Tiffany Reed grew up in a biracial Pentecostal family that moved frequently and fasted occasionally, per her father’s instructions. “He would read about Church history, watch documentaries, and then get excited and introduce a new family practice,” she told me. While a student at King’s College, a Christian school in New York, she saw some evangelical classmates become Anglicans or convert to Catholicism. She graduated in 2016; a few years later she moved to Waco, Texas to join Brazos Fellows, a program in partnership with Baylor University that offers recent college graduates nine months of theological study. There she found herself drawn to the structure of the Anglican tradition and began to investigate early Christian approaches to fasting.
While some evangelicals joining Anglican churches to escape close ties to the religious right: “For me, politics had nothing to do with it,” Ms. Reed said. “It felt more like a bit of tinkering with the way Christianity is practiced in the evangelical church. This can be a good thing, giving people the opportunity to be more expressive, emphasizing a personal relationship with Jesus. But for me, motivation needed less of that, because I started putting too much emphasis on your preferences and what feels good.
Modern secular culture tends to define personal freedom in terms of “negative freedom,” as made famous from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: the absence of constraints, the possibility of doing what you want provided you do not encroach on the freedoms of others. But Ms. Reed, who now works as a freelance writer in Waco, explained the paradox of feeling freer during the rule-bound Lenten season: Rules save you from the pressure to pretend you’re a completely autonomous being. “We live in a culture where you can have every comfort and an extremely high level of self-determination in relation to history. You can do whatever you want with your time and money,” she said. “In this context, undertaking Lent is a powerful reminder that you are a limited and weak creature who must eat several times a day to stay alive. The true nature of our presence in this world is extreme dependence.
Fasting, she said, is one of “the models God has given us for human flourishing.” If we trust the models, they work, wherever you come from, whatever your background. At first glance, they may seem too excessive, or too oppressive, or “this doesn’t fit my personal story.” But trust that this model is a living thing and can work with you. It is not a rigid, dead burden.
Julie Canlis, who has a doctorate in theology and works at an Anglican church in Washington state, loves talking about the restrictions of Lent with secular friends. “If there’s anything that secular society recognizes, it’s that we limit our freedom most to ourselves,” she told me. “We know that simply removing external barriers does not automatically pave the way to inner freedom. » Her four teenagers “love fasting and Lent,” she said. “They do it because no one challenges them to do difficult things.”
