The Dead - Spring Equinox 2021

 

In the midst of a global pandemic that has claimed over half a million Americans lives, I have been thinking a lot about the dead. One of whom at least peripherally is mine.

 

Nearly nine years ago, I sat listening as my father died. Two days earlier, I had received a call. He needed me to come over right away. Hospice was on site and they wanted someone there to help take care of his wife until her son could arrive when the inevitable happened. My stepsister-in-law had assumed that duty until she had suddenly departed a few weeks earlier for reasons I wouldn’t learn until I had a chance to speak with her after she came back with my stepbrother.

 

A few hours after I got there, my father slipped into unconsciousness, to return only once and only briefly. The hospice nurse said this was pretty typical. He was waiting for someone to take over responsibility so he could let go. I only had a couple hours to talk to him and confirm his arrangements and final wishes, which included cancelling my sister’s longstanding debt to the estate at my request. It didn’t benefit me (in fact it cost me), but did make life easier for my stepbrother. He would have had to enforce it, which would have been less than pleasant.

 

Over the intervening two days, I spent a great deal of time on the phone updating distant family. My aunt had already said her goodbyes to my father months before, and sadly parted on less than perfect terms, although not as bad as my stepsister-in-law. I talked to my stepsister-in-law and got increasingly evasive answers about the timing of their arrival which I only later understood.

 

I stressed to my sister that if she wanted to see our father before he died, she didn’t have much time. I was being told days at most. Theirs was yet another in a string of dysfunctional relationships within my immediate family. And yet, if she’d said the word, I would have moved heaven and earth to make sure she would have gotten to see him. I knew how to make that happen. I knew it might be important to her later. She declined to come, a decision I think she would later regret.

 

The next two days were kind of surreal. I had never witnessed anyone die before. Hospice told us exactly what to expect, down to the physical changes to look for that said the end was imminent. But they stressed that these were only indicators; they didn’t provide an absolute timeline. There are no hard and fast rules with dying, just strongly coincident trends. So, we waited as we listened to my father’s breathing change and watched his fingernails turn increasingly blue.

 

Because of the layout of the condo, hospice had set up his hospital bed in the living room, just by the sliding glass door that looked out onto the lagoon. Between that and having at least one and sometimes two hospice nurses there, along with my stepmother plus the two of us, his dying felt public, like he was on display. I am certain he felt that, too, from our final, brief conversation.

 

To give my stepmother as much privacy as possible, my wife and I spent most of our time either in the breakfast nook off the kitchen, where I reviewed a proposal for adapting a story of mine, or in my father’s spare bedroom office sorting and arranging all the documents my stepbrother might need later. He was the primary executor on the will and on the trust. He would be responsible for what happened to his mother, although she and my father had come to an agreement on what that would be. Because of her own long-term health conditions, she was unable to take care of herself so was unable to stay in the condo. She would die in a facility in Missouri less than three months after my father.

 

None of which really mattered when his final moments came. The previous evening, the night nurse had given us the heads up that the end was very near, under twenty-four hours. She would wake us if he began to change. He didn’t before the next morning when the day shift nurse took over and the unit supervisor showed up. They both reaffirmed the night nurse’s assessment. He wouldn’t be among the living much longer.

 

By nine that morning, all we could do was watch, wait and listen. My stepmother in her recliner, facing my father’s bed. My wife and I on a couch along the opposite wall, facing her. The hospice staff at the bar by the kitchen, trying to be discrete and give us what distance they could while staying close enough to witness and log his death when it happened.

 

The TV wasn’t on, which was unusual for my stepmother. It was May in Florida which meant the windows were shut because it was by then AC weather. Off and on my stepmother would get up and walk over to peer down at my father without saying anything, then return to her chair. For a short time, I sat by him and whispered reassurances that it was ok if he wanted to let go, and other words I will not share. The hospice nurses told us that he may or may not be able to hear us, even in unconsciousness. Near death experiences indicate hearing lasts until the very end, even after all other senses fail. I don’t think I was the right person to comfort him, but I was the one there.

 

For a long time, no one spoke. There was nothing to be said and really nothing to be done. We were all waiting for the next phase of the process which we knew couldn’t happen until after he was dead. Then we knew there would be a flurry of activity, the official parts of which, like contacting the mortician for pickup and assisting in getting a death notice in the paper, the hospice workers would handle. I knew I had a number of phone calls to make and had to plot out the proper order of who to call first, and who to ask to pass the information to who else down the chain to avoid as many hurt feelings as I could.

