Note: The following is cross-posted from the Beatitudes Society social network (Be@ts 2.0), where I was the guest writer for Lent this week.

Growing up as a Southern Baptist in Mississippi, Lent never got much play. Nor for that matter did any other season of the liturgical calendar. Advent, Epiphany, even Holy Week—these were all, if mentioned at all, relegated to the exotic hinterlands of mysterious things the minority of Catholics did somewhere on the other side of town. Like icons, incense, written formal prayers, kneeling, and other “smells and bells” of the Christian tradition, we discarded the liturgical calendar as we pared down religion to what seemed its essentials—individual salvation and a personal relationship with God. To be sure, we celebrated Christmas and Easter (insofar as they related to Santa Claus and substitutionary atonement—churches in our neck of the woods were likely to advertise Christmas with a marquee declaring “Jesus was born to die”), and saw the pews swell on those days. But rather than the crest of a crescendo, these days were more like punctuation marks, thunderclaps with echoes never lasting very long. There was little in the way of squinting in darkness, of yearning, of wrestling…of waiting.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which it was Lent all the time. Consistent with our evangelical, revivalist roots, each Sunday we received at least six opportunities for reflection on our own sin and shortcomings, unless we skipped the fourth verse of “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” in the interest of beating the neighboring Methodists to Morrison’s Cafeteria. But it was my experience that these opportunities for reflection never had much transformational staying power for the baptized in the pews for at least two reasons. First, they were largely aimed at producing a moment of salvation. They mapped the territory around salvation in minute, redundant detail, but they left the longer Christian journey largely uncharted. Second, they focused on individual attitudes and moral purity, and offered few resources for thinking about broader patterns of character, social structures, and responsibility to act for justice in a broken world. And in that sense, we missed Lent altogether.

As I’ve moved out of seminary, through academia, and into the strange world of studying how religious people interact in public life, I’ve become grateful for finding what might be called “seasonal Christianity” rather than “punctuated Christianity.” Here’s why: the challenges we face run so deep that we need significant time and space to find the first thread that might begin to unravel our bindings, that might allow us to behave, as one of the lectionary readings for this week states, as citizens of heaven rather than card-carrying members of our lifestyle enclaves.

One of the most persistent and theologically disturbing conclusions I’ve come to from conducting and studying public opinion polling is this: Christians in American might qualify as “people with faith,” but they surely don’t qualify as “people of faith,” at least if that means people whose actions are mostly guided by those lights. The truth is that we Christians are often governed more by our demographics than by theological convictions that have any power of critical distance, whether on specific issues like support for torture or health care reform, or support for Democratic vs. Republican candidates. Moreover, the kind of Christian one is is also highly correlated to a number of demographic factors such as region, urban/rural residence, race, education level, or income level. We are generally more likely to predict someone’s denominational affiliation accurately from these factors than from their theological beliefs. Against these odds, a seasonal Christianity that offers real time to comprehend the frightening claim these powers and principalities have on us is critical.

Now I don’t want to sound too one-sided here. God knows that there are members of the frozen chosen in seasonal Christianity churches who could use a good thunderclap. But on balance, I’m grateful now for the mere fact that Lent offers us a season, not just a moment, for reflection. That time gifts us with the best chance to see the deep patterns that distort our lives, to grasp our complicity, and to stumble, however imperfectly, toward becoming a force governed less by our happenstance demographics and more by a vision of love, justice, and healing in the world.

Labels: evangelicals, lent, liturgy, seasonal christianity, southern baptist