Declared Non-Combatant: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Culture Wars

I'm always at something of a loss for the correct way to start a new project, especially one (like this one) which has the potential to be looked over by other people. Should I plunge in without an introduction? Risk boring people with an intro post full of cute sayings and pithy details? Should the tone I take be lighthearted, cynical, pontifical?

In the end, I guess I have to start somewhere. So (though I'll do my best to avoid the cute sayings and pithy details) I can't really avoid making an "intro post"; and given the name and (hopefully) the general concept of this blog, I suppose the best way to begin is at the beginning.

Bear with me.

Declared Non-Combatant: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Culture Wars

Some people I know seem to have been born non-combatants. Raised in non-combatant families, schooled in the regular way without battles over textbooks or teachers, they grew up to be nice, normal people who find phrases like "war on Christmas", "threat to traditional marriage" and so on vaguely distasteful if not outright ridiculous. Most of them know of "the Culture Wars" only peripherally; the aforementioned being waged largely by people with whom they are genially and happily unconnected.

I was not born a non-com -- just the opposite, in fact. I was raised and schooled to be a frontline soldier in the Culture Wars. It was my destiny -- my duty -- to fight the good fight for Creation Science* in schools, Biblical literacy* in pulpits, Traditional Marriage and Christmas and everything else. I was going to be On Fire For God, I was going to push for revival and the triumph of our Traditionally Christian Nation*. This was what my church leaders and (to a lesser and more complicated degree) my parents expected of myself and my same-age peers; this is what we were trained up to expect from ourselves and from each other. For a long time, this was the identity I was happy to have; I wanted to be part of the battle of hearts and minds being waged in America.

That was what I told myself, anyway. The truth is that I was always miserable at the prospect of confronting strangers with the intent of converting them to my way of thinking. I didn't really care what opinion other people had on things like the age of the earth -- except that I had been trained, rigorously and thoroughly, to believe that I had to care to be a good Christian. So I stifled my feelings, locked them down behind my armor, and went about the business of prepping myself for a lifetime of front-line service in the Culture War.

And then a lot of things happened. The first was that I went to college. I started actually interacting with the things I had been trained to fight against. I started reading scholarly texts on things like Biblical composition and the age of the planet. I made friends with atheists and pagans, Catholics and agnostics and Protestants of other traditions; and I found that they were really just other human beings. Not my enemies. That while they had different ideas than I did on a range of subjects, they did not hold them because they wanted to destroy my ideas -- they were, in fact, more than willing to listen to me as long as I offered a little reciprocity.

I discovered that I liked listening.

I discovered that I could listen, converse, disagree, and that I could do these things without trying to strongarm them into agreeing with me -- and more, I discovered that I could do all this without sacrificing my own faith or my own opinions. I could think that someone was wrong -- and if they walked away from the conversation still being wrong? That didn't mean I had failed.

I discovered, in other words, that most of the world has no interest in fighting according to the rules of engagement I had been trained to follow.

The other major change that occurred during my college years was a religious one. After years of being deeply drawn to Catholic faith and practice, I finally started attending Mass on a regular basis. For about a year I did double-duty; I went to early service at the Culture Warring church I'd been raised in, then slipped out the back in time to make the late Mass at the campus parish. Then, gradually, I stopped attending "my" church and started simply attending Mass. Mass was where I was comfortable, where I really felt spiritually fed and fulfilled. And, significantly, in my new home parish I found a community of strong, deeply loving and committed Christian people who, like the people I'd met and made friends with on campus, were not interested in being Culture War combatants**.

Between these two influences -- the University and the Church -- I gradually came to understand that changing one's mind is not automatically a negative trait, and that it did not make me a bad person or a bad Christian if I chose not to take the hardline culture-warring viewpoint I had been drilled in since childhood. I turned my back on the culture war I had been reared to fight. I finally felt free to admit that other things -- social justice being a big one -- held far more interest for me than whether the mall put up Happy Holidays banners or not.

By the time I fully converted to Catholicism in the spring of my last year of college, I had become a declared non-combatant; and here I am.

I feel it only fair to get this out of the way right up front: I did not switch sides in this fight. I decided to stop fighting altogether. I consider myself a moderate politically, socially, and religiously, which means I often end up holding a position that ticks off both sides in the culture wars. This blog may involve my holding forth on What Fundamentalism Failed to Teach Me, but it may also wander into Why the Culture Warriors Might Have A Point About X. Being a non-com means living in the DMZ, and this blog is largely my tool for picking through that minefield, examining the preconceived notions left me by my martial upbringing, and holding up any shiny bit of battlefield junk that catches my eye for your common perusal.

If that sort of thing sounds interesting, then by all means join me.

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* I know these phrases do not mean what they seem to mean, and that is most likely going to be the subject of a future post or posts, but for now let's assume that when I use the terminology employed by those on either side of the CWs, I do so without necessarily embracing and/or rejecting it unless otherwise noted. Fair enough?

** Again, the broader question of the role American Catholics and American Catholicism play in the Culture Wars is more complex than I have space to get into here. Another time, perhaps.