Having spent my first 10 years in India, I’m attracted to some elements of Hinduism, particularly the ideals in the Upanishads. And because I struggle to understand the nature of God, I like Hinduism’s “tat tvam asi”—whatever one can imagine, “that thou art.”
The trouble with Hinduism, from my perspective, is that it is so, well, so Indian. All those Sanskrit terms, food I love but that doesn’t always love me, chants that sound so—so foreign.
I’m also attracted to some elements of the Baha’i faith—their gender-equality, their tolerance of other traditions.
But much of it feels so, well, Persian.
I am, of course, Christian. At least, I claim to be Christian—although some on the more conservative end of the Christian spectrum might challenge my claim. I used to think that Christianity had no particular cultural ties, that it was universal. But I am slowly recognizing that Christianity—at least, the Christianity that I grew up with—is also a cultural religion.
It’s not Jewish, even though it has its origins in Judaism and still claims Jewish scriptures as part of its Holy Book.
But Christianity lost most of its Jewish roots when Paul brought the story of the risen Jesus to Philippi at the head of the fabled Aegean Sea. He re-shaped the story of a Jewish Messiah into Greek thought patterns. He argued his case as Aristotle might have, by reason, not by narration.
The religion that spread north and west, and eventually centred itself in Rome, would soon feel as foreign to Jews as Hinduism feels to me.
As Europe became the industrial heartland of the globe, Christianity became even more a prisoner of its culture, especially since Gutenberg printed the Bible. When our preachers expound the word of God, they think of the printed word of God.
Evangelical preachers typically hold a Bible in their hands as they preach. Liberal preachers may not actually wave the Bible around, but they will inevitably refer to it, quote from it, building their message around it.
Western Christianity has become dependent on the printed word.
There’s a story about a church that used a red-letter Bible with the words Jesus supposedly said printed in red. As a reader prepared to read the gospel passage, the sun shining through the church’s stained glass windows cast a beam of red light upon the lectern. Jesus’ words disappeared.
What would we do if we didn’t have the printed text to rely on?
Print automatically sets up its own set of perceptions. It is orderly. It is sequential. It is abstract. It is rational.
But none of those are necessarily true of religious experience. Religious experience can be, and often is, chaotic, undisciplined, jumbled and immediate.
McLuhan contrasted figure and ground. We focus on the figure, but fail to see how the ground influences how we see that figure. For western churches, print is the invisible ground that shapes “the word.”
We see our faith through the filter of a technology.
To other cultures, the rational faith I have known all my life must seem very, well, foreign.
