The hype over the penultimate Harry Potter movie made me think of the star’s professed atheism and then I imagined asking him what makes him think that at his young age (and this was a while ago, so he was a teen) he could call himself an atheist. I tried rewording it to sound more polite, “How would you respond to those who might task you if you’re a bit young to profess to atheism.” It didn’t sound much better, but then it set me thinking about how young I was when I started getting the message.
We were a church-going family. We said “Grace” at mealtime. Although my father was a Methodist, my mother was a Stealth Atheist. That is, she never mentioned it while we were growing up. She warbled the hymns each Sunday (while my dad boomed a bass line he probably thought was “manly”), prompted me to sing those horrible little tunes they taught us as Sunday school (“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” is a particularly execrable one), sang little religious ditties to me to comfort me (“Down in the Dumps I’ll Never Go” was amusing), told me when I was hesitant to do the Right Thing (especially things I didn’t want to do) that it would earn me Stars In My Crown (that is, in Heaven). I was never threatened with Hell. Who would do such a thing to a small child? God was a big, friendly daddy in the clouds who watched over me and kept me safe. I said prayers each night before bed, nervous about that “if I should die before I wake” business which I quickly replaced with the Lord’s Prayer as soon as I learned it. To please my dad, I even tried to learn it in German. He was also big on memorizing psalms – and if the boys in his Sunday school class learned the prescribed ones they were allowed to feel his cauliflower ears he earned while wrestling before headgear was required.
Our family’s religious habits were eclectic. As I mentioned, my dad was Methodist, so I was baptized Lutheran and confirmed Presbyterian. Each time we moved, different churches were auditioned and my sister and I had to keep scarves on hand in case we attended a service that called for women’s heads to be covered. There may even have been times when we went to a service on a day other than a Sunday. On the last move, my mother fell in love with the Unitarian service but my dad vetoed it – both for the same reason: the absence of the name of God, but that discussion was not for our ears. In the end, we went Presbyterian because that particular church had a very lovely interior. Mom scoffed at the tenet of Predestination. “They don’t mention that because it embarrasses them now,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about. Her sister was unhappy with the service when she attended and when Mom pointed out the lovely and expensive stained glass windows (Mom was an artist), her sister sighed and said that she was missing the Whole Point.
My first inklings of suspicion came from my earliest recollection of a Lutheran Sunday school where even the tiniest of us had a sort of mini-service that included an offering. I am only slightly mortified to recall that I did not like handing over my few pennies, even though they had just been given me that morning. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter, and I cling to my cash, even at age five. Money was the taboo subject in our house, instead of sex. I wasn’t allowed to know how much my dad earned, even when time came to fill out college scholarship forms. I filled in everything else and then my mom completed the financial bit, put it in a sealed envelope, and gave it back to me for delivery. This must have been a Depression Survivor thing. Anyway, it is my recollection that they passed the plate and then put it on our miniature altar. After the offering came some prayer and we were all to bow our heads. At the end of the prayer, the plate was gone. Now, I can’t say definitely that I was ever expressly told that God reached down and took that plate, but that was the impression I got … until the day I peeped. I was scandalized to see one of the teachers remove the plate and silently take it away. What? My nickel was not going directly to God?
This, however, did not kill my belief in God or Jesus (although for some reason the latter was keen on us little ones “suffering”). I still believed in this enough to worry about those angels who were supposed to be watching over me (and this was about age eight or nine), which I thought was incredibly creepy and insisted on extra blankets. If they could see through the roof into my room, they could probably see through a layer or two of bedclothes and I wasn’t having any of that!
Moving and changing churches involved, sometimes, changes I had trouble with. I had finally committed the Lord’s Prayer to memory by age eight and now I had to learn a slightly different version. This was the change from forgiving trespasses to forgiving debts. Oh, dear! My mom tried to explain that it was a tiny difference but I knew that “debt” was a bad, bad word in our house. Later I learned that some churches used the word “sins” – which sounded absolutely horrible. It’s one thing to walk across a neighbor’s yard without asking (what I thought of as “trespassing”) and another to forgive “debtors” – although this was easier to say than “those who have trespassed against us.” I was interested in words and it seemed odd that there would be such a difference in terminology as well as euphony (and as difficult as learning to say “those who have trespassed against us” was, I enjoyed the meter and poetry of it).
Then there was the German version. Schuld means all sorts of things. There was a bit of German spoken in the home, as well as sung, and I knew that there were some words that just couldn’t be translated from one language to another. It hadn’t fully hit me that these words I chanted (or, later, read in the Bible) were not originally written in English.
I joined the children’s choir at the church in Cincinnati and enjoyed singing to no end. I still wrestled with the training-tithes, this time in the form of a cute cardboard church you were to fill with pennies and return by a certain date. I was the sort who filled piggybanks until they literally burst, but that was because I was saving up for something I wanted desperately (which probably had to be a new piggybank after the previous one cracked). In those days, pennies could actually buy something. If you had a dollar – omigosh! I resented having to use my own money (now) to give to what was plainly mission work, but was described as the deserving poor in underdeveloped nations – as if there weren’t poor enough people across town.
