Crowd Control

I’m a moderately liberal, independent, agnostic black sheep in a fundamental, Christian conservative Republican family. When I called my mom on Election Day to ask if she’d voted, she told me my older brother played a joke on her by telling her he was voting for Obama. She went on about how crazy and implausible that was, assuming she had my implicit agreement. When I interrupted her to tell her that I in fact DID vote for Obama my announcement was met with a moment of stunned silence. To her credit, she didn’t lecture me about my ‘responsibility as a Christian’ to elect a conservative to the White House; she and I simply discussed our reasons for our respective choices and agreed to disagree. Ten years ago that conversation would not have been possible as I wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise while she crammed conservative fundie propaganda over the line and down my throat, but we’re both older and wiser. Because she is saddled with one child who refuses to conform, instead of alienating me she has chosen to learn tolerance, acceptance, and dare I say it? Understanding, at least to a small degree.

What’s truly sad is that many fundamental Christian right-wing conservatives, being born into their political/moral worldview, don’t ever stop to wonder for themselves if or why they believe women shouldn’t have a choice about abortion or whether people who love each other should be denied the right to marry because they happen to be of the same gender. They’re programmed with an incomplete and convoluted set of outdated rules that may be interpreted any number of ways to support their preconception of ‘good’ and they make up for their lack of insight by adopting a militant position. They don’t know why it’s wrong to lie, so they’re not able to choose when it might be okay to do so. I have heard more than one parent proclaim their intention to ostracize a family member over a perceived infraction of their moral code. If they’re so ready to judge their loved ones, how much more criticism must a stranger endure?

Many of these fundamental Christians are just whack-jobs of another color, but there are others like my Mom who have the ability to adopt a more compassionate worldview if only the message can get past all that religious legalism. But that’s a mighty big ‘if only.’ She’s not a militant, money-grubbing, gay-hating right-winger, just a compassionate woman who is deeply misled by religious rhetoric she doesn’t understand, and she’s afraid questioning those beliefs is tantamount to denouncing her faith outright. But I have also seen her attitude change about other things that used to be an issue between us – my church attendance (or lack thereof), swearing (which she now occasionally does, much to my delight) and the wearing of short skirts (I think she just gave up on that one). So I still hold out hope she will one day readjust her thinking on the weightier issues.

She still believes abortion is immoral, gays shouldn’t even exist let alone marry, and Sarah Palin was God’s choice for the White House because she spammed half a million email inboxes with a last-ditch request for prayer on the eve of the election. I don’t expect she’ll give up those views in this lifetime but at least she no longer vocalizes her disapproval with the trademark condescension of a religious zealot. I applaud her for at least listening as I attempt to communicate some of the simpler errors in reasoning with which we were inculcated as members of a conservative church. The other members, I am certain, would not react so calmly.

It’s funny, but as I’ve slowly and methodically rejected first religion, then Christianity, then the idea of god, I’ve become appreciative of all three in a more aesthetic sense. When you put aside the mental and spiritual enslavement men levy on one another in the pursuit of eternal life, there is so much art and music to appreciate in the historic traditions of many religious practices. I love the stained glass and Latin prayers of Catholic mass, the old hymns of the Lutherans and Mennonites, and the wild, passionate dances of the Pentecostals. There is beauty in the history of the church, if not in its practices.

It is also interesting to me that while I reject all religions in my world view, I can see why people stick to them in spite of all the guilt and hell and hate and stuff. For people like my mother beauty, hope and comfort are worth the sacrifice of truth and reason. She is guided by adherence to a set of rules for which she believes she will be rewarded after death when her ‘real life’ begins. Perhaps more than just religious crowd control, most faiths give those unable or unwilling to reason out their own code of conduct a pre-made recipe for moral and social action according to the prevailing ideals of their culture, and in the promise of eternal life a pretty attractive incentive for doing so. I guess as long as you can factor out the messages of hate, judgment and discrimination, religion can serve a purpose in the broad social picture by keeping the non-thinkers in line. There’s no way my mom could devise her own belief system by analysis and deduction. She would lose her way because she’s just not wired like that. In the end though, we hold many of the same basic principles simply arrived at by different means. Socially that’s all that matters, and in matters of spirituality even the most judgmental Jesus freaks are instructed not to judge. Therein lies the major disconnect; the intolerance inherent in all religions. In order to have a ‘chosen’ you have to have the ‘rejected’ and therein lies the major fault of most faiths. Someone is always being left out in the cold and being condemned for it.

So maybe it’s just the pretty stained glass pictures are all that’s worth keeping after all.

Because I post here, I don’t really have anything to post here. I might try someday anyway. . I don’t accept notes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t comment.