Strange Gods
Page 48
Because of Ali’s difficulty in articulating his thoughts in recent years (actually, decades), it is impossible to trace the evolution of his religious beliefs except by inferences drawn from his actions. By all accounts (including those of journalists, family, and friends), he remains a devout and observant Muslim, according to his personal understanding of what Islam means. His daughter Hana Yasmeen Ali said in 2005 that her father always prayed five times a day until advanced Parkinson’s made it too difficult for him to kneel. It is Ms. Ali who told an interviewer that her father had embraced Sufism—a kind of mysticism that exists within every branch of Islam—and become “very spiritual—more spiritual now than he is religious.”17 Who knows? Ali’s daughter was twenty-eight when she was interviewed in 2005. The squishy phrase “spiritual but not religious” has only become common during the past twenty years, as the number of Americans who want to claim some connection with a deity but do not want the obligations of traditional religion has grown. “Spiritual but not religious” sounds like an American in her twenties or thirties. This phrase, perfectly designed to avoid taking a stand, certainly doesn’t sound anything like Muhammad Ali in the days when he was able to speak for himself. In his daughter’s book about him, Ali is quoted as saying that he thought he would be the Muslim Billy Graham until he got Parkinson’s. Now, that does sound like the brash young Ali.
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The change in Ali’s public reputation has not occurred because a majority of Americans necessarily agree with the charges he leveled against his country in the 1960s and 1970s. I doubt that Bush had read The Greatest when he decided to award Ali the Medal of Freedom. Ali’s recollections about his feelings when he was asked by a lieutenant to step forward and be drafted would certainly have made a unique citation to go with the medal:
But who is this white man, no older than me, appointed by another white man, all the way to the white man in the White House? Who is he to tell me to go to Asia, Africa, or anywhere else in the world to fight people who never threw a rock at me or America? Who is this descendant of slave masters to order a descendant of slaves to fight other people in their own country?18
Part of the explanation for the honors showered on Ali surely lies in the infinite American capacity for historical amnesia. To most Americans born after 1970, who know next to nothing about the Vietnam War or the Nation of Islam—and are taught next to nothing about the controversies of the sixties in public school history classes—Ali is a black man who once stood up for, well, something. He is not seen today as the dangerous (to received opinion), challenging figure he really was. He is also one of the last living, larger-than-life figures from that era—despite the illness-induced diminution of his powers. And let us not underestimate the sentimentality associated with the severe disability of someone who was once an athletic giant. Even if Ali made a mistake in initially swallowing the more peculiar teachings of Elijah Muhammad, he has paid his debt to society! If America can forgive Bill Clinton for having oral sex in the Oval Office, they can certainly forgive a man who said some intemperate words about the souls of white folk when he was in his twenties.
And, oh yes—Ali has a Jewish grandson. In accepting children and grandchildren who have made their own religious choices, he is behaving exactly like a majority of his generation of Americans. One of the last times Ali was spotted in public was in the spring of 2012, when he attended the bar mitzvah of his grandson Jacob Wertheimer at a Philadelphia synagogue. His daughter Khaliah Ali-Wertheimer, who was raised a Muslim and who, like much of the family, seems to have a laissez-faire attitude about religious choice, is married to a Jew. The couple allowed their son to choose his own religion. Congregation Rodeph Shalom, where the bar mitzvah ceremony was held, is a Reform synagogue. In Reform Judaism, the child of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father is accepted as Jewish if he performs acts—obviously, a bar mitzvah qualifies—that publicly identify him with Judaism. Conservative and Orthodox Jews would require a formal conversion for the child of a non-Jewish mother to be considered a Jew.
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There is also little doubt that one factor in the change of public attitudes toward Ali has been the growing acceptance of religious conversions of all kinds during the past four decades. His conversion—controversial though it was at the time—was consistent with a period of immense religious change unparalleled since the Second Great Awakening. Liberalizing religious trends ranged from a new interest in Eastern faiths, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, to a diminution, triggered by the Second Vatican Council, of fidelity to traditional Roman Catholic dogma among American Catholics. But conservative trends were equally important, and the resurgence of right-wing evangelical Christianity was the most important story missed by the media until the movement could no longer be ignored, after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, points out that, although the 1966 “Is God Dead?” cover story in Time completely ignored the new evangelicalism, the phenomenon “would produce a memorable cover story for Newsweek, exactly ten years later.”19 During the demythologizing decade, a little-known group called the Campus Crusade for Christ began organizing at colleges across the nation—an effort that would produce a new generation of energetic, effective, well-educated evangelical leaders. In 1967, in a location of great symbolic importance, the Crusade held its national convention on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. A key event took place on the steps of Sproul Hall—the site where thousands of students had gathered in 1964 to protest campus restrictions on free speech, setting the pattern for subsequent protests on other campuses throughout the nation. A young evangelist named Jon Braun stood on the steps and praised Jesus as the “world’s greatest revolutionary.” The Crusade, which had only 109 employees in 1960, grew into a national organization with sixty-five hundred paid staff members by the mid-1970s. Today, the group proselytizes around the world.
