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“I Thought I Needed to Reproduce Emotional Experiences to Progress in My Faith”
Patton Dodd—The ninetyandnine.com
Interview
By Cara Davis
November 29, 2004
The stuff of
spiritual memoirs normally explains the process in which an author loses or
leaves the faith—whichever that faith tradition happens to be. But a new trend
in the genre emerges with authors who came back to the faith, or somewhere near
it.
Girl Meets God
(Algonquin Books) introduced us to Lauren Winner: a girl born to a secular
Jewish father and southern Baptist mother who turned to Christianity in her
teens, then to Orthodox Judaism in college then to Anglicanism (where she’s
found a home). Surely that history has given her enough fodder for more than one
spiritual memoir. She’s written two books since, but she’s not the only one.
Blue Like Jazz
(Nelson Books) by Donald Miller has become a word-of-mouth favorite among
postmodern twentysomethings who have their doubts about religion but like the
idea of Jesus (to put it mildly). His second book, Searching for God Knows
What, was released this fall.
First-time author
Patton Dodd has contributed to the genre with My Faith So Far: A Story of
Conversion and Confusion (Jossey-Bass). But this time, the focus is turned
on the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement.
Dodd is currently
a doctoral student in religion and literature at Boston University and a
contributing editor to Killing the Buddha. He grew up Southern Baptist,
delved into drugs during his teen years and at age 18, adopted a religious
fervor in a Charismatic church. He enrolled in Oral Roberts University (ORU) in
Tulsa, Okla., and doubts started to creep in. Doubts and questions his religious
experience couldn’t answer.
As his book released in early November,
ninetyandnine.com spoke with Dodd about his experiences.
90&9: Why did you write this book?
PD:
I ask myself this question
all the time! Some religion scholars say that Americans have a confessional
impulse, and I suppose I’m an instance of that. But actually, I didn’t feel I
needed to get things off my chest as much as I felt I needed to survey the mess,
organize it, inspect it. Having done this, I feel like I can see my beliefs more
clearly, and reject what I need to reject and retain what I need to retain.
Just as
pertinently, in the sense that writing always comes from reading, a couple years
ago I was reading all the big hot memoirs—Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Anne
Lamott, et al. So I had memoirs on the brain.
90&9:
Who is your ideal reader for this book?
PD:
Anyone who has had any experience in evangelicalism will find something to
relate to. But more specifically, I guess the short answer is “people like me.”
Which is to say: bewildered evangelicals or ex-evangelicals. Christians who feel
at odds with their culture or faith tradition but want to resist abject
cynicism, on the one hand, and mindless capitulation on the other. The ultimate
score would be the reader who has walked away from everything religious, and
then through reading this book was challenged to reconsider.
90&9: What was the faith background in which you grew up?
PD:
Southern Baptist. Happily
so for the most part, but some time in high school I stopped attending church in
favor of other extracurricular activities. Like, say, pot. But I always
considered myself a Christian until around my senior year of high school. When
my sister starting dragging me to a new church, I quickly saw that there was a
great deal of Christianity that I had left very, very far behind.
90&9: What turned you on to Charismatic/Pentecostalism?
PD:
The life of the thing. The
robust, eager, high-pitched
“this-is-God-and-this-is-you-and-this-is-what-needs-to-change-in-you” aspect was
really appealing to me. God was at once bigger than I had ever conceived of Him
and yet much more personal that I thought He could be. That phenomenal paradox
was gorgeous to me. I understood it and felt the power of it. It made me dance,
and I’m no dancer.
Charismatic
Christianity also gave me a praxis. Suddenly, I knew how to read the Bible, how
to pray, how to worship, how to associate with fellow believers. Those practices
were sharply defined, and as a young believer it helped to have spiritual
disciplines that I could follow without much training. Even as I grew confused
about those practices, they still gave me a useful framework.
90&9: What turned you off to it?
PD:
Well, I’m not really “off”
it, but from pretty early on I was at odds with the culture of Charismatic
Christianity. I found it stultifying. Epistemologically, it was a very narrow
groove and not nuanced enough to handle much in the way of ambiguity and
perplexity. Plus, it was emotionally reckless. Like lots of Christians of all
stripes, for a while I thought that I needed to reproduce emotional experiences
to feel like I was making any progress in my faith, and some of the churches I
attended in college encouraged that notion instead of challenging it—which I
certainly wasn’t wise enough to do myself.
Also, because my
Southern Baptist-ness was not fully ingrained, at least in terms of a working
theology, I had no way of appropriating and contextualizing the things that
happened to me when I got to ORU. I’ve always suspected that had I just stayed
at my home church—the Charismatic megachurch that bookends the memoir—I might
have had time to develop a mentality that would have enabled me to think through
the frustrating aspects of the culture. I mean, my church was definitely
Charismatic, but it always managed to resist and/or offer a corrective for many
of the problems in Charismatic culture. ORU, in my experience, was such a full,
unmediated expression of that culture. I was such a young Christian at the time
that I didn’t know how to do anything but believe. I thought I had to believe
every single thing uttered from the pulpit, and if I didn’t, I was in trouble.
That’s a dangerous place to be.
90&9: What questions or observations did you have/or
not have that the culture of Charismatic Christianity didn’t allow room for?
PD:
Frankly, it was very basic
stuff. How do we honestly evaluate and critique our own religious experiences?
