When one of my professors invited our class to his house for dinner last semester and we all ended up discussing our religious backgrounds, I noticed, much to my chagrin, that my confusion about my confessional identity is evident even in the way I use pronouns. In fact, my pronoun usage is perhaps the most obvious indicator of my confessional confusion.
When it came my turn to tell everyone about my religious affiliations, I began by explaining, I think coherently, that I had been raised in a Seventh-day Adventist home but that now I’m not sure whether or not I am an SDA; while I usually think of myself as SDA, I’m not sure if other SDAs would include me in their fold if they knew what I believe. At this point, though, my professor broke in and asked me to describe Seventh-day Adventism, since he didn’t know very much about it, and his seemingly obvious question threw a wrench in the works of my cogent explanation. I began by explaining Seventh-day Adventism to him in terms of “their” history and “their” unique beliefs, but by the end of my description I found I was describing it in terms of “our” history and “our” beliefs. While I began by distancing myself from the faith, I ended by including myself within its boundaries.
No one mentioned, or perhaps even noticed, the pronoun shift in my explanation or the confusion that it betrayed about my confessional identity, but I was embarrassed about my inability to clearly and truthfully describe my position. I suppose I could write off my pronoun mix-up as a result of the inability of language to fully describe reality, but, while I do think language is flawed, I also think it’s all we’ve got and that we have an ethical responsibility to use it as accurately as possible. And, I don’t think I used it as well as I could have.
In the end, I probably won’t worry too much about my mis-speech because I don’t think anyone was harmed by it. This time. I can’t help but wonder, though, if even little inaccuracies like misusing pronouns can be hurtful. For instance, I worry that the way I use pronouns to describe myself to SDA church members may falsely lead them to see me as a traditional SDA and that they may feel betrayed if they discover otherwise. I try to be as honest about my beliefs as I can, at least with close SDA friends, but I’ve noticed that even after I reveal my heterodox beliefs to them, they still treat me as a traditional SDA. Are little inaccuracies in my speech–like including myself in the SDA “we”–giving them a false picture of me?
I don’t really have a solution to my pronoun problem, but I suspect it is connected to larger questions about truth-telling and the importance of good writing and speech. Maybe all I can say is that this incident at my professor’s home reveals just how critical learning language skills is for being a good church member and, more broadly, a moral and spiritually-aware individual.
*Confessional identity is a term I’ve learned recently in my study of Protestant/Catholic relations during the Renaissance. It refers to how one identifies oneself in relation to religious confessions–for example, whether one calls oneself a Protestant or a Catholic . I like the term because it captures the important connection between what one is and how one names oneself.
