At the end of his essay on Mark Oppenheimer’s “David Brooks, Please Stop Saying You Are Jewish,” Shaul Magid asks, “If Heine was ‘baptized but not converted,’ is Brooks then ‘converted but not baptized’? And what would that mean for Christians?”
As an Episcopal priest, a Christian theologian, and a scholar of Jewish-Christian relations, my initial take is “it depends.” Christianity has several pathways for being a Christian. On one level, there is cultural Christianity, in which one is Christian more or less by being born into a Christian family and a Christian culture. One can speak of Irish Catholics as combining an ethnic identity with a religious affiliation. But this typically also involves rites of initiation like baptism (a point I will return to later). Ironically, this way of being Christian is closest to how one is identified as Jewish. One first belongs, and belief and behavior follow. This is also the model that most depends on a culture of Christendom, which has eroded significantly in the United States, even if Christianity is still the majority religion.
Brooks’s description of his turn toward Christianity tracks with a more conventional Protestant model, in which one becomes Christian by believing. There is some sort of turn toward belief, specifically in Jesus, that happens. Conversion as a process of assent to, and affirmation of, belief can have the flavor of an evangelical altar call (a pattern I am familiar with, having spent many summers as a youth at bible camp) or of more sober intellectual and spiritual processes.
Christianity in a conventional Protestant sense is taken as an act of assent: you believe and so you are. As Oppenheimer rightly notes, the way in which Brooks narrates his turn toward Christianity has an Emersonian flavor to it. Experience and emotion move Brooks toward a sort of Christian faith, or at least of sense of now being Christian. As Lauren F. Winner rightly notes, this Brooks essay is curiously devoid of reference to doctrine or communal worship. It seems to be purely experiential. Brooks might claim to be a Christian, but his expression of Christianity offers no evidence of its being connected to a Christian community.
This is where the question of Brooks’s Christianity gets interesting. Can he be a Christian if he does not affirm belonging to a Christian community? Brooks writes, “These days I go to church more than synagogue.” But does church attendance make him a Christian? As Winner notes, we don’t know if Brooks has been baptized. But in a catholic (small c) sense, one is not a Christian unless one is baptized. And this is not merely baptism as a mark of entry into a community of similar believers (like the Irish Catholic baby baptized as a matter of course). This is a baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that baptism makes one a member of the Body of Christ. That is the core piece of the “whole shebang” (as Brooks puts it) for Christians. What makes you a Christian is baptism, because that makes you part of Jesus Christ himself, and so part of the entire spiritual community of other believers gathered into the church across space and time. And it is precisely that sense of Christian identity that is missing from how Brooks describes his turn to Christianity.
Can Brooks be a Christian if he does not affirm belonging to a Christian community?
Augustine and other Christian theologians postulated the possibility of a “baptism of desire,” by which one might first become a Christian by being spiritually drawn to Jesus. But the normative expectation in Christianity has always been that this desire is followed by actual baptism in water in the name of the Trinity. It is an affirmation of belief followed by a liturgical act, the very things Winner notes are missing from Brooks’s reflections on his journey.
On one level, it really is not up to me to discern the Christian commitments of David Brooks. He very well could have been baptized and be a member in good standing of a church today. But he has not divulged that information. Rather, he has set forth a model of being in between two religious identities. This in-betweenness, or what Catherine Cornille calls “multiple religious belonging,” is part of what Oppenheimer and others have reacted to.
Choosing to claim multiple identities and inhabit multiple religious spaces is part of the fabric of contemporary religion. A sizable portion of Americans report attending religious services outside of their own tradition. While this is good for religious toleration, it also raises the question of what it means to display religious commitment today. To say one belongs to two traditions at the same time, without also displaying some of the core markers of belonging (a rite of initiation or declared membership, say), undermines the coherence of religious communities. This represents the corrosive effect of neo-liberal consumerism today. To believe without belonging might be good for one’s spirituality, but it’s bad for communities. And since we are social animals, the erosion of community means a diminishment of ourselves.
To return to Magid: the question of whether Brooks has converted without being baptized represents for Christianity the problem of the coherence of its own communities and institutions. In the realm of American Protestantism, where Brooks appears to be situated, welcoming newcomers is of such high priority that often little is asked or expected of them. Churches are so desperate to keep their doors open and to fund their ministries that barriers to full participation in congregational life are often very low. Many churches now practice a form of open communion, in which not even baptism is required to take part in the Lord’s Supper.
I suspect the process of conversion that Brooks describes is not so dissimilar from the processes of many other adult converts. The question for the church is, when do you invite them to become part of the Body of Christ?