Why Didn’t I Ever Become Christian?
My wife and I made a trade last month: I would listen to a book of her choosing and in exchange she would listen to one of mine. I decided to make her listen to God Speaks Again in exchange for listening to Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, and this is just a fabulous comparison of where our heads are at generally. However, she enjoyed God Speaks Again enough that she suggested I listen to it too, so I have been, and then in our conversations about it, she said “it’s just funny to me that you like leapfrogged right over Christianity.”
Why didn’t I ever become a Christian?
The short answer is that it was easier for me to become Jewish and then to become Bahá’i, and then as a Bahá’i, to accept Mohammad and then Jesus as Manifestations of God, than it was for me to go in historical order. And I can accept Jesus as a Manifestation on the basis of His words, through the Bahá’i lens, but I don’t think I could in the same way as a Catholic or a Baptist. The rest of this is the long version.
There are limits to what I can explain rationally. For example, I can rationally explain why I became Bahá’i in terms of what was going on my life, but my experience of being Bahá’i is not a rational one so when I do make such explanations they feel very flat and like they are missing the point. I like bird watching, but I can’t give a rational reason why I enjoy it; I could try, and it might “make sense” but it would totally fail to convey the point of it.
There were two categories of causes for my becoming Jewish. The first was a series of coincidences which seemed to me to be God’s hand in my life. The second was a set of beliefs and rational arguments. The first is basically personal experiences that will have no meaning for other people. The second, because it is somewhat rational, can be conveyed and appears susceptible to counterargument, though I wouldn’t accept it.
I have always believed in the oneness of God and the existence of some kind of afterlife. I always felt like the unity of God contradicted the idea of Jesus being God or the Son of God or part of some kind of trinity of God. I was already looking elsewhere, and I had dozens of smaller objections but that was the main one.
I feel like I should make a few things clear. For one, I was literally shopping for a religion when I was young—I really liked the Sikh religion, but decided it wasn’t workable because there was no nearby gurdwara (except for the one in Española that was at best a sect and probably actually a cult). It was important to me when I became Jewish that I could still entertain other beliefs, like Taoism or whatever. I knew of several Jewish Buddhists. Later I became aware of Tenrikyo and found a great deal to admire in Ofudesaki. It was always important to me that Judaism did not portray itself as having the only path to God. I said at the time that I felt like it was a good “broth” that I could mix other ingredients into to make a soup.
I wasn’t shopping for a religion when I became a Bahá’i, I just happened upon it during a time when I was growing more and more disaffected by my faith and my relationship with God. The character of my discovery of the Bahá’i Faith was a confrontation with one whole entity, rather than a winnowing down of a large set of possibilities. I would not have been open at that time to the possibility of becoming, say, Catholic, because my prejudices against it were still in place. And moreover, it was the Bahá’i ideas themselves that convinced me something interesting was going on there and it was worth a deeper look.
If you’re wondering about those ideas, the basic one is probably unity. It is not insignificant to me that the other Abrahamic faiths have adherents passionately trying to kill each other, in obvious contrast to their teachings. A unique fact about the Baha’i Faith is that it is the only one that has a distinct vision of kind of future world we should be building, and how to do it without violence or compelling anyone to do anything they do not want to do. It doesn’t rely on everyone becoming Bahá’i, or upon some kind of future supernatural or eschatological event. In my opinion, most other faiths of today are stuck between a fantasy foundational era and a fantastical dream for the future. They are either trying to recreate some bygone culture in which all the obviously outdated rules can be implemented (and ignoring the groaning of all the nearby nonbelievers), or they are twisting themselves into knots trying to find a way to repurpose their ancient books to suit the modern day, struggling to figure out which parts are baby and which parts are bathwater. Both sides are engaged in a kind of active waiting, hoping for a messiah to literally descend from the clouds and put all the pieces back together into something coherent.
…
I tried to return to daily Jewish prayer after learning about the Baha’i Faith. It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what daily Jewish prayer should be like, which is interesting, but in any event there is a moment in the Amidah where you pray for the temple and its service to be restored. I realized I could not actually pray for this, because it would mean replacing prayer with sacrificing animals. I’m no longer clear on why I was alright with praying for this before, either, but probably it was because I wasn’t doing daily prayer.
I don’t know if it was right before or right after this that I tried saying the Bahá’i daily prayers. I think I tried before and then stopped, because it was causing too much upheaval at home, and then I resumed. The hard part was different there and I realized it had something to do another area where Judaism had enabled me to persist in a certain bias, and that was my discomfort with the idea that God speaks to humanity through certain people.
Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses are all extremely ancient, so there isn’t anything like concrete archaeological evidence for them. This makes them practically mythic characters, and I could suspend my disbelief because the dust of age covered it all up. Nobody really knew what happened, nobody had anything like proof. I was comfortable with that, because it enabled the Rabbinic process of evolving the religion. But it also meant accepting that nobody has had anything like direct contact with God in 3000 years or more. Or that everybody has had direct contact with God, nevermind the contradictions.
In my notes from this moment in my investigation of the Bahá’i Faith, I can see my own struggle with the idea that Bahá’u’lláh is a Manifestation of God. Looking back on it now, it’s clear to me that this was a fight with my own ego, on three fronts: 1) if He were a Manifestation, it wouldn’t leave any room for me to disagree or find rationalizations for things that I didn’t agree with, and 2) it would mean that I would have to reconcile myself to the validity of Jesus, and thus, 3) my conception of the validity of Judaism would be undermined.
Point one took some time. There were a few things I disagreed with. But I came to understand them. I think this is a common experience for adults who become Bahá’i.
Point 2 is likely a problem for other American Jews. You have sunk a lot of time, effort, and identity into resisting the general cultural pull. You have to undo that, but you are undoing it for the sake of growing closer to God and your fellow man. It is probably the same, coming into the Faith as a non-Jew in Israel, or coming to terms with Mohammad as a non-Muslim in any predominantly Muslim country. Everyone who becomes Bahá’i has to set aside their prejudices and biases with respect to race, religion, gender, nationality, etc; this one was just harder for me than I expected.
Regarding point 3, it actually wasn’t that big of an issue. Although Shoghi Effendi later rescinded this instruction, ’Abdu’l-Bahá had told the Bahá’is not to abandon their former religious communities. Since the Faith confirms all the other Faiths, I did not feel like I was resigning being Jewish. In fact I still feel Jewish, although it’s a bit awkward for me because I converted to Judaism for the sake of the religion, and now I am Bahá’i. I do not feel like I am no longer Jewish, I just feel like it is no longer a central pillar of my identity, and certainly no longer a quality upon which I could base decisions about who to associate with or who I would find it easier to relate to or whatever.
…
To return to the original question, why didn’t I ever become Christian? The answer is that I did become a Christian, when I became Bahá’i. A profoundly ignorant Christian though; I have only read the gospel of Matthew. I don’t know as much as I should, but Bahá’u’lláh confirms Christianity, so it is true, at least in its core, and He would not want anyone to spend much time disputing with believers about which parts are which.
I no longer feel excluded from any faith. The whole idea of choosing a Faith seems deeply strange to me now. I think is partly because Bahá’u’lláh completes them all. Perhaps the deeper reason is that making distinctions between religions is fundamentally about excluding people: grouping people together to create tribes and thus infighting between tribes, and that now seems so obviously contrary to what God desires for us.