But the rise of right-wing Christian evangelicalism was not the only conservative religious movement of the sixties. The attraction of many children of nonobservant secular or conventionally observant mainstream Jews to Hasidic sects caused as much angst in many Jewish families as a conversion to Catholicism would have fifty years earlier. Known as the Baal Teshuva movement, after a Talmudic term that literally means “master of repentance,” the attraction of some young Jews to a form of Judaism based on practices dating from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Eastern Europe and Russia involved a rejection of cultural assimilation and a return to an ethos that abhorred both the Jewish Enlightenment of Moses Mendelssohn and secularism. I well remember how my husband’s aunt, an observant Conservative Jew, wept when her son, who had changed his name from Joseph to Elijah, refused to visit her home with his children because she did not keep kosher. Exactly why the new convert to Satmar Hasidism considered “Elijah” a more authentically Jewish name than “Joseph” was, like so much about his new religious enthusiasms, a mystery.
In certain respects—although this was covered up by the American obsession with the “black” in “Black Muslims”—Islam in the United States also expressed socially conservative instincts in the 1960s and 1970s. Young African American women who covered their heads with the hijab and wore long, flowing dresses that concealed their bodies were just as culturally out of step with the sexual revolution of the sixties as young Hasidic women who donned sheitls (wigs) to cover their hair (thought to be unbearably provocative to men) and wore opaque stockings and long skirts to conceal the shape of their legs. Some of these converts to conservative religion in the seventies were motivated by a deep disgust with the drugs and sexual promiscuity that had once pervaded their young lives. (My husband’s cousin Joseph a.k.a. Elijah married a woman who was so ashamed of having had many lovers while she was taking the Pill that she not only stopped using contraception but also dyed her abundant, gorgeous red hair a dull brown, so that, even when she removed her sheitl, her erotic luster would be dimmed.) Many
of the new young right-wing Christian evangelicals shared the same disillusionment as Hasidic Jews and Black Muslims with the sexual and pharmacological experimentation of the counterculture.
The writer Adam Hochschild, in a memoir of his complicated relationship with his father—who at the time disapproved of many of his life choices—captures the spirit of the era nicely. Hochschild notes that his own career and marital choices began to seem far less unconventional to his father as he saw the children of his many friends become “followers of various messiahs, Oriental and otherwise. So you say young Johnny’s at…Cartwright College? And doing…Christian work? I welcomed all these departures from familiar paths. The more divorces, the more gurus, the better! It made my own life’s course look quite reasonable by comparison, and much of Father’s disapproval gradually evaporated. At least I wasn’t in an ashram.”20
It is impossible to determine how many of the religious changes of the sixties—whether they could be described as liberal or conservative, as a departure from or a return to tradition—turned out to be lifelong, life-changing conversions. There are no good studies about how many of the “returned” young Jews stuck with the kosher kitchens and itchy wigs; how many members of the Nation of Islam remained Muslims, much less respectful of Elijah Muhammad; how many who began studying Buddhism or Hinduism in their youth went on to become more than dabblers in the Eastern cultures they originally knew nothing about. We know more about Catholics. Reliable research shows that more than 20 percent of Americans born in the United States who were raised as Roman Catholics no longer consider themselves Catholics.21 Many of these ex-Catholics are children of the sixties, disappointed by the failure of the church to follow through on hopes for reform (particularly in teachings about contraception, divorce, and maintaining an all-male priesthood) engendered by the Second Vatican Council.
