A Guest Post by Mike Wilhelm, Ph.D. Dr. Wilhelm is the senior chaplain at Cal Farley’s: a worldwide leader in the field of residential childcare for boys and girls, providing services at no cost to families. Mike is the director of the Iona Project and an alumnus of Faulkner University’s Great Books Honors College.
I had a young friend some years ago. I’ll call her Ellie. Ellie came to our residential childcare community as a young teen from a single parent home. Her mom was stressed trying to make ends meet and was noticeably unavailable to Ellie on an emotional level. Smiles, hugs, and mommie-daughter conversations were strangely absent. Mom seemed frozen. I’m not sure what childhood at home was like for Ellie. I’m not even sure if she was always safe, or perhaps at some point abused. Much of her childhood history remains a mystery. Whatever the case, Ellie was a smart girl, and she was able to make friends here on our campus. And I’m grateful to say that I became one of them.
One day in my office, we were having a good chat. But the conversation suddenly turned serious. In a moment of honest desperation, Ellie shook my soul with this troubling confession:
“Chaplain Wilhelm, I wish so bad I could believe in God, but I can’t!”
Her eyes flooded, and soon a few slow tears streaked down her bewildered face. Ellie’s tears revealed that her unbelief was not teenage rebellion. And unlike many compromising religious adults in her world, her lack of faith had nothing to do with the idolatry of convenience (that is, “being too busy for God”). Her confession was a desperate plea for help. Ellie simply did not have the capacity to believe in God, and she was heartbroken about it. I would describe her as being truly “tone-deaf to God.” Trying to persuade her to believe in God would be like trying to persuade a deaf man to hear an Italian opera: a cruel joke.
On the other hand, I’ve had some rough and tumble cowboy friends at our childcare setting over the years. These boys wouldn’t strike you as religious. They’ve been known to cuss a bit and are rumored to carry contraband cans of Copenhagen in their school backpacks. And you’ll rarely find them in the youth room at church attending the popular youth ministry events. They prefer to be down at the horse barn swinging a rope or shooting the breeze. But much to my surprise, I’ve discovered over the years that prayer comes especially easy to this unreligious group. Compared to their peers who regularly attended our youth group, their souls seemed more at home with the Transcendent, and their imaginations seemed better prepared for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Photo: Rosedale Abbey
Faith emerges from four underlying conditions: intellectual acceptance, plausibility, imaginability, and at the deepest level, a sense of the Transcendent (C.S. Lewis calls it “the Numinous”). We can’t put our faith in something that we don’t believe to be true. We can’t believe something to be true that is unbelievable. Nothing is believable without first being imaginable. And it’s hard to imagine something that just doesn’t feel right. We can think of these four categories as “pre-conversion” conditions for faith. Ellie suffered from a deficiency at the deepest level. You can see how a failure in any one of these four ascending categories interrupts faith development. If, for example, the Gospel is unimaginable, it cannot be believed in. True atheists will be missing one or more of these four pre-conversion elements.
C.S. Lewis was one such atheist. In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he describes one October day picking up a book at the train station book stall. The book? Phantastes, a faerie Romance, by George MacDonald. Like I said, no two people are alike, and Lewis was especially unique. He had a rare intellect and a remarkable grasp of literature. His mind seemed to hold the entire repository of British literature like a staggering Google server. Most of us would consider this impressive, if not a bit strange. Lewis, needless to say, was a well-informed atheist.
George MacDonald was an exceptional Christian thinker with a true pastor’s heart. His book Phantastes, nonetheless, might not be suited for everyone’s tastes. But it was the right book at the right time for Lewis. It is a strange fantasy full of images from the works of many of the British authors cherished by Lewis. It is not, however, what we would call “a Christian book.” Instead, it is an astonishing Christianly-written book. Lewis read Phantastes that night, and reports experiencing a remarkable change:
“That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.”
What happened? To be clear, Lewis did not experience a conversion to the Christian faith that night. But something important happened to him that made faith in Christ a possibility. His stifled imagination was transformed and set free to consider the believability of the Gospel. Lewis is reporting an early stage of metanoia necessary to ultimately believe in the Gospel. The metanoia of the intellect would come some time later, leading to his conversion. But this never would have happened had his imagination not first been “baptized,” as he puts it, by Phantastes. The Gospel was now imaginable, making it possible to consider its plausibility.
No two conversions are alike, and admittedly, few folks will undergo a conversion struggle like Lewis. He had an unusually strong mind, and it was stocked with more philosophy and literature than most of us could possibly consume in a lifetime. So please don’t assume Phantastes will necessarily have this same effect on the young skeptics in your life (though it might!). Lewis’s case is important because it shows the role of the imagination in conversion. And as I’ve been suggesting, some imaginations are better prepared for the Gospel than others.
