Navigating as a nonreligious person among Christians on Christian territory can be tricky even though all of us are very open-minded.

I had a serious problem understanding an author I was studying. I expressed some of my frustration via email to my advisor and my advisor replied via email that I should not consider the author stupid because the author was not stupid, and that I would do a better paper if I did not consider him stupid.

I called my advisor on the phone to ask how to handle the situation because the author seriously failed my expectations. I caught him just as he was leaving the office to go home and he was somewhat curt. I assumed it was because he needed to get home and didn't have time to give a detailed answer. I acknowledged that it would be more professional to handle things the way he suggested. Then suddenly he opened up and talked like his normal happy self.

Hours later I was still puzzling over the matter. How come he suddenly opened up? Then it hit me. This had happened once before. In both cases, when I acknowledged his right to be who he was, he opened up and talked. Working my way backwards from there, I realize that in both cases he could have felt that I was attacking either his intelligence or his beliefs.

When he understood that I genuinely needed help understanding my author, he was able to explain things in a way that opened up a whole new world of understanding for me. He was not afraid of the atheist perspective. Our topic was human motivation. He explained that the Christian philosophers had to make room for God in their philosophies. The atheist philosophers who came later did not have to do that. Thus, we get two different ways of thinking about human motivation.

My author was a Christian theologian who critiqued various philosophers of his time (1800s). I was having extreme problems with his logic. It was driving me crazy! It was the kind of logic I had lived with all my life and it did not make sense--neither then nor now. I told my professor that it is a mode of thinking that I can't pin down but it is unacceptable to me. He suggested that perhaps my people still used the 1800s mode of logic. I am convinced they do. So when he mentioned that the Christian theologians had to "make room for God" in their philosophies, so many things fell into place.

When he further suggested that the atheist philosophers did not have to make room for God and could thus look directly at the psychological workings of the human mind, even more things fell into place. (I know something of the history of the development of the mental health field; it branched off from philosophy in the late decades of the 1800s. My author was writing just before that, in 1870.) I understand human motivation as psychological functions coming from inside the individual, NOT as impacts from an outside force such as God.

Thanks to a Christian who was willing to explore ideas from outside the profession of Christianity, I was able to better understand a fundamentalist Christian author. Not that fundamentalists will be likely to understand such a statement but it's true all the same.