Why Christian Apologetics Important
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All right. Well, I used to be an atheist. Some people have a hard time believing me when I say that. And I think it may have to do a little bit with my name, Mary Jo. You start making some assumptions when they hear my name. And then they find out that I live in Texas and that, oh, thank you. And the assumptions start to ramp up. Mary Jo, Texas, if they dig a little bit more, they find out I’m Baptist and then just the assumptions go crazy.
So they tell me things like, “Well, you were born and raised in church, so you’ve never known any different. If you just look at the evidence, you would not believe anymore.” Or they say things, actually, I think I’m going to show you this one later, but “if you could just get out of your cocooned little world, you’d see that no one believes in your nonsense.”
Those are the kinds of things that I’ve been told, and I think it’s because they hear about Mary Jo, Texas Baptist, and that’s what they think. But really I’m from Portland, Oregon. Do I have any Oregonians here? Oh, I do. More than last time. All right. I’m from a suburb of Portland, Oregon, and it’s really a nice place to live. It has these beautiful volcanic mountain peaks soaring over the city, which for the most part I loved, except for once in a while those peaks got angry.
This one you may know if you’ve heard about Mount St. Helen’s and its eruption. You guys are familiar with that? I was a child when that happened, living in Portland, Oregon. It wasn’t supposed to cover us with ash because all of it was supposed to go to the east and then the winds changed and it dumped ash all over my neighborhood. I think this is actually one of the reasons I was so interested in science growing up because we had this major volcanic event.
I grew up watching a lot of science shows and nature shows. I actually, I think my dad and I watched almost every episode of Nova. If you know what that is, that’s the old Carl Sagan show. It’s being revamped into the show Cosmos. It has the same sort of atheistic naturalism in the new show as it did in the last show. I watched a lot of that. But like I said, I grew up in a very different place from where people assume that I’m from. And it has a very different culture in Portland, Oregon than in the south and in Houston. The culture’s not overtly Christian. It’s not overtly Christian.
I like to tell people one of the main differences that you can automatically see between Houston, Texas and Portland, Oregon is we don’t have churches on every street corner, in Portland that is. And Portland didn’t have gas stations on every street corner. And for my Texans, I say nor did Portland have Mexican restaurants on every street corner. People think I’m like, they’re building a third one on the same street corner in my area of Houston.
So it’s really, really different there. I also wasn’t raised in church. I had parents who were, after talking with them before I published my book, I had them look it over, the part about them. And they said we were agnostic. We hadn’t totally left belief in God, but we had just gone agnostic. In fact, they had left church by the time I was too little to remember it. So I wasn’t raised in the church and I was raised in a part of the world, like I said, it’s very different from where I live now.
Just for an example, that distance there is like going from England to Turkey. It’s a long ways away. And it’s very, like I said, very culturally not Christian, especially when I was growing up. So where did I get my view of Christianity as this child of agnostic parents who didn’t go to church? I got my view of Christianity from TV and the movies. You can tell that’s a good place to get it. And it was horrible in the 80s and 90s. There was a movie, I don’t know if any of you know this movie, I’d be super impressed, this trilogy called, Oh God. It had, yeah, nobody.
There’s nobody shaking their head. Not going to help you with that one. John Denver and George Burns were in this movie and George Burns played God and God was a cigar smoking old man. And he’d pop in and out of John Denver’s life and create trouble for him basically. So this is my view of Christianity’s developing by what I see on TV because I don’t have any upbringing in it. And then in Portland, and generally the feel I get from Oregon, it’s not all of Oregon, but just generally the feel I’m getting is religion is a private matter. You don’t talk about it necessarily.
It’s not as overt as it is in the south where everybody knows a pastor or their daddy was a pastor or their uncle was a pastor or somebody goes to church that you know, and somebody’s wearing a Jesus t-shirt with a cross. And in fact, the Texas women like to put blingy crosses on their purses. They’re like this big and they’re all rhinestones. Just very different. You wouldn’t see that so much in Oregon.
So at a very, what I would call my view of Christianity growing up, it was very shallow. It was very shallow what I thought of the Christian faith. I didn’t understand church. The only time I had gone to church was when a boyfriend asked me to go with him because he couldn’t date me unless I went to church with him. So I went and I slept through most of the sermons and I thought those were nice people, but it wasn’t for me. I didn’t see why I would need God or need that.
And I had a general distrust of church because of what I saw on TV. Not only did I see movies like the Oh God trilogy, but I saw scandals like the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal. It was all over television in the 80s. And that was very impressionable on me as a child. I thought here’s what the church does, it takes your money and uses it dishonestly. These people are giving their money to dishonest people. I didn’t trust the church.
Now my upbringing did include a lot of culture and arts. My parents both love plays, symphonies, music, ballet, opera. We went to all of that stuff. In fact, I was a band nerd growing up. Total band nerd. I played saxophone just like my dad. I still do, still play saxophone. So I did have a background steeped in culture and science, just not in Christianity. Now I had a, like I said, I was a band nerd, there’s a reason that’s important. And that’s because of this guy. That’s my high school band director. My high school band director had a burden for me and my senior year of high school, he had been very close to my family over the years, both my sister and I were in band so he’d known us.
She’s five years older than me. So he had had us around for a really long time. And he had a burden for me my senior year. He said, “Mary Jo, I have a gift for you, a going away gift.” So he gave me a conducting baton. So if you are a band person, you know what I’m talking about. They hold it in their hand. They use it to conduct the symphony. He gave me the conducting baton that he used to win the state band competition with for the first time ever.
So it was really important to me because he knew I was going to go off and I was going into music education at college. So he knew that was important. And then he gave me the first Bible that I read all the way through. He gave me an NIV one year Bible and I took that Bible and I started to read it. See, I really respected this man a lot. I wanted to be a band director just like him. I wanted to teach students music and the joy that it brought me because I had had great examples.
So I took that Bible from him and I read it all the way through. This man had never, well, let me say it this way. He was very, not only was he very burdened for me, he was very worried about sharing his faith with me because we were in a school district where that was definitely not okay. And in fact, he now gives talks, he’s a college professor in Oregon. He gives talks on the ethics of being a Christian in the public school setting as a teacher. And he brings up the story of how he shared his faith with me. But he was worried that he might lose his job over it.
He could actually have lost his job. He said, “I was so glad your reaction wasn’t like, ‘Well, I’m going straight to the principle’ or something like that.” But he told me it wasn’t a great reaction. He said it was something like, “Oh yeah, thanks.” Later on he told me you felt like a schmuck. That was his word. “I felt like a schmuck after witnessing to you.” He never saw what was going to come from that one stepping out in faith.
But he witnessed to me. I began to read that Bible. Oh, I didn’t tell you what he said. How did he witness to me? He said, “Mary Jo, when you go off to college, you’re going to have a lot of hard questions. I hope you turn to this.” That’s it. That’s what he said. And I did. I started reading it. And what I came to the conclusion of was that there’s a God. I didn’t get all the way to Jesus yet. I got to there’s a God. And the thing that was really troublesome for me, and I think a lot of people forget this, is here I had this background steeped in science. I was watching all these science shows.
I knew that there were stars out there that were way more powerful than our sun. Now I believe there’s a God that can create that and I’m morally accountable to him. Think about hat kind of realization, how it would hit you so hard. And it began to upset me. I began to have some nightmares about it. I was terrified of a God that was so powerful he could create universes and I was morally accountable to him for how I’ve been living my life.
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