Blue Like Jazz
Book Review
Book by Don Miller
According to one reviewer, this book is "generating whispers of giddy discovery in coffee shops, dorm rooms and narthexes across the country." In other words, it is creating quite a buzz among the emerging generation of younger evangelicals, many of whom identify with author Don Miller in the same way baby boomers identified with Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. In fact, I found myself thinking often of J.D. Salinger's classic as I read Blue Like Jazz. As it turns out, this was more than coincidence, because late in the book, Miller says of someone's devotion to the Bible, "He seemed to have an emotional relationship with the Book, the way I think about Catcher in the Rye."
I would infer from this that Miller was greatly influenced by Salinger, and that he intends for Blue Like Jazz to be an exposé of evangelical superficiality and hypocrisy at the beginning of the 21st century in much the same way that Catcher in the Rye was an exposé of the superficiality and phoniness of the East Coast Establishment of the 1950s. He even borrows from the incident when Holden Caulfield catches his teacher surreptitiously picking his nose, only he pokes fun at himself. Of the room in the house in which he lived in community with five other guys, "a room with windows on every wall, about ten windows in all" he writes:
"I set my desk in front of the huge window that looked down on the traffic circle and the statue. My friends used to drive around the circle and honk when they went by. I always forgot I lived in a glass room so I would pull my finger out of my nose just in time to wave back. I went from living in complete isolation to living in a glass box on a busy street."
Having come of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I recall how my generation rejected the materialism of our parents, who had grown up and come of age during the Great Depression and World War II. Our parents had vowed that we would never suffer the material privations they experienced growing up, but many of us threw it back in their faces, especially during the Vietnam era. "Never trust anyone over 30" was one of the rallying cries of the radical protesters of the 1960s. Catcher in the Rye prefigured that sentiment, as Holden Caulfield saw through the phoniness of his elders.
In a manner similar to our parents, many of us who came to faith as college students or young adults in the 1960s and 1970s have vowed that our children would not suffer the spiritual privations that we experienced, and many of them have rejected our spiritual values in the same way we rejected our parents' material values. George Barna has estimated that two-thirds of those raised in evangelical churches leave, and half of them haven't yet come back. Others have rejected the spiritual structures we created for them, even if they haven't rejected our values. In his book The Younger Evangelicals, Robert Webber quotes one of them as saying: "We have been given structures, but we don't really like what they have produced. We want to be about making disciples."
Don Miller echoes that sentiment in this book. He would probably consider himself a "recovering fundamentalist"--"I was a fundamentalist Christian once. It lasted a summer." He rejects much of the evangelical subculture, and compares it unfavorably to a group of hippies with whom he lived in the woods for a month:
"They loved me like a good novel, like an art film, and this is how I felt when I was with them, like a person John Irving would write. I did not feel fat or stupid or sloppily dressed. I did not feel like I did not know the Bible well enough and I was never conscious what my hands were doing or whether or not I sounded immature when I talked. I had always been so conscious of these things, but living with the hippies, I forgot about myself. And when I lost this self-consciousness, I gained so much more. I gained an interest in people outside my own skin . . . It wasn't that I didn't love my Christian friends or that they didn't love me, it was just that there was something different about my hippie friends; something, I don't know, more real, more true. I realize that is a provocative statement, but I only felt I could be myself around them, and I could not be myself with my Christian friends. My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics like don't cuss and don't support Democrats and don't ask tough questions about the Bible."
What he is talking about, of course, is authenticity and unconditional acceptance, which should be a hallmark of the evangelical subculture. Unfortunately, however, it is often more characterized by spiritual correctness and judgmental attitudes. Miller writes:
"I felt like both churches [he could attend while working in a Christian camp] came to the table with a them and us mentality, them being the liberal non-Christians in the world and us being the Christians. I felt once again, that there was this underlying hostility for homosexuals and Democrats and, well, hippie types. I cannot tell you how much I did not want liberal or gay people to be my enemies. . . . The real issue in the Christian community was that it (i.e. love) was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. . . . I began to understand that my pastors and leaders were wrong, that the liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reasons Christians were Christians, because they believed their philosophies were right, good and beneficial for the world."
Ouch! Miller definitely has a point, and he suggests that Jesus would embrace many that the evangelical subculture rejects. He quotes his friend Penny, who came to faith while studying the Bible with a friend as they "smoked cigarettes and ate chocolates":
"There were people [Jesus] loved and people He got really mad at, and I kept identifying with the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcasts or pagans. There were others, regular people, but He didn't play favorites at all, which is miraculous in itself. That alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn't show partiality, which every human being does."
Miller thinks that "the most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus." When he heard of how Bill Bright broke down and cried when an interviewer asked him what Jesus meant to him, he "knew then that [he] would like to know Jesus like that, with [his] heart, not just [his] head. [He] felt like that would be the key to something."
