Don't let 'em put a name on you.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the usefulness of labels. Labels like orthodox, heresy, open theism, or Calvinism. But mostly, about the label "Christian." It has been suggested to me recently that it isn't really a useful label, that labels really just end up causing division, trying to emphasize the ways we are different and distinguished from other people, rather than seeing the ways we all agree, the things we all have in common. Here is a quote from my friend:

"When it is useful to bring about good ideas and discussions to Christians, I am a Christian. But deep down I am just a person. Labels are lies."

This has been making more and more sense to me lately, particularly in my own journey to figure out if I'm a Christian or not. I don't really feel like I can totally claim being a Christian, and in a lot of ways, I don't really want to. But I do care about conversing with Christians, and being taken seriously by them. Most of my friends are Christians. But if I don't put that label on myself, all the sudden, we're on different teams. So whether or not what I say makes sense, they don't have to listen to it, not because it's illogical or ill-founded or evil or anything like that; just because it's not "Christian." I mean, maybe they'll be charitable enough to listen to it, but it has no power to influence them.

Also, I think I believe in God, and I like Jesus a lot, and the Bible. But not in a Christian way. My whole life is not built around being like Jesus for the sake of being like Jesus, or living how the Bible says, because the Bible says it. My life is about pursuing what I know to be good and true, because it is good and true. In a lot of ways, that is a foundational difference from the way "Christians" organize their lives.

Ok, so that's why I don't know if I can call myself a Christian. But, I don't want to just stop conversing about God and Jesus and the Bible for that reason; those are still important things to me. And this is why "deep down, I'm just a person" came as a real revelation to me. That is exactly what I mean.

The thing I can't stand, more than much of anything else about (here comes a slew of labels) your conservative super-evangelical Calvinist types is the way they process the world according to labels. They decide who to trust, whose opinion is worth hearing according to labels, and apart from being deeply unloving, this just seems to lead to a dangerous cycle of self-deception. If it is valid to dismiss a thought/argument based on a label alone, then you are guaranteed to never have to actually deal with an opinion different than your own, and that is a recipe for a changeless, challengeless set of beliefs. This is also the source of one of my biggest fears in being honest about my thoughts. If someone can pigeonhole me as liberal or emergent, non-Christian, Gnostic, etc., then they can shoot me down. So I must find creative ways to phrase my ideas so as to disguise their resemblance to the caricatures of these positions that most people hold in their minds.

Another thing, and I've noticed this a lot in partisan politics: people like to take comfort in fitting perfectly into one label or another. By the creation of these labels, they somehow morph into supposed goods in themselves, so that depending on which circle you're in, it can be a good thing to show how "conservative" or "liberal" you are, or the opposite. Some people wear "Republican" or "Democrat," "conservative" or "liberal" like a badge of courage. It makes them feel better about themselves to be on the right team. This is just immature, I think. And it just causes division.

Another part of this comes from this song, "Name," by Derek Webb:

There's no categories,
just long stories
waiting to be told.
So don't be satisfied
when someone sums you up
with just one line.
Baby, don't let 'em,
don't let 'em put a name on you.

It's true, our differences aren't evil. There isn't some stark dualism of good/bad, right/wrong, us/them. People have reasons to come to the conclusions they do, reasons to disagree, and once you've actually sat down and listened to them, you would probably understand where they're coming from, and it wouldn't be so easy to dismiss them with a word.

So I want to stop thinking so much in labels, stop identifying myself by them, and stop identifying others by them. But this has a few problems. First, a label is just mental shorthand for a set of ideas, and taking away the shorthand doesn't necessarily take away the ideas. I do wonder if it wasn't so easy to organize thoughts into sets of ideas if such polarization and condemnation would occur. But still, there are fundamental differences in the ways we understand life and the foundations for our understandings of the world, and that is where the conflict is coming from. Taking away the names won't change that.

This is a sort of specific way of talking about the fact that language is merely a way of categorizing reality, of carving meaning into chaos. Language is a complicated system of labeling. So we can't stop using labels altogether, or else we'll have no language, no means of expressing ourselves. Even within this post, I've spoken of wanting to distinguish myself from "conservative, super-evangelical Calvinist types." It's not those labels, it's those ideas that I want to distinguish myself from, and it would just make things a lot more complicated if I had to spell out exactly what that means. Also, it might be entirely impossible. If those labels were to actually disappear, there'd be no real way to distinguish one idea from the next. So we'd be crippling ourselves.

Really, though, most of the world has no problem ascribing many, even contradictory labels to themselves simultaneously. Buddhist and Christian, Muslim and Christian. Maybe I can be agnostic/atheistic and Christian. Ya think? And can I throw in some Buddhism too? But then, I achieve the same effect - Christians ignore me. I'm a half-breed. I might as well not claim the label at all.

But I'm less concerned about what I would gain from others using this philosophy, and more concerned with the effects of my using it on others. Does it just lead to the dissolution of meaning? Should I despise labels? This is the question I sat out to answer in writing this post, and I am just now getting to it. The answer will probably just take a lot more thought. But hopefully, I've at least gotten the question across.