I Am a Christian, Sort Of

It happens in about a second and a half and he has never once heard himself do it.

A man at work asks him, on a Friday, not unkindly, whether he is religious. And what comes out is: yes, sort of, I mean, not in a big way, but yes.

Four qualifiers in eleven words. He would not be able to tell you afterwards that he said any of them.

He does it every time. At his sister-in-law's, when somebody asked why he had not been drinking, he said something about a phase. At the school gate, when another parent mentioned church, he said he goes sometimes, which is true if by sometimes you mean nearly every week for six years. At the hospital, when a chaplain asked whether he had a faith, he said he supposed so.

He has been going for six years. He reads it most mornings. He prays in the car, out loud, and has done since a bad stretch three winters ago that nobody at work knows anything about.

And if you asked him to say the plain sentence, without a hedge on the end of it, he could not do it, and he could not tell you why.

That is you, and the qualifier is not modesty.

What the hedge is actually doing

Let me be careful here, because there are two entirely different things that look identical from outside, and only one of them is a problem.

The first is genuine humility about your own conduct. A person who knows the gap between what they say they believe and how they actually behaved on Tuesday will sometimes soften the claim, and that instinct is not wrong. It is honest.

The second is a hedge, and a hedge has a different job. A hedge is there so that nobody can later accuse you of having claimed something you had not earned. It leaves you an exit. It means that if the conversation goes somewhere uncomfortable, or if somebody who knows you well raises an eyebrow, you have already said sort of and can retreat to it without ever having been caught out. Scripture already said it in Romans 8:16, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

You know which of the two yours is, because you know it costs you something every time.

And underneath the hedge, if we go all the way down, is a sum: that the word belongs to people who are better at it than you, and that using it plainly would be taking a title you have not qualified for.

You are not applying for a title. Scripture says as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, John 1:12, and it puts the whole of it on receiving and none of it on qualifying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a corridor on a Friday afternoon.

The witness you did not produce

There is a verse in Romans that goes straight at this, and the mechanics of it matter more than the sentiment.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:16

Read who is doing the testifying.

Not you. The Spirit bears witness with your spirit. There are two testimonies in that sentence and only one of them is yours, and the other one does not depend on how confident you were feeling in a corridor on a Friday. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Romans 8:16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

That is a strange relief once you see it. Because you have been treating your own certainty as the evidence. On a good week you feel fairly sure, and you would almost say the plain sentence. On a flat week you feel like a fraud, and the hedge gets longer. And you have concluded, without ever putting it into words, that the fluctuation is a report on whether it is real. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Romans 8:16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

It is a report on your week. It is not a report on your standing, because your standing was never resting on your own testimony in the first place.

You are not the only witness to this. Scripture says the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, Romans 8:16, and the Holy Spirit named in that verse is the one testifying, which means the case does not collapse on a flat Tuesday.

Nobody is going to argue you into it

I want to say something about how this article intends to work, because you may have had the other kind.

There is a way of dealing with this that is all argument: evidence, logic, four reasons you can be sure, a chain of verses assembled to corner you into confidence. It is well meant and it does not work, and the reason it does not work is that you are not in doubt about the facts. You could pass the exam. You could explain to somebody else exactly why they are not disqualified. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Romans 8:16, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

The problem was never information.

So I am not going to argue with you. What I am going to do is point at what has already happened, in the ordinary evidence of your own life, and let you look at it.

You have prayed in a car, out loud, alone, most weeks for three years. Nobody performs for an empty car. You read most mornings, which nobody has asked you to do and nobody checks. You have kept going to a room for six years without ever telling anyone at work you go. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Romans 8:16, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

That is not the profile of a man who might be religious in a small way. That is the profile of somebody whose life has quietly reorganized itself around a person, and the only thing missing is that he has never let himself say so out loud.

You have been living the thing you cannot say. Scripture says by their fruits ye shall know them, Matthew 7:20, and it does not exempt a person from being allowed to read their own, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man see the last six years as evidence rather than as an accident.

What it costs at the school gate

And now the thing the hedge is actually taking from you, which is not theological.

Every time you say sort of, the conversation ends. It is designed to. The qualifier is a door closing politely, and the person you are talking to hears it and moves on, and both of you go home. Scripture stands under that in Romans 8:16, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

Which means that in six years, at work, at the school gate, at your sister-in-law's, not one person has ever had the chance to say oh, me too.

You are not meant to be doing this on your own. Scripture says not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, Hebrews 10:25, and it assumes people find each other, which requires at least one of them to say a plain sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranges those meetings out of ordinary corridors.