Why I came back around to repentance

During times of turbulence in politics, culture, and religious life, it’s tempting to hold tightly to current convictions. Allowing a change of one’s mind or heart can be difficult work. With this in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939, in which we ask leading thinkers to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, and hopes as they address the topic, “How my mind has changed.” This essay is the 13th in the new series.

As skepticism goes, I’m kind of a late bloomer. My twenties, which tracked exactly with the first decade of the 21st century, were an experiment in holding on to certainty long after my peers had, as a matter of shared quarter-life crisis, let it go. The times are never lacking in turbulence, and our particular turbulence was Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an economic crash that shook the country to its core. Having grown up with a notion of God as an anchor in the time of storm and with a seeming front seat to the surely coming end times, I fancied my friends a foolhardy lot as they marched, I imagined, away from Jesus and toward debauched lives.

I wore dogma about the neck, literally spending most of college wearing a blue and white What Would Jesus Do lanyard with my keys on it. I was a walking billboard for Jesus freaks everywhere. At some point, the lanyard broke. I vaguely remember wondering as it fell to the ground whether this had some deeper spiritual meaning, whether I had, in some of my moral failings of late, become an unworthy ambassador for the faith. The most compassionate answer I can offer to myself is that dogma is a ready response to trauma. Dogma, especially the Christian brand, orders the world in a clear ledger of rules and rewards. It puts the puzzle together in a discernible image, undaunted by jagged and misshapen pieces.