Biography

Submitted by Clark on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 17:51.

Name: Jeremy Clark

Job: Student (PhD in Cryptography)

Youthful church background: Fellowship Baptist. In Canada, there was a split between the modernist and fundamentalist Baptists. We were the fundies (and boy did we hate those Convention Baptists).

Current religious leanings: Agnostic; somewhere between deist and negative atheist.

Why the change: I always had intellectual trouble with Christianity, and in my late teens I became obsessed with theology. I felt that the answers were out there, I just had to find them. Through this process, I liberalized my beliefs significantly, but I also got distracted. Theology got boring and I started reading about the philosophy of religion, and then just general philosophy. From there I discovered political philosophy; I spent a long time shaping my political beliefs. This also led me to study economics, and behavioural economics bridged my interest into cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. In short, I just stopped trying to figure out religion because there were more exciting things to learn. But recently, economics and evolutionary psychology has brought me back to reconsidering it. The latter really challenged my beliefs by presenting an alternative explanation that seems to better fit the facts, and the economics of religion helped me to understand why I still value Christianity so much even if I basically reject it intellectually.

First church culture memory: I have a notoriously bad long-term memory. I don’t remember being “saved” for example, which happened when I was four, and the most available memories are the most salient (like throwing up during church), not the cultural things that I just assumed everyone did. I suppose the earliest would be the flannelgraph Bible stories.

Strangest church culture memory: Strange is relative, and growing up Baptist kept me shielded from the Charismatic movement. And so my first witnessing of the outpouring of the holy ghost left me feeling quite perturbed, in a psych-ward kind of way. (I’m not trying to rile any charismatics up, this is just an honest reflection of what it felt like).

Claim to fame within church culture: Unlike my co-authors, I really don’t have one. All my letters to Breakaway were never printed and I had a knack for getting banned from Christian message boards for pointing out the real reason Sodom was destroyed or pointing out that the charismatic movement stole glossolalia from the Mormons.

First CCM song heard: The first one I heard and loved was Geoff Moore’s (pre The Distance) cover of “Why Should the Devil have all the Good Music.” Growing up in a hymn-singing church where rock and roll was “from the pit of hell,” this song spoke to me in so many ways. I wore out the cassette listening to intro: a few measures of an organ being played just like Sunday mornings, and then out of nowhere, a ripping guitar solo begging you to crank the volume.

Book that changed my life: “Beacon’s Dictionary of Theology.” This was basically a theology encyclopaedia, with articles on nearly all variations of a Christian belief on a given topic. Because it offered criticism of beliefs the editors didn’t agree with, it was a “safe” book to have. But it exposed me to new, exciting, and unorthodox beliefs that I didn’t know were out there and would go on to embrace.

Most embarrassing thing about church culture circa 2007: The political agenda. Although it is more subtle than it’s made out to be by the media, there is a consistent subtext. Its embarrassing because the church believes it is influencing politics without being influenced itself—-sort of like evangel-dating a non-Christian.

Church culture weakness that will probably never go away: I’m not sure if this question is meant to be relative to me or relative to the church, but I’ll assume the former. If they can even be called a weakness: Philip Yancey’s books. He’s like the Malcolm Gladwell of Christianity.