Relentless Mind and Searching Soul
Jason Blakely grew up in a middle-class family in a suburb of Denver. His father was a fierce critic of religion, though not an atheist. His mother was a practicing Catholic, but silent about her faith. Early on, he went to church but was less than enthusiastic.
He perceived many of the Christians around him as less sensitive to human loss and suffering than the secular progressives he knew (and he counted himself as among them) and less responsive to injustice.
Blakely, who is now an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, recently wrote an article in America Magazine called, “An Atheist’s Conversion.”
Among Millions
He was among the millions of young people – according to polling – who were active in their churches and synagogues until their teens but no longer attend. A few have changed religions, but many are no longer interested in religion or are atheists or agnostics.
Blakely’s conversion was tortured, marked by inner struggle, contradiction and the adoption, and eventual discard, of materialistic and fatalistic philosophies. Unlike the Christians he knew, “atheists had intellectual courage and spiritual strength,” he believed.
Meeting his future wife seems to have been the start of his change of mind and heart.
“I had always said marriage was an inauthentic convention of the bourgeois class,” he writes, but he came to ask the question, “Was there anything more beautiful than to promise to accompany someone to the vanishing point on the horizon of existence?”
That was then. But as students at UC Berkeley, he and his wife, Lindsay, “were having rolling discussions about marriage, our love, what it meant to live well. Christ came up more and more often in these discussions. Not some kind of moralism or dogma but as a beautiful person – as a person whose life resonated more and more as a story of what it meant to live well.”
Noblest Story Imaginable?
He began reading the Gospels, among other things, and saw that it is “the noblest story imaginable” and concluding that no human mind could have thought up something so beautiful.
“Christ’s biography in its four versions was absolutely shocking, baffling, unimaginably good. It took twists and turns no one could foresee. And inside the story was his stories. Strange parables about widows and mustard seeds, lost coins and lost sheep, wineskins and pearls, prodigal sons, rich men and servants.”
Blakely’s was a case of awakening to the Bible; at first, perhaps, simply as beautiful literature, but later seeing it as the Word of God in the words of humans.
Unfortunately, many young – and perhaps not so young – people – have what I view as a bias against anything biblical. And on one level, it’s understandable. It’s not easy reading, and fewer and fewer people nowadays read anything, let alone something written 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. “How can something that old have any relevance to my life?” they may ask.
Most Need Help
In my opinion, most of us need help to understand and value the Bible. That could be in the form of individual study, using materials written by biblical scholars, or a Bible study group that requires study of scholarly biblical literature.
The bottom line is that the search for God in the Christian tradition is very hard to conduct without reference to the Bible, especially the Christian Bible. It’s like trying to build a house without tools or trying to pay bills without money.
Writes the apostle Paul in his Second Letter to his sidekick, Timothy: “All Scripture is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching, for refuting error, for correction, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them to be holy.”
