Monkeys make me nervous. Whenever I hear about chimpanzees solving math problems or Koko the Gorilla using sign language to order her breakfast, I feel inexplicably threatened by their humanlike qualities and intelligence. I do my best to avoid the monkey exhibits at zoos and those creepy Dian Fossey documentaries on Animal Planet.
When I traveled through the Himalayan foothills of India, where wild macaques climb all over the bridges and power lines, one monkey in particular looked incredulously at my camera bag and then at me, as if to ask, Who do you think you are, lugging that fancy equipment all over a country where half the population hasn’t got enough food to eat? Perhaps I read into it a bit, but I could have sworn he then turned and whispered something to his friend, who rolled his eyes at me in disgust. After that, I kept a closer eye on my camera.
I suppose my monkey-phobia has something to do with the sneaking suspicion that maybe the biologists are right after all. Maybe man and ape share a common ancestor, and that explains our eerie similarities. It’s a bit disconcerting to think of modern humans arriving so late to the evolutionary scene, of God taking millions upon millions of years to get to the point. Such a scenario certainly does a number on one’s pride and calls into question the notion of being created in the image of God.
To make matters worse, somewhere along the way, I was told that belief in evolutionary theory and belief in a personal, loving Creator are mutually exclusive, that if the Bible cannot be trusted to accurately explain the origins of life, it cannot be trusted for anything at all, and the Christian faith is lost. Commitment to a literal six-day creation, with the formation of Adam and Eve at its climax, held such fundamental significance to my young faith that I spent the first twenty years of my life scribbling words like debatable and unlikely in the margins of science books. I guess whenever some sly little monkey tries to undo it all with a knowing smile, I get a bit anxious.
Charles Darwin claimed that the survival or extinction of an organism is determined by its ability to adapt to its environment. Failure to adapt explains why wooly mammoths didn’t survive the end of the Ice Age and why we get pigeon poop stuck on our windshields instead of dodo poop. I’m still not sure what to make of evolution. Scientists have perfectly good evidence to support it, while theologians have good biblical and philosophical reasons to be wary of its implications.
However, I have a feeling that if Darwin turns out to be right, the Christian faith won’t fall apart after all. Faith is more resilient than that. Like a living organism, it has a remarkable ability to adapt to change. At our best, Christians embrace this quality, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then. At our worst, we kick and scream our way through each and every change, burning books and bridges and even people along the way. But if we can adjust to Galileo’s universe, we can adjust to Darwin’s biology — even the part about the monkeys. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that faith can survive just about anything, so long as it’s able to evolve.
I used to be a fundamentalist. Not the Teletubby-hating, apocalypse-ready, Jerry Falwell type of fundamentalist, but the kind who thinks that God is pretty much figured out already, that he’s done telling us anything new. I was a fundamentalist in the sense that I thought salvation means having the right opinions about God and that fighting the good fight of faith requires defending those opinions at all costs. I was a fundamentalist because my security and self-worth and sense of purpose in life were all wrapped up in getting God right — in believing the right things about him, saying the right things about him, and convincing others to embrace the right things about him too. Good Christians, I believed, don’t succumb to the shifting sands of culture. Good Christians, I used to think, don’t change their minds.
My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand. Adele is gay, so she knows better than most people how sharp those fingernails can be. And I think she’s right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry some of them out of my hands.
The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change. When you count each one of your beliefs as absolutely essential, change is never an option. When change is never an option, you have to hope that the world stays exactly as it is so as not to mess with your view of it. I think this explains why some of the preachers on TV look so frantic and angry. For fundamentalists, Christianity sits perpetually on the precipice of doom, one scientific discovery or cultural shift or difficult theological question away from extinction. So fearful of losing their grip on faith, they squeeze the life out of it.
Fortunately, the ability to adapt to change is one of Christianity’s best features, though we often overlook it. I used to think that the true Christian faith, or at least the purest version of it, started with Jesus and his disciples, took a hiatus for about a thousand years during the reign of Roman Catholicism, returned with Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and fell under siege again by the modern secular humanists. I was under the impression that the most important elements of the faith had not changed over the years but had simply gotten lost and rediscovered. They were right there in the Bible, as simple and clear as could be, and it was our job as Christians to defend them and protect them from change.
But the real story of Christianity is a lot less streamlined. The real story involves centuries of upheaval, challenge, and change. From the moment Jesus floated into the clouds at his ascension, leaving his disciples standing dumbfounded on the ground, Christians have struggled to define and apply the fundamental elements of his teachings. We haven’t spent the last two thousand years simply defending the fundamentals; we’ve spent the last two thousand years deciding on many of them.
Things get especially heated when false fundamentals sneak into the faith and only a dramatic change in environment can root them out. Take geocentricism, for example. In Galileo’s day, the church so adamantly espoused the traditional paradigm of an earth-centered universe that anyone presenting evidence to the contrary could be excommunicated. At that time, most Christians believed that the Bible speaks quite clearly about cosmology. The earth has a foundation (Job 38:4), which does not move (Ps. 93:1; Prov. 8:28). Even Protestant theologian John Calvin considered geocentricism so fundamentally true that he claimed people who believed in a moving earth were possessed by the devil.1
But if a geocentric universe is indeed this vital to the survival of Christianity, then Christianity would have died out with the eventual acceptance of a heliocentric cosmology. Imagine centuries of faith undone by a telescope! But instead, Christians adapted. I’m sure it took some getting used to, but believers found a way to rethink and reimagine their faith in the context of a new environment, one in which they no longer sat in the center of the universe. When the environment shifted, they chose to change their minds rather than accept extinction. In less noble terms, they decided to compromise.
