After a childhood of picketing abortion clinics and an adolescence spent campaigning for George W. Bush, Alisa Harris became increasingly uncomfortable with the politicization of her faith. So began her personal journey of discovering how to escape from the culture wars without abandoning her faith or the deep respect she holds for her parents.
An introductory message to youth workers from Alisa Harris:
As a youth bred in the boot camps of culture war, I believed my Christian duty was to confront and polarize by treating every public gathering and private interaction with a belligerence that forced people to take a stand and pick a side.
In this excerpt of my upcoming book, Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics, I describe how I never wavered from the assumption that I possessed all the right answers in prepackaged and easily digestible soundbites, how I never considered listening instead of combating—until I faced conversations deeper and more complicated than the canned confrontations I’d been trained to master.
I was taught that faith was so simple and easily grasped that I could argue someone into it, which ended up shaking my faith when I found that belief wasn’t simple, and argumentation and evidence could only take me so far.
As youth ministers who help young people navigate the complexities of modern faith, I encourage you to encourage your kids’ passion and commitment while also helping them see that life confronts us with difficult questions, many of these questions have no easy answers, and intellectually honest people often disagree on what’s best.
Raised Right: How A Young Culture Warrior Went from Belligerence to Burn-Out to Love
By Alisa Harris
I attended a church where everyone was not only a Republican but a Republican who submitted to my parents’ biennial cajoling to man the GOP phone bank in support of pro-family candidates. We did not attend public school or listen to rock music or wear faded jeans or watch movies made after 1955 or dance to anything except for our worshipful interpretations of Rebecca St. James or make friends who did any of the above. A public-schooled family came to our church for a while, but we stared at them pityingly and felt we had nothing to say.
For four days every February during the state legislative session, my fellow homeschoolers and I trooped to the state capitol in our uniforms of khaki pants and denim dresses to learn about the inner workings of government. We gathered outside the governor’s office to pray that our leaders would turn to God again. We heard talks about how a biblical worldview leads to a belief in limited government; and we learned that polarization creates debate, and debate is good. We learned the essence of cultural engagement is confrontation—badgering people into a corner to defend their beliefs, even and especially if it makes them uncomfortable.
I proposed serious bills for our mock legislature—that we should take educational power from the state government and return it to local schools, for instance—while others proposed that Snickers bars should become our organization’s official candy or that older siblings were forbidden to commit PDAs. I wanted to debate my serious bills so we could converse about the purpose and role of government, but staff members shoved them to the bottom of the stack so they could teach us clever maneuvers to crush our opponents, a goal they could accomplish only by pitting us against each other and stoking our quarrels. They knew we would fight to the death not over abortion, an issue on which we all agreed, but over MMs versus Almond Joys. Without controversy, no one fought; and if no one fought, then no one learned anything about winning in politics.
At night after our regular classes, we learned how to browbeat heathens into faith. Our adult leader, Bill, taught a fool-proof apologetics tactic that did not actually require you to know anything—perfect for 15-year-olds whose main contact with atheists was confined to 10-minute disputes. Bill was not above donning a wizard costume to represent the forces of worldly wisdom, but underneath his jokes lay a deadly seriousness. In a social setting, you got the sense that he’d prefer to sidestep chitchat for the thrill of asking a Marxist how he would feel about being wrong if he died.
Bill’s fool-proof strategy centered on Four Killer Questions: What do you mean by that? How do you know what you are saying is true? What difference does it make in your life? And the sobering kicker: What if you are wrong and you die?
This approach didn’t require you to refute, or even know, the tenets of Marxism, socialism or secular humanism because you strictly limited your conversation to asking these four simple questions again and again. If the Marxist responded with the same questions, you shot back, “What kind of evidence would you accept as proof?” Because we’d learned his objections weren’t serious or intellectually honest, that they were grounded in nothing but a stubborn blindness to truth, the Marxist could give just one honest answer: “None.”
To demonstrate the implementation of the Four Killer Questions, Bill showed a video of himself using a man-on-the-street interview style at a street fair. He would approach someone who had taken sides against God—perhaps a girl in a spaghetti-strap top in a Planned Parenthood tent or someone manning a New Age booth studded with crystals—and unleash the Four Killer Questions. These conversations usually ended with the person throwing Bill out of the tent. This was fine with Bill.
