Donald Miller and Western Faith

In Donald Miller’s book Through Painted Deserts he writes about the “how” questions vs. the “why” questions. He refers to “how” questions as being less important than the “why” questions. To my friend Don “how” questions sound a bit like this; “How do I get money, how do I get laid, how do I become happy, how do I have fun?” But “why” questions seem to be much bigger. They are the questions that underlie existence, nagging at us as we stare back at the cosmos and wonder “why?”

I have been taking a religion class that I finished today actually. In the class we reviewed the “big boy” religions of the east and west, starting with western ones and moving on the eastern ones. I have written a few posts that I will just never publish about that class due to my stupid frustration with western religion and especially Christianity. When I was writing these posts my words got caught somewhere between my brain and my fingertips (clogging some major arteries) so I gave it up hoping that the unexpressed would never need an outlet. Then I read some of Mr. Miller’s words and it helped me understand a bit. Don says that “[Christianity] did seem to stem from something beautiful, for sure, but it had been dumbed down and Westernized. If it was a religious system that explained the human story, its adherents had lost the grandness of its explanation in exchange for its validation of their how lifestyles, to such a degree that the “why” questions seemed to be drowning in the drool of Pavlov’s dogs.”

As the course moved from western religions to eastern religions my frustration subsided, I stopped referring to my professor as a Nazi, and the blood began to course through my veins again. I studied the east and began to have strange thoughts about Christianity. Thoughts like, “I bet if Christianity had been an eastern religion then Christians would actually be able answer some ‘why’ questions and not be such a joke to scholars.” Religion and daily life in the east are joined together in inseparable beauty, a thing of beauty that another hero of mine, David Crowder, applied to Christianity in his book Praise Habit. Christians have their church life, their church friends, their church clothes, all of which they use to successfully to mask themselves. Westerners have a kind of commercial, American version of spirituality. Again, Donald Miller to the rescue with a great example; “’What is beauty?’ I would ask. ‘Here are the five keys to a successful marriage,’ I would be given as an answer.”

In my religions class I saw Christianity through the eyes of the world and it terrified me. I have found out that the world has no idea what Christianity is because it got buried in western commercialism. Western Christianity focuses on the “how’ questions threatening to swallow us all in a bottomless greedy pit. “I needed God to be larger than our free-market economy,” confesses Miller, “larger than our two-for-one coupons, larger than our religious ideas.”