 

But that would come later. At that moment, we sat in an eerie silence broken only by one of us occasionally shifting position and my father’s increasingly ragged breath. At some point, I realized that we were all purposefully still, frozen, anticipating. Somewhere in those final minutes, I started counting the seconds between his breaths, which got longer and longer as time wore on. First a second, then two, then five, then ten. Each intervening pause of silence eventually interrupted by another sometimes sharp, sometimes struggling, sometimes almost startled intake of breath. I think the last pause I counted was twenty before the hospice supervisor called his death. By then, her words came as a relief.

 

Because I had been beside him when that moment of transition came, I never had any trouble accepting my father’s death. While I had some unresolved issues, as most people do, I understood he’d had his time to say anything he wanted to say to me. He never did. But I didn’t dwell on it as we both had our opportunity. In the end, of his own two kids, and his wife’s two, I was the one he called to take responsibility. The youngest of the four. The one he knew would go to bat for his wife with anyone against anything no matter what happened. I guess to me, while that didn’t say everything, it said enough. As I talked about in “Dead? Dead.” it took my stepmother a little longer to process his death, which, while completely surreal at the time, was not abnormal, especially for someone in her situation.

 

All of which came into sharp relief last spring.

 

Just before my wife’s birthday, I received a phone call from my sister. My mother was dead. She had been dead for an indeterminate period of time, which turned out to be just over two days as the hospital searched their records for any point of contact. Neither my mother nor her caregivers had given one when she’d been admitted to the hospital. No one had called to let either my sister or I know. No one had called any of her local friends.

 

Two months earlier, my mother had stopped answering my calls. I suspect because she mistook my concern for her well-being and my inquires as to whether she was getting everything she needed during the pandemic lock-down as “checking up on her”, an accusation she’d leveled during another health crisis eight years earlier, at the same time my father was dying, when she was in and out of the hospital and rehab on a bi-monthly basis. Our relationship had always been complicated. By this point, I would categorize it as somewhat estranged.

 

With the pandemic, as well as for other reasons, I didn’t help clear out her apartment. So, I didn’t have that stark marker as a confirmation of her death. I only had the initial silence followed by a series of increasingly agitated and recriminatory phone calls from my sister. Another complicated and strained familial relationship.

 

Three years earlier my sister had fought tooth and nail to become the executor of my mother’s estate to the point of subverting even the people who tried to help her make that happen. When the time came, she refused to take it up. By then I was in no position to. But I went out of my way to share all the information I had with her, and guide her as best I could, and then legally resigned any interest in my mother’s estate in favor of her. When things had started to slip sideways with my father’s estate, I had offered to do the same with my stepbrother so my sister would get a full share. Which in hindsight strikes me as equal parts misplaced loyalty and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

 

Or maybe it was just part of my unique grieving process, in both cases for something more than just losing a parent, some of which had happened decades earlier. The loss of a childhood, the loss of a family, the loss of any possibility of salvaging any of that, the loss of any possibility of acknowledgement of who I was or what I’d become. The loss of any and all illusion. All the remained was the present slipping moment by moment into a troubled, murky past.

 

Either way, when my sister became so upset by having my mother’s ashes physically near her because she thought they were cursed or possessed and couldn’t deal with them, I told her to mail them to me. Not exactly what I wanted, but not new territory for me either. My stepbrother had sent me my father’s and my stepmother’s ashes eight years before because he and his brother didn’t know what to do with them, and thought I might. So, I knew how to handle it.

 

Accordingly, as we’d done with the other two before, my wife and I scattered my mother’s ashes in an appropriate spot and wrote up a description of what we had done for my sister, my aunt and cousins, and my mother’s few remaining friends, and took a couple of pictures. By then, stealth burials had become a tradition in my family. It seems like that should have laid the matter to rest for me.

 

But it didn’t.

 

I have spent a great deal of the intervening time convincing myself that my mother was really dead. Some of that faded briefly when I scattered her ashes. Watching what remains of a cremated human body pour out from a container is a visceral experience. But it is also abstract. A couple pounds of certified and tagged ash and pulverized bone fragments do not have the same gravity as a body. Intellectually, I knew they were her, that there was no vast conspiracy in which she could still be alive. And yet, below the surface, my mind wasn’t quite ready to accept that my situation had changed. That something I had dreaded for many years had come to pass, and that everything would be ok. In that moment, I wasn’t sure it would be, for reasons that would take a great deal of mental energy to sort out. Energy, which at that moment, I just didn’t have.

 

And due to the very strange nature of that act during the pandemic lock-down, that niggling feeling didn’t fully go away. I still found myself having to reiterate in an internal monologue that she was dead. I don’t think that’s because I was closer to her than my father. I wouldn’t say I was by the end. I don’t even think that it was fully because I was still afraid of her, though that certainly played a part. I think more it had to do with having witnessed my father die where my mother’s death was more remote both physically, mentally and temporally by the way the situation unfolded.

 

That reaction surprised me.

 

When my wife’s father died just over a year ago, her mother was somewhat insistent that she return home for the viewing so that she wouldn’t have trouble accepting it. As there was no way my wife was going to sit beside her unrepentant brother and pretend nothing had happened between them, or with the rest of her family, for even two hours of a visitation and viewing, that was never going to happen. As well, she had said her goodbyes the last time she had seen her father alive. So, she didn’t need to see him again with her own eyes to confirm that he was dead. She’d already set that picture in her mind.

 

I was fortunate enough to have done the same with each of my grandparents, so I knew what that feeling was like. There is closure in setting a final image in your mind beforehand, as I had with both of my mother’s parents the last time that I had seen them together, and then the last time I’d seen my grandfather alone. I’d done the same with my father’s parents, separated by a dozen years. I’d attended all their memorials, three of which involved trips north that I never want to take again by the way the family dynamics played out. Instead of reinforcing good memories of my grandparents, these trips fostered more familial trauma. I completely understood my wife’s refusal to do the same. Instead, she visited her mother several days after everyone else had left. Which, by the way, is something many grief counselors encourage to keep the situation from getting overwhelming for a new widow or widower.

 

As you can tell from some of the above, at the best of times death can be a messy business despite its mechanisms being pretty straightforward and simple. It’s complicated by we the living. The ones left behind. The ones who may or may not be able to confront the idea that everyone we know, everyone we’ve ever known, will eventually leave us behind. Unless we leave them first. Never mind our being willing to confront our own mortality.

 

Which may be why the rites surrounding death are some of the earliest human rituals that set us apart from other primates, and in general from all but a handful of other mammals. There is a primal mystery surrounding death, one which other species don’t appear to dwell on, or at least not to the extent that we do.

 

When we’ve had cats die, we have left out their bodies on the porch for a little while before we buried them in a kind of viewing to allow their housemates to see that they are gone. Usually, the living cautiously approach and sniff the dead, then look at us with a certain expression that is hard to interpret, and don’t go back. Only a handful who were very close to the dead call for their missing companion at night for some period of time, where they never called before. None have really searched the house to see where their friend had gone. It’s hard to know exactly what they are thinking or what they really understand. Something, from what I’ve seen.

 

Perhaps people aren’t much different. We just have more elaborate social ceremonies to help our fellows cope.

 

Different cultures have different customs regarding death. In some societies only outsiders are allowed to handle the dead. In others, only family. Preparing the dead is universal, especially washing and dressing or wrapping the body. Standing vigil over it until it can be buried, cremated or otherwise disposed of. Laying it to rest with treasured possessions, perhaps for use in an afterlife, perhaps just to honor their spirit or to keep them happy. We often mark the place we lay them to rest, sometimes with stones or shrines or other symbols, other times by using a sacred communal burial ground or just noting a private location in our minds. In modern western society, we send correspondence and make phone calls to notify friends and family of what has happened. We sometimes take pictures to share with others who could not be present. For legal reasons, we advertise deaths in papers and other public forums.

 

But most of all, we gather. We open our homes to visitations, to comfort and to receive comfort from family and friends. We feed the mourners, recognizing some have come long distances to stand beside us. We hold services and memorials. We hold wakes, not to wake the dead, but to be alert or wakeful ourselves. The veil between worlds is open. We are uncertain what might slip through in either direction if we do not pay attention. We share poignant stories and memories of the dead while trying not to speak ill of them. For some because we feel the dead can no longer defend themselves, for others because we are quite afraid that they can. We lay out the dead for viewings in funeral parlors or churches or other public venues, or sometimes in our homes on dining room tables, so people can confirm reality for themselves.

 

Dead? Dead.

 

Although many may deny it, almost all these rites and rituals are intended for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for those left behind. One way or another, the dead are beyond caring. Many people will also tell you the horniest they’ve ever been is after a brush with death. Those documented and quite psychologically normal experiences are as intense and intimate as they feel inappropriate. Life reinforces life.

 

There is solid anthropological evidence for why many of these funerary rites exist. One predominant view is that they provide a coping mechanism to channel our individual grief and other often mixed emotions (relief, guilt, anger, fear, etc.). Another is that they reinforce social coherence through group bonding as we support each other in a time of shared pain.

 

That doesn’t always happen. Death brings out either the best or the worst in people. Often both. But without those ceremonial frameworks, I think worse is more likely than better. Without set societal expectations and guidance, things are more likely to get out of hand in stressful times. Death is difficult, a mental shock. The scars from the living often linger.

 

There also might be pragmatic reasons that our ancestors stumbled upon as they codified their practices. Primitive sanitation. Dead bodies aren’t generally healthy to be around after a short time. Unintended consequences. The lye from scattered ashes gets clothing down river cleaner, or even acts as a primitive disinfectant. Communal safety. Standing vigil might have started as simply as keeping dangerous scavengers at bay, either animal or human. Unless of course you favor sky burials. But even then, that feast is ritualized and out of plain sight.

 

The most intriguing explanation I’ve read is that burial or cremation began as an attempt to literally bury or destroy the evidence of death. The anthropologist who advocated it traces it back to sacrifice (making sacred) often through scapegoating (casting the community’s sins upon a person or a creature), then killing it or banishing it and making it divine. Which he believes channels our inherent human violence to prevent our strong tendency as primates to mimic violence with further violence in a destructively escalating cycle.

 

He contends that many of the earliest burial sites we’ve found through archeology house sacrificial victims. Once the dead were dead, early societies wanted to hide the evidence of the ritual to prevent reprisals from erupting. The one way to do that was to make the victims holy after the fact, so their sacrifice could be honored as benefiting the community at large.

 

There is a counterintuitive resonance point here. In popular Christian culture (not strictly doctrine or theology), our dead are transformed into angels, by any definition divine beings, who then reside in an unearthly paradise for eternity. It is not difficult to deconstruct that myth into a near universal concept of paradise being a reward for enduring the suffering of this mortal life, which serves as a coping mechanism. Again, in popular Christian culture, some of those angels watch over us and guide us, at least if we pay them the proper respect, like visiting their graves, offering them small sacrifices like flowers at various anniversaries, and remembering them at other important family social occasions like christenings or weddings. When you pull it apart, that’s an abstract form of ancestor worship which has been widespread throughout various world cultures at one point or another in their history.

 

Or, if you favor a slightly different view, some of those restless dead may attempt to enact revenge upon us as reprisals for the slights they suffered in life. They either use small, mischievous acts, or dire visitations in our dreams or during illness, mysterious times when the barrier between physical reality and the spirit world is lower. Like gremlins or the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Should these dead be particularly jealous of the life in which they can no longer partake, they may seek to seize us while our defenses are down. From that perspective, we celebrate them to remind them that we love them. We inter favored items with them to bribe them, to keep them content in their graves. Safely entombed in stone or underground. Or diluted in water. Or dispersed upon the wind.

 

Almost any way you look at it, anthropologically the dead are potentially fearful forces that most sane people have no wish to offend. Best to hide them away in their own special area, out of sight. Close enough to visit, far enough away that neither side is inclined to casually make the trip. Not grouped together in so large a congregation of graves that we can’t hold our breath as we pass them by to keep some opportunistic spirit from stealing into us.

 

As a species, we prefer to imagine that somehow this life continues beyond the transition into death. I won’t debate any particular religious belief except to say they are ubiquitous. Most of us would prefer to imagine at least some of our dead in a better, more restful place, at the very least free of pain, though a few we might like to see receive righteous punishment for their accumulated misdeeds. Heaven and hell. Or more benignly, circling back to continue learning and improving through reincarnation. Even the most atheistic among us sometimes like to imagine our atoms serving as building blocks in creating new life even if not through conventional reproduction.

 

In other words, we construct elaborate illusions in the name of psychological self-comfort. Humans rarely let our dead rest or even fully let them go. Many people visit their dead. Many more talk to them. In general, I don’t do the former but sometimes do the latter. Just as I also talk to quite (presumably) living people who are not here with me. Sometimes I argue with both kinds although they rarely have epiphanies.

 

I think sometimes we believe we will get finally get straight answers from the dead once they have been freed from their earthly biases. But in general, the dead keep their secrets. Dead men tell no tales, at least not willingly. I think if we get answers, it is more often in our dreams, and then only because of our intuition processing events that we often refuse to accept while awake. Or through years of psychologically intense counseling, which often amounts to much the same thing.

 

Perhaps in burying or cremating the dead, we are merely trying to conceal our own grief, our own pain, whatever form that might take. Humans, like all animals, avoid pain in almost any way they can. Sometimes to the point of self-delusion.

 

Which leads me back to acceptance.

 

As I said, it quite surprised me that I had to remind myself that my mother was dead until just recently. I hadn’t felt that at all with my father, my grandparents, my uncle, a friend’s mother who helped shape me, or the best man at my wedding. Sure, I’d felt sadness and a similar sense of loss with some. I missed our conversations and correspondence dearly in others. But I never had to remind myself the situation was real. Normally, I would expect part of that with my mother was old trauma resurfacing, except I know other people who have gone through the same with a much more stable family history. Although they often felt differently about their dead.

 

The closest I have come to the feeling I had was with several of our feline companions who died. I think because I interacted with them more day to day, and so had to get used to a new routine that did not include them where they had been nearly omnipresent before. But with all but one of them since we’ve been in this house, we had a physical body to view and enough time with it for the situation to set. In the one case we didn’t, we eventually received a credible report of his death from a neighbor. Although before we did, we had a pretty certain feeling he was dead.

 

Last spring was different. I think part of it certainly stemmed from the suddenness of my mother’s death. I think part, too, from the bizarreness of the circumstances, both leading up to her dying and of the broader virus lockdown, both of which consumed a great deal of my psychological bandwidth, both of which contributed to a feeling of distance and isolation. And then there were the living who would complicate the event going forward no matter what I did.

 

But honestly, I don’t think it was any of that. I think a lot more of it came down to expectations. With my father, there was never an expectation from him or from anyone else that I would help. He made it clear throughout his life that I was not the son he wanted. He said as much to me directly. So perhaps there was a modicum of redemption when he called me in the end, not any of the three other steps/siblings, not his sister. Maybe because that was an admission of me being somehow worthwhile. In doing so, he gave me the power to deny him, although I chose not to. I suspect he knew I wouldn’t and relied on it. I had stepped up before where others hadn’t. Or maybe I was just the last, best choice he had.

 

With my mother, there was always a sense of obligation, from her and from others in my family. An obligation I no longer felt, nor felt the need to live up to. And yet, when the moment came, she chose to inform none of us. Like a feral cat, she slunk away privately to die. That level of rejection is pretty difficult to comprehend or accept.

 

But that lack of acceptance, that having to remind myself she was dead, was not out of a particular sense of sadness or grieving. It came with a certain measure of freedom and relief. It wasn’t that I could never speak with her again, it was that I didn’t have to. I no longer had to dutifully send cards and gifts, or make phone calls and get admonished or rebuked for caring or for trying to do what was right, in spite of the consequences, in spite of what it cost me. That I wouldn’t ever receive her calls again after her choices had caused her life to slip sideways, when she expected me to bail her out. In the end those choices killed her, or at least significantly contributed to her death.

 

It took those months to realize that I could finally set her burden down. And a burden it had become.

 

With my mother, like my father, there were really no larger, unanswered questions. Both my parents made their positions clear over the fullness of time, through words and deeds. As had I. Theirs had not changed, nor had mine. With both of them, long before their deaths came, I had already begun to disengage, if only for my own psychological stability. In a way I hadn’t had to with more favored friends and family even when I knew their deaths were imminent.

 

And yet, I did the same for my mother as I had done for my father and my stepmother. I performed the final ritual of laying her remains to rest, if not for me for others who, while they couldn’t or didn’t want to directly be a part of it, I believe needed it on some level for their own acceptance and mental well-being. I wrote up what I’d done knowing the people I shared it with might want to feel included in some way, where I was more ambivalent.

 

So perhaps on some level, I felt that instinctive need to honor then hide away my dead. To scatter their ashes to wind and water, only I know exactly where. To safely entomb them behind walls of light so we all might finally get some rest in peace.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Thoughtcrime - Imbolc 2021

 

 

Recently, I was reading an article concerning what Orwell’s 1984 is really about as opposed to what people think it means as they decry certain current events as Orwellian. The article lists four terms that are central to 1984 without further explanation: Big Brother, Doublethink, Newspeak, and Thoughtcrime.

 

The concept Big Brother is well steeped in American society, to the point of us creating a reality TV show based on the concept. Doublethink (holding contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time) and Newspeak (the control of language to limit the expression of unwanted ideas, at times by turning the meanings of words and phrases upside down) are both familiar.

 

But something about the last concept caught me. Just the word “Thoughtcrime” teased me like the tone of a bell at the edge of memory. A connection to a quote. A quote from the Bible. A Bible quote brought up in casual conversation, though not directed at me as an admonishment. All that flashed through my mind in an instant.

 

Suddenly, an association I hadn’t seen before struck me. I knew it would take me a little time to tease it apart. Thus, I decided to dedicate this musing to it. If all of this is familiar ground to you, I apologize. As well as for the light review of concepts as I understand them for those who have not read the book. I have a somewhat diverse readership so I can’t count on that everyone has.

 

Thoughtcrime in 1984 essentially refers to politically unorthodox thoughts and beliefs that run contrary to the teachings and tenets of the Party in Oceania (the dystopian society the novel is set in). Thoughtcrime is detected by constant and near universal surveillance by Thinkpols (thought police) through two-way screens. Crimestop is a mental indoctrination technique each citizen uses to prevent such errant and illegal thoughts. As implied by the term Thoughtcrime, those thoughts are criminal. They are punishable by death.

 

So merely thinking the wrong thoughts and having it detected through your body language or other physical cues is a capital crime in that society if you don’t self-censor, all monitored by a constantly watching authority. That sounded more than vaguely familiar. Something in there resonated with my past. Something about sinning in your heart.

 

It only took me a quick search to find the Bible quote I was thinking of. Matthew 5:27-28. In plain English, it reads (with Jesus speaking at the Sermon on the Mount), “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery’; but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman in lust has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The next two verses go on to say, “And if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell. And if your right hand offends you, cut it off, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell.”

 

If you lust against someone in your heart, you have committed adultery. Not by action, by mere unclean thoughts. The punishment, cutting out an eye or cutting off a hand, in the context of the body is death with an allusion to a congregation or body politic. Pretty straightforward and often taken quite literally in the real world as well as a literary one, as it has been in several of the churches I’ve attended and in many of the conversations I’ve had with more fundamental believers.

 

There are a couple interesting points to unpack here. First is the change of what we commonly define as sin to include a sin that resides in thoughts rather than only through actions. Of course, one needn’t stop with lust. Covetousness could fit. Taking the Lord’s name in vain. Really most of the big ten commandments, never mind the 600-something plus lesser commandments in the first five books of the Bible.

 

Second is the repetition of the graphic, unforgiving and brutal punishment as reinforcement that this new kind of thought sin is taken just as seriously as the other kind, layered with the ambiguous phraseology in discussing body parts as members, in this case likely of a congregation. So, a dual meaning applying both to the individual and to the society/congregation in which they participate. In modern parlance, those individuals are like an unseen cancer that must be excised to save the greater whole.

 

That attitude is closely echoed in 1984. Consider the parallel. In both cases, what amounts to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent authority (all powerful, all seeing and all knowing) monitors and judges each and every one of us each and every day, not just for our actions but for our thoughts. The punishment for such pernicious thoughts/sins is execution in one case, eternal damnation in the other, unless you are rehabilitated/forgiven by the all-powerful authority that stands as judge.

 

While we naturally assume Orwell was talking about totalitarianism, specifically fascism or Soviet communism, the concept of thoughtcrime goes back millennia before Mussolini or Lenin. Which is perhaps why it resonates so strongly throughout Western society on both sides of the political aisle.

 

I can hear the immediate objections from people who think I am overanalyzing this. Yes, Orwell was an atheist who considered himself a humanist. He fought against the fascists in Spain but as a Democratic Socialist (a moderate), not a communist. Because he had attended meetings of the Communist Party as research for a book, he was under surveillance in England in a time where fascists and communists vied for control of his country. He witnessed the tactics of British Blackshirts up close.

 

Consider though, his grandfather was in the clergy. At a young age Orwell was sent to a convent school his sister attended. While he was not a believer himself, he could quote long passages from the Bible from memory. The verses above would have been quite familiar to him. If I remember them enough to find them in a two-minute search, he likely would have known them by heart.

 

Ok, that word association game is not what I was primarily thinking about when I decided to write this essay. It was fascinating to me that it flashed through my subconscious in an instant and I was able to piece it together. But that alone is not particularly meaningful or necessarily insightful to anyone but me. My mind extended the parallel into much more controversial territory.

 

You see, I was reading this article in the wake of the January 6^th insurrection at the US Capitol (hopefully by the time I post this, I won’t have to reference which insurrection I am talking about like a Soviet revolution, Feb, Oct, 1917, 1905). At the time, several key figures who participated, incited or supported the insurrection were claiming the consequences of their actions (cancelled book deals, social media bans, job terminations, etc.) were Orwellian violations of their Constitutional rights. It’s pretty much a black letter reading that they are wrong in terms of them being a violation but they are also wrong in them being Orwellian, too. The article makes that case much better than I ever could (you can find it referenced in the Notes and Asides in the comments).

 

Regardless, I was more thinking about why particularly fundamentalist evangelicals in this country continue to support the President who helped incite this insurrection, despite his actions, attitudes and lifestyle seeming to be completely antithetical to stated Christian theological and American political doctrine.

 

Many 1984 literary scholars agree that the Trump Administration has been Orwellian. They have strongly leaned toward authoritarian while at times courting American neo-fascists. During the insurrection at the Capitol, that flirting passed into an outright relationship. Its supporters have been steadfast and staunch in their denials of it being either an insurrection or in any way antithetical to American democracy to the point of deep-seated cognitive biases. Some of the most fervent support has been from charismatic, fundamentalist evangelicals, both leaders and lay congregations. That had me wondering why, or more precisely how, they continued to be convinced their support of this man was not only right but necessary.

 

Of the four concepts mentioned, I’ve touched on the parallel to Thoughtcrime in Christian theology. Orwell’s other three terms have resonance points as well.

 

Big Brother, well, what could be more like Big Brother than an all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-present god who is deeply judgmental and at times outright vengeful. The choices you make in this life are for eternity, no ifs, no ands, no buts. No mulligans. Not exactly the dictates of an all-loving god. Would you brutally punish your children’s sometimes even minor wrongdoing forever without appeal? If so, Social Services might want a word with you.

 

Doublethink becomes even more intriguing from a socio-psychological point of view. Many of the people who supported this insurrection (and by extension the President who incited it) have had to hold at times two contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time: their dedication to a literalist interpretation of the Bible and their dedication to the Constitution. As anyone who has ever been told that the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment only applies to Christian sects because we are a fundamentally Christian nation, fully understands. Or anyone who has been told that gay marriage or abortion or even at times even racial equality violates God’s Law and are therefore Unconstitutional. Many of the people who directly participated in the insurrection are self-professed Christians but also former military or other public servants who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, including some current elected officials.

 

But this juxtaposition isn’t alien to fundamentalist Christianity. Imagine, if you will a god that so loved its creation that it sent to earth its only begotten avatar to be sacrificed to save its people set against the same god that wiped out nearly all its creation in a cataclysmic flood. Or a god who gets into a wager with a fallen angle who then capriciously antagonizes a believer’s life to win a bet (Job). Or a host of other inconsistencies. These are not easy concepts to reconcile. But Christian doctrine requires it.

 

So, is it a difficult step from those three to Newspeak, where up can be down and black can mean white, either of which can reverse at any moment based only on what your leaders tell you? That might seem to be a bridge too far given most fundamentalist’s literalist reading of the Bible and all its tenets (even the seemingly contradictory ones). Given that a literalist reading of any text is its own kind of Newspeak, a constraining and pruning of language, I think not. Literalist fundamentalism attempts to pare words down to a single desired interpretation while ignoring context, history, translation, nuance, ambiguity, parable, and allusion, all of which are what make the Christian Bible at times a rich, diverse text. If you are looking for precise details on how, which I don’t have time to delve into here, I recommend Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop Shelby Spong.

 

And yet, the New Testament cites that the devil can quote scripture for its own purposes (which some will accuse me of doing above). Especially fundamentalist Christians are taught to ignore any quoted scripture if they think it is being used to trap or trick them into evil purposes. It’s a fallback position I’ve seen used again and again in debate. It’s an escape hatch that terminates discussion.

 

In reality, I recognize that fundamentalist evangelical support of the now former President and his movement stems from Machiavellian realpolitik, that these outwardly Christian individuals are willing to compromise and sacrifice their beliefs to achieve the goals they desire. The ends justify the means. They often embrace greedy, self-righteous reasons for their support, however cynical that may sound. And no small part of that is rooted in the same racial identity politics that played into American society around the American Civil War, whether consciously or unconsciously.

