by Bruce Bawer
Why has mainstream society taken so long to realize fully what legalistic Christianity was doing to America—and to Jesus?
Part of the reason, I think, is that, for all the nation's cultural homogeneity—our thousands of identical fast-food outlets and mall stores, and our common popular culture of music and TV shows and movies—we are deeply fragmented in matters of religion. In no other Western country do so many denominations claim as their members such large proportions of the population. This lack of a shared religious culture, along with our overall indifference to history and our public schools' hands-off attitude toward religion, has made us a people who have a very fuzzy sense of what religion is and has been in America, of what things used to be like and how they have gotten to where they are.
For me, religion was always much more of a question mark than, say, music or math or geography. As someone who was raised in a conservative Republican household that was somewhere on the cusp between secularism and nonlegalistic Christianity, I was probably quite representative of many Americans who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century. During my childhood in the 1960s and my teenage years in the early 1970s, I was close to Catholics (both devout and lapsed), to Jews (both religious and secular), and to a wide variety of Protestants. I knew enough people of different faiths, indeed, to be struck over and over again by the extraordinary religious diversity of the society in which I lived, by how little most of the people in my life seemed to know about one another's faiths, and above all by the unreflective zeal with which some of those people could claim for themselves the label of Christian and deny it to others.
My family was itself pretty diverse: My father's parents, who had come to New York City from Poland during World War I, were Roman Catholics; my mother's father and mother in South Carolina were raised in Methodist and Baptist churches, respectively (though my grandmother later switched from Baptist to Methodist). Both of my grandfathers died in the 1950s, but my grandmothers lived on into the 1980s and continued to be regular churchgoers. In my Catholic grandmother's apartment a crucifix and a calendar painting of Jesus hung on the wall; my Protestant grandmother's house was piled high with Bibles, copies of Norman Vincent Peale's magazine, Guideposts, and small paperbound volumes of prayers and meditations.
My parents weren't churchgoers. My father had no apparent religion, while my mother, though disaffected from institutional religion by the racism and hypocrisy in the churches of her youth, considered herself a Christian. Though she sent me for several years to a Lutheran Sunday school, she did not have me baptized, for she was determined, in the Baptist fashion, to let me make that choice. She was not big on doctrinal statements but instead, like more than a few American parents, drove two points into my head over and over so that they would stick there forever (and they did). One point was that God was about love; he loved me and everybody else. The other point was this: "It doesn't matter to God what religion you are. What matters is whether you're a good person." Little did I know what a radical, unacceptable doctrine this was to millions of Americans who called themselves Christians.
As a child, I spent little time in church. Our family attended a few Lutheran Easter services, and every Christmas my sister and I accompanied Catholic friends to their church's midnight mass. I remember at one such mass being astonished by the priest's sermon, in which he ordered his flock not to watch the TV show Maude because a recent story line had concerned abortion. What business, I wondered, did this guy have giving such orders? And what kind of congregation tolerated such high-handedness? I knew so little about the authoritative role of the clergy in Roman Catholicism that I was astonished to hear such preaching, and appalled that it didn't raise an eyebrow among the folks in the pews. I wondered how many of those people actually obeyed the priest's command.
In those days my life was compartmentalized where religion was concerned. My Sunday-school classmates, of course, were all Protestants—in fact, they were pretty much the only Protestants I knew in New York. Most of my public-school classmates were Jewish, while almost all the kids on my block were Catholics who attended parochial school. On Jewish holidays, when I had the day off and the Catholic kids heading home from school saw me reading on our front steps, some of them would jeer at me, saying that I was a Jew and would therefore go to hell. "I'm not a Jew," I would protest. "If you're not Catholic, you're Jewish!" they would insist. "And you're going to hell!" I was amazed that these children, who attended a religion class every day of the school year, could think that everybody was either Catholic or Jewish. Hadn't they ever heard of Protestants—or Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems? What were those nuns teaching them? Even more amazing was the glee with which these supposed friends of mine declared that God would send me to hell—and would do so for no other reason, apparently, than that I had been born into the wrong faith. It was plain to me that the God of love that my mother had told me about would never run his universe that way. Why wasn't that plain to them? And why were they so eager to embrace such a brutal image of God, anyway?
