M: I wouldn’t even know they were Catholic.
N: They understand their Christian burden of service. They just apply themselves to helping others whenever possible. My siblings and I grew up going to church. I was an altar boy. I did the readings when I was a teenager. Probably around age twelve or thirteen, I remember sitting in the congregation, just noticing that when people would recite the Nicene Creed, there was no heart in it. Everyone was just like, (Monotone) “We believe in one God. This is what we say when we’re at church so then we can go watch football.” I was struck by the disparity between how people actually behaved in church and what effect religion was purported to have on our lives. I thought, “I don’t think this is the faith for me.” And that started me on a road that I’d call agnosticism. I feel like there really is a power, an omnipotence, that I would equate with, simply, nature more than anything else. And I’m certainly happy to attach a mysticism to it. I think it is beyond, and will always be beyond, human comprehension. But that’s just Mother Nature.
M: I have it figured out.
N: Tell me! You’ve been holding out.
M: (Laughs)
N: You’ve watched me wander all these years?
M: It was a test.
I was raised—well, not raised—my mom was Catholic. My father was nothing.
N: I think he was Church of Dionysus.
M: (Laughs) Until my mother was eighty-eight—she’s confined to a bed now—she went to church every Sunday. I know the priest from Christ the King visits her every once in a while. Father Stansberry. I was taken along to church every Sunday for a while there, and to Sunday school. I didn’t get it at all. I had that same reaction—I thought it was so dry. I thought, “This is people’s spiritual life? This dry, rote chore of a session?” It just felt like nobody wanted to be there. Even the priest seemed bored! So when I was nine, I got into the car with my mother after Sunday school one day, and I informed her that I would not be going back. To my mother’s credit, she didn’t make me. But she did have two nuns come over with a little thing that I still have in a drawer—people who are devout Catholics will say that’s why I’m still alive—they gave me this little mildly embroidered oval with a picture of the Virgin Mary inside of it. And a little tiny piece of cloth that was supposed to be a piece of the Shroud of Turin.
N: What? You got a fucking pass?
M: I’m sure it really is a piece of the Shroud of Turin—I have no doubt that these two nuns in Oklahoma City just happened to have access to that most holy of relics, which they were allowed to cut little pieces off of in case a nine-year-old goes rogue. They came over and kind of blessed me on the down-low. I think my mom had them do some kind of hocus-pocus on me so that she could feel like I would be all right for the rest of my life. And then I was. So thanks, Mom! But I did get christened—is it “christened”?
N: Baptized?
M: No, christened. Because I don’t have a middle name, and my christening name is Mary. It comes before Megan—Mary Megan. I was christened when I was twelve or thirteen, even though it was way after the fact of my bowing out of all of that organized religion.
N: Are you sure that wasn’t confirmation? The sacrament of confirmation?
M: That side of you really bums me out.
N: What?
M: The fact that you know that . . .
But whatever it was, I did get a christening name. It’s not on my birth certificate. And I don’t use it.
N: I think mine was Michael.
M: Oh, really? That explains a lot.
N: Probably after my mom’s dad.
M: So it would be Michael Nicholas David? Or would it be Nicholas David Michael?
N: I don’t recall, to be honest.
M: That’s a lot of power names going on there. A lot of white-guy names. You’ve got them all. All except Doug.
N: It may have been my grandpa Ray. Could have been Raymond. But I’m pretty sure it was Michael.
But let’s roll through the sacraments . . . check them off.
M: I don’t know any—what? I don’t know one. What are you talking about? I don’t even know what “sacraments” means.
N: There are seven.
M: Oh god . . . it’s going to be a while before you get laid, buddy.
N: You’ll understand. Let’s see which ones we’ve received. Baptism?
M: Well, may I tell my story?
N: Of course. I think that’s what we’re doing here.
M: This is when people will close the book and throw it across the room.
I remember being baptized when I was eighteen weeks old. And that is my earliest memory. I remember my parents carried me up the steps of the church. We hung a right and went into . . . What’s it called? The nave?
N: Yes, the nave.
M: Where the baptismal font is. They laid me down in this cold marble thing. The priest came in, and he leaned way over and put his big, red, ruddy church-wine face right in my face, and he said, in a kind of baby talk, “I’m going to sprinkle some water on your forehead now, so I don’t want you to cry!” And I thought, “You know what, motherfucker? I had no intention of crying until you said that, but guess what’s going to happen now?”
I remember this so vividly. Like it just happened.
N: I don’t doubt it.
M: So he put on the water, and I cried, but, like, loud. I remember my parents saying, “She doesn’t usually cry like this . . . That’s weird.” They picked me up and took me out, and on the way down the stairs of the church, there was another couple coming up the stairs with their baby, and the woman was wearing a yellow dress.
N: And that woman . . . was Lady Bird Johnson.
M: (Laughs, sighs)
N: So you were baptized. Check for both of us. First Communion . . . yes, check.
M: I thought it was weird.
N: Fucking super weird. I think confession is a sacrament.
M: I kind of dug that. I thought it was cool.
N: Yeah, I did, too.
