Last week, my local Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF) chapter watched a documentary titled Becoming Truly Human at one of our meetings. This film, recently produced by Ancient Faith Films, attempts to seriously discuss the statistically increasingly common religious phenomena of the “nones”, that is, the non-religiously affiliated. You can watch the trailer by clicking here. My goal in this article is not to spoil the movie or its claims in the slightest; rather, I will attempt to seriously reflect on them given the experiences in my own life and conversion from Protestantism to Orthodox Christianity. If you would prefer to watch it beforehand, you can purchase the DVD here or stream it on YouTube here.
The documentary is, in a sense, two films in one. It first follows the personal account of Basil, a man raised by a devout Lutheran mother and a nonreligious father, as he attempted to discover transcendent truth through art, drugs, and philosophy. Basil eventually ended up becoming Orthodox, concluding that Orthodox Christianity is the path to becoming truly human. This story is intercut with Basil interviewing eight “nones”, all of who were raised in a religious household of some form and ended up becoming religiously unaffiliated. The documentary did an extremely good job of unbiasedly asking these people about the backgrounds that they came from and why they ended up leaving their respective religious traditions. I will leave it to the reader to watch the film and hear the specifics of their stories. However, common threads through their responses dealt with the disillusionment in religion after legitimate doubts and questions are raised and remain unanswered. This led to some of them turning to pure reason as the basis for all truth, while others were led to explore the spirituality of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs without directly joining any religious organization. Nearly all of them said they would be open to the idea of God but felt that the God of Christianity was an angry God who arbitrarily imposes rules on people.
Their concerns fit well with Basil’s story, who became disillusioned with western Christianity in high school but later reconsidered it when he married a devout Protestant. Still being frustrated with Protestantism after attending church for years with his wife, he turned to the “God of the philosophers”, searching for a God that was not angry with His creation nor the cause of evil. During this time, he stumbled upon the writings of the early Church father St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and was struck by his view that God is the source of life, and that the Christian life consists of returning to God in order to become truly alive. It is for this reason, St. Athanasius argues, that God became Man in the Person of Jesus Christ. Seeing humanity separated from God and thus falling into death, God, out of His love for mankind, comes to humanity as a human in order to rescue them from death and imbue His life back into creation. This view connected with Basil, who ended up discovering that the Orthodox Christian Church holds this view. Over several years of deliberation, he eventually became an Orthodox Christian along with his wife and children.
I think the power of the film comes from its blatant and unapologetic honesty. The film explores the doubts that people inevitably have when they are raised to unquestionably believe something. And, by embracing those doubts and working through them, it demonstrates how life can be found on the other side. This experience is the same as my process transitioning from Presbyterianism to Orthodoxy. Realizing that the normal American Protestant (particularly Calvinist influenced) beliefs of “once saved always saved” is not in line with historical Christianity came as a shock to me, and the transition to the more historical view of salvation as a process was (is) a long and hard one. But this process of becoming more filled with life as I struggle to become like Christ has been of insurmountable value to me. It has allowed me to reevaluate parts of my life that I previously would not have considered “sinful.” It has allowed me to reconsider how I think about and treat my neighbor on a daily basis. In short, it has allowed me to repent (μετάνοια), to reorient my thoughts and actions towards God.
Perhaps the most telling part of the film comes from the quotation used at the end before the credits roll:
Birth-pangs are upon me. Suffer me, my brethren; hinder me not from living; do not wish me to die… Suffer me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I shall become human. Suffer me to follow the example of the Passion of my God.
Said in the first century by St. Ignatius of Antioch as he was heading to his martyrdom, this quote aptly summarizes the main question the film is asking: “How do I become human?”
I would recommend the movie for anyone who identifies as a nonreligious, is interested in Orthodox Christianity, or already is Orthodox. The good narration, high quality cinematography, and the transitions between Basil’s story and the interview with the nones keeps the film interesting.
