Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing--and How We Can Revive Them - Softcover

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Jonathan Merritt is one of America’s most prolific religion and culture writers. An award-winning contributor for The Atlantic, he has published thousands of articles in outlets such as USA Today, Buzzfeed, and The Washington Post. As a sought after commentator, Jonathan has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News, and NPR. He holds two graduate degrees in religion and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

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Chapter 1.

A life coach once told me that adults searching for meaning should pursue their childhood dreams. Which seems reasonable enough if you fantasized as a kid about becoming a tax attorney or insurance adjuster as a kid. The principle doesn’t work as well for people like me, who dreamed about becoming a cowboy.

My mother reminisces about the way I played pretend in the living room, wearing nothing except pajama bottoms, a mini Stetson hat, and black boots with silver spurs. I’d force my cowboy boots onto the wrong feet, which made the whole scenario a little more precious and a lot more absurd. On more than one occasion, I sauntered around the house, knock-kneed, waving a plastic six-shooter and asking where I could find a good watering hole.

“When I grow up,” I told my mother, “I’m movin’ to El Paso.”

I had never been to El Paso. Heck, I’d never even seen pictures. In my version of El Paso, the townsfolk rode horses and never left home without pistols strapped to their hips. Only one lawman lived there, and he could usually be found outside the jailhouse smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. I assumed most residents wrangled cattle during the day, lay under a blanket of stars at night, and after a hard week’s work, gathered at the saloon for a frothy mug of sarsaparilla and a hand of Texas Hold ’Em.

When I was old enough to move to the city of my choosing, however, El Paso didn’t even make the Top 10. My cowboy dream had long faded. When I decided at the age of thirty-one to join the 8.5 million city slickers who call New York City home, I wondered if that wrangler spirit had led me there.

You won’t find horses in the Big Apple unless they’re dragging carriages around Central Park. The only cows we have are served medium rare and will cost you a second mortgage. The city’s strict gun laws mean you’re unlikely to see a pistol unless it’s resting in a police officer’s holster, and the closest thing you’ll find to a tumbleweed is a windswept potato chip bag.

And yet, New York City has a certain frontier-like quality. Countless people arrive each year—in moving vans, like modern covered wagons—with hopes of forging a new life, conquering the iron wilderness, and if they’re lucky, maybe even striking gold. The scent of opportunity is everywhere—I’ve caught whiffs on street corners and nearly choked on it on Wall Street.

America’s biggest metropolis is diverse enough that citizens can curate their own version. The New York of the Upper East Side is not at all like the New York of Astoria, Queens. So different are the two neighborhoods that it’s almost laughable for them to claim the same city of residence.

I settled into the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, which is less like Seinfeld and more like Blue Bloods. The buildings are smattered with graffiti and bursting with third-wave coffee shops. Hipsters and Latinos mingle with a remnant population of Hasidic Jews who have decided to stay put even as the neighborhood gentrifies. (I spy more menorahs during Hanukkah than twinkling trees at Christmas.)

On the waterfront, Brooklyn residents lounge with loved ones on benches beside the East River and watch the summer sun sink into the skyline. The final rays of dusk wash Manhattan’s skyscrapers with sheets of light on clear nights. During the autumn months, McCarren Park fills with guitarists and flag football teams and a weekend farmer’s market where you can purchase apple cider and tupelo honey and rhubarb jelly.

Living here is just as lovely as it sounds.

The delights of New York did not blindside me, of course. But I never anticipated, upon arriving, that I’d run into a crippling language barrier. Sure, I could order a late-night kebab from a halal street cart or relay an address to a taxicab driver. I spoke English as well as I always had.

My problem was that I could no longer “speak God.”

Prior to moving to New York, I resided in a suburban neighborhood in the heart of the Bible Belt. Almost all my friends were Christian, and most of us attended the same type of church. I worked as a minister to a congregation outside of Atlanta, and before that, I was a full-time seminary student. The community in which I was immersed was so thoroughly Christian, I sometimes forgot that other people practiced different religions or none at all.

In this world, there was a kind of cultural Christian lingo that many speak and almost everyone else understands. If someone sneezed, a stranger might say, “God bless you.” The sneezer would not stop to think, What do you mean by “God”? Or by “bless”? If someone mentioned that he had been “saved,” “born again,” or “attended a Bible-believing church,” no follow-up question was needed. On meeting a new acquaintance, Southerners will usually ask where they attend church rather than if.

I used religious language with ease in the South, rarely pausing to think about the meaning of my words. I grew up surrounded by these syllables of faith, used daily in my home and community. But I was not in Georgia anymore. I penned columns about the intersection of “faith and culture” from my Southern Christian enclave, but as it turns out, pontificating about a post-Christian society is far easier than living in one.

In New York, religious fluency is not assumed. The majority of residents don’t attend church on any given Sunday, and only about three percent of the population is evangelical Protestant like I was raised. I soon discovered people who had never heard the sacred words I’d long taken for granted—and others who used them with wildly different meanings.

I realized this linguistic chasm en route to visit a church in Manhattan on my first Sunday in New York. Waiting on a subway platform, a woman standing next to me asked where I was headed. I explained that I was going to a “worship service.” She asked for clarification, having never heard that phrase. I clarified that I was new to the city and was going to visit a church. She perked up and said she practiced the Baha'i faith. She held up her crystal amulet necklace and explained that it protected her from evil spirits. If I was spiritually curious, the woman said, she’d read my chakra and access the invisible energy fields around my body.

As we talked about our respective religious practices, it became clear that neither of us understood what the other was saying. I glanced down the dark tunnel in hopes of spotting a train, but rescue wasn’t in sight.

She peppered me with questions about God and the Bible and the afterlife. I fumbled for answers, but what came out didn’t make much sense. When I used terms I considered common—“grace” or “gospel” or “salvation”—my conversation partner stopped me mid-thought to ask for a definition, please. I sputtered, stammered, and stuttered, trying to rephrase those words in ordinary vernacular, but I couldn’t seem to articulate their meanings. It was like trying to define the word color or the. Though I had used the terms often, I’d never stopped to consider their meanings.

The train finally slid into the station. I thanked the lady for conversing, though I felt anything but grateful, and bolted down the platform to find a separate train car.

Not all New Yorkers are like this woman, I came to realize. Others presented a different set of obstacles. Many are familiar with sacred terms but have experienced them as a source of pain or judgment or coercion. In such cases, I often felt...