Thursday, December 2, 2010

Are you a Christian? And what does Yoga have to do with it.

Are you a Christian?

This is a question my family and I are often confronted with living in Knoxville, TN, what some call the “buckle of the Bible belt.”

It is also a question to which -- however I answer -- sometimes I am telling the truth and I am also at the same time lying.

Four years ago, when we were new in town, I was dumbfounded when a teenager at a doctor’s waiting room was immediately attracted to our family and came to play with the boys, then about 4 and 2, but caught herself and asked, “Wait – are you Christians?” I told her we were and she immediately relaxed and continued to be cute with them. I couldn’t help wonder what she would have done if I had said no. Would she have turned around and gone back to her chair and ignored us for the rest of the time? Perhaps she would have tried to sit next to me and share “the Good News.”

About two years ago I had taken the boys to a play date at a water park in Powell. When the play date was over, our friends left a few minutes before us. An attractive young woman dressed in a nice sweater and a long skirt approached me with a smile. I smiled back. You see, where I grew up and in the two communities in the United States where I have lived (the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Davenport, IA) such an attire is often a sign of an open mind. Come to find out, in Tennessee, it often is a sign of belonging to a fundamentalist church where wearing pants or showing one’s calves are considered sins.

Soon after the conversation started I could tell she was a fanatic and started hurrying up picking up our things so we could leave. When she asked me if I was a Christian, this time I told her no, grabbed the children’s hands and started walking towards the parking lot. She followed us to the car, leaving her own children unsupervised in the playground, and tried to push pamphlets into my hands, while she asked one question after another, without giving me a chance to answer: Do you believe in God? Do you believe Jesus is God? Do your believe Jesus died in the cross for your sins? and on and on. Once I had the boys safely buckled in the car I told her to step back and leave us alone in no uncertain terms.

So why did I answer “yes” to the same question four years ago and “no” a couple of years ago?

This is why: all my life I have believed that a Christian is a follower of Jesus, someone who agrees with the teachings of Jesus and does their best to live their life according to them. In this sense I have always been a Christian. In this sense many of the people I know who would not define themselves as Christians, really are Christians. In this sense, some of the people we have met in East Tennessee who claim to be Christians, really are not – they spread fear instead of love. Below is an example.

My husband, a chiropractor, had some lettering added to the back window of his car. It had the name of his practice, “Genesis Chiropractic,” the phone number and website and in Spanish “El Dr. Habla EspaƱol” (The Doctor Speaks Spanish). One day he had gone to the East side of town to pick up something and was coming back home the back way. Close to the Mall Center he noticed a car seemed to be following him. This went on for about twenty minutes, all the way to our home. An irate woman parked on our driveway, right behind his car. She got out and started screaming at him. First, of course, she asked him if he was a Christian, to which he answered “yes.” She made a comment as to wanting to make sure he had the right to call his practice Genesis. Then she asked if he knew what he was doing with a message in Spanish: encouraging illegal immigrants to come to this country to take away the jobs from good American citizens who were Christian and law abiding. She said immigrants are criminals infested with illnesses that they are bringing to the US. Didn’t he read the news about Mexicans bringing leprosy into California? Her rage seemed to be focused on Hispanics. She must not have noticed my husband is Hispanic himself – he has a lighter complexion than most Latin people and, being born in the US, he has no accent.

There was also the family in Halls who defined themselves as our “best friends” but stopped talking to us when they learned that the church we attended (TVUUC) welcomed gay people. Or the man at the gym that never greeted us again after we had a conversation about liberal Christianity.

Soon after we moved to Knoxville we learned the definition of “Christian” here can encompass many things, and that unfortunately often those who define themselves as Christians are people who affirm to take the Bible literally, yet focus only on  passages that, artfully taken out of context, seem to support their world view, which is extremely right wing, misogynistic and racist. These people may say that they believe in Jesus Christ, but their behavior is far removed from the teachings of Jesus.

So this is why when people in East Tennessee ask me if I am a Christian, there is no easy answer to this question. If I say that I am a Christian – will the person assume that I am a judgmental person whose only motivation to try to be good is the fear of hell? Or someone who justifies their lack of goodness in the fact that they only have “to believe” in order to be saved?

If I say I am not a Christian, will the other person assume that I do not believe in or follow the teachings of Jesus?

I feel at this point I should make a distinction between fundamentalist and evangelical. We have very good friends who are evangelical Christians. My own grandmother and a couple of my aunts ditched the traditional religion of Latin Americans, Catholicism, for evangelical Christianity. We respect each other’s views and guide our relationships from our hearts. They do not feel a need to impose their particular set of beliefs on us and are open to different views of the world.

You are probably wondering as to the word yoga in the title of this blog and where it comes in.

I have actually found a formula to figure out if there is potential for friendship with someone who defines themselves as a Christian in East Tennessee: I ask them how they feel about yoga.

If they tell me yoga is dangerous because it opens up the mind for sin, or that it comes from the devil, I know that it is very unlikely this person can build a friendship with us. As soon as they learn I do Feng Shui and Reiki, they would run the other way, or worse, try to “convert” me.

If the person is OK with yoga, I can tell they are open minded to goodness and wisdom that comes from other cultures and even other religions. This is a good sign.

Recently I was delighted to see the new billboards for an international Christian health and fitness organization, displaying a woman doing a yoga pose, in an area where some pastors are telling their congregations that if they do yoga they will go to hell. This gives me hope.