The Paris Project

Belonging

Whoopie pies, shoo fly pies, handmade woodwork, and quilts were all for sale at the Pennsylvania Relief Sale, the proceeds of which benefit the Mennonite Central Committee. I saw friends from church and neighborhood and colleagues from work, and several old-school Mennonite women admired my family ("Three little boys," I imagined them thinking, "good work if you can get it.") That felt good, but there was one thing I saw at the sale that I couldn't buy - people's parents' friends. The PA Relief Sale was like a family reunion for lots of PA Mennonites - parents, grandparents, cousins, and friends and neighbors of each. Not to mention my parents themselves, I felt nostalgic for church concerts or college gatherings in Minnesota where I'd see friends of my parents, occasional spaces where I belong because of whom I'm related to.

When you move 1006 miles from home as I did, there are no more casual reunions, no meeting up at a sale, no cousins or grandparents in our daily lives. There's also no way for me to be a link in a three-, four- or eight-generation chain of religious tradition, as there is for many Mennonite parents I saw today. We moved out here, in part, for precisely that reason - to be intentional about how we situate ourselves and our children within the broad stream of Christianity.

I'm evangelical in a deep, historical way -- I believe in Jesus, the Bible, social justice, service, personal holiness, practical action, and not too much elitism or hierarchy. In Anabaptist settings, I find myself reacting to things with evangelical sensibilities. But the evangelicalism of my historical moment, say from the mid-1970s to present, is so much less than the goodness of broader evangelical history. I couldn't pass on my tradition even if I wanted to -- my education, job and our household structure (not to mention the feminism that animates it) would horrify my fundamentalist Baptist preacher grandfather, as would the rouge I wore, billiards I played, and moving pictures I viewed as a teenager, all evidence of how far my parents had moved from their own upbringings. Middle-class midwestern white evangelicalism of the 1970s and 1980s was so much more acculturated than grandpa's time. We went to public school but skipped sex ed, and went to prom but didn't dance. We lived in nice suburban houses, but compared our materialism favorably against those in the next higher income bracket. We shopped and shopped and voted Republican. We insisted on believing idiosyncratic and contradictory beliefs about the Bible, the end times, and other people's eternal fates, and as we lost lifestyle markers of distinction from the world, used those beliefs as identity markers.

It makes me sad that my boys' religious experience will be different than my childhood one, but even more sad that contemporary evangelicalism isn't hearty enough to maintain my allegiance. I'm not an agnostic parent, telling my children to be open to whatever truth they find. I'm raising them Christian, but with the agnostic method -- here's a Bible verse from evangelicalism, a social justice movement from Catholicism, an icon from Eastern Orthodoxy, and a whoopie pie from Lancaster County. Make what you will of it boys -- with God's help, that's what I'm doing.