M: It’s really dark, you’re in a little thing, and . . .
N: Sometimes I’d try to go into the sordid details of my actual transgressions, and I never got the response I wanted. I was looking for some kind of shock.
M: Well, I never did anything wrong. So I had to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find one thing that could be considered a sin.
N: I think I began to embellish my confessions so that Monsignor Seidl would find me interesting. A child of note.
M: He called today.
N: From heaven?
OK, that’s three. Confirmation, which we think we both did.
M: I did.
N: It’s the dogma, dude.
M: I did. I had a special dress. I was twelve or thirteen—I was a little old. As I said, I’d put a stop to all that, so it took a little while to get it accomplished.
N: When you’re confirmed, that’s when you are considered an adult in the church. It’s considered the end of catechism. You can think for yourself.
M: Just another waste of a dress, in my opinion. The same as when I had to be a debutante to please my poor mom. Because her whole social life depended upon it.
N: It’s only right. You’re a good daughter.
M: Thanks.
N: Now here’s where it’s going to get fuzzy. I know I’ve got two of the remaining three. The next one is marriage. We’re living in sin. We’re not married in the Catholic Church.
M: No. Not in the Catholic Church.
N: Just in the eyes of Mother Nature.
M: But we’re married.
N: We are married.
The sixth one is kind of a bust. I believe it’s the holy rites. So only if you become a priest, I believe, can you get the sixth sacrament. Which means you have to be a dude, I believe. Isn’t t
hat still—
M: Wait, what is it?
N: It’s called the holy rites. So if you become a priest, you become ordained.
M: You’re not going to do that, are you?
N: Let’s see.
M: The pope just said this week that he’s considering letting married men become priests. Men who are already married. But if you’re already a celibate priest, you can’t get married. So the people who are already priests are like, um . . .
N: Fuck that, Fro! Step back, Francis.
So the Catholic Church is still THAT backward and arcane.
M: And women can’t be priests.
N: It’s an issue on the table if a married man can practice their Masses.
M: I don’t get it.
N: That’s why we’re in love.
So the sixth sacrament is being withheld from the majority of Catholics. The seventh sacrament is your last rites, on your deathbed.
M: I don’t think either one of us has had that.
N: I don’t have high hopes for the last rites.
M: My mom’s had that done, because there were six different times that we were told she was dying. So she’s had them six times, at least. Maybe more.
N: She’s good to go. (Laughs)
M: My mom really is kind of like a saint, though. Even though she can still look you up and down with the most searing look that just conveys—the most withering look that lets you know that what you’re wearing, or your hairstyle, or your weight, or your face, or all of the above are not making the grade.
N: But I think she’s a very benevolent person. Who’s maybe a little snotty about appearances.
M: She’s got the most incredible ability to stay positive of any person I’ve ever met. And her love for me legitimately knows no bounds.
N: So, for me—here’s the thing about religion in general. Because of my mom and dad, primarily, I understand that you can live a full and rich life in the world and be a devoutly religious person. I feel like their foibles come more from just living in a conservative community, where there weren’t any minorities, and there weren’t any gay people out in the open. So they had touches—they had a benign homophobia and racism.
M: And yet they raised a gay son!
N: (Laughs) Don’t call my brother that.
So I don’t feel judgment—I don’t like it when someone like Bill Maher says religions are stupid. I don’t disagree with the Christopher Hitchens of the world, who point out all the bloodshed at the hands of religion. How brutal they can be, and how sort of tribal and backward and full of arcane thinking. But I understand that a lot of people need some sort of faith. Laurie Anderson talks about how it’s all just storytelling. We need our stories so we don’t go insane. And whether that’s organized in a church, where everybody’s getting their stories from the same book, or we make up our own stories—we all have our mythologies that allow us to comprehend the incomprehensibility of life.
The thing that I don’t like about religion, and the reason I have such a bone to pick with it, is because of all the trouble it’s causing in the world, particularly in our country. I generally focus on Christianity, on the bad Christians. Those are the ones who are simply hypocritical, like Christians in the government, who—
M: People who are pro-life, meaning they’re anti-abortion, but they’re for the death penalty.
N: Or they’re completely hawkish . . . no abortions, but by all means kill the Syrians.
I remember when I got to college, I was just out of the Catholic Church, which I wasn’t really feeling but I was still attending.
M: Wait.
N: I was doing the readings every Sunday. And so I had the dogma in me. And I also had been pretending to be born again for a few years, because the girl I was dating was born again.
M: You should note that I yawned at this moment.
N: Noted.
So I had to do this cognitive walk-back with my new friends, the members of the Defiant Theatre, that I met at the University of Illinois theater department. I had to say, “OK, you guys, here’s the deal. I was brought up in this religion, and then I professed this further religion . . .” I actually had a transition girlfriend, who was also going to Bible study. Hilariously, her name was Tammy Schwartz. She was cool. She was a senior actress. And so we dated . . .
M: Did you ever tell anyone at Parks & Rec that you dated someone named Tammy?
