Check Your Mind at the Door

Posted by Eric (May 9, 2006 at 1:18 pm)

You’ve heard it a thousand times before: the Church demands that you “check your mind at the door.”

The first thing that’s wrong with this phrase, and which reveals the mind set of those who employ it, is the very idea that going in or out a door has anything to do with religious faith.

Yes, I realize this is a metaphorical door, but even so it must be a metaphor for something—for the line between the religious aspect of one’s life and all the rest, all that which hasn’t anything to do with religious faith.

If you’re drawing lines like that, you’ve already checked your mind at some other door, possibly your bedroom door—you were already handicapped before you made it to the kitchen.

Check your mind at the door.

I don’t think I ever really used this cynical phrase myself in my Decade of Apostasy, but for a long time I held the view that people with religious faith are misinformed and credulous—a view that had more to do with my effort to dismiss the moral demands of the Church than any actual encounter with Catholic intellectuals.

I first encountered such creatures on a Catholic e-mail list which at that time was mirrored on Usenet. I don’t remember how I stumbled on this particular group on Usenet. I was already warming up to Catholicism at the time thanks to the influence of an Natural Family Planning course my wife and I were taking from the Couple to Couple League. Perhaps I was looking for some way to fuse Catholicism with the liberal views that I still I held on such matters as recreational drug use and sexual orientation.

In any case, on this Usenet group I found a fascinating discussion on women’s ordination, starting with a post on why women ought to be ordained which I found insightful and persuasive. Then I went on to read the responses to this fellow’s argument, which were much more than insightful and persuasive—they were brilliant and convincing. I was amazed at how smart these orthodox Catholic guys were.

It’s been about nine years since then and I’ve learned that it’s not only possible to be a Catholic intellectual, but that most of the smartest guys around are Catholic—like the smart guys I’m working with over at BEMA. And I’ve learned that when you walk into a room of thinking Catholics, you’d better check your mind at the door—to be sure it’s revved up and ready to run at full throttle.

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