Ryan’s love of the Boss started back in the early 1980s. “I was lonely. I was at a new school. Didn’t feel connected. Super insecure. You know, my parents’ divorce—just feelings of loneliness and isolation. Like we all have. But I had more than my dose of it. So anyway, I was getting a ride to school with my older brother’s friend and he’d play that music and it just hit me. I bought a few albums and I just used to sit alone in my room and turn out the lights and light a candle and put on The River. And I wasn’t even smoking dope! I was just so touched by the music.” Then he went to his first concert. “I went by myself. And it was just amazing. And I walked out of there feeling like I had just spent time with fifteen thousand of my best friends—and I didn’t know any of them. It’s like the sense of community was completely overwhelming. And the content of the songs, you know, it is all about loneliness, despair, isolation, and hope. There’s just this emotional content to the music that we can all connect with. The songs tell stories about people, everyday people who are struggling, who are lonely, who are fighting to get to a better place.”
Ryan describes the concert like a conversion experience—uplifting, comforting, cathartic. For Ryan, a Bruce Springsteen concert is a far more “religious” experience than anything he’s ever encountered in any church.
“When I go to the shows, there is a huge sense of rejuvenation, there’s a huge sense of happiness. A real emotional experience. When Springsteen comes to town, I go to his concerts. If he’s playing for three nights, I’ll go to every show. I’ll go back time after time. That’s how much I get out of it. My wife is a lapsed Catholic. She grew up in a very, very Catholic family. Three of her aunts are nuns. And when she walked out of her first Springsteen concert, she said, ‘I want to be a better mom. I want to be a better person. I want to be a better wife. I want to be better in every measure of my life.’ I mean, that’s how inspiring she found his concert to be.”
A couple of years ago, Ryan took his oldest son, Zander, to a concert. “Now, you have to understand, I’ve been singing Springsteen songs to him just about every night, when I put him to bed, since he was a baby. He’s gone to sleep almost every night to me singing ‘Promised Land.’ This music has just been such a huge part of my life. So to take him to a concert—okay, maybe six years old is a bit young, but I wanted him to experience something that has been so meaningful to me. I was able to get amazing tickets so we were right in the front row. It was his birthday and we made a sign for him to hold up that said, TODAY I’M SIX, and Springsteen saw the sign and waved to Zander and sang to him and spent some time connecting to him. This is in front of sixty thousand people. It was almost like a moment that was meant to be.”
Ryan’s deep love for and personal devotion to the Boss is extremely similar to many religious people’s feelings for their savior or prophet; in fact, Ryan’s wife recently bought him a bumper sticker that reads MY BOSS IS A SINGER FROM NEW JERSEY—an obvious parallel of the popular Jesus-referring bumper sticker proclaiming MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER. And as Ryan explains it, a Bruce Springsteen concert is quite akin to a religious revival; what Ryan gets from Springsteen’s music and concerts is similar to what religious devotees get from their involvement in religion: inspiration, hope, connection. This is most likely why secular people will often say that music is their religion, or literature, or nature, or theater, or football—they want to indicate and stress that such this-worldly, nonsupernatural things can provide heightened levels of meaning and sacredness. And they provide equally powerful and enjoyable rituals, traditions, and experiences—rituals, traditions, and experiences that can be shared with one’s children.
Ryan took his passion for Springsteen and imparted it to his son by making it ritualistic in nature and cementing it as a family tradition. Whenever the Boss is playing a concert in town, Ryan takes Zander. And Zander loves it.
