Belief - Lughnasa 2020

When I was young, I desperately wanted to believe in something. I wanted to belong to something, perhaps because I didn’t get that feeling of belonging at home.

My early religious instruction was pretty normal. A pastoral church out in the country, an acceptable substitute denomination when my parents couldn’t find their own, macaroni iconography spray-painted gold, feeding carrots or apples to the neighboring horses after services. I still remember the excitement of the first day I was allowed to sit with my parents and sister rather than in the daycare center the church had for younger kids.

These bucolic outings were curtailed when the Congregationalist church opened a mile from our house. But we still attended as a family off and on when my father wasn’t traveling for his job, which meant less and less often.

That changed again after my parents got divorced. My mother declared she no longer benefited from going to church, though my sister and I still would. That never quite made sense to me, though I suspect now she was looking for a once a week break from us. The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on my sister, who started ditching church like school then stopped going altogether. I wasn’t far behind. Church was a family activity. My family had disappeared.

That didn’t mean I stopped searching, even in a back-burner kind of way. Or perhaps I felt a not so subtle need to conform. But none of that was pressing.

Then came the worst year of my life. Sixth grade arrived with a new school, new friends, and new expectations, all of which was normal enough. But those changes were combined with my sister’s now full-steam rebelliousness layered with my mother struggling to find a job then working nights. Most of what I remember from that year was them fighting Texas Cage Match style, knowing that at any moment it could spill over to me and often did. I remember feeling constantly terrified and exhausted. I often wished I would go to sleep and never wake up, that God would claim me. I didn’t have some vision of unearthly fantasy paradise filled with streets of gold and choirs of angels. That’s not what Congregationalists teach. I just knew heaven couldn’t be any worse than earth. All I wanted was some peace.

About that time a new church opened across the street from my middle school. The Evangel Temple. I don’t know what denomination it was. I suspect it didn’t have one at all. No one knew what to make of them. They were new and didn’t seem to play by the existing rules. I mean who named their church a temple? Not the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Catholics or even the Southern Baptists, never mind the Congregationalists. Not in the 70s, not in sleepy Rockledge, Florida. It sounded kind of Old Testament. Perhaps that should have been a clue. Yet here they were, all exciting, shiny and white.

But that’s not what grabbed my attention. Soon after opening, they started trolling the neighborhood in a brightly made up van like an ice cream truck, gathering an audience of kids with free candy, then enticing us with little Biblical puppet shows to say was how much fun their church could be. They were definitely progressive in spreading their Word, at least to our generation. They had a dedicated children’s church with its own rock band. They had a refurbished school bus that would pick us up if our parents didn’t want to attend. It was the perfect disaffected suburban setup, remarkably similar to other 70s cultural temptations. Remember, kids, samples are free.

Somewhere in my head I decided this might be a better way to spend my Sunday mornings than at home. All my friends were in church and television was a wasteland. Just Face the Nation, the 700 Club and the Bobby Bowden Show. And it wasn’t like there were any family activities in the offing, not even Sunday dinner. So, I signed up.

My mother was initially less than enthusiastic. But once the bus came around and honked its horn, she seemed onboard with my once again disappearing for several hours each week. In fact, as the shine wore off because I didn’t really make any friends in the children’s congregation or find it particularly entertaining or as comforting as I’d thought, she was the one who insisted I continue to attend.

The place was weird to me. The first thing they did each week was ask if anyone was new then drag them up on stage to be “saved.” Which I know now is a pretty standard scenario in most evangelical, charismatic and sometimes fundamentalist American Christian churches. Which, aside from making me uncomfortable, struck me as completely alien. No other church I’d been in did anything like this, especially with kids, especially without their parents around. Besides, it seemed unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I knew I’d been baptized. At least I’d seen the pictures though I couldn’t swear my parents weren’t beaming over some other random infant in a white christening dress near a font with a minister.

Plus, none of the sermons, if you could call them that, spoke to me or made much sense. None of the Bible stories were the way I remembered them. It all felt like a huge bait and switch. But as with any boring class in school, I tolerated it as I checked out and daydreamed the time away.

Then came the fateful day someone asked how old I was. I don’t remember if it was around my birthday or just a random question. Either way, thirteen was the answer. Oh, well, that’s a problem. Children’s church is for children only, meaning twelve and under. You now need to attend the regular church in the regular sanctuary. I didn’t like this idea very much. But being a rule follower, I did as I was asked. Not that it was a request. They’d given me one final week in children’s church as a courtesy. After that, the nice lady who ran the place drew a hard, red line.

The next Sunday, I went into the main sanctuary alone, which was as large and sterile as any other church I’d been in. The service was as dry and meaningless to me as any other I’d sat through, either in my previous churches or attending some of my friends’ churches as a guest. Hell, the last Congregationalist sermon I remember revolved around baseball. I’m not sure I followed the metaphor but I do vividly remember the minster examining the ball, tossing it up and down, and setting it on the podium. This was all Old Testament stories and sin as I remember. Definitely perplexing and adult, without a Virgil or Beatrice to guide me through.

