Mark Noll, in an interview for IgnatiusInsight.com regarding his book Is the Reformation Over? noted that he and his co-author did not realize that different teachings (or the lack thereof) regarding the nature of the church define the really critical difference between Evangelicals and Catholics (and the Orthodox and most confessional Protestantism) until they’d been working on their book for a year and a half–and after thirty years of teaching a lot of Catholic history. This is worth further attention later, but in the mean-time, see what ex-evangelical Orthodox blogger Daniel Larison has suggested as an explanation of this evangelical blind-spot. ~Fr. Jape, The Japery

I recommend Fr. Jape’s post to anyone interested in ecclesiology and evangelicalism, but I would like to make a correction about this identification of me as an “ex-evangelical.” That simply isn’t the case, and actually gives me too much credit as an authority on evangelicalism, but I suppose I can see why it might have seemed to be true (I did say relatively positive things about Wheaton College, after all, concerning their firing of Prof. Hochschild).

It is probably not always easy to determine just what my religious background was before I became Orthodox from what I write here on Eunomia, so I should clarify things. Both sides of my family are almost entirely Protestant, mostly in what are now considered the “mainline” denominations of Methodist and Presbyterian, and both of my parents were Protestants, but came from different denominations and could not determine how I should be raised, which meant by default that I was raised with virtually no understanding of Christianity whatever.

It was when I was around eight or nine that it occurred to me that the word Christ had a rather prominent place in the word Christmas, which suddenly made sense of all those songs I kept hearing (“Oh, so it’s like a Mass about Christ,” I think I must have said rather stupidly), but I honestly can’t recall anyone ever having told me anything about this before then. Sometime after that I received a children’s Bible that, independent of any religious context or worship, made literally no sense to me. I read it as I would have read any other book, starting at the beginning, and this consequently bored me before I managed to get past the story of Ruth. Having no sense of why I should take an interest in these stories, or what they meant–and the meaning, friends, is not always obvious to an untrained reader–I was even less interested in them in the future and fell into the conventional agnosticism of ignorant children.

When in Europe, I was awed and amazed by the great cathedrals, but very much for their sheer antiquity and grandeur and as a monument of history. My interest in history and my medievalism long predated any acquaintance with Christianity, though this later acquaintance would dramatically strengthen both of these tendencies. Since the cathedrals were mostly empty and unusued in England, I could be forgiven for not paying much attention to the fact that these were places of worship, much less to what that worship meant or to Whom the worship was offered.

It was not until I was around fifteen that I became aware that Easter had something to do with an empty tomb and, again, this same Christ. He kept cropping up everywhere, yet no one had ever told me much about him. I suppose my experience during these years was a bit like C.S. Lewis’ phase as an atheist, except that he had already learned something about Christ. But learning that about Easter was very surprising–no rabbits and no eggs involved at all, just some Resurrection. It would years more before I understood why that Resurrection was even supposed to matter, and a few more before I believed that it mattered.

School was, of course, no help, since it must have been assumed that everyone already knew something about Christianity before they came to school, and I also went to private schools that studiously avoided any religious subject (unless, of course, it was time for Hannukah or Kwanzaa, but that is another story). If you want to keep your child ignorant and shielded from religion, the only better bet than a public school is a secular private school.

This was all quite funny in a way, since by 1990 or 1991 I had already begun being exposed to “conservatism,” at least of the WSJ and Limbaugh variety (though these were in the Clinton years when the WSJ and Limbaugh seemed reasonable, and in any event I wouldn’t have known the difference between them and real conservatism anyway), but had scarcely any acquaintance with the breadth and depth of the Western tradition all these conservatives were presumably trying to conserve in some way. I was aware, of course, that there were Christian conservatives out there somewhere–but I had never personally met any of them. My father’s family were cultural WASPs, for whom the Protestantism had become rather outmoded or uninteresting. No, in fact, I became very early on one of those conservatives who identified with the GOP and thought that conservatism simply meant fewer regulations, lower taxes and more cash back. Perhaps you may understand better why I find this sort of conservatism so despicable now.

But I digress. An interest in philosophical and religious ideas had begun to spring up around the age of thirteen or fourteen, and I read Dostoevsky without much understanding (they mentioned the Resurrection in Crime & Punishment, but its connection with Easter was still entirely lost on me–honest) at the same time that I was reading Lao Tzu. There followed a very silly, partly gnostic, partly syncretist phase when I would have put an ecumenist to shame in my willingness to mix and match religious ideas and traditions. It was at that time that I became much better educated in “religion,” but remained woefully ignorant of Christianity, except what I unavoidably encountered in reading European history.

Part of my syncretist interests did involve reading the Philokalia (St. Nikodemos’ collection of spiritual writings by Orthodox Fathers, not St. Gregory’s on Origen), but all of the references to Christ and Logos were more mysterious to me than the mystical experiences the Fathers were describing. The Philokalia was probably my first substantive encounter with real Christian spirituality or real Christianity for that matter. It all made a great deal of sense to me, but I had not yet connected those writings to anything about Christ Himself.

In spite of a short, very unfortunate and lamented detour through Islam, which is embarrassing proof of my general naivete and poor judgement at 18 (and also why I am very confident that Islam represents a great spiritual and cultural danger to any secularised society that is looking for meaning), Dostoevsky’s works had remained an unexpected anchor that kept me from going adrift for too long. Once I had sobered up a bit, so to speak, Dostoevsky’s Orthodoxy (as mediated through his conservatism) was the beginning of my understanding of cur Deus homo. It was actually in reading a Berdyaev quote in a book on Dostoevsky that I understood this, but it was principally with Dostoevsky’s Christ, Whom I also encountered in the Slavophiles, that I understood.

It would still be a little while before I became thoroughly familiar with the essentials of Christian doctrine (though the Orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and Christ seemed to make perfect sense long before I understand something as simple as why Christ had had to come in the first place), but everything in my experience to that point was pointing me in the direction of Orthodoxy. My difficulty in understanding the reason for the Incarnation was not, oddly enough, a difficulty in understanding the predicament of man: the original or ancestral sin, from the moment that I knew what I should call it, seemed perfectly obvious to me and seemed to be proved daily and throughout all of history. What had not yet made sense to me was how the Incarnation delivered man from his predicament. Catholic theology might have had a plausible explanation, but I had already begun reading Orthodox theology and found the answer there. Then once I had found the answer in Orthodoxy, which on comparison then seemed the most coherent and the most Traditional, the alternatives did not seem at all compelling.

Reinforced by my studies of theology and church history in college, which centered more and more on Orthodox and Byzantine subjects, it was simply a matter of time before I did finally convert (though at the time it sometimes seemed as if my stubborn will would never yield), which I did three years on the Eve of Theophany (Old Style) in the church of St. Juliana of Lazarevo in Santa Fe (a rather appropriately named place for it, if I do say so myself). So, I’m sorry to disappoint, but I was never an evangelical and so, for the record, I am not now an ex-evangelical. I apologise if I somehow gave anyone that impression.

In some ways the lack of any evangelical, mainline Protestant or Catholic interlude made embracing Orthodoxy much easier, and it also made Orthodoxy seem not like some exotic alternative but as the original and authentic Christianity that Orthodoxy seems to me to be and that the Orthodox Church claims to possess.