Tiffany Reed grew up in an interracial Pentecostal family, moving frequently and fasting under her father’s direction. “He had been reading about church history and watching documentaries and was excited to introduce new family customs,” she told me. As an undergraduate at King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, she watched her evangelical classmates become Anglicans or convert to Catholicism. She graduated in 2016. A few years later, she moved to Waco, Texas, where she attended Brazos Fellows, a program affiliated with Baylor University. This program provides university graduates with nine months of theological study. There, she was drawn to the structure of the Anglican tradition and began researching early Christians’ approaches to fasting.
While some evangelicals join the Church of England to escape its close ties to the religious right, “politics had nothing to do with me,” Ms Reid said. “I’ve noticed a bit of a DIY feel to the way Christianity is practiced in evangelical churches. That’s a good thing, and it leaves room for people to be more expressive, with an emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus.” But for me, I didn’t need as much motivation because I started focusing too much on what you like and what feels good.”
Modern secular culture tends to frame individual freedom in terms of “negative freedom,” a phrase famously used by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. This means that there are no restrictions and that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t infringe on your freedom. Others. But Reed, who now works as a freelance writer in Waco, described the paradox of feeling free during a Lent bound by rules. Rules save you from the pressure of acting like a completely autonomous entity. “We live in a culture where we have access to all the comforts and a much higher level of self-determination than in history. We can do what we want with our time and money,” she says. said. “In that context, Lent is a powerful reminder that we are finite, weak creatures who must eat multiple times a day in order to survive. The essence of our existence is extreme dependence.”
Fasting is “one of the patterns God has given us for human flourishing,” she said. If you trust the pattern, it will work no matter where you come from or what your background is. On the surface, they may seem too much, or too oppressive, or “that doesn’t fit my personal story.” But trust that this pattern is alive and will work well for you. It is not a hard, dead burden. ”
Julie Canlis, who has a doctorate in theology and works at an Episcopal church in Washington state, loves talking to secular friends about the rigors of Lent. “If there’s one thing that secular society admits, it’s that we limit our freedom the most for ourselves,” she told me. “We know that just removing external barriers does not automatically pave the way to internal freedom.” Her four teenagers “love fasting and I also love the seasonal season,” she said. “They do it because no one lets them try difficult things.”