Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I think this happened in 2002, maybe 2003. It was after Sept 11 2001, because the teacher in question didn't come to our school until 2002.

Evangelical Christians believe they are under attack - spiritually, materially, socially. They are taught to see threats everywhere, and to rehearse responses to it. There was a version of the story of the Columbine massacre in which one of the students in the library was asked, before being shot, 'Do you believe in God?' and answered 'yes'. We were given exerpts of a biography and versions of the story to read, to internalise, to _fantasise about dying under fire_.

(I now find a. that that version has been discredited and b. this was not a feature of the entire massacre)
(and now I teach medieval studies and find myself faced with students who don't instinctively understand the point of marytrologies)

At some point in 2002, or maybe 2003, a student - a personable, charming guy, I'd had a crush on him for most of junior high - asked our English teacher, for reasons I can't recall, 'If the muslims invaded and you had to either convert or die, would you be willing to die for Jesus?'

And she said no.

She said no, if she was at gunpoint she would convert. To Islam, or anything else. She said she would hold her faith in God in her heart and hope for change, but she knew she didn't have the courage to die.

(There was no point in trying to point out the structural issues here - that since Sept 11 2001 the fantasies of dying at the hands of atheists or oppression by The World had taken on a specific, and racist, cast. To single THIS fantasy out as specifically weird would have encountered mostly blank faces, because they - we - had been being trained for years to envision life-or-death tests of faith. Life, death or premarital sex.)

This was not well-received in this classroom, but it stuck with me. I instantly recognised myself: I, too, would convert.

(I am pretty sure this teacher had universalist tendencies as strong as my own.)

The same teacher taught senior religious studies, and let me do my special topic research on Islam.

I don't have a conclusion here, except to say that: this was a completely normal conversation in my school. Fantasies of martyrdom at the hands of a religious group we had never even met. And that one teacher had the courage to puncture the bubble and say 'no. We don't all have to be martyrs'.

She wasn't a perfect teacher by any means, but I respect her for that. She had the courage to speak an unwanted truth in the face of consequences far more immediate than martyrdom - the mockery of teenagers, the loss of social capital, damage to her standing in the eyes of staff and parents. We don't all have to be martyrs, and probably most of us wouldn't, and frankly it was fucking weird to train us to expect we would.

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( Related, one of the things I am most ashamed of in my life is an occasion when I had taken a friend to an evangelical church service and, because she wanted to, I went through the process of 'dedicating my life to Jesus'

Not because I didn't believe. I did. I was a very devout child. But because I did not have any sense that I /invited jesus into my heart/ that day - I firmly believed I was a christian and had always been. I went through the happy-clappy and the laying on of hands and I felt /dirty/. I did not have the courage to say 'no, this isn't for me, this is not my experience of faith, this is an insult to the baptism my parents gave me and the confirmation I expect to fulfil in my home congregation')