Kristin told me that an official from an organization in Colorado Springs came to speak at her college on Christianity when she was a first-year student. He said that Christians believe women should be subservient to men; that people of other faiths, especially Muslims, are wicked; and that professors who teach courses applying philosophical and intellectual frameworks to Christianity should be avoided because they will just dilute your faith. One group of students in the room excitedly gathered around this man. They wore the label ‘Christian’ on campus. The other group slunk away and scattered.

Reflecting on this, Kristin told me: “I don’t want to be subservient because of my gender, I don’t want to hate anybody because of their faith and I don’t want to put my mind on hold because of my beliefs. If that’s what being a Christian is about, count me out,” she said.

The more I talked to Kristin, the more I realized that everything she learned about Christianity growing up focused on how to speak and act in church. She knew about the rituals of her own Protestant denomination, but her education about religion never related her faith to the world. Kristin had only a private language of faith. When she went off to college and was confronted by one particular public language of faith – meaning how faith related to the broader issues in the world, not just issues in her personal life and her hometown church – Kristin had no knowledge to challenge what she was being told about the relationship between faith and gender, Christianity and other religions, or religion and reason.

Perhaps the leaders of Kristin’s church intentionally offered a religious education that was relevant only within the walls of the faith community. Perhaps they did this out of some sort of sense that faith is only a private affair, a connection between the believer, the church and the Creator.

If so, they made a terrible mistake. By not addressing the public dimensions of faith, they effectively forfeited that dimension and that discourse to a group of people who were willing to talk about it – a group that happened to have an extremely narrow view on that subject.
In the absence of alternative perspectives, Kristin was left to believe that Christianity only had a right wing understanding of gender equality, religious diversity and reason. She was presented with a false choice: Christianity on the one hand, or progressive ideas and intellectual growth on the other. And even though she still felt spiritually nourished by Christianity, she had given up on it as a tradition that could guide and support her as she made her way in the world.

Kristin’s church leaders failed her, they failed their religion, and they failed their democracy.

And if what I’m hearing out there is true, that type of failure is happening all the time.