I didn’t exactly hide the reputation of Reed College from my parents when I was doing college applications, per se. I just emphasized certain aspects of its reputation more than others. To be fair, Reed didn’t make it easy on me. The day that I called my parents to tell them that I had made my decision, the news broke that a Reed student had died of a heroin overdose. I knew that my parents had a lot of confidence in me to make good decisions, but I also knew better than to emphasize its eternal presence on the “Students Ignore God On A Regular Basis” list or its toleration of experimentation to my conservative Christian parents. Imagine my surprise, then, when my mother told me that all of her friends had already heard of Reed College through Christian writer Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.
In theory, this should have been the perfect book for me. I grew up in the church, but unlike myriad other gays that grew up in the church, I don’t hate it, and I don’t hate Christians. I like most Christian people, and still consider the people in the church that I grew up in part of my family, even though I think very differently than I do now. It’s one of life’s little ironies that all of the Christian education that I went through as a child worked. I carry the Bible in my heart exactly like they wanted; I can no more divorce it from my psyche than change the color of my eyes. I am comfortable with that, my problems with Christianity rarely lay in the Bible. I left the church because once I left for school I was confronted with people that made lifestyle choices and thought in ways that the church had always said would lead to immorality, and found that I could not condemn them. Once I realized that I was learning more about universal love and acceptance in a dead secular academic environment than in church, I had to leave.
That is a story that would be extremely familiar to Donald Miller. His story parallels my own, except where I left the church Donald went on an epic road trip to the Cascades and found Jesus again. This book is a collection of essays written mostly after that road trip when he first moved to Portland, Oregon and started attending church in Portland and auditing classes at Reed College.
I liked most of the book. He has a belief about the need for churches to begin again to orient themselves toward serving the poor, the homeless and the sinners than being clubs for the “righteous” that I think is absolutely true. It’s worth remembering that for most people throughout history, the church was their social security; it ensured that there were people that would help you if you fell on hard times. Like me, Miller sees almost no resemblance between the American Evangelical church and the movement that Jesus founded. He also sees the politicized church’s mobilization against gay rights and liberal and progressive politics as potentially contrary to the spirit of Jesus. He writes honestly and from the heart, and some of what he writes is genuinely and truely moving.
And yet, there were some things that I found a little troubling. Miller writes in a loose, self-consciously ironic style filled with short, idiosyncratic sentences punctuated by non sequiters. I found it endearing at first, but then found it annoying, and later yet, confusing. Put bluntly, I worried that not only were they “Non-religious Thoughts” but “Non-religious Non-Thoughts.” I am still divided as to whether it is simply a rhetorical device or a crutch to hide behind in order to distance himself from his own ideas.
Even more than that, I occasionally found his lack of intellectual curiosity and ability to think in someone else’s shoes frustrating. The most egregious example is when he talks about his exploration of Buddhism through a Buddhist friend:
And then I started thinking about other religions. I wasn’t cheating on God or anything, I was just thinking about them… There were times I wished I was a Buddhist, that is, I wished I could believe that stuff was true, even though I didn’t know exactly what a Buddhist believed. I wondered what it would be like to rub some fat guy’s belly and suddenly be overtaken with good thoughts and disciplined actions and a new car.
This really bugged me. Either he studied Buddhism, and got nothing from it (I mean, I’m no expert on Buddhism but I would never think of “rubbing some fat guy’s belly” as the central tenant of the faith (also, it’s a little disrespectful for anyone, let alone a writer who admits that “to be a Christian you have to be a mystic”)) or he was afraid to seriously look at other religions because that might upset his faith. That’s an instinct that I see a lot in my Christian aquaintances that I have never understood. I remember one of the most uncomfortable moments ever of my church life was in a meeting in youth group before a Junior High School missions trip to a Navajo reservation. The trip leader was making fun of the Navajo belief in Skinwalkers and everybody was laughing along with him. I was drinking the Kool-Aid back then, but even then I found it hypocritcal for a man who wanted to tell the Navajos that they would burn for all eternity after death if they didn’t ask forgiveness from a man dead two thousand years.
You see it in the political arena too. It came up when I was arguing with my mom about parental notification about abortion. Personally, I find abortion to be absolutely horrific. I also recognize that there are circumstances where it can be necessary. I can certainly imagine a scenario in which an underaged woman would be in physical danger if her parents knew that she had the abortion, or even if she needed an abortion. That, for me, is enough. I was trying to explain my position to my mom, and told her that if you think that the only reason that your daughter is not having abortions left and right is because you have to be notified, something is already wrong. If the only reason that your marriage is working is that gays can’t get married, you have deeper problems. If the only reason you believe in Christ is that you are completely ignorant of other religions, your faith is not that strong.
More troubling to me is his allusion to his friendship with Mark Driscoll, one of the most loathsome people than I hope never to meet. This is Mark Driscoll:
I cannot express in words how little this young urbane bisexual male musician cares for the vision of Christianity that Driscoll projects. I can’t for the life of me understand what Miller sees in him. Here’s Driscoll again:
You have been told that God is a loving, gracious, merciful, kind, compassionate, wonderful, and good sky fairy who runs a day care in the sky and has a bucket of suckers for everyone because we’re all good people. That is a lie… God looks down and says ‘I hate you, you are my enemy, and I will crush you,’ and we say that is deserved, right and just, and then God says ‘Because of Jesus I will love you and forgive you.’ This is a miracle.
Putting aside how gross that statement is, it runs contrary to everything that Miller says in his book (except maybe the day care and the suckers).
Even with these reservations, I would definitely recommend giving it to some of my more closed minded Christian friends, to make them think if nothing more. I did a lot of internet research on the book before I bought it, and there were many positive and negative reviews. In the true spirit of Oscar Wilde, he had impeccable taste in enemies. Most of the negative reviews castigate him for not being harder on the pot smoking, gay, promiscous hippies. If that’s where the book is hitting them, they are already lost.
*A final note: This is really picky and not important, but the title really bugged me. It makes no sense. He compares the undefinable feeling of religious peace brought on by Jesus to the “soul” that helps jazz musicians find the right notes. That is bullshit. Jazz musicians play the right notes because they’ve practiced a lot and studied more to get there. He says “The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It’s a music born out of freedom.” Apart from being factually incorrect (about the timeline), jazz evolved becuase black musicians could not attend traditional music conservatories and schools in America. Whole generations of black musicians moved from classical music to jazz becuase they couldn’t make a living playing or writing European music. It is a music born from a response to discrimination, not freedom.
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