Spring 2006 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra

Viewpoints

Postmodern Atheism Leaves One Breathless

I read with interest Judith Andrews’s letter in the winter Quarterly and my classmate’s response in the following issue, particularly as the Rev. Cresswell’s experience was rather different from mine.

While I would not go so far as to say that Mount Holyoke has become “an abomination unto God,” I think it is undeniable that it was in my day, and probably still is, a more difficult college than most to be a Christian at.

I remember, my first few weeks at MHC, attending the college chapel as the default closest church and being confronted with a liturgy so strange and syncretic that it could hardly be called ecumenical (meaning “of the church”) in any sense. Far from speaking truth to and challenging it, the college chaplaincy seemed to be the sponsor of the suffocating predominant culture, a militant and paradoxically postmodern atheism.

I made quite a few close and continuing friendships at MHC, for which I am grateful, but my faith has been a continual source of bemusement to my friends. “Why are you a Christian? You are the only smart person I know who believes in God. What gives?” Questions like these provoked some wonderful two a.m. conversations, but an unrelenting stream of them also makes one very weary.

Looking back, I see now that some, though not all, of the disjuncture I felt was caused by the incommensurability of my ancestral rural Methodism with South Hadley’s cultural and political categories. I have also realized that an environment actively inhospitable to the Christian faith has some advantages over the disinterested tolerance that reigns at Stanford and, from what I hear, most other secular colleges in the country. (“You’re into God? Awesome! I’m into skiing.”) My time at MHC, though painful in this aspect, challenged and stretched my faith in ways that it otherwise might not have.

Charis Quay Huei Li ’01
Menlo Park, CA