the dangers of the imagination: the conservative response to Christmas, Undocumented

Some time ago, my friend and writer George Elerick asked his readers if the church has a future, and if so, what would it be? My response was instantaneous.

Imagination.

And I think it is precisely what is glaringly absent from many of our churches today in America. Now, I’m not talking about using our imaginations to come up with trendy, hip or innovative church models, not even progressive ones. Don’t get me wrong, these are vitally important, but I can’t help but feel that they are attempts to patch holes in a capsizing boat.

What I’m talking about is something different. It’s about allowing — trusting — our imaginations to connect us with something infinite and transcendent and to allow our imaginations to merge with that something that is both within us and beyond us.

And in this meeting place, where our infinite imaginations meet the infinite God the result can be an explosive outpouring of creation, of new languages with which to encounter the Divine, a modern-day pentecost.

And perhaps this is precisely what makes opening up our faith and sacred texts to our imaginations so threatening to some. Because in doing so, it turns us all into creators and it imbues us with the responsibility to create and the responsibility for what we create.

And what has been created by so much of American Christianity of late has been utterly toxic.

But when we allow our imaginations to open up the story of God, Christianity is no longer something only received, only handed down from tradition, from parents, from culture, but something we also create, author and live within.

Imagination seems absent from much of American Christianity, and no surprise, it’s art has begun to wither where it once flowered. Some of the most powerful Christian art comes from centuries past. Nowadays, when someone mentions Christian art, we more likely to think of the saccharine work of Thomas Kinkade or a schmaltzy Christianized imitation of a romance novel than a truly sublime and transcendent piece of art that can transport us, challenge us, or move us. I’m not saying my work is necessarily any better (I hope it is!). But I am saying I hope Christians artists and writers move in a more invigorating direction that deals more with the imagination and less with theological systems.

Now, I understand that historically, Christianity has done as much to restrict art as it has to empower it and that, freed from the strictures of religion, art and imagination have themselves moved in stunning directions. So perhaps Christianity has always feared where the imagination would lead the faithful: to become creators.

But imagination, when put to the stories of our faith, breathes life into them again and helps us to fall into their rich, deep and complex narratives. It transforms them from a rule book or an ethic of life to a story of ourselves and of God that we live into, in wonder, in awe, in doubt, in faith, in our imaginations.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that it was not any of my intentionally provocative, questioning essays I have written that has drawn the ire of a few conservative Web sites. Rather it was a piece of short fiction I wrote, intended as a Christmas gift to my friends who have supported my writing, that has provoked a response. As I perused the responses yesterday, I was struck by how threatened many of the commenters seemed to be, not only because of the political implications of Christmas, Undocumented, but also because of how I engaged with the Nativity story imaginatively and turned it into a piece of fiction, or what our theological forbears might call midrash.

So, here are my favorite responses with a few editorial comments:

1. Exactly. Those that use GOD instead of worshiping HIM will pay for their misdeeds. <smh>