While the ability to adapt to change is built into the church’s DNA, letting go of false fundamentals rarely happens without a fight. The first Christians argued over whether converts should be required to follow Jewish law. Reformers Wycliffe and Hus were branded as heretics for insisting that people should be able to read the Bible in their own language. When Martin Luther took issue with the church’s selling of indulgences, he launched one of the greatest debates of all time about Christian fundamentals, risking excommunication and even death for challenging accepted doctrine. Just a few years later, Protestants themselves systematically executed Anabaptists for holding to the “heresy” that a confession of faith should precede baptism. And in America, not so long ago, disagreements regarding the biblical view of slavery split denominations. The original Southern Baptist Convention organized, in part, because Baptists in the South did not want to be told by Baptists in the North that owning slaves is wrong. After all, they argued, the Bible clearly teaches that slaves should obey their masters.
Of course, in hindsight, it’s easy to see where the church went wrong. In April of 1993, the pope formally acquitted Galileo of heresy, 360 years after his indictment. Similarly, the Southern Baptist Convention of 1995 voted to adopt a resolution renouncing its racist roots.
We would all like to believe that had we lived in the days of the early church or the Protestant Reformation, we would have chosen the side of truth, but in nearly every case, this would have required a deep questioning of the fundamental teachings of the time. It would have required a willingness to change. We must be wary of imitating the Pharisees, who bragged that had they lived during the time of the prophets, they would have protected the innocent (see Matt. 23:30), but who then plotted against Jesus and persecuted his disciples.
With this in mind, I sometimes wonder what sort of convictions I might have held had I lived in a different time and place. Would I have used the Bible to defend my right to own slaves? Would I have cheered on the Crusades? Would I have chosen to follow Jesus in the first place?
This is why I try to keep an open mind about the monkeys, and it’s why I consider myself an evolutionist — not necessarily of the scientific variety but of the faith variety. Just as living organisms are said to evolve over time, so faith evolves, on both a personal and a collective level. Spiritual evolution explains why Christianity has thrived while other ancient religions have perished. It explains why our brothers and sisters in rural Zimbabwe and those in the Greek Orthodox Church can worship the same God but in much different ways. Christianity never could have survived the ebb and flow of time, much less its own worldwide expansion, had God not created it with the innate ability to adapt to changing environments. The same versatility that allowed Paul to become all things to all people applies to the church collectively. The ability of the body of Christ to change — to grow fins when it needs to swim and wings when it needs to fly — has preserved it for over two thousand years, despite countless predictions of its imminent demise.
That’s why I’m an evolutionist. I’m an evolutionist because I believe that the best way to reclaim the gospel in times of change is not to cling more tightly to our convictions but to hold them with an open hand. I’m an evolutionist because I believe that sometimes God uses changes in the environment to pry idols from our grip and teach us something new. But most of all, I’m an evolutionist because my own story is one of unlikely survival. If it hadn’t been for evolution, I might have lost my faith.
It started small — a nagging question here, a new idea there, an ever-changing, freshly accessible world everywhere — but before I knew it, just as I was preparing to graduate from a Christian college ready to take the world for Jesus, twenty years of unquestioned assumptions about my faith were suddenly thrown into doubt.
No longer satisfied with easy answers, I started asking harder questions. I questioned what I thought were fundamentals — the eternal damnation of all non-Christians, the scientific and historical accuracy of the Bible, the ability to know absolute truth, and the politicization of evangelicalism. I questioned God: his fairness, regarding salvation; his goodness, for allowing poverty and injustice in the world; and his intelligence, for entrusting Christians to fix things. I wrestled with passages of Scripture that seemed to condone genocide and the oppression of women and struggled to make sense of the pride and hypocrisy within the church. I wondered if the God of my childhood was really the kind of God I wanted to worship, and at times I wondered if he even exists at all.
But rather than killing off my faith, these doubts led to a surprising rebirth. To survive in a new, volatile environment, I had to shed old convictions and grow new ones in their place. I had to take a closer look at what I believed and figure out what was truly essential. I went from the security of crawling around on all fours in the muck and mire of my inherited beliefs to the vulnerability of standing, my head and heart exposed, in the truth of my own spiritual experience. I evolved, not into a better creature than those around me but into a better, more adapted me — a me who wasn’t afraid of her own ideas and doubts and intuitions, a me whose faith could survive change.
While evolution on a broad, historical scale happens every now and then, evolution within the souls of individuals happens every day, whenever we adapt our faith to change. Evolution means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we’re not sure we want him to be. It means being okay with being wrong, okay with not having all the answers, okay with never being finished.
My story is about that kind of evolution. It’s about moving from certainty, through doubt, to faith. It’s not about the answers I found but about the questions I asked, questions I suspect you might be asking too. It’s not a pretty story, or even a finished story. It’s a survival story. It’s the story of how I evolved in an unlikely environment, a little place called Monkey Town.