But I couldn’t find a way out of it. My mother remained insistent I attend. I’d signed up so wasn’t allowed to quit. I did manage to get off the bus by saying I could ride my bike. My sister briefly went with me, but really that was just a cover for her to ditch and do something with her friends without my mother knowing. She swore me to secrecy and threatened me if I blew her in. That lasted until the day she wasn’t at the assigned meeting spot when I got out. I waited but knew when she didn’t show that I had to get home or risk my mother’s wrath. By this point, we were fighting over the lifeboats: it was every child for themselves.

I don’t remember how long I attended regular services before a family sitting down the pew from me said they’d noticed me attending alone and asked me where my family was. I told them my parents were divorced and neither my mother or sister wanted to come. They invited me to sit with them each week. I think the words “you can be part of our family” were uttered.

I may have only been thirteen but my stranger danger radar blared away full blast, red lights, sirens and everything. I went home that afternoon and told my mother I wasn’t going back. I didn’t tell her why or what had happened. She thought about trying to force me, but something in my stance and hardened eyes must have convinced her it would have been a futile effort. I was done.

So, after eighteen months, I was once again a confirmed heathen with my Sunday mornings free. That little experiment in freewill had definitely cured my itch to belong and believe, at least for a time.

That lasted until I was in high school and had a steady girlfriend. Which surprised even me. Somewhere in the time we were dating, she’d been born again outside the denomination of her birth. She was going to some nondenominational, fundamentalist church out in the sticks of Cocoa. She would tell me about her Bible study class, how great and educational it was. How we really should go together. As a couple. She’d told them all about me, which struck more than a little fear into my heart. After my earlier experience, I wasn’t particularly interested. But in the spirit of compromise and cooperation and a continuing relationship, I eventually, reluctantly agreed.

First problem. Bible study came with homework, which I wasn’t particularly inclined or interested in doing. I had a Bible. But sitting down to read it to discuss with a group of strangers wasn’t high on my list of things to do over a weekend. Second problem, the study group met before the first of two regularly scheduled services. So early, at least for me at the time, which meant setting an alarm on a day I might normally sleep in, especially after a late night on Saturday, or if I had to be at work at noon. Again, not high on my agenda.

But like a dutiful boyfriend, I did my best. For about eight weeks, I did (most) of the assigned reading and contributed to the discussion, though usually only when asked. My opinions weren’t what I’d call the standard interpretation at the table. But the group was at least different from what I’d seen before. The people seemed mostly ok. Though I had my doubts about the guy who would show up bright and early in a tie one week, late in a t-shirt and perhaps hungover the next, miss the next two or three meetings completely, then rinse and repeat. And the group treated it like nothing ever happened. Which struck me as pretty odd.

After the study group, my girlfriend and I attended the main service together. She seemed quite happy with the whole arrangement. At some point I realized she was showing me off, which I wasn’t sure I minded. While it wasn’t my favorite couple’s activity, the congregation was too conservative and literal for my taste, I could generally deal with it. Or so I thought.

Which lasted until a particular Sunday morning. We were sitting in the center of a long row of pews, about mid-distance front to back. Hard, polished wood pews as I remember. No pad or carpet like the Evangel Temple, which seems opulent by comparison. We had gone through the ritual of turning forward, back, and side to side to shake all our neighbors’ hands. It was springtime in Reagan’s newly minted America. Which cast us, I suppose, as the shining city on the hill.

The minister immediately launched a fiery sermon on the perils of premarital sex as a wage of sin. Living in the era of Just Say No, this rolled right off me. It was pretty standard rhetoric. I’d heard it all before. As far as that sin went, there were bigger worries in the world in my mind. In fact, I wasn’t really paying much attention at all.

Right up to the moment he added, “any woman who has sex before marriage is damaged goods in God’s eyes.” That caught my full and undivided attention. Had I just dropped back fifty years and landed in a church Pleasantville? Had my technicolor world just changed to black and white?

At first, I didn’t take his statement seriously. A smile might have tried to curl the corners of my mouth. I thought it was a provocative setup line for a twist that would lead to the real sermon. That had to be it. As I glance around, that nascent smile emerged stillborn. Everyone in front of me was nodding. These people were dead serious.

“Damaged goods.” The minister repeated that phrase for emphasis, with a pause for contemplation. Like women were precious cargo in their God’s eyes. Possessions not people.

I glanced at my girlfriend to check her reaction. She had a rapt expression fixed on the pastor as she nodded gravely, too. I quickly refocused forward, stunned, surrounded, my stranger danger blasting a red alert again. Understand that in our relationship, that ship was no longer tied up at the pier. It’s not like she and I had embarked on a different journey in that regard. Neither of us had sailed alone. Except I wasn’t damaged in her God’s eyes. She was. Not me. Just her.