How can we say that all parts of the Bible are equally inspired? How do we
account for its apparent flaws and inconsistencies? If our Charismatic
experience of God is genuine and biblical, why don’t we see more evidence of it
throughout the history of the church? You know—the usual catalogue of questions
that Christians ask. Questions of theodicy, Christian history, biblical
reliability, personal experience. I did find reflective Charismatic people at
church and at ORU, but even so, it was hard to get much traction in dealing with
these questions. The answers we offered one another were often prepackaged
absolutes or nuggets gleaned from apologetics, and they weren’t satisfying in
the way I thought they needed to be. Plus, I was not very patient. I wanted
immediate insight, and I wasn’t going to stick around and wait for it to come to
me.
Several years passed before I finally had
a Christian pastor—a non-Charismatic—who said to me, “Look, I’m not going to try
to answer your questions or pray that you’ll stop asking them. I’m just going to
pray that God gives you endurance during the struggle, and I’ll walk with you
along the way.” That was liberating. I had a Charismatic pastor say the same
thing later, but for a while I thought I needed to leave the Charismatic fold to
hear things like that. Did I? Probably not. I’ve since learned that it’s often
better to work from within, to remain connected and still critical (in the
regenerative sense). But it was tough to do that at 20.
90&9:
Tell us about your first (or just an interesting) exposure to
speaking in tongues and the physical manifestation of the Spirit as seen in
services (dancing, shouting, etc.).
PD:
The first chapter of the
book recounts my initial experience with the baptism in the Holy Spirit. It was
an okay experience at the time, but it confused me later because the way it
happened gave me all sorts of reasons to question its authenticity. But I should
be clear—most of my Charismatic experiences were not like that. Save for the
occasional attempt to be slain in the spirit or something, my experiences of
speaking in tongues, ecstatic worship, etc. were powerful. Very real and
genuine. Especially in the early days. But as the years went by I had to admit
to myself that sometimes I was trying to recreate experiences, and I felt I was
being encouraged to do so.
The most powerful
encounter I ever had is something I won’t talk about in a public way. But let it
suffice to say that there was one night when I believe God healed me of some
deep emotional or psychological scar. It was at a prayer service, and these two
men prayed for me about something I was really struggling with, and it simply
went away. For good. That was about 10 years ago, and I’ve always felt like God
took care of 10 years of counseling in one night.
90&9:
How do you feel your book will be received in Charismatic
circles?
PD: Well,
the book is not a tell-all of the horrors of Charismatic culture; it’s just a
story of confusions that inevitably arise for some evangelicals and Charismatics.
In my experience, especially in recent years, most Charismatic Christians
understand that not all Christians are on the same page with them. And they
understand that sometimes their culture is off-putting and that certain kinds of
people get pushed aside. I think they’re saddened by that, and they know it’s an
ongoing problem, and hopefully they’ll see this book as part of a remedy.
90&9: How would you “label” your current faith?
PD:
This will come as no
surprise to anyone who is at all in touch with trends among young religious
people, but at the moment I’d say I’m a schizophrenic Christian in search of
orthodoxy. I’m an evangelical by virtue of my past and the basic structures of
my belief, but I’m not entirely comfortable there. As the book makes clear, I’m
not comfortable rejecting it either. I’m middled.
90&9:
Where do you attend church now?
PD:
Park Street Church in
Boston, Mass.
90&9:
Are you married? Kids?
PD:
My wife Michaela and I have
an 18-month-old daughter, Isabel.
90&9:
What does your family think about your book?
PD:
They’ll let me know after
they read it! My immediate family has read chapters here and there and always
have kind things to say. The book isn’t a tell-all about my family; in fact, I
hope it honors them.
90&9:
What profession are you in?
PD:
I work as a professional
writer and editor and teach composition. I am a doctoral candidate in religion
and literature at Boston University.
90&9:
Describe killingthebuddha.com for readers who are unfamiliar with
it.
PD:
As the site’s manifesto
proclaims, it’s a religion webzine for the
non-religious. That’s a pithy way of saying that it’s a site about the
breadth and depth of religion in American life, and
that the bulk of its readership is presumably
non-religious. Though I am religious, I was drawn
to the site as a reader because it offered such a
unique, open appraisal of religious
experience—sometimes kind, sometimes tough. KtB has a wide range
of focus, from traditional religion to marginal
spiritualities, and, again,
though the posture is often critical, the site has given me and
other writers space to explore our own questions from within our traditions.
90&9: What are your future plans
for writing? Are you currently speaking to promote the book?
PD:
Well, first I have a
dissertation to write. And I’m working on a couple different ideas for another
book. But in the meantime, I plan to continue writing as I have
been—contributing articles to various magazines and websites. As for speaking, I
may be planning events in Tulsa, Colorado, and Boston in the coming months.
Perhaps others.
90&9:
What’s your dissertation topic?
PD:
It is still inchoate, but it will have something to
do with the Bible in American culture.
Broadly, I’m interested in the ways in which the notion of
the Bible’s inerrancy was foregrounded in the 19th
century, so that the Bible was useful only
insofar as it could be proven to be a
rationalistically reliable document. Then, I want to see how that issue and
other issues related to conservative Christianity are
represented in American literature and film,
from Moby Dick to Pulp Fiction. Basically, I'm
surveying American literature and film and looking
for references to the
Bible and seeing what kind of interpretive work needs to be done.
ninetyandnine.com
© 2004, Cara Davis
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Cara Davis
is the associate editor of ninetyandnine.com.
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