This reflects the fact that many people who have serious problems with Christianity are nevertheless attracted to Jesus. Miller recalls a hostile radio host who "told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God." Miller is obviously conflicted, because he rejects much of the evangelical subculture, but he obviously deeply loves Jesus. He writes further:
"If people were bad, we treated them as though they were evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everyone else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody. I wanted everything to be cool. I realize this sounds like tolerance, and to many people in the church the word tolerance is profanity, but that is precisely what I wanted. I wanted tolerance. . . . On the other hand, however, I felt by loving liberal people, I mean by really endorsing their existence, I was betraying the truth of God because I was encouraging them in their lives apart from God. . . . How could I merge the culture of the woods and the Unitarian church with Christian culture and yet not abandon the truth of Scripture? How could I love my neighbor without endorsing what, I truly believed, was unhealthy spirituality?"
Some will criticize Miller for things like this, but he does have some excellent thoughts on relating to non-believers and why it is so difficult for the church to do so:
"And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly . . . This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. . . . When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more. . . . Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them. If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say. . . . When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don't. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love. If both conversations are not true, God is not involved in the exchange, we are on our own, and on our own, we will lead people astray."
Miller lives in Portland and has been a part-time student at Reed College, which is widely known as one of the least spiritual campuses in the U.S. He speaks very highly of Reed College and what it taught him about Jesus and how He would relate to people like the students at Reed, where "The first day of school was exhilarating. It was better than high school. Reed had ashtrays and everybody said cusswords." As part of the Christian fellowship at Reed, he did offbeat things like setting up a confessional booth in the middle of campus during a weekend devoted to debauchery, not for the students to confess, but for the Christians to confess the sins of the church. As weird as this sounds, it created many opportunities for meaningful dialogue with students. In fact, one of the most valuable aspects of this book is the guidance it gives us for dialogue with people with whom we share little or no common ground. In fact, Miller learned much himself through being part of the small Christian community at Reed:
"But I learned so much from the Christians at Reed. I learned that true love turns the other cheek, does not take a wrong into account, loves all people regardless of their indifference or hostility. The Christians at Reed seemed to me, well, revolutionary. I realize Christian beliefs are ancient, but I had never seen them applied so directly. The few Christians I met at Reed showed me that Christian spirituality was a reliable faith, both to the intellect and the spirit. I knew that Laura would fit in with this group. I knew that Laura, no matter how far she was from God, could come to know him."
Miller is not self-righteous in his condemnation of self-righteousness, and he recognizes that he is part of the problem. He echoes (without quoting) Solzhenitsyn's statement that the line between good and evil in the world is not a line that separates good people from evil people, but a line that goes right through every human heart:
"I am the problem. I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems of the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest. . . . I can't think of anything more progressive than the embrace of this fundamental idea. . . . I think every well-adjusted human being has dealt squarely with his or her own depravity. I realize this sounds very Christian, very fundamentalist and browbeating, but I want to tell you this part of what the Christians are saying is true. I think Jesus feels strongly about communicating the idea of our brokenness, and I think it is worth reflection. Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror."
Miller no longer has a lot of confidence in the ability of classical apologetics to convince anyone, even if at one point he couldn't give himself to Christianity because he thought that it was a religion for the intellectually naïve: "In order to believe Christianity, you either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children's stories or ignore them. The entire thing seemed very difficult for my intellect to embrace. Now none of this was quite defined; it was mostly taking place in my subconscious." He now believes that intellectual debates about the truth, or lack thereof, of Christian truth claims are largely irrelevant and that "At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong, we are still going to be okay." He continues:
"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly, I don't care. I don't believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything."
How post-modern is that? This reminds me of the "Whatever" reactions we so often get when I try to convince my kids of something by intellectual arguments.
Miller also writes movingly of self-absorption: "The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this. 'Life is a story about me' . . . no drug is as powerful as the drug of self." and of evangelism: "Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension. . . . For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained." He writes of grace:
"For a very long time, I could not understand why some people have no trouble accepting the grace of God while others experience immense difficulty. I counted myself as one of the ones who had trouble. I would hear about grace, read about grace, and even sing about grace, but accepting grace is an action I could not understand . . . I wanted to feel as though I earned my forgiveness, as though God and I were buddies doing favors for each other. . . . I love to give charity, but I don't want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace."
This is an important book, because it puts into words what many young adults raised in Christian environments feel deeply. If it didn't, there would not be so many of them who are so excited about it. Miller has apparently done for a generation of young people raised in evangelical homes what J.D. Salinger did for a generation of young people raised in materialist homes in the 1950s and '60s. Everyone who is serious about serving the next generation needs to read this book and take it seriously, even if it does "sting" at points.
Miller, Don; Blue Like Jazz; Thomas Nelson Publishers; Nashville; 2003; ISBN 0-7852-6370-5