We moved again and found another new church, the one with the famous stained glass windows and the downplayed Predestination. This was in the 1960s and the theme was reaching out to other religions and popular culture. We visited a synagogue, we studied other religions and tried to find similarities – it was hippie ecumenicalism and Let’s All Feel Good down the line. Well, except perhaps in the minister’s forgettable sermons. Mom pointed out that when he really got going, his nose started to run and I paid attention more to how often his big, white hanky came out than what he was orating – and he was Orating. He was a Doctor of Divinity! As a daughter of the middle-management middle-class, I was heartily impressed with anything that smacked of the professional class. This man was smart. My dad may have gone to college, but this man had a doctorate. I was easily impressed.
The assistant minister was lumbered with the onus of what is now called youth ministry, and he was easy to ignore, but when the head stepped into our classes with what seemed like his tall, imposing physique (I am remembering from a time when I was shorter, of course) and his grand demeanor, we all straightened up. One time he decided to quiz us on our Christmas story knowledge, asking some difficult questions about the three wise men – such as what they did afterwards. Okay, that seemed more difficult at the time because I have now read the entire New Testament but at the time we only read pieces in some garbled christospeak. So, probably wishing to appear knowledgeable about something, I asked about the fourth wise man. The Great Man smiled condescendingly at me and said that that was a mere fairy story. Well, I loved fairytales and read them over and over and I thought I knew one when I saw it, and the three wise men was one if ever there was. But, I had not made that connection until he sneered at the idea of a fourth.
In later, more sophisticated years, I took it upon myself to read some of the Old Testament and was appalled by what I read – mostly in Deuteronomy and Numbers. Feminism had reached me and it had been hammered into me that rape was not a woman’s fault. A woman walking around in a short skirt does not give her rapist the “out” of “She was just asking for it!” – but it said in the Old Testament that if it occurred inside the walls of the city where she could have been heard to cry out, she gets a stoning on top of it. Outside the walls, well, maybe no one could have heard her there. It hit me that it would be easy for an adulteress-wannabe to meet her lover outside the walls to hedge her bets. Basically, I could have been Bill Clinton if I’d worked at it.
None of this took away belief in God or in the goodness of Jesus (although that three-gods-in-one mess confused me – fortunately, the Apostle’s Creed that I had to memorize says Jesus sits on the right hand of God, which keeps him nicely separate) and we were still going to church regularly until that one fateful Sunday. I had been out late (probably not drinking, but just hanging out with my friends) on Saturday and when my mother came in to ask me if I wanted to go to church, I truthfully said “No.” I had meant, “No, I’d rather not, but I’ll go if you ask me to.” Mom took this as her out. “Good,” she said, “I’m sick of this.” She told Dad we weren’t going anymore. Dad might have gone on his own for a little while after that, but he stopped as well.
My dad was from that intensely personal Christian background that needed his own faith only and not the reinforcement of organized religion. He never lost that faith – despite all the arguments with my mother in future years about the reality of God. He wondered why she felt she had to argue with him about it. “It’s Faith,” he would say, “you can’t prove or disprove logically.” “Yes, well, if I’m going to Hell,” Mom would counter, “I want you with me.” I suppose that is some sort of deep devotion - or else she was just making a joke.
Religion fell away from me then by degrees. I found myself being annoyed by other Christians. There was an annoying habit one had of agreeing by saying, “This is true.” If you say that once, it rings. If you keep saying it over and over instead of “Oh, yes!” or a number of other more neutral expressions, it loses all impact and instead becomes a gnat buzzing around your ears. I winced every time she used it.
The Late Great Planet Earth was a popular book when I was in college and several of my friends would regale me with the startling coincidences that reveal that the End Times were nigh. Well, Chariots of the Gods? was also out at that time and I was more inclined to read that one, if not believe it. At least it had some nice pictures in it of archaeological interest, and I was very interested in archaeology.
As an adult, I watched the tragedy of a minister’s family breaking up over his adultery. He lost his vocation and his family in one moment. I thought it was sad because he was so personable. His wife, whom I worked with, was so nice also. In retrospect, I think they should have worked something out. At the time it just showed me how human ministers were – a real change from that Great Orator with the Evangelical Rhinitis*. And I think you understand human failings better if you experience them yourself. I believe he went on to be a counselor/therapist. I bet he was a good one.
I love to read, so I went through quite a few books on religious topics. It was only too plain to me, after years of studying Spanish, German, French, and Latin that it was hard to translate things exactly, and if there are many Bible translations and they are different - well … I later started to study Koine Greek on my own** and one of the exercises was translating the Ten Commandments. I slaved through that, amazed by what I was making of it and thrilled by the plasticity of words. Then I turned to the back to see the correct literal translation … and it was just the same as in the Bible. Nothing at all like what I’d created, unlike the other exercises I was able to translate properly. Hmmmm, I thought. I subscribed to Biblical Archaeology Review for a while – but eventually I gave up when the letters section was reduced to religious in-fighting. The problems with the book on Koine Greek reminded me of the infighting that led to Constantine causing the sects to sit down with each other and hammer out a unified belief. We’re still fighting over what Jesus meant – and I include atheists because we seem to be as vocal about that as anyone else.
