Accommodationist and Proud of It, Part II: A Christian Childhood

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Today's entry was written by Michael Ruse. Michael Ruse is an author and philosopher of biology well known for his works on the creationism and evolution debate. Though not a believer in God, he takes the position that Christianity and evolution are not incompatible. Ruse's latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, published by Cambridge University Press, argues against the extremes of both creationism and "new atheism".

Intro: This blog is the second entry in a series of excerpts from a recent autobiographical article by Michael Ruse. The article in its entirety will later be posted among our Scholarly Articles, and Ruse’s first post can be found here. In the excerpt below, Ruse describes the Christian community of his childhood with “nothing but gratitude and fond memories.” Later in his essay, Ruse also describes the uneventful fading away of his faith during his twenties. A few discussion questions are included below the excerpts. For a video interview on a similar topic, visit CPX.

Part 2: A Christian Childhood

So let me start at the beginning. I was born in England in the Midlands at the beginning of the Second World War (1940), and grew up in a lower-middle-class family. My father was a conscientious objector during the war (he had been a communist before the war and went to Spain to fight, although I don’t think he ever did).

After the war he worked for the government as a transport officer. After the war, my mother returned to school teaching, when the government for the first time allowed married women into the classrooms. Also after the war, my parents joined the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers.

It has been a long time since I had anything to do with the organization, but I do know that many American Friends are fairly agnostic on the God business. Let me say unequivocally that back then in England this was not the case at all. Quakers did believe in God and believed also that Jesus was his son.

Quakers have never been big on the Bible, in the sense of sola scriptura like most Protestants after the Reformation. They have always placed much more of an emphasis on the Holy Ghost and its workings – the Inner Light and that of God in every person. So I can’t tell you a lot about the theology. But my guess is that the emphasis (as I believe was also true of the Church of England at that time) was more on the Incarnation than the Atonement.

In other words, Jesus was seen as God coming down to be with us, rather than as a sacrificial lamb whose death made possible eternal life. Not that there was no belief in eternal life. It was just that a blood price was not part of the theology. As you probably know, Quakers do not have a communion service nor do they made a special thing of Easter (or Christmas for that matter) – although they are not stuffy about this, and we certainly celebrated Christmas at home and had Easter eggs in the spring and all of that sort of thing.

Quakerism is very much a middle-class sort of religion and in our meeting and the larger group to which we belonged (technically, the Birmingham Monthly Meeting) there were large numbers of schoolteachers and the like. The care and education of the children in the group was taken as a sacred duty and I was duly enrolled in “Junior Young Friends” and would go (from a very early age) to Birmingham once a month to join in discussions and so forth. There were also weekends at conference centers and summer camps at Quaker boarding schools.

We may not have done much Bible study, but we sure did a lot of discussing of morals and society and that sort of thing. Not, I should say, in an American evangelical sort of way that is focusing on sex and personal purity and so forth, but on larger issues. Quakers are pacifists and after the war against Hitler and the Nazis it was by no means obvious that pacifism was a moral stand. So we discussed these sorts of issues in detail.

I should say that although Quakers taken overall are about as far from biblical literalists as it is possible to be, my memory is that we took the Sermon on the Mount in a very literal fashion. I remember many years later reading a book that explained that the Sermon was almost certainly not given on one single occasion and was put together by the followers of Peter to stake out a theological position. I found this deeply upsetting! You will learn that although I am a not a believer I am a very conservative non-believer.

The one thing I do want to emphasize, and this is very important for my present story, is that the whole atmosphere – family, friends, co-religionists – was deeply loving and supportive, taking seriously the intellectual things of life but putting everything in a context of self worth and care for others. I can truly say that this has lasted me all of my life. I have nothing but gratitude and fond memories.

This is probably reinforced by the fact that just as I was entering adolescence, at time when I might have started to question and break away – because that is what adolescents do, and we were certainly encouraged to think for ourselves – my mother died suddenly. Without getting too heavy-handed on the psychology, I suspect that this reinforces my positive feelings about my childhood and no doubt Photoshops a lot of the blemishes. Causes real or apparent, the feelings today are very positive.

The excerpt below is taken from a later section of Ruse’s autobiographical essay.

Let me say a little more on the topic. Childhood Christianity just faded away in my early twenties. There wasn’t any kind of Road to Damascus experience in reverse, nor was it a direct function of taking up philosophy. I didn’t read David Hume and become an instant skeptic. It was rather like baked beans and stamp collecting, two other things I had been passionate about as a child. The feelings and beliefs just went. They have never returned.

I thought perhaps that as I got older, I might start believing again. I cannot honestly say that if I were on a hijacked plane I would not start praying again, but I find actually that a gentle skepticism is really very comforting as I move into old age. For some strange reason, my non-existent God has always been a bit of a Presbyterian – the kind who created the earth and its denizens and then regretted it mightily. I suspect that this may be bound up with a loathing for my boarding-school headmaster. If you were not one of the chosen – good at games or well connected – he was cruel in his indifference. Calvinists know all about this.

Ruse's series continues here.

Discussion Question: In this post, Ruse explains that his childhood faith “just faded away in [his] early twenties.” In situations like this, is the Christian academic community to blame in any way? Do we not provide interesting and engaging questions to counter the great questions being posed by the secular world? Should BioLogos make a particular effort to show that Christianity can engage those big questions in an academically respectable way?