Christianity: what is real and what is fake?

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I have just read Philip Yancey’s memoir Where the Light Fell.  Its an account of his life growing up in poverty and fundamentalism in Atlanta, Georgia with his widowed mother and older brother.

Yancey’s father was a Baptist Minister who was just 23 when he died from polio:

‘Dozens, scores of times I have heard the saga of my father’s death, how a cruel disease struck down a talented young preacher in his prime, leaving a penniless widow with the noble task of wrestling some meaning from the tragedy.’

It is only years later when he discovers a newspaper clipping and finds out the reality behind his father’s death: that he had chosen to leave the hospital where he was being treated in expectation of miraculous healing.

‘Quite by accident I am discovering that the man whom I never knew, a saintly giant looming over me all these years, was a sort of holy fool. He convinced himself that God would heal him, and then gambled everything – his career, wife and two sons, his life – and lost.’

Spiritual straitjacket

His mother’s reaction to her husband’s death and its knock-on effect on her two sons is a major theme.  After her husband dies, his mother pledges her sons to God’s service like Hannah dedicating Samuel in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 1). But this becomes a destructive spiritual straitjacket for the whole family as she corrals and manipulates them into her religious discipline and missionary ambitions.

They are desperately poor and his Mum makes ends-meet through becoming a popular Bible teacher who everyone considers a saint for her dedication and commitment.  But in their tiny trailer home, her anger and bitterness towards her sons grows increasingly toxic.  When his older brother decides to leave the fundamentalist Bible college she insisted he go to, it leads to a spiraling estrangement which will last over 50 years.

Vivid picture

Yancey’s paints a vivid picture of Southern US Christian culture in the 1960/70s. His honesty about the racism he participated is unflinching:

‘I feel twinges of guilt about racism now and then. I wince when our pastor calls Martin Luther King Jr. “Martin Lucifer Coon”. I try not to repeat racist jokes, even though they always bring a laugh.’

Yancey’s church teaches a racist theology that black people are inherently intellectually inferior, spuriously based on Noah’s curse on his son Ham (Genesis 9). So he is shocked on his first day of an internship when he discovers that the eminent scientist he is working under, who has a PhD in bio-chemistry, is black.  

“All summer a crisis of faith smolders inside me. The church has clearly lied to me about race. And about what else? Jesus? The Bible?”

Question of truth

At the heart of this book is the question of truth.  His brother’s struggles with drug addiction, mental health and their mother’s behaviour, leads him to continually question the Christianity they have been raised within. He keep asking:

‘What is real and what is fake?’

It’s a vital question.  In any sphere of life ‘fakeness’ cannot be sustained, nor can it provide a firm foundation for anything of true value. The truth will out.

‘Spiritual overlay’

We need to be honest that often churches and religious culture can be some of the worst places for concealing and suppressing reality. Towards the end of the book, Yancey records a Bible college reunion:

‘At the reunion that day, my classmates speak in phrases we learned as students: “God is giving me the victory…I can do all things through Christ…All things work together for good…I’m walking in triumph.” Yet they speak a different vocabulary  when relating their lives after college. Several are suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and others from clinical depression. One couple recently committed their teenage daughter to a mental institution. I wince at the disconnect between these raw personal stories and the spiritual overlay applied to them.’

This scene rings true. I know many who abandon faith because of the lack of reality and honesty in the church culture they participate in.  We should question the disconnect between spiritual clichés and reality.

Deep hope

Where the Light Fell is an unflinchingly honest memoir of a life and culture deeply affected by the ‘dark energy of ungrace’ and the faults and failures of Christian culture.

But its also a story of hope which is all the deeper for being salvaged from from the rubble of toxic religion. Amid this turbulent journey Yancey has clung to the reconciling grace and truth of Jesus:

‘In the churches of my youth, we sang about God’s grace, and yet I seldom felt it. I saw God as a stern taskmaster, eager to condemn and punish. I have come to know instead a God of love and beauty who longs for our wholeness’.

Its a story which reminds us that grace is amazing – but only if accompanied by truth.

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Buy Where the Light Fell by Philip Yancey