Typical modern kids, sad to say, no longer have imaginations nourished with great literature. As you might have noticed, the American education system has undergone some big changes in modern times, with great literature playing a reduced role in our public schools. In general, great literature and the fine arts are now considered a boutique curiosity from the past. Some folks think great literature is too difficult for modern students. Other folks condemn it for the threat they believe it poses to a particular political narrative. And folks of a utilitarian bent have long been scoffing at great literature simply because it fails to lead directly to a handsome monetary reward. When I was in public school back in the 1970s, I noticed literature was treated awkwardly by the faculty. Poetry, for example, was often ridiculed, though usually in a fun, teasing spirit. It was assumed that since it was useless, it was therefore worthless (unless, of course, you were an English teacher paid to promote such a thing). But it needs to be said that “useless” and “worthless” are not the same thing. A cherished family photo, for example, may be useless, but it is definitely not worthless. Be that as it may, great literature has since been fading from curriculum altogether.
But does great literature really matter?
Charles Darwin, like Lewis, was a very unique man. Odd, many would say. I mention Darwin not to critique his theory of evolution, but to draw attention to his mid-life state of mind. He reports the loss of his ability to find pleasure in beauty and seems to have suffered from the effects of a neglected imagination. In his autobiography he says,
“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
It’s hard to say what happened to Darwin. Maybe addiction to his work damaged his sense of connection. Or maybe he was stricken with depression or some other infirmity. Whatever the case, he was aware that some fundamental part of his humanity had been lost, and he recognized the important role of literature and the fine arts in cultivating a soul that could properly feel, think, and act. With some regret, he says, “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”
It seems Darwin may have lost some of the conditions necessary to believe in the Gospel. Furthermore, his remarks show how the ongoing neglect of the imagination might actually erode our underlying capacity for the God-haunted feeling from which all the elements of faith emerge. Perhaps Darwin’s laser-focus with his subjects of study gave him tunnel vision that blinded and deadened parts of his mind. Not only was his mind now a mere “machine,” as he describes it—the world around him now appeared this way, too. The sense of wonder was gone.
Our society’s high regard for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM subjects) is well-founded, since the hard sciences play a key role in tackling some of the big problems facing humanity. But to privilege STEM subjects in our schools without equally addressing the proper cultivation of the imagination will lead to moral and spiritual disaster. We’ll produce kids with sharp analytical minds but no soul, living with a diminished sense of what is good and beautiful in a cold dystopian world of advanced technologies. Wendell Berry has said, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Perhaps Darwin’s testimony should serve as a warning. I’m noticing a trend at hand where top students seem to be experiencing Darwin’s dilemma, losing the warmth and imagination necessary for faith. And I see no reason why this trend won’t continue.
Despite Darwin’s midlife neglect of great literature and the fine arts, he did enjoy close contact with nature. This alone, in most cases, is enough to keep wonder alive in the imagination. (Like I said, Darwin was an odd soul, and it’s hard to say for certain what his spiritual tone-deafness was all about.) Before modern times, kids grew up in close contact with nature. They lived in their natural habitat, worked in it, and played in it. But things now have changed. Kids no longer have much contact with the natural environment. The days of getting up to feed the chickens and milk the cow before walking to school in the morning have long passed. Few, nowadays, even walk to school. Minecraft has replaced the once popular pastime of building treehouses. Kids spend most of their lives safely indoors staring at screens, and this separation from nature has stunted their imaginations. And as you can see, stunted imaginations will bring about stunted spiritual growth.
Indoor kids deprived of a true liberal education may still develop a real faith if they belong to strong religious families. But this faith will rely heavily on the scaffolding of social influence, top-heavy and teetering on a weak, brittle base. It will be less resilient in our rapidly changing world and more susceptible to either apostasy or fundamentalism. This is not to say that affiliative faith can’t ripen and endure. If anything, it shows the added importance of godly families, healthy church culture, and vibrant youth ministries in these disenchanting modern times.
My young cowboy friends, unlike most modern kids, benefit from a lifestyle that has them immersed in nature. They are at home in a world that is now largely hidden from their peers. They spend less time in the modern machine and more time in the Father’s world of everyday miracles. Considering the resurrection of Jesus Christ probably isn’t so hard for those who have seen countless sunrises or have witnessed the birth of a wet and wobbly Quarter Horse foal. Pausing to pray to the Creator probably feels natural to those who are intimately familiar with his creation. Despite whatever they might lack in regards to a liberal education, these kids blessed with a “low and rustic life” (to quote Wordsworth) have hearts better tuned to God.
More and more kids, however, like my friend Ellie, are growing up with a diminished capacity to believe in God. Some have faith development that has been arrested by theodicy. In other words, they’ve been victims of circumstances that make the goodness of God seem unimaginable. Others enjoy charmed childhoods by popular standards, but the cold mechanism of modernity is stripping them of their capacity to feel and imagine properly. Altogether, a generation has emerged with a very real tone-deafness to God. This, in my opinion, is the greatest and most underreported crisis of our times. Raising kind, faith-ready children in the years ahead will include a rich and steady diet of great literature along with an ongoing exposure to the fine arts. And while reaching out to help the disenchanted kids in your neighborhood might not involve a trip to the opera, I suspect it will have much to do with introducing them to the soul-stirring wonder of the world outdoors.