If any of those young people ever inquired of their teachers why God had set up such a cruel, meaningless system of postmortem reward and punishment, I never heard about it. Few of them, indeed, seemed ever to reflect on the things they were told in religion class. Plainly, they had recognized from an early age that questions weren't welcome, that thinking wasn't acceptable, and that what was called for was unreflecting, unquestioning assent. I couldn't imagine how people my age could have taken all those religion classes and yet managed never to examine critically the things they were being told about the ultimate truths of the cosmos.
When I was thirteen, several of my Jewish classmates had bar mitzvah parties. I was confused when I was not invited to any, not even the one for my best friend. When my mother, sure that this was an oversight, called his mother, she was told that I hadn't been invited because I wasn't Jewish. She was miffed—and I was shocked. Suddenly I was aware that in the minds of my Jewish friends—or maybe just their parents?—there was a distance between me and them to which I had been blind. Their Jewishness had never made any difference to me; to discover that my non-Jewishness made such an immense difference to them was earthshaking.
Around that time, my Sunday-school classmates and I began to be prepared for our confirmations. Our teacher assumed that we had all been baptized, and when I told her I hadn't, she was sure I was mistaken. The people at the church checked with my mother, however, and when they learned to their horror that it was true, they made a series of insistent phone calls to her, demanding that I be baptized immediately. She refused. Finally an official church delegation called at our house and tried to scare her, solemnly declaring that if I wasn't baptized, I would go to hell. (Thus did I learn that it wasn't just Catholics who said such silly things.) Politely but firmly my mother ordered the delegation out of the house and withdrew me from the Sunday school that I had attended for some seven or eight years. She was determined not to let anybody baptize me unless and until I decided that I wanted to be baptized.
What my mother did then was, I believe, inspired. On a succession of Sunday mornings, she took me to services at various Protestant churches in our neighborhood. One week it was the large stone Presbyterian edifice on Queens Boulevard, the next the small brick Congregationalist box on Eightieth Street. And so on. The idea was to acquaint me with my denominational options—to open my eyes to the variety of ways of worshipping the Almighty, at least within a Protestant context, and perhaps to find a church that I might want to belong to. Though I didn't end up joining any of those churches, the experience instilled in me a fascination with religion that has never abated. I noticed all the similarities and differences—in everything from music, liturgy, and preaching to the way the clergy dressed and the way the church interior looked—and I wanted very much to understand them.
That summer, in my uncle's house in South Carolina, I found a book that compared Methodism to Catholicism in elaborate detail, with the former coming out wa
y ahead. (This outcome was not surprising, given that the book had been issued by a Methodist publishing house.) Among other things, the book cataloged the popes' villainous misdeeds. It was eye-opening. Imagine—popes who had murdered, stolen, kept mistresses, and fathered children! At about this time I also acquired a hand-me-down parochial-school history textbook whose biases were soon obvious even to me: By its account, the church was always right, the popes always virtuous. I was surprised that a schoolbook could misrepresent the truth so shamelessly. And I rejoiced that I attended a public school, where the schoolbooks weren't (I thought) slanted at all.
I was then only beginning to notice the gaping hole in my formal education. At school I learned about Western culture, but Christianity—which stood at its center—was almost entirely omitted. I studied American history, but the course materials included almost no details about the religions that had decisively shaped the nation from its beginnings. Where the subject could not be avoided, the textbooks and teachers handled it briefly and delicately, doing their best to skirt anything potentially controversial. I was taught, for example, that the Pilgrims and Puritans had come to America because they wanted to establish "freedom of religion"; I was also taught that Roger Williams, America's first Baptist preacher, had fled the Puritans' Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded Rhode Island because he wanted to establish "freedom of religion." Huh? If the Puritans had practiced freedom of religion, why had Williams been forced to flee Massachusetts? That question was never fully confronted. Nor did I learn much about what exactly the Puritans believed and how it compared to what most Englishmen believed—or, for that matter, to what other American colonists believed.