I read
The Bible as History as well as
The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion. I still have the former, as well as a number of historical books on Christianity. Everyone comes to different conclusions. I was willing to accept anyone’s beliefs, bow my head out of respect when they prayed, go to their places of worship until I moved back to the south. I have a German last name, and I’m often asked if I am Jewish. This gives me a little thrill as I see an opportunity to “punk” them. But I don’t. My background is of a people notable for their oppression of Jews and so I take the high road and ask, “Is it important?” If they say no, then I say I don’t need to tell them. If they counter with, “Well, yes …” then I refuse to tell them on the grounds that it would change our relationship. It doesn’t always work, but I usually try it on (I also like Jonathan Miller’s response that he is only Jewish around anti-semites). There are accusations of Jewish lineage on both sides of my family tree but I can’t document it. It’s a shame, really, because small towns like where I live now really need more variety in them so they stop taking things for granted. What things? Well, things like praying as a group in a work situation.
I’ve wrestled with my newfound antipathy towards Christianity (and other religions and some atheists, but I see mostly Christian bullying in my day-to-day existence) for twenty years now. On the one hand, I would like to be able to opt out of praying without causing a fuss (thinks back to an office Christmas party) and on the other hand I know that my reaction to the heavy-handed religiosity only makes them react more heavily. It’s a conundrum. Here’s only a sample of what happens:
A patron came in one day and I was helpful. Before she left, she felt obliged to ask me if I were a Christian (without any subjunctive or indefinite verbiage). I am not forbidden to respond to such questions and either way I answered would cause a problem. If I said I was, then I would give her the false impression that there were more like-minded people out there and she probably had some follow-up question to trick me into admitting I was the wrong kind. I knew it would be equal trouble, but I said I wasn’t and this led to a Conversation. I said, upon being asked why, that I had read and seen too much to believe. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I’ve seen many people confused by …” and she went on.
Yes, many of us are confused by historical and scientific facts, but that does not necessarily cause us to stop believing. We are not confused by our studies because generally we only see the parts we agree with anyway. We more often are struck by our lack of belief and then go searching for material that bolsters this. I have tried to look at both sides at first. I had read Mere Christianity and was with Lewis right up to one little point where I realized his logic fell apart. After that, it was all over. The fat lady sang. This was not an ancient document that was a copy of a long line of copies. It was not something that an editor interpolated something he thought he heard someone say that he heard someone say that Lewis said once. It was in Lewis’s attempt to clinch his argument – and not at the very end, but hidden in the last few irrefutable statements where it might go unnoticed. But I saw it and he failed. He tried to do the impossible, and I applaud his attempt, but it didn’t work. In the end, it was Christians who made me an atheist and everyone since that has fired their best shot at me, ordinary or wielding their credentials like clubs, has also failed. Therefore, I suspect that foisting my beliefs on them would work equally poorly.
The more embellishment you lard on, the less likely I am to accept it as truth. I know stories and I love them. Passion stories and the Christmas story can bring me to tears even in their most banal renditions, but not because I see Truth – I just see a wonderfully told tale. I am willing to leave the question open on whether or not Jesus existed as a man. It seems likely, but for me there is no God for him to be Son Of. I have to, as The Life of Pi suggested, go with the Better Story. I don’t buy the tiger one and I’m sure Martel could have made the other story just as interesting if he’d bothered instead of reducing it to a few dry sentences. As it was, I was reconstructing it in my mind the same way scholars try to eke out the verifiable in the Bible.
Everyone else is free to find their Better Story, but, as they say, it’s in the way you tell ‘em. And, even better, is the one you discover for yourself.
*Bob and I discussed the pseudo-scientific naming of this “ailment” (I suffer from Gustatory Rhinitis – or perhaps other people suffer having to watch me dab at my nose at the table) and he came up with all sorts of adjectives, notably: Rhetorical Rhinitis (which, though the alliteration is to die for, makes it sound more theoretical), Proselytizing Rhinitis (which I rejected because that would be orating on street corners), Pulpitary Rhinitis (you can’t keep a good man down when he’s on a roll), Homilary Rhinitis (okay, that one was all mine, but Bob had to think of the word Homily for me), Sermonizing Rhinitis (which didn’t sound “science-y” enough although I tried Sermonial for a while), Eschatological Rhinitis (which sounds so – so final) and Hortatory Rhinitis – but we just descended into silliness.
**I did not begin my study of Greek purposefully to unravel the Bible myself. It began with reading Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” and laughing so hard that Diet Pepsi came out my nose (and very nearly the bean burrito as well). I started to wonder if it was as funny in the original Ancient Greek as the translation was. It is. Well, that part was anyway.