Which made me wonder what kind of self-hating, hypocritical relationship I was in. If I had been alone, I would have walked out on the spot. I was that repulsed. As my anger curdled, I almost did. Instead, I donned a mask, not wanting to make a scene, working through the rest of the service from the safety of its disguise. On the drive home, I told her I would never go back. If she was comfortable accepting that kind of judgment knowing she didn’t conform to their God’s expectations and never could, that was her choice. Personally, I thought treating women like that was bullshit, albeit an ironic, artistic exclamation point in the statuary garden of the golden calf.

I am pretty sure that’s where our relationship began to founder, though it took another year or so to break up on the rocks. Looking back, that was for the best.

This time, I only kept free and clear from religious entanglements for another couple years. Once again, my return had to do with a girl. Two girls in fact.

The first was a friend who was two thousand miles away when she told me she’d attempted suicide. The second was in the campus Christian group my born-again roommate introduced me to for solace when I told him. She, and they, seemed different from the Christians I’d been around up to then. More caring and honest. Though still on the strange side of metaphysics in my mind, especially as an aspiring engineer.

Long story short, this girl was generous, kind and pretty. I liked her. I thought she liked me. I wanted to see where it might lead. That yellow brick road is paved with good intentions.

Where it ended up was in a tent revival, which is like a southern rite of passage as I understand it. I’d never been to one. Given what I’d seen and heard in the past several years, I figured I could handle it without a problem. How bad could it be? Once again, my estimation and reality didn’t quite intersect.

A tent revival is a lot like a circus sideshow. There’s a striped canvas tent setup in an empty lot on the outskirts of town. Inside there are row upon row of white folding chairs with an aisle down the center facing a platform stage. There are ushers, men, in long-sleeved button-up shirts who look a little like bouncers at a strip club. There is a local barker to warm up crowd and draw them in before the headline talent hits the stage. All this happens after dark.

Revivals are itinerant and somewhat mendicant. They travel from place to place, often in an established circuit, advertising their arrival at various evangelical and charismatic churches. Sometimes the headliners end up as a guest ministers or speakers in a local church, but more often not. Theirs is a particular talent more suited to Saturday night than Sunday morning. Some bill themselves as healers or miracle workers, others as speaking in tongues or any variant of being inhabited by the Spirit. Most are just fiery, inspired speakers who know how to work an audience, which ranges from small and intimate to local carnival large. It is a very strange ecosystem that inhabits the margins of society like a tidal pool.

It’s important to remember these speakers are old-school religious showmen. People turn up to be entertained as well as to be saved or renew their faith. While all are welcome, most know what they’re in for and exactly what to expect.

I didn’t. But I quickly learned. The dialog and narrative structure were novel to me, although as the night progressed, I found the plot points very familiar.

The first trick to showmanship is anticipation. You always make your audience wait. So, a 9 o’clock kickoff time drifts closer to 9:15-9:30. Bearing in mind this is springtime in Florida, so while not Amazonia hot, definitely not what you’d call cool. Pack a hundred or so bodies into a plasticized canvas tent and draw the flaps and it gets downright warm. Not quite uncomfortable, just bordering on giddy.

I don’t remember all the particulars of the how the evening unfolded. The lights were low to set the mood. There wasn’t a microphone, though it wasn’t a big space. An usher guarded the entrance with another at the stage entrance to outside and maybe a third stationed somewhere in front of the stage. There was a local warm-up act who gave the introduction. There was some sort of fiery sermon with allusions to the devil walking among us with his temptations and the punishment that awaited us should we yield. Like every religious service I’d been to, at some point they passed a plate. All of which built toward the highlight of the evening: the call for salvation.

At some point the speaker asked a series of questions. Who had never been here before? Who had a problem the Holy Spirit could address? Who needed to renew their faith? Who had never been saved?

For me, these were all rhetorical questions I had no intentions of answering, or even stirring for as they were asked. I knew what was coming from the Evangel Temple. While I was in the audience voluntarily, I had no desire to make it more than a spectator sport. I didn’t remember hearing a portion of my grade would be based on participation. So, I sat impassively with my arms tucked across my chest watching the spectacle unfold.

Unfortunately, the girl I was with didn’t get the memo. She must have raised a hand and pointed at me behind my back. Suddenly, there was an usher at the head of our row, beckoning to me.

I should have shaken my head and refused. But again, there was a girl involved, one currently encouraging me to accompany this guy. Against my better instincts, I went along.

He guided me up on stage, to the end of a line of half a dozen others. The preacher made a show of more build-up, dragging a last couple stragglers up to join us. At this point, I wasn’t really paying attention because I really didn’t want to be there.