While I had a pretty good notion, moreover, of which national groups had migrated to which parts of America, I had only the vaguest understanding of the religions they had brought with them. Not until later in my teens, when I had begun to research my family tree, did I perceive how critical a role religion had played in my ancestors' coming to America—and, by extension, how important a dimension of the nation's history had been left out of my school lessons. One of my ancestors, for example, turned out to be a Quaker named Valentine Hollingsworth who had emigrated to the New World in 1682 with William Penn and settled in Delaware. Another, John Bristow, was an Anglican who came from England as an indentured servant and served as a church clerk in Virginia. One ancestor named Dauge, a member of France's embattled Protestant minority, the Huguenots, came to America around 1680 to escape Catholic persecution; another Huguenot ancestor fled France in the early 1700s and became an associate of a then-famous pioneer Baptist minister named Oliver Hart. If I was stunned to realize that my mother's family had preserved no living memory of these facts, and that I had had to discover them in dusty library records, I was even more stunned to learn what a vital motivating role religion had played in so many of my ancestors' lives—in the series of decisions that had led to, among much else, me.
In school I had learned about the Protestant Reformation, which had begun, we were taught, early in the sixteenth century when a German priest named Martin Luther got angry at the church for selling documents called indulgences that were supposed to guarantee purchasers a reduced sentence in purgatory. Beyond that, however, my teachers didn't teach much about the origins of Protestantism. They didn't go very deeply into Luther's profound theological rupture from Catholicism, at the center of which was his rejection of the church doctrine of salvation by works (you go to heaven as a reward for what you do on earth) in favor of a doctrine of salvation by grace (as sinners, we cannot merit heaven, but those who embrace Jesus as savior receive it as a gift). My teachers didn't examine the lives and beliefs of other Protestant reformers, and didn't help us to understand the ways in which these reformers' ideas, transported to the New World by their followers, had definitively shaped American society and culture.
By the time I started researching my family tree, to be sure, I knew a few scattered, superficial things about Christian history and theology—but I knew them only because I had picked up information on my own. I learned somewhere, for example, that the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer John Calvin had believed in predestination (the idea that every person is for all eternity designated unalterably either as damned or as a member of the heaven-destined "Elect") and that some of his followers had founded the Presbyterian Church. I knew about the Calvinist doctrine of "once saved, always saved," but I didn't know about the antithetical doctrine—known as Arminianism and preached by Methodism's founder, John Wesley—that it was possible to fall from grace. I knew something about Christian Science, mainly because my father's complete set of Mark Twain included Twain's book-length attack on its nineteenth-century founder, Mary Baker Eddy, which I read with fascination. I didn't know that the Quakers had been founded in the mid 1600s by an Englishman named George Fox, but I knew from the movie Friendly Persuasion that they believed in nonviolence and called one another "thee."
Then there were the Jehovah's Witnesses, founded in the nineteenth century by an American named Charles Taze Russell. I knew quite a bit about their beliefs because a nice old man came to our door two or three times selling Jehovah's Witness books for fifty cents. Each time he came, I bought one. And I read them—not because I found them theologically credible but because I found it incredible that other people did. One of the books, entitled Then Is Finished the Mystery of God, interpreted the mysterious, fantastic symbolism of the Book of Revelation in great detail. Among the twentieth-century events that the book cited as direct fulfillments of specific biblical prophecies were the dictatorship of Hitler, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the 1968 expansion of the Jehovah's Witnesses' Brooklyn printing plant. I read all this with open-mouthed astonishment. Could the nice old man who had sold me the book seriously believe such things?