N: I don’t think so—it didn’t last very long, so she doesn’t really stand out as one of the main relationships in my life. But I had to walk myself down from this life that had Christian watermarks in it into full-blown hedonism with Joe Foust. He gave me The Book of the SubGenius, which is a wonderful, hilarious satire of not only Christianity but all religions, and also America, and, um . . . humanity.
M: I didn’t have any of those kinds of problems because it never dawned on me that I should feel conflicted in any way. But I was a weird kid. I believed in elves and faeries. All I wanted to do when I was a kid was play elves and faeries. It was a little hard to get my friends on board with that, because they were like “Um . . . nothing’s happening. We’re just sitting in a room.” But that did not deter me in any way.
My belief system is closer to Taoism or Buddhism. Like a lot of people, I do feel that there are aspects of every religion that are important, and if you could somehow roll all the good parts into one, that would probably be a good thing. But in terms of the Bible, and being very literal about the Bible, that wasn’t something I encountered until I was older. For example, Nick and I know someone who is gay, but he or she won’t be gay, because he or she says there’s a sentence in the Old Testament that says something about it. He or she continues to have sex with people of the same sex, but is convinced that they will someday marry someone of the opposite sex, even though they have never had sex with someone of the opposite sex, and aren’t attracted to people of the opposite sex.
N: It’s Beyoncé.
M: It is absolutely not Beyoncé.
In any event, the last time I spoke to this person, I said, “You’ve painted yourself into this crazy corner where you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life.” And the response was, “Maybe I’m fine with that. Maybe that’s just the way it’s going to be.” And I thought, “Okay, sure. But if you could embrace your own actual human instincts and not be at the mercy of a sentence in a book, that might be good, too. Things might start to make a little more sense.”
N: This is a good thing to focus on because we both became deeply involved in the theater at an early age, and theater has traditionally been one of the places where gay people can congregate and feel safe. For me it was a huge, eye-opening transition to meet gay friends and learn how their lives have been. Many of them had really traumatic childhoods, and some of them had come out to their families while I knew them. It really upset me on their behalf when the families wouldn’t take it well—a lot of it is societal, and a lot of it is fueled by religion. That’s a good example of something that’s completely nonsensical, but it creates so much strife and trauma for so many people around the world. It’s an example of archaic moments in these writings that are being taken literally. And discrimination against gay people in this country is one thing, but the insane shit that goes on around the world—genital mutilation, the torture that women have to undergo, the inhumanly sexist religious laws—that’s what really riles me up about religion. That and things like the creationist sect. If you want to believe the notions that they believe, which I consider to be goofy . . .
M: And it’s also so disrespectful to all the billions of people on the planet who aren’t part of their religion.
N: Especially when they suggest that the tenets of their religion are supreme. Let’s take anything based on the Bible. There’s no denying that any of the stories in these religious texts have great value. They’re great parables, great all
egories, great cautionary tales to tell us not to steal, or covet each other’s spouses, or kill each other. And that’s great, I agree, we should all remind each other of these things. But to use those stories in any literal way, to presume that only your people are right and correct—forcing one religion’s prayers into schools, teaching the Book of Genesis instead of science in school—those are infuriating moments.
M: I love them.
N: We’ll work it out.
M: Here’s the thing. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Whoever the standard-bearers are for enlightenment, those people aren’t going to become less enlightened. This is always reflected in the arts. Artists who create great works move that bar of enlightenment higher and higher. It can’t be stopped.
N: It can’t, and as two people who aspire to make good or great art—
M: Yeah, did you see me on Breaking In with Christian Slater? It was on Fox.
N: Did you see my NASCAR commercial? That was some great art.
M: That wasn’t that bad. You can pick something worse than that.
N: One thing I really do regret is my three-episode arc on 24 where the whole story line was that someone had trumped up a lie that some Middle Eastern terrorists had set off a bomb in Los Angeles. And I played a pedestrian, a rube, who saw this news item and went out on the streets to enact racial violence against any “towelhead” that the character could find. It was a horrible story line.
M: I played a white supremacist in You, Me and the Apocalypse.
N: I daresay that the writing on that show was a couple of notches above the level of enlightenment of the thriller procedural 24. We just lost a great many readers.
M: Kiefer just threw the book out the window.
N: It’s interesting, in this crazy blue-red bifurcated national mentality of the moment, that the red side is much more tenaciously clinging to their Christianity, and the blue side, while not claiming nearly as much religious devotion, is behaving in a much more humanistic and empathetic way. Just today there was a big news item about how President Trump’s proposed budget would cut the funding for Meals on Wheels. All of the reading I did about it from the left was saying, “Is nothing sacred? You assholes.” One year of funding for Meals on Wheels, by the way, is worth about one trip to Mar-a-Lago. The reactions I saw on the right were things like, “If you feel so bad, why don’t you just donate your money to Meals on Wheels? We don’t want our government money going to this program.” It’s just inhuman, a lack of empathy, when it comes to things like health care or Meals on Wheels. Where this purported party of Jesus doesn’t have the wherewithal to say, “Some of my people might get old and need meals.”
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Page 10