The Heretical Habitus
For secular Americans such as Ryan Gorski, there are various additional possibilities for creating and enjoying rituals and traditions within the family context. The first is to participate in secular activities: a rock concert, a baseball game, a monthly neighborhood potluck, a motorcycle parade, a pig pickin’, a kindergarten graduation, or the Fourth of July. A second possibility is to participate in religious holidays and ceremonies that have been secularized: a Jesusless Christmas morning, an Allah-absent end-of-Ramadan breaking of the fast, a ministerless wedding, or a godless Passover seder. A third option is to join up with other secular humanists for celebrations of such occasions as Darwin Day, Earth Day, the summer solstice, or the vernal equinox. A fourth is to actively create rituals and traditions on one’s own. For example, when our children were younger, my wife and I liked to create a little bit of mayhem on the morning of Saint Patrick’s Day: we’d buy some Lucky Charms and throw them messily around the kitchen, we’d put green dye in the drinking water in the refrigerator door, we’d scatter the kids’ toys a bit—and blame it all on mischievous leprechauns that had been in the house the night before.
An obvious fifth option for nonreligious parents is simply to participate in rituals and traditions that are overtly religious, even when the spiritual or theological content is problematic, or even offensive. For example, my wife and I sometimes go with the kids to their grandparents’ church at Christmastime. It makes my in-laws happy, it’s nice to see their friends, the music is good, the vibe is festive, and as for the sermon about Christ the King, well, we just endure it. And we happily attend the annual Passover seder at my cousin Julie’s house not because we particularly enjoy the retelling of the troubling biblical story from Exodus, but because we love seeing our extended family gather around a long table one night a year, we love to see how our nieces and nephews have grown, we relish the food, we enjoy my father singing in Yiddish, and it feels good to remember aunts, uncles, and grandparents who used to sit around the exact same table but do so no longer because they are dead.
It all boils down to choice. That is essentially the secular approach to rituals, traditions, ceremonies, and holidays: personal, individual choice. And it is both beautiful and baneful.
The beauty of being secular on this front is that you and your children are not bound to rituals. You are not enslaved by traditions. You do not have to engage in such activities because it is expected of you, or because your family urges you to, or because you feel obligated or guilty or forced to. Secular families perform rituals, celebrate holidays, and partake of traditions only if they want to. If they decide to. Thus being nonreligious means that you have much more freedom to pick and choose what you want to do or not do, participate in or avoid, join up with or walk away from. This approach offers a freedom that can be quite liberating; it leaves open the possibility of discovering new rituals and traditions from all kinds of sources. It allows for flagrant, bold, and personally satisfying reinterpretation, restructuring, and redefining of rituals and traditions. And it allows for the creation of completely new ones. And furthermore, the secular approach to rituals and traditions means that one must actively, genuinely, and sincerely think about and contemplate the various rites and ceremonies one chooses to be involved with, which means that when one does choose to be involved, there is a greater sense of the reasons, purposes, and benefits of doing so.
But there is also a downside to all of this. First, all this active picking and choosing and contemplating and creating can be a bit of a burden. It is a lot of work. For religious families, rituals and traditions come much easier. Everything is already established, conveniently prepackaged. There is already a familiar framework. When a person dies, the religious funeral service is already set. When a baby is born, the baptism ceremony is already set. When your kid wants a bar mitzvah, the whole thing is already set. When one wants some psychological comfort through prayer, the prayer is already written. The rosary is in hand. The icon is there. The rite is ready. In other words, religious parents can generally be much more relaxed and even quite passive in their involvement wi
th rituals and traditions since these things have already been established, laid out, written, constructed. But secular parents must be much more conscious, aware, active, involved. And all of this awareness and reinterpreting and recreating and rewriting and active questioning—it can actually be quite a drag at times.
