Once upon a time I was talking with an atheist English teacher who believed in predestination. These are the kinds of conversations you have when you are a priest. Anyway, she said she didn’t believe in God or heaven or hell, but she believed in predestination. Obviously she had my attention.
We were talking about free will. An often-discussed binary in Christian circles is around predestination vs. free will. You’re supposed to pick one: Do people have free will, or are they destined for specific fates before they draw their first breath? As a constitutionally difficult person, I believe in both. But anyway, the atheist English teacher said that even though she didn’t believe in God, she believed in predestination – then she qualified it a bit: She said she didn’t think all things were decided ahead of time, but that people have far less free will than we think we do. Please say more, I said.
And then she woke me up by telling me things I had always known but never considered. She said when I was born, I was born in a specific neighborhood in a specific town in a specific country at a specific time, raised by people who speak a specific language and have specific beliefs – religious, political, economic, moral, – and specific cultural tastes and expectations, and who have placed within me in me very creation specific DNA that shapes what height I will be, what my skin and hair color will be, if I’ll keep that hair or lose it, if I’ll be thicker or thinner – all things that will affect how I experience the world, how the world experiences me, how people treat me, how society will perceive me. So much of my lifelong health propensities are decided before I ever get a choice about anything. I have no say in any of these things.
There is no free will involved in this very incomplete list. And all of these things affect the choices I have in my life. And let’s be clear they don’t just affect how I will make the choices I have to make in my life – they will affect which choices I am even given in my life. There is no standard set of circumstances into which every person is born. We are each born with our own set of limitations and benefits. They are never quite like anyone else’s. And they are not all equal in terms of how they are treated in any country. America is not excluded from that reality.
This is how an atheist can believe in predestination.
If life is a baseball game, I was born on third base.
I was raised to believe we live in a meritocracy. We don’t. I’m not saying this as an insult to our country, or because I’m angry or outraged or any of that. It’s a cold, simple statement of fact. Our system is not a meritocracy. The playing field is not level and never has been. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there trying to make it more level, trying to make it more meritocratic: but it is not now, nor has it ever truly been a meritocracy. Insisting otherwise is, with respect, an act of denial. I say that with respect, because I have been in this state of denial for most of my life.
I remember when former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to speak at my college. She stood tall and spoke clearly. In her opening sentences she declared, “America is the only country,” and then she rapped her fist on the podium and repeated emphatically, “the ONLY country to be founded on freedom!” I don’t mind admitting that I teared up – that staunch sonorous British voice speaking so passionately about our country. That’s right, Iron Lady! Tell these liberal coastal elites how it really is!
It’s a funny kind of freedom in which 20% of all the people in the country are enslaved. That’s one in every 5 people. It’s a strange kind of freedom in which only 6% of all people in the country are allowed to vote – as was the case at America’s founding – and for many many years after. The romantic notion of our country as a meritocracy is so attractive. I want to believe it even more than I want to believe that the Reds have a chance this year.
There is a spiritual sickness that is given room to germinate and spread within us when we live in denial – or worse, when we make denial essential to our love of something. I say that because saying America is not now and has never been a meritocracy elicits a visceral reaction – accusations that I must hate this country. If I call attention to the simple observable facts of our country’s history – how it has been structured in such a way that it has overwhelmingly benefited wealthy, property-owning cisgender heterosexual White Christian men such as myself, and has done so to the clear detriment of people who were not born into circumstances such as mine – I am accused of hating America.
Well, I love America. I love my country. I cannot really love anything or anybody if I only love them so long as I ignore large obvious truths of who they are and who they have been. That’s not love. That’s denial, and I want no part in it – not when it comes to loving my country. As James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
So our beloved country, like us, was born into a set of circumstances that has predestined much of where we have come today. 21st century America is no more a blank slate than I am. But my atheist English teacher friend stopped short of saying there is no free will. And again, I think she was right on. We do not have a blank slate, but we also are not puppets or automatons. We have choices about how we operate within the preset circumstances of our lives.
This, to me, is one of the many great gifts Jesus gives us in his life and ministry. If you want to talk about someone who understands deeply the complexities of both predestination and free will, look no further than our Lord Jesus. He is born with a very specific destiny – and he knows it. There are so many things over which he has no control. He is never under any illusions about that. Jesus is the master of knowing what he can control and what he can’t. Jesus spends no time defending the fairness of an unfair situation. He does not pretend at meritocracy either. Within his own predestined reality, Jesus chooses how he will act – what he will do with what circumstances he’s been given, and especially, how he will treat those that are placed in his life.
With whatever free will Jesus has, he chooses to love his neighbor. His love is the kind of love the author bell hooks describes, not as a warm gushy feeling or sentimental notion, but as the intentional, committed action of extending himself for the spiritual nourishment of others.
Some people who are born on third base think they hit a triple. And they will pretend it is fair and defend to the death the supposed fairness of the system that birthed them into a better situation than so many others. Jesus knows his privilege. Rather than wasting time issuing a denial, Jesus uses every precious breath in his body stewarding his privilege for the benefit, care, and spiritual nourishment of others. He does not kill to preserve his privilege: He dies extending his arms to draw the rest of us into what he’s been given.