I knew he did, because once when I was about sixteen and was hanging out with friends on the block, he showed up and started telling us about his religion. He said—to the jeers and gibes of my friends—that the world would end soon and that, before it did, the most important thing was for believers to evangelize and for nonbelievers to convert or face hellfire.
I remember marveling at the man's unshakable calm in the face of ridicule. I knew he was deadly serious about what he believed, and I knew his beliefs—which included an expectation of a Judgment Day that sounded like a cosmic-scale comic opera—were absurd. Why would God set up a situation in which only those who embraced the correct arcane scenario of the "End Times" would be saved? Why would he turn salvation into an eenie-meenie-minie-mo guessing game? Why would he bring the history of the universe to an end with a grotesquely silly apocalyptic show? What would be the point, the purpose, the meaning? Surely the universe had a greater ultimate significance than that; surely its God had more imagination. And what about God's love? My experience with the old Jehovah's Witness, like my experience with the Catholic kids who screamed at me that I was going to hell, drove home to me the fact that certain people—not only children, but grown-ups too—needed to believe that they were saved and that somebody else wasn't. To be sure, it wasn't a need that necessarily manifested itself in an overtly nasty way: The old Jehovah's Witness man was unfailingly gracious and gentle, and certainly wanted to save as many people as he could before the end. But deep down his theology was still ugly, wasn't it?
By the end of my teens, then, I did have a smattering of knowledge about religion in America—more, surely, than most young Americans. But there was so much that I didn't know. In fact, I didn't even know how much I didn't know. I had never heard of dispensationalism, the baroque nineteenth-century theological system on which American Protestant fundamentalism is founded. I had never heard of the Rapture and the Great Tribulation, both of which are bedrock concepts of that theology. And I had never heard of the Scofield Reference Bible, which had codified those concepts and which was a revered fixture in countless American homes.
How little I knew was driven home to me every year when, after
receiving the new edition of the World Almanac in my Christmas stocking, I perused once again the long list of U.S. religious denominations along with their membership figures. There I read, in bold print, the names of the large old religious groups—Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, and so forth—as well as other familiar names: Christian Science, the Society of Friends (Quakers), the Salvation Army. But there were also, in lighter print, dozens of other sizable groups with names that meant nothing to me—names like the Brethren, the Evangelical Free Church of America, the Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ World Wide, and something called Triumph the Church and Kingdom of God in Christ. There were also numerous perplexing variations on the words Church of God: the Church of God; the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana); the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee); the Church of God, General Conference; the Original Church of God; the Church of God by Faith; the Church of God of Prophecy; the Church of God in Christ; the Church of the Living God; the Church of God, Seventh Day; the Church of God, Seventh Day (Denver); and, last but not least, something called the House of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. I didn't have a clue what most of these churches might profess, or what their history might be, or what kind of people you might find in their congregations. Nor could I imagine why there were so many of them. What difference could there be between a Church of God headquartered in Anderson, Indiana, and one headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee? I knew that the difference must have something to do with theological particulars; for I had already begun to understand that while common spiritual experience could bring people together in love and worship, a tendency to insist on doctrinal specifics could cause enmity and division. Why was I so ill-educated about these things? And why are most people in the United States, with its astonishingly high percentage of churchgoers, even more badly educated about them? The reasons aren't hard to fathom. Religion is a touchy subject, and America has a long tradition of church-state separation. In a diverse country where most children attend public schools, it's not easy to find an objective way to teach religion. Yet to omit it, for this reason, almost entirely from history education is to distort history beyond recognition. And it isn't just history. Pre-Romantic European literature, art, and music were to a huge extent about Christianity. How can one fully appreciate Mozart's Requiem Mass if one doesn't know how a mass is structured and why? How can one fully appreciate a Madonna by Fra Angelico if one is clueless about medieval faith? When I was in high school and college and even graduate school (where I studied English literature), my teachers assigned the work of Dante, Milton, Herbert, and Donne, religious poets all; yet, absurdly, most of us read, discussed, and even wrote papers about them knowing only the most rudimentary facts about the religious ideas that informed their works.