Additionally, secular approaches to ritual and tradition, by their very nature, lack intergenerational consistency. Burning Man may be an awesome, transformative experience for many—but it wasn’t for their great-grandparents, grandparents, or parents, because it didn’t exist back then. A Bruce Springsteen concert may move Ryan Gorski in very deep and personal ways, but one day the Boss will be dead, and Ryan’s grandkids won’t be able to partake of the magic. A personalized, uniquely constructed funeral may be wonderful for those present, but when the next generation starts to die, what will their funeral services be like? Totally original, uniquely constructed creations as well? And if so, that is all well and good—but it severs the consistency and predictability of the tradition, and actually undercuts the very notion and point of “tradition.” There is something powerful about rituals and traditions that have been as they are over many generations. It can be comforting and even inspiring to do some act or state some words or perform some rite that one’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents also did in just the same way—and to simultaneously know that one’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will do it thus as well. As sociologist Lynn Davidman argues, many people crave such unchanging, fixed rituals and traditions in a world that often feels rootless and ever-morphing. Such transgenerational consistency in ritual and tradition has the power to place an individual in a loving, noble niche, attached to a “chain of memory”—to use Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s apt phrase—which simultaneously links an individual to his or her ancestors as well as his or her descendants. This sort of thing is, if not totally absent from secular rituals and traditions, then certainly limited.
Ultimately, what contemporary secular culture thus lacks is heritage. By heritage I mean inherited customs, rites, symbols, and lifeways that are shared by people with a common past and common future, people linked by similar memories and future expectations, people enmeshed in similar experiences over generations. Such a heritage is hard to discern within secular culture, at least overtly.
However, there actually may be a secular heritage, albeit a subtle one, something that might be understood as a distinctly secular legacy: a legacy of personal freedom, of individual proclivity, of ongoing choice. When it comes to being secular, though we do not impart to future generations specific rituals or traditions that we expect them to uphold, what we do provide for them, as a legacy—or simply as a consequential by-product or inevitable outcome of our secularity—is this: the gift of allowing them to be unencumbered, unrestrained, and unfettered in choosing how they want to construct their lives and express their individual orientations. Perhaps this is what secular men and women most clearly, even if unconsciously, bequeath to their children: rituals of their own choosing and manufacturing, and, though paradoxical as it may sound, a tradition of no tradition. Call it the Heretical Legacy. For after all, the root meaning of “heresy,” derived from the Greek hairesis, is “choice.”
Chapter 5
Creating Community
Ever since she read Just Plain Maggie, our daughter Flora had wanted to go to sleep-away summer camp. When she turned eleven, Stacy and I felt that she was ready. But which camp? We had sent our older daughter, Ruby, to a Jewish camp for her first away-from-home summer experience. Ruby had liked it. But she didn’t love it. So we didn’t think that it would be a great choice for Flora. We considered sending her to a music camp (Flora plays the cello), and also to a nature-outdoorsy camp in the Sierras where her cousins go every summer.
But then one day I happened upon the Web site of Camp Quest, and I was tickled by their tag line: “Camp Quest: a place for fun, friends, and freethought for kids ages 8–17.” In reading more, I learned that Camp Quest was founded in the 1990s, when a group of like-minded parents, some from Ohio and some from Kentucky, noticed that while there were a zillion religious summer camp options available for the children of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, Baha’is, Mormons, and even Scientologists, there weren’t any for the children of atheists, agnostics, and/or secular humanists. They decided to make it happen. The first camp session took place in Boone County, Kentucky, in 1996, with twenty campers attending. The enterprise has enjoyed impressive growth ever since, as there are now Camp Quests in Arizona, Virginia, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Connecticut, Washington, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, and two in California.
Stacy was open to Camp Quest as a possibility for Flora, but we both wondered: was it really the right camp? We asked ourselves: why send Flora to a camp that emphasizes being nonreligious? If we don’t want her to go to a religious camp, fine—there are countless nonreligious options out there, camps that focus on hiking, or tennis, or cooking, or gymnastics, or learning Mandarin. But I was further enticed by what I read on the Camp Quest Web site, especially their definition of what “freethought” means: “it means cultivating curiosity, questioning and a certain disdain for just taking the word of authority; demanding evidence and knowing you can make your own observations even if they lead you to disagree.” I liked that. Stacy did too. We also liked what they emphasized in the bullet points in their mission statement, such as their goal to “cultivate reason and empathy as foundations of an ethical, productive and fulfilling life” and to “demonstrate atheism and humanism as positive, family-friendly worldviews.” And we also thought that it would be nice for Flora to hang out with kids who are growing up in homes like hers, whose parents hold opinions and worldviews similar to ours, allowing her to find a sense of connection and belonging with other secular kids.
