The Form of Faith. James Prothero
and specifically the question of where everything came from and what was here before, beyond the known precincts of history.
I bring all this up because one of the first charges against Christian faith is that it is merely a cultural relic that Europeans and Euro-Americans slip into because they don’t know any better. But I can’t believe this; my experience is different. Don was taken to Sunday School where some teacher, a middle-class, white businessman with little education outside college, where he majored, no doubt, in business and thought of little else, tried to sell Don the Fundamentalist view of the first chapters of Genesis. Don, probably around seven at the time, argued passionately that the man hadn’t read his science, which was doubtlessly true. I don’t know what the man did. My guess is that he probably didn’t sign up for teaching Sunday School again. But for Don this was a supreme moment of self-definition. He slipped into no form of cultural Christianity. Instead he bucked. Sometime in high school, he and my mother came to an understanding, and except for weddings and funerals, he never attended church again. There was no pressure, no push from my parents to explain that all decent people are Christian, nor similar arguments. They believed no such thing. They felt no such cultural pressure, which was part of the reason why my Dad did not attend church. Don was allowed to believe what he believed. And this is the legacy of my parents that wasn’t quite so Ozzie and Harriet. I may have been exposed to the Evangelical Protestant world view, but the very air I breathed at home was the air of intellect and creativity.
My father, though he was by profession a technical artist, was a man of science; more precisely, he had the soul of an engineer. He had been raised in the faith, but he firmly believed that God was never threatened by the truth, and if there was a conflict between perceivable truth and what Christian teachers taught, those teachers had got it wrong. This fact for years kept him out of the Evangelical Presbyterian churches my mother preferred. Holding this inviolable dedication to truth may seem a very simple principle, but you can already see how this must have influenced my brother on that Sunday morning of his battle with the teacher. And it influenced all of us. It was a pole around which our world spun. Nor have I ever felt the slightest shame nor regret about having such a position in my own mind.
The second pole would be that though my mother was an Evangelical, and attended women’s Bible study almost every week of her adult life until dementia began to take her mind, she was also an artist. The visual arts were part of my growing up. There was never a time in my home when there wasn’t a room designated as an art studio. My father was a supervisor in the art and printing department of Lockheed Aircraft. By the time I reached college age, he was the manager of the department. He met my mother in 1950 or 1951 because she had some art training and was working there. In fact, she defied company policy and married her boss in 1952. Our house was always full of books and art and I grew up in that rich environment. My own tastes run to the impressionists and post-impressionists, but my parents were eclectic. I recall several abstract paintings hanging around the house, one of which was a print of a Wassily Kandinsky painting.
So as a Christian in America, I have often felt out of step with Evangelicals who believe that scientists lie and that art is immoral. I was raised to be anything but anti-intellectual and puritanical and I have never had much patience nor pity for either tendency. I was raised in a world where there was no conflict between science and Christ, science and truth, nor Christ and truth. And it was also a world where beauty and creativity were to be pursued, not to be ashamed of or limited to some form that inevitably had to do with hard-sell evangelism. Art was there because God, the Ultimate Artist, created it, and it was to be celebrated. And science was the act of discovery of all the things in nature that God has done. Neither were anything to be ashamed of or somehow limited in order to accommodate someone’s narrow reading of scripture.
Around the time I was five, my Dad was transferred to Sunnyvale, California, for almost two years. There my younger brother, John, was born. I have always gravitated to the visual arts like my father, but also inherited his love of literature. Indeed, all of us brothers have devoted our lives to one or more of my father’s wide interests. Donald embraced my Dad’s interest in science. John grew to become the photographer that most followed in my Dad’s footsteps with a camera. John also was the artist, but with his voice and has since sung with professional grade choral groups. Although my Dad was never a singer, his love of all the arts, and the world of art he created around us brothers as we grew up, made this possible for John. But the Sunnyvale adventure did not last long. My dad was transferred back to Lockheed Burbank and we returned to Glendale with baby John to a house in an area known as the Verdugo Woodlands.
So this was my world where from an early age, I became well-acquainted with the stories and the content of the Bible through my mother and through my church. Fortunately for me, I never had the Sunday School teacher tell me that the earth was created in six days, something that would have made me uncomfortable. Like Don, I would have felt the need to correct the teacher, but however I lacked Don’s confidence to speak up. I got to know first the Sunday School Jesus. He was white, and had kindly eyes with a slight smile in all the art I saw. I have always been visual, so this was vital to my perceptions from the beginning. Also what was interesting from the beginning is that I felt a distrust for the images from the start. I lived a life fairly insulated from black, brown and red America, but I instinctively felt they were out there. So how did I begin to suspect that the safe, white, Evangelical, middle class world wasn’t everything? Perhaps it was the genial children’s television host, Captain Kangaroo, who did much to educate my young mind, (and to whom I am eternally grateful) who made a point of showing videos made of picture books that featured children of many races. And being the reader I was with access to Bibles—there were probably fifteen of them laying around the house at any given time—I read not only the passages where Christ was loving and reassuring, but the passages where he was severe, of which we heard less at Sunday School. And though I was too young to express it, I sensed even then that there was more than the world I saw and knew, and more than just the sweet and friendly Sunday School Jesus. Perhaps it was little hints in Sunday School songs like, “Red and yellow, black and white/ They are precious in His sight/ Jesus loves the little children of the world.” And why should this Jesus, who lived in the Middle East, look white? After all, wouldn’t Jesus look more like an Arab? My father’s endless supply of National Geographics had given me a visual clue what Middle Eastern people looked like. I wondered.
One thing Captain Kangaroo accomplished with me was to make me a researcher long before I knew what that was. I recall as a young boy discussing my “favorite subject” with my friends. I found myself surprised that I was one of the few that had a subject upon which I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and that this subject changed from time to time and that I considered that normal behavior. My parents surrounded me with books, but the Captain gave me my love of literacy, and the love of the intellectual and literary pleasures of exploring the world on the pages of a book. Of course, my parents knew what they were doing and were happy to park me in front of the television if the Captain was on. They did not allow me to watch just anything, but the Captain was a recognized blessing and I ate it up with my brothers, who were likewise bookish and born researchers. If there were any conflicts with my parents over television it was my love of Warner Brothers cartoons, Jay Ward cartoons and Tom and Jerry. But my folks needn’t have worried. From the wise creators of Bugs Bunny, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Tom and Jerry, I learned irony and just how odd the world is, and how laughter is pretty much the only thing one can sanely do with what life hands us. It gave me my love of irony which my students since have often remarked on.
So the ink line and watercolor Jesus of the Sunday School materials was the first thing I experienced in Christianity. The one other thing was that my mother rose early every morning and read her Bible and said prayers in the holy stillness of first light. I still do so to this day.
Two: Summer Camp and Finding Another World
Small service is true service while it lasts;
Of Friends, however humble, scorn not one:
—“Yarrow Revisited”, William Wordsworth
There were many other events in my young life that I would include if this were a pure autobiography. I had a few startling and generational memories, my own private Forest