Once he was done with the preliminaries, the preacher started at the head of line. He stood before the first individual, looked them in the eye, then raised a hand and pressed it hard against their forehead, pushing back quickly with a loud, “Be healed” at the moment he made contact. That individual fell back as if they’d fainted into the waiting arms of one of the burly ushers who helped them to their feet and guided them shakily offstage.

The preacher moved down the line, bam, bam, bam, felling individuals one after another like a row of yellow pines. Like a trust exercise at a team-building seminar, each was caught by an usher who assisted them back to their seats. You could see the preacher’s performance was gathering steam. This was why the audience was here.

When he came to me, he gave me that same long, meaningful look into my eyes but didn’t say a word. I assume he thought I knew the script from those who came before. Maybe the first person in line was a ringer to show us the way. Except I’d been through similar before. While I had no intention of disrupting his performance, I also had no desire to participate unless I felt so moved.

“Be healed.” When his palm connected with my brow, my head rocked back. But I felt no spark, no spirit, no knee-buckling euphoria. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel something, maybe even hoped to. But there was nothing. So, my head just snapped back forward.

The preacher’s eyes narrowed as his expression flashed between annoyance and outright anger. I just met his gaze levelly before I was grabbed firmly by the arm from behind and hustled back to my folding chair, now more than a little scared. These guys were truly upset that I had ruined their show.

The whole affair wound down quickly after that. As we spilled out into the night, I did feel somewhat reborn, not in spirit but in clarity. After seven years, I’d finally peered behind the curtain and seen the show for what it was. Needless to say, my performance didn’t make a good impression. I didn’t get the girl. Again, likely for the best.

I can’t say that was the last time I was in a church, though I am pretty sure it was the last time I went voluntarily for anything other than a wedding or a funeral. Within a few years, I stopped calling myself a Christian entirely, which was a harder transition than some might think. From what I’d seen, it was no longer who I was or who I wanted to be.

Some people might have been embarrassed by this episode. I know a few people reading it might be embarrassed for me. I am not. I value this experience. If nothing else, it taught me about indoctrination, insular communities, critical thinking, and to see the world as it is, not as I think it should be.

I see similar events played out again and again on social media right now, the same concepts, the same tactics, the same manipulation, if not always surrounding the same belief. The arguments unfold in the same way, uncritically. They rely on blanket acceptance of dogmatic axioms and postulates. Such beliefs are one small step away from prejudice. They are easily manipulated and weaponized by unscrupulous leaders who claim that you are either with us or against us. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s about religion or gun control or capitalism or civil rights, once people self-segregate and divide into isolated camps, once the dialogue is distilled down to memes or clever turns of phrases, coherence and understanding is lost. Everything is reduced to black or white.

Except this world is painted shades of grey. Most sin is simply shame in disguise.

That doesn’t mean I no longer have beliefs. I do. Most are nuanced and require some exploration to untangle. Some border on religious though I rarely discuss them. More are philosophical. A few just bring me comfort even if they only have an internal consistency to me. But I continually renew them or discard them based on my current understanding of the world, refusing to take them solely as articles of faith.

Everyone has beliefs, not all of which are religious. They are often irrational. Most are harmless. Some aren’t. The thing is, the vast majority of people are born into them. Most never have much reason to question them outside of a little adolescent rebellion which often only serves as a test.

That is not inherently bad. Beliefs serve an important psychological and sociological function. They are a shortcut to make the world understandable and relatable. They quantify the world into easily digested categories so we can make simple decisions without expending an inordinate amount of energy and move on. In that they are an evolutionary advantage. But like any inherited, instinctive trait, in modern society they can easily short-circuit and run amok.

On the other side, so can unbridled, undisciplined skepticism. When someone claims you have to verify everything for yourself rather than accept the findings of people with experience and expertise, they are sending you on a fool’s errand. They are trying to wear you down into apathy and exhaustion. It’s only meant to erode trust and damage societal institutions. In that, it has become little more than its own corrupt belief system, secular not religious, though many refuse to see it.

Thinking critically is more than just validating other people’s evidence (that’s called peer review, the operative word being “peer”). It’s about hearing what is and isn’t said. It’s about understanding rhetorical arguments and cognitive biases, our own not someone else’s. It’s more about self-reflection than cross-examination.

In his defense at his trial for heresy, Socrates said to his accusers, “An unexamined life is not worth living”. By which he meant any unexamined belief. Wise words. For which he was condemned to death.

In the end, people believe what they want to believe, regardless of the contradictions, regardless of the hypocrisy, regardless of the evidence right before their eyes. No one can change them. No one can force them to see the truth. Unless you seek, you shall not find.

In that, the last of my Congregationalist indoctrination springs to mind: God helps those who help themselves. And if we lose our ability to do even that in these troubling and contentious times, may s/he have mercy on our souls.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III