“I am not a nice Christian,” Bill announced. He said that by nice he meant “stupid,” a definition from the 1300s.
The Four Killer Questions brought the godless to Christ—later. Those Four Killer Questions would gnaw away at the girl from Planned Parenthood or the guy with the dreads, eroding their faith in their worldview until someone else dropped along with the gospel message, which Bill could give in precisely two minutes using his watch as a prop.
The implementation of these Four Killer Questions was tricky; however, something such as an elephant trying to put a thread through the eye of a needle. The staff informed its young charges that this week they had invited as our guest speakers several non-Christians against whom we could wield the Four Killer Questions. Many of us had never seen a Democrat before and were eager to convert one to a Christian Republican using our newfound arsenal of deadly queries. The first victim was a woman who gave our group a pedestrian talk about what a legislator does all day. When she paused, a slender youth in a navy blazer, impatient to turn the talk to more vital matters, raised his hand and went straight for the kill: “What do you think about abortion?”
The woman replied that it was important to respect different viewpoints on such a controversial matter, but she did indeed support a “woman’s right to choose.”
A girl in a long khaki skirt bobbed up: “What do you mean by that?”
Bemused, the woman explained.
“How do you know you’re right?”
The woman said something about how a woman’s right over her own body took precedence over a fetus that could not survive without her.
“What do you mean by fetus?”
The answer did not matter; it only served to clear the way for the next question. A boy whose ambition was to rule the world by the age of 30 lobbed the next grenade: “What difference does it make in your life?”
The woman’s voice got testy as she launched a volley about back-alley abortions. The class director got up, stood politely behind her, and lifted his hand: “One more question!”
“What if you’re wrong and you die and you’ve killed thousands of babies?”
We gave the speaker a standing ovation because the staff had trained us well in the ways of politeness. The woman stalked out, forever leery of speaking to Christian leadership schools again, and I stayed safe from the taint of her sin and free from having to listen to her story.
***
I spent a year at community college believing that standing up for Jesus meant making myself the most obnoxious student in class. I struck a deal with God, promising that because He gave me a job at the local newspaper and wanted me to stay in New Mexico, I would speak out for Him. In my classes, I argued that Social Darwinism led to the Holocaust. I said Christianity was the only possible foundation for democracy. I noted that the Native Americans did savage things, and that was why the pioneers dubbed them savages. I agonized over whether I should speak up or shut up and struggled to hear God’s whisper every time my teacher said something liberal.
Then I burned out. The belligerence drained me. The confrontation made my classmates aloof. I ran out of arguments and fled to a more like-minded college to escape the exhaustion of constantly defending my faith.
During one of my summers home from college, I worked at a library with heathens who wore ugly clothes, had large hair and glasses, and liked books—a passion I shared. We painted our supervisor to resemble a statue for an educational library program, ate chocolate-covered locusts to get kids interested in books, dressed one another up as Dora the Explorer to pique the interest of the young ones in learning, and got together for picnics in the park to play Ultimate Frisbee. After we became friends, my parents invited them to our home and we built a campfire, roasted s’mores, and sat around talking until late at night. On one of those lazy summer evenings, I realized I’d lost the compulsion to argue people into worldview compliance. Although our Christian friends exhorted us to do our duty by creating conflict where there was none, I never unleashed the Four Killer Questions. I didn’t chide my friends for swearing or sinning, and I abandoned the need to be always, forever, noting how other people were wrong. They knew we were Christians by the books on our bookshelf, the picture on our wall that showed a father praying over his child’s bed surrounded by angels, and the plaque that said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” For once, I wanted just to care about people as people—not as enemy combatants, potential converts, or notches in my holy belt of truth.
At the end of that summer, my sister left for college and one of the boys wrote her a message that said our family had helped him believe again that people could be good. It was so much more rewarding than killing with questions.
Adapted with permission from Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics and Learned to Start Living the Gospel by Alisa Harris (WaterBrook Press, 2011).