Because a propensity for reinvention has always been a part of the American story, the religious experiments and realignments of the sixties made conversion seem more respectable and much more normative than it had been in the past. Eventually, that aura and assumption of respectability extended even to such a controversial figure as Ali. What once seemed like a radical religious and political decision by an anti-white athletic champion now seems inseparable from a time when many Americans were questioning their most cherished values as part of our most cherished traditions exalting freedom of conscience. Muhammad Ali said: No, I am not a Christian. And, no, I am not someone who will fight this war. But he, too, sang America. And America eventually listened to the song.
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*1 Ahmad Jamal also shook my hand, along with the hands of the other audacious fifteen-year-olds from an Okemos, Michigan, high school who had sneaked out of their Chicago hotel at night, during a class trip, to hear jazz. I had called the club and explained that, although we were not old enough to drink alcohol, we understood that we would have to pay the cover charge and that I would pay in advance. (I knew that a nightclub manager would not be thrilled to see a large party of people who weren’t old enough to drink legally and might therefore take up a table for the price of Coca-Cola.) Apparently, the manager told the musicians, because we were given a prize table at the front of the club, and the trio took our special requests. Did these Muslim musicians hate white people? I don’t think so, given the trouble they took to make a special experience even more unforgettable for a bunch of very white teenagers.
*2 The best account of Ali’s complicated relationship with Malcolm X appears in David Remnick’s King of the World. Written in 1998, when Ali was still able to express himself in private interviews, the book traces the evolution of Ali’s views about race and religion. He told Remnick that one of his greatest regrets in life was his break with Malcolm.
*3 One important reason the contract is less binding today is the presence of women sportswriters on every major beat. Female sportswriters who cover Major League baseball, for instance, do not labor under the delusion that, were it not for some fickle twist of fate, they might have made it to the big leagues. Looking at male athletes without the lens of envy, they are less disappointed and angry when the sports “heroes” turn out to be merely human.
*4 One wonders whether the writer would consider it equally strange that the actor Michael J. Fox, also afflicted with Parkinson’s, attends many meetings concerned with the rights of the disabled.
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AMERICAN DREAMING
A FEW YEARS AGO, I was browsing in a Judaica store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when I noticed a greeting card in the shape of a menorah proclaiming, “Congratulations on Your Conversion.” On the inside, the new convert was saluted with a “Mazel Tov.” Despite the ambivalent attitudes that have always characterized the unique American experiment in religious pluralism, a greeting card celebrating someone’s change of faith probably does reflect the current positive stance of most members of the American public toward conversion (as well as the greeting card industry’s determination to profit from every conceivable life milestone). A religious phenomenon that has been the cause of so much bloodshed throughout history has been transformed, in American society, into a cheerful slogan affirming tolerance and the right to choose. Tell an Italian or a Norwegian friend, as I have, about this card, and she assumes that you are making some sort of joke—one that does not translate well. It is not that Europeans disapprove of conversion but that they simply do not share the American penchant for treating religious choices as a smorgasbord of free second (and sometimes third) helpings.
We do not know whether the (probably) Christian relatives of the new convert to Judaism were as pleased as the Jewish side of the family and as willing to offer their support and felicitations. But it can be predicted, with a fair degree of certitude, that the Christian parents are unlikely to disinherit their converted child or cut themselves off from their future grandchildren. There may be a good deal of angst when Christmas and Hanukkah arrive every year, but the families will likely find ways to cope. It is now the American Way. It is even the way for the minority of Americans who are, as I am, committed atheists and secular humanists. I would not be thrilled if a child of mine became a religious believer and raised my grandchildren as believers. But I cannot imagine banishing a child or grandchildren from my life, as Westerners did for centuries and people still do in many cultures and areas of the world, because of religious differences. I, too, sing America—in a secular voice.
One may laugh—as I did—at a greeting card slogan summing up a transformation that, however it begins, involves some of the deepest and most intense human feelings about our relationship to time and eternity. But it is doubtful that anyone who truly believes in her own religion, or who feels a strong connection to the ethnic and social history entwined with that religion, is entirely happy about a close relative’s (especially a child’s) conversion to another faith.
In the 1960s, even though the baby boomers had begun to enter mixed marriages in sharply rising numbers, it was more socially acceptable than it is today to express ambivalence about the conversions that often followed. This was true not only of conversions to unpopular religions like the Nation of Islam or the Jehovah’s Witnesses but of conversions to faiths that enjoyed wide social acceptance. Many who, in theory, think that one religion is as good as another believe deep down that their own religion—or what it signifies culturally—is better than others. In 1961, Philip Roth remarked: