Faithless

The latest entry at the Fundy Post provides, in the context of its argument, a working definition of atheism with which I am in accord. Reading it set me to thinking of how I cherish my atheism, which I consider hard-won, not in the sense of having to work hard not to believe in a deity, but in allowing myself to accept the fact that I don’t. Coming to a point of good-humoured, workaday atheism has been as character-defining for me as questions of sexual identity have for others. (I don’t doubt that if I’d focused more on sex and less on culture and philosophy when I was a student, my personal identity politics might be rather more interestingly-skewed.)

What makes one person an atheist and another a follower of religion? One could play the game in standard terms and say that one or other has the truth and the other is mistaken, though this seems to me hardly the point. It doesn’t bother me that I may be wrong in my atheism, because it remains for me the most accurate expression of how I understand the world, at the same time as it best expresses my own temperament, which is irretrievably sceptical.

It wasn’t always like this. I was raised Anglican, by one agnostic and one Christian parent who were involved with the church and who sent my brother and me to Sunday school and later to church itself. From this, I gained perhaps three things: an introduction to memorial arts and crafts—stained glass windows, tombstones and altar decorations—which category of art remains among my interests, familiarity with liturgy and ritual, which made the later rituals of the orchestras and choirs in which I would play and sing easy and enjoyable to learn, and a partial knowledge of the bible. Sunday school lessons focused on the gospels and parts of Genesis and Exodus, though none concerning the various polygamous unions, rapes and forced circumcisions or any of the narrative histories of the Israelites’ bloody progress toward and away from their god.

The actual teaching of the tenets of Christianity touched me the least, I think, because, although apparently pious, I was a deeply superstitious child. Jesus seemed largely unreal; the main function of God the father, however, was to protect me first from monsters (in which I firmly believed) and later—when I was about ten or eleven—from the combination of natural and man-made disasters that I was sure were threatening us all. These were the Reagan years; the nuclear clock was at three minutes to midnight (I seem to remember Leeza Gibbons mentioning this on Entertainment this Week) and, in addition, some mischievous classmates had convinced me that the Banks Peninsula volcanoes were not in fact extinct but could blow at any time.

God in all of this was for me a talismanic protector to which I ritually prayed each night, listing in my mind all the extrinsic threats from which I needed protection. If I fell asleep before getting through them all, I was doomed. Curiously, it never occurred to me to ask for divine protection from very real threats: school or family bullies, and all the various stranger dangers about which we were constantly warned. (In the same manner, when I hit puberty and became terrified of rape, it never occurred to me to ask god to keep the rapists at bay. A neighbourhood girl had been raped by an intruder, and the fact that this had happened seemed to undercut any of religion’s claims of protection, since if it could happen to her, then why not me?) This habit of prayer-as-magic-charm lasted perhaps two or three years, until I reasoned that I was probably capable of imagining more malevolences than there were actually hours at the end of the day during which I could ask to be protected.

Out of Sunday school, I joined the school Christian group in third form, mainly as a way of spending time with those friends of mine who had already decided to join. There, I fell in with the company of fundamentalists who had come from private Christian schools. They insisted on Satan’s ascendant role in the cosmos, right about the time that numbers of my extended family coincidentally embraced fundamentalism. The very kind of prayer-as-protection that I had so recently eschewed was suddenly all around me, except instead of being directed against the powers of volcanic eruptions, floods and nuclear attacks as I had used it, it was being directed against things that had seemed to me previously facts of life: principally sexuality in all its temptation and variety and indeed a more general kind of backsliding whose risk, it had never before occurred to me, was apparently at the heart of faith. My moderate-minded friends peeled away but I did not; without ever giving into the fundies, I stayed alongside them, taking my role as that of protecting the younger students coming through (about whom I was worried) from too much of the fundamentalist influence.

Other things happened, which regular readers know about, and the major depression that marked my exit from compulsory state education also had the unexpected effect of clearing my mind. My scepticism finally overcame superstitious piety with all the clear, fine light of an anti-revelation and I realised that, from that time at least, I no longer believed at all. It was all a convoluted and often ugly nonsense, for all my love of the tradition and the ritual and the art with which I’d been raised. The twisted thinking of depression meant my exit wasn’t clean, however; I walked, thereafter, out of more than one church service in disgust, rightly baffling those who were simply saying the Nicene Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, to whose tenets I could no longer subscribe.

I went back, in different guises, in the next few years; I worked as a church organist for a while and directed a choir, observing as if from a distance the piety of others who were neither superstitious nor in many things prescriptive. But in the end, I felt I couldn’t roll with it all: even though I was culturally an Anglican, I remained, in my adult self, faithless, and to continue in the church was for me a lie, in that I was appearing to be what I was not. That made my fringe-dwelling unsustainable and it was, at that level, a relief to depart physically as well as mentally. Theistic Elvis finally left the building, in time for me to have most of my twenties extricated from my religious conundra.

So I think what makes one person an atheist may be the same as what makes another religious: a particular interaction of culture, history and temperament, not to mention the directions in which our sudden decisions, our sense of understanding something previously not understood, take us, an understanding I see as a product of the factors I mention above.

Against the idea of truth itself, I tend to argue along Richard Rorty’s lines: that the idea of truth is an enlightenment notion that’s been imported back into evangelical Christian discourse. Prior to the scientific revolution there were not so much things that were true or not true (such as the existence of god) but things that were true or heretical, whether within one’s confession or external to it (let’s not forget the regular prayers for the infidel that were included in English liturgy). So if I set aside the notion of truth, it’s not to say that everybody is right and nobody is wrong—to embrace relativism—but rather to say that the fact that this remains, for so many people, the point, is itself a product of our own local and global cultures. I agree with the Fundy Post’s contention that it doesn’t matter whether you are right and I am wrong in terms of personal belief. What does matter is how our beliefs are used socially and politically—the realm of ethics. Need I contend here that the greatest benefit accrues to all when church and state are separate? Such contentions, of course, are the provenance of a journal of religious politics rather than the rather less urgent project of remembering and recording that goes on here, which seems the best assertion on which to conclude this entry.