Final Thoughts:
More Than Culture
Hailey Bolin
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My faith was given to me when I was very young. It manifested itself as conservative evangelicalism as a result of my family, my culture and myself. It was presented as a package: accept a few fundamental truths, and everything else flows logically from these premises. The journey of faith is the process of discovering more logical conclusions, supplemented by religious experience to confirm the truth of what you have rationally deduced. There was room for questions, but all of the questions already had answers. They all had right answers and they all had wrong answers, and there was never any question about that. And I bought in completely. Not that I didn’t ask questions, but I allowed myself to be too easily satisfied by the answers. I like being right and I like having the answers. It’s safe and stable.
This was not entirely a bad thing. My drive for consistency and security helped me avoid the hypocrisy of saying I believed one thing and acting like I believed another. It forced me to take seriously the words of Jesus and integrate my faith into my whole life. It challenged me to follow my beliefs to completion, through good works. That is, trying to serve, love and sacrifice for others. If I really believe God loves me unconditionally, the only possible response is to love back, and to love God is to love others. I knew God loved me and I knew loving others was the right response, so out of fear of having a hollow faith, I did my best to obey.
When I came to Dartmouth, I became a philosophy major because I wanted to confront the hard questions and find the truth, looking for a challenge. I wanted to know things and discover things. I had complete confidence that my faith was real and true and that I had nothing to fear by testing it against the most brilliant minds of the past several millennia. Unfortunately, when one’s faith is a package deal, all neatly tied together, it does not take much to unravel the entire thing. In my junior year both my classes and my experiences began to pull apart my faith. Inconsistency, skepticism, falsified religious experience, lemming-like mindlessness, observed hypocrisy in religious community and a realization of how poorly justified most beliefs are in general forced me to step back and reconsider my faith.
This was incredibly terrifying and isolating. My entire life was (and is) built around my faith but it was crumbling from beneath me. In my cynicism, the God I loved was becoming a ghost we had conjured up to create purpose and order in an otherwise meaningless life. My religious friends didn’t seem bothered by any of the same doubts, and my non-religious friends didn’t understand why it was such a big deal. When I went home to Texas over Christmas break last year, I hoped that a more religious environment would make things easier, but it actually became more difficult as the ‘faith’ around me seemed like mere culture, superficial and insincere. I do not want my faith to simply be a part of culture, a system of morality or something to make me feel better. To have faith, it must be connected to something (or Someone) real.
My background in philosophy became useful, however, as I surveyed the bleakness of what I thought was my situation. I realized I had made a bad inference: a lot of people relate to their faith insincerely. It’s true that we cannot prove beyond doubt the existence of God, and many traditional positions are wrong or just don’t make sense, but none of this has anything to do with what really is, with what is true. I am not putting my faith in others’ experiences (sincere or insincere), in logic or in religious convention—my faith is in God—that is, the one who loves me, justifies me, redeems me, sanctifies me, frees me to genuinely love others and enables me to follow the way of Jesus here and now. These are real things that have happened and are happening to me, and I cannot doubt that and must worship their Source even when I don’t fully understand it. This is far from saying that I am free from doubt, but I am free from fear when my faith can’t be tied up into a neat package for easy consumption.
My faith is different now. It’s more flexible, more gracious. As much as grace is a point of doctrine in which we believe, it is also a state in which we live. That is the hope that I have now, not in fact or doctrine but in the Truth of a Person, real and alive. We will always debate doctrine and rightly so. Doctrine is important and can be very complicated. When we turn God’s personhood, grace and love into mere points of doctrine, however, we undermine the actual person, grace and love of God. The power of the Gospel is not in its rigorous consistency or emotional sensationalism but in its ability to genuinely transform lives, including our own.
Haley Bolin ‘08 is from Tyler, Texas. This June she will graduate with a double major in Philosophy and Geography. During her four years at Dartmouth she has been actively involved with the Navigators Christian Fellowship, the Edgerton House, and she plays the cello in the Dartmouth Chamber Orcestra. She is also passionate about thrift shopping, farmer’s markets and outdoor concerts, especially when they are free.
Next year she will be moving to the Phillipines to work for the International Justice Mission. With the lawyers at this Christian human rights organization, she will promote justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. She then plans to attend law school.