 

In political terms, Newspeak is how propaganda works. Even seemingly inconsequential changes in political language over time have been called out again and again. The Department of War becomes the Department of Defense. People killed in bombing raids become Collateral Damage. Demanding respect and social justice become Political Correctness. Consequence for actions become Cancel Culture. Lies or misinformation become Alternative Facts. Etc., etc. These language changes are powerful tools in shaping thoughts. Orwell understood that, as he discussed in “Politics and the English Language”.

 

Big Brother is the constant monitoring of the masses (especially by government officials) in an authoritarian regime to ensure they are faithful and toe the party line. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have all seen such monitoring increase in the name of security. In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol, we will again. As we did after Pearl Harbor when we gathered citizens in Internment Camps so we could keep an eye on them. Orwell understood that monitoring from the twelve years he was under government surveillance for research he conducted to write The Road to Wigan Pier.

 

Doublethink is a kind of mental purity/loyalty test that in practice reinforces the political gaslighting that starts with Newspeak. And yet it works precisely because we all hold seemingly contradictory thoughts and opinions in our head all the time. It’s just to us that they follow some internal logic and consistency. Most of us are good at compartmentalizing, which anyone who has ever held a security clearance can tell you. In that, Orwell understood the fundamentals of human nature and the nature of power, as revealed by Animal Farm.

 

And Thoughtcrime is a form of self-censorship that instills fear and doubt by reinforcing that the monitoring is inescapable. That constant second-guessing and looking over your shoulder is what allows that gaslighting to work.

 

Combined, all four psychologically subvert any individual’s will, as well as their grip on objective reality and reason. Control thoughts and you control actions. Resistance is futile. And even if it isn’t, the amount of energy you need to expend to overcome that psychological overpressure is immense.

 

And yet, you cannot lead people where they don’t want to go. In order to walk them over an authoritarian cliff, you have to give them milestones along the way, ones they are so familiar with that they resonate subconsciously. Religious touchstones are some of the most powerful because they are so ubiquitous, if sometimes invisibly woven into contemporary culture. Even atheists use phrases from the Bible without realizing it. It is the most referenced book in English idiom followed closely by Shakespeare. I could cite Daoist doctrine to Americans until I run short of oxygen. If they don’t recognize something familiar in what I say, they will not follow me, no matter how much intellectual sense my words might make or how much benefit the individuals I am speaking to might derive from them. If I want to lead them, I would have better luck with allusions to Jesus or even the Bard than to Lao-tzu.

 

To be clear, my point is not that Christians are Orwellian patriarchal authoritarians. I do not believe they are, not all or even the overwhelming majority. Nor do I believe that any religion, not limited to Christianity, is always or even predominately good or evil. As well as providing comfort for events and circumstances beyond our control, religion serves a Darwinian social function, just as many cognitive biases do, one that would have rooted itself out long ago were it not in some way beneficial to the species. In this case it provides value through social cohesion. We are not herd animals as much as we are animals that derive overwhelming environmental advantage from operating in cooperative groups. Those groups, whether tribal or national, require social cohesion to maintain.

 

I have read that religion is regarded as one of the three legs of the sociological stool that defines a culture (the other two are language and land). A culture is merely a large-scale cooperative group. So politically harnessing that cognitive bias not only makes sense, it’s likely inevitable. The problem for a democracy comes when someone is able to yoke that religious workhorse to an authoritarian wagon. As Mussolini did so elegantly but brutally in Italy when fascism was born. Who Franco then modeled with his Nationalists and received aid from during the Spanish Civil War. Where Orwell almost died from fighting against them with the Republicans.

 

As I said, he knew a thing or two about authoritarian governments, having witnessed several being created, sometime from whole cloth. Even the United Kingdom during the Depression was pretty much touch and go with the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley. And the Papacy eventually came to regret its alliance with Mussolini.

 

To paraphrase a popular expression, history doesn’t repeat but it often echoes. Which brings me back to where I started.

 

I admit, this might not be a compelling argument, more just a curious one based on the parallels. I recognize these structures might prove be thin and need reinforcement if placed under academic scrutiny. I’ve just outlined the contours of an idea that struck me. The touchstones and resonance points, while they do not make any outcome inevitable, perhaps make the one we’ve seen slightly more understandable. They create an intriguing association to me as a writer who constantly examines people’s motivations. One that I believe deserves further thought and consideration.

 

This, like all the other musings I plan to write this year, is meant as a starting point not a final destination. A journey and an exploration which we ultimately each must undertake alone as we try to make sense of our increasingly complex world. But sometimes it’s just pleasant to have a little company as we share a path along the way.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

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