Leaving my Brain at the Door: an Evangelical Homecoming

Back in the early aughts, when I led a youth group and served on the Vestry at All Saints Pasadena, we repeated a line often mistakenly attributed to Robin Williams: “Being Episcopalian means we don’t have to check our brains at the door.” (If you do a Google search for that phrase, you’ll see that many Episcopal parishes use it proudly on their websites.)

It is a smug and sneering phrase, because it invites the congregant to consider himself so very fortunate to not be somewhere else. How lovely not to have to share a pew with the unwashed, the bigoted, and the anti-intellectual! How lovely to be around the like-minded, the sort of thoughtful, discerning people who want a religion entirely compatible with modernity. To be fair, the crack about not checking one’s brains at the door is not just a contemporary snideness – it refers to the founding impulse of Anglicanism. The first great systematizer of the Anglican Church (known as the Episcopal Church here in the States) was the Elizabethan scholar Richard Hooker, who preached that Reason and Tradition were co-equal with Scripture when it came to discerning God’s will. Hooker called it the “three-legged stool,” and suggested it was a sturdy foundation indeed. A little later, John Wesley – founder of the Methodist tradition – would add in “Experience,” giving us the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, usually identified with the acronym REST.

See, I’m starting to give a lecture already. It comes so naturally after so long.

I have a PhD in medieval religion, with a minor field in scholastic philosophy. I taught a course in American Religious History at Pasadena City College. Raised by atheist parents, I was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic at 19 – and soon wandered to the Assemblies of God, the Episcopalians, the Mennonites, the Kabbalah Centre, and Chabad. I stayed at some of these longer than other, and at everywhere except the last, ended up in leadership. Polite, articulate, curious, urbane, self-deprecating white men eager to volunteer? They rise very fast, and invariably find themselves teaching something they aren’t sure they believe. It never ends well.

Heloise has started going to church. For her birthday last month, she asked her parents and her brother to go with her to a service. My first-born has joined a multi-ethnic non-denominational ministry in the heart of Koreatown. The rapidly growing congregation rents a fine old church building on Wilshire, a structure vaguely Romanesque in style. The services run exactly eighty minutes – of which the first forty is praise music. If you aren’t familiar with modern worship music, the basic idea is that the songs are designed to be very easy to sing, with simple, stirring, repetitive chord progressions. If you have Spotify or another music service, look up Elevation Worship, or Bethel Music, or the durable masters of the genre, Hillsong.

It's easy to mock, but anything young people do with guilelessness and passion is easy to mock.

When we walked into the service, I noticed seven words projected onto a huge screen: “Until all of Los Angeles is Saved.” Teacher brain kicked in: “Saved to what? From what? And once all are saved, then what?” The questions are reflexive, coming from a mind that has marinated in and around graduate level theology and practical ministry for decades. I thought about asking my daughter or her friends those questions, and I wondered why on earth I would want to do that. To inculcate doubt and suspicion? I’ve marinated in doubt all my life, and where has it gotten me?

Allow an old man to boast: I can still stumble (barely) through the koine Greek of the New Testament. I know how to talk comparative soteriologies. The night before we went to church, I poked around online – and quickly found that while my daughter’s new spiritual home is nondenominational, their statement of faith is lifted straight from Assemblies of God. Good old AG! I know them well too, one of my many stops along my very circuitous route towards the mountaintop. My third wife had run a chapter of AG’s campus ministry, known as Chi Alpha, where one could get “slain in the spirit” before getting back to studying for an organic chemistry exam. I’ve never been, in fact, slain in the spirit – the dramatic and sudden experience of being overcome by the power of God in the midst of communal worship, often signified by falling down or fainting. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. At AG, I’ve heard people speak in tongues, and I’ve sat quietly as a child prophesied nearby, holding a congregation transfixed.

As I drove to meet my own kids and their mother the morning of the service, I thought about trying to explain to my daughter more about the faith that she has found. Perhaps she’d like to hear about the distinction between “Finished Work” and “Holiness” Pentecostals -- and what that division means in terms of the understanding of sin and sanctification. Would she like to know of the particular history Los Angeles itself played in the modern Pentecostal Movement? A quick summary of the Azusa Street Revival? The lecture writes itself in my head. It would be engaging and captivating, I imagine.

It would not be helpful. It would shed a small and dim light, but no heat. And sometimes, we don’t need to see as much as we need to be warm.

In church itself, through the third praise song, I raised both hands over my head, palms to the heavens. My son looked at me, astonished at his father’s adoption of the signature Pentecostal posture, and I smiled at him. Then I started to cry. Maybe it was just the dang chord progression from the praise band. Maybe it was just emotion I’ve held back, pain looking for an acceptable outlet. Maybe it was muscle memory from countless Sundays years ago. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit.

When one has a brain that never shuts down, one very much wishes to go somewhere and leave the damned thing at the door. I do not want my church services characterized by carefully constructed intellectual arguments. If I’m going to go, I want to feel the Holy Spirit in the room. I want undignified displays of emotion, I want hypnotic repetitions, I want to be reminded less of my obligations to the world and more of the simple and remarkable truth that I am forgiven, and that I am seen for my worst and somehow loved anyway. It is the brain that tells me I am wicked and irredeemable; it is the brain that observes and mocks; it is the brain that keeps up a savage running commentary; it is the brain that is always quick with an anecdote or a shrewd observation or a well-chosen quote; it is the brain that leaves me isolated, despairing, self-loathing, and alone.

If I’m gonna skip a hike, or the gym, on a Sunday morning? It will need to be not to hear a message, but to feel one. It will be to experience not a cognitive epiphany above my ears but a convicting in my chest. And with all respect to the ancient rites and hymns of the more sedate and reflective liturgical churches, if I want that conviction in my chest I will need to go be with the Gen Zers with electric guitars and pricey sneakers. I will need to leave my brain, my disdain, my suspicion, and my all of my intellectual training at the door. I will need to go where I can weep.