Christian mind," to use another of Blamires' phrases, requires something much more sophisticated than proposing to enact the Ten Commandments into law. It demands an intellectual commitment to mastering revealed truths about God, human nature and good and evil--and a careful, tolerant application of these principles to the problems faced by contemporary society. When evangelicals consider political issues, we start with a commitment to absolute standards of right and wrong and a knowledge of humanity's tendency to act sinfully. It is true that our approach doesn't produce automatic answers, but it makes our search for solutions different and, we think, useful to the community at large. For those of us who choose to participate in the public arena, to take any other direction would also be to "grow" our way out of Christianity, and that's not an acceptable option. In light of the implicit "No Christians need enter" signs I've seen posted in the entry ways to the public square, I've been tempted to consider myself a victim. I've even been occasionally tempted to enter into an isolated world of fellow believers, and, sadly, some of my friends have done so. But to follow them would be to abandon my Christian obligations to my secular friends and to the world in which I live. Moreover, a measure of acceptance for evangelicals in the public arena is beginning to develop. Three years ago, a Washington Post news story labeled evangelicals "poor, uneducated and easy to command," a backwoods stereotype it wouldn't dare repeat today. Instead, the mainstream media have started, however slowly, to acknowledge that evangelical Christians are thinking individuals with a legitimate voice in social policy debates and party politics. If progress continues, the coverage of evangelicals will increasingly focus on their ideas rather than on their religious motivations. But evangelicals aren't out of the (back)woods yet. Young Christians like me still face the daily burden of explaining our faith's relevance. As we move forward in our careers, we cannot and will not keep our faith locked up in the prayer closet. John D. Pickering e-mail: john.pickering@juno.com -------------------------------------------------------- file: /pub/resources/text/contemp: pickering.soldier.txt .