But perhaps more important, we wanted Flora to go to a camp that was openly, proudly, and self-consciously secular, so that she would understand that being nonreligious isn’t simply the absence of something; it isn’t just a rejection of something. It is about much more than that. It is a positive embracing of a naturalistic worldview, and of ethics based on reason and empathy. It is about inquiry and skepticism, reason and science, and independence of thought. It is about affirmative, purposeful community united by a grounded orientation to the goodness of this world.
So off she went to Camp Quest. And by sending her there, Stacy and I were actively choosing to include Flora in the growing swell of something relatively new in American culture: the conscious creation of affirmatively secular communities. Such communities are springing up everywhere, from small towns and rural outposts to large cities and major urban centers. From Seattle Atheists, to the Downeast Humanists and Freethinkers of Ellsworth, Maine, from the local chapter of Citizens United for the Separation of Church and State in Sarasota, Florida, to the Utah Coalition of Reason, the river of secular community is swelling. Ten years ago, the American Humanist Association had about 4,000 members; today it has approximately 13,000, with an additional 250,000 likes on Facebook.
People are starting up, organizing, checking out, and joining various atheist, secular, humanist, and nonbeliever groups throughout America for all kinds of reasons. For some, it is about collectively fighting against religion’s presence in the public square and seeking to protect the ever-threatened separation of church and state. For others, it is about replacing certain aspects of religion that they miss, especially the experience of being part of a morally minded, multiaged congregational environment that many people cherished as kids. For some, it is about seeking refuge from a social environment in which religion is all-pervasive. For others, it is about deepening their knowledge of secularism—its history, its philosophy, and its potential as a force for good in the world. For some, it is about critiquing and debunking religion, which they see as a malevolent, irrational force. And for a handful, it is about dancing naked under the stars on the summer sol
stice. But for most, it is simply about getting together with other like-minded people.
Atheist Soldier
Consider Scott Renfro. As he began losing more and more army buddies, he also began losing his faith. He went to Iraq a Christian, but left an atheist. And soon after, he started up a secular club.
Scott is from a small town in central Texas. His father was a fireman for many years but now works as a sheriff’s deputy. Scott’s mom is a school librarian. Scott was raised a Southern Baptist, going to church every week and Christian camp every summer. He loved the Left Behind book series when he was in middle school—those books scared him and further motivated his Christian faith. And when he first met a kid, in his high school chemistry class, who said that he didn’t believe in God, Scott’s condemnation was swift. “I told him right then and there that he was going to hell.”
Today, however, Scott is utterly godless. “I’m an atheist. I don’t have a problem with that term. I know that some people prefer to use the term ‘agnostic’ or ‘humanist,’ but for me, it’s ‘atheist.’”
What happened?
“Iraq.”
I asked Scott to explain.
“We were assigned to escort fuel trucks from the city of Mosul up to the Turkish border and back. Convoy operations. The route we went out on was getting hit pretty hard, and a bunch of soldiers on that same route had recently gotten killed—it was pretty terrible. Anyway, before we went out on our missions, the chaplain would come in and say a prayer. And this one morning he said something that really put it into perspective for me. It made me say to myself, ‘Okay, this doesn’t make any sense.’ This chaplain said that the reason my unit hadn’t had any serious losses yet was because God was protecting us. And I couldn’t think of a worse thing to say. I just sat there thinking, ‘Well, what about those four guys in that other unit—and I knew two of them—who got killed just yesterday morning? Where was God then?’ That’s when it really just clicked for me. I was really bothered by it. I got onto Facebook that night and I contacted my youth minister back in Texas and I said, ‘Hey, I am having doubts. I don’t think I believe this anymore. What should I do?’ He couldn’t say anything that helped. We exchanged a few messages back and forth and nothing he said convinced me at all. I knew that was that. I didn’t believe anymore.”
Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions Page 11