When Faith Left

A Look Back .

We were new, both as a family and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the beating heart of the Bible Belt, and the question was, not what faith would we profess, but what church would we “go to?”

“There’s the big church on the hill,” my new father said.

“Is it Baptist? Mother wondered. “No, Methodist. Let’s try it and see if we like it.”

And that’s how I came to belong through childhood and adolescence to the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, an art deco edifice crowned by a towering phallus, easily the most prominent in town (See www.bostonavenue.org) .

It wasn’t my choice. I was not quite five, newly enrolled in kindergarten, and was seldom included in choices. And, no, I am not depending on perfect recall from that age for those quotes. My mother recounted the story consistently and often and I have no reason to doubt her version.

I also learned later that we went as a family, introducing ourselves as a mom and dad married the requisite number of years to have produced a legitimate five-year-old, and transferred to Tulsa from the Chicago office of the CIT, a financial corporation.

In truth, my mother was newly divorced and remarried. My father had left her scant months after I was born. She waited for him to return until my step-father’s proposal of marriage and a new life forced her to choose. Their secret held for over 50 years until the end of their lives,, but that’s another story.

Except for a couple of years when Dad played golf both Saturday and Sunday mornings – to Mother’s frequent and vocal disapproval – we attended church faithfully. Probably I liked being dumped into that den of vociferous cubs of my age called Sunday school.

Gradually my parents dropped church for Sunday school, notably the Married Folks' Class, taught by a bible thumping “teacher,” deemed much more inspiring than Dr. Watts, the church’s minister. There was general relief when Dr. Watts made bishop and left. I attended Sunday school also, moving up through the classes with my age group.

The church became a large part of our social life. They attended the suppers, the recitals, seasonal ceremonies, even the occasional lecture or book reading, often dragging me along.

Boston Avenue Methodists enjoyed the status of belonging to a large, respectable congregation, while tacitly acknowledging the social superiority of the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians. We could in turn look down benevolently on the Lutherans (and they on us) and most other main stream Protestant denominations, but finding the Baptists a tad too jubilant for our taste.

We wondered with disdain about the Holy Rollers, Christian Scientists, Adventists, Mormons and the like, while indulging in the casual overt prejudices of the day concerning Catholics and Jews. Any atheists or agnostics around were tucked safely in the closet. We were uneasy about Unitarians and Quakers, and the world’s non-Christian organized religions were considered Greek mythologists in contemporary dress and in dire need of enlightenment.

I was not one of the “we” cited above. Those were adult concerns. I went each Sunday, made friends, struggled with my inability to sing, especially around Christmas time, and over the years of childhood and adolescence absorbed elements of the old, old story without thinking much about it. It was something you were made to do like school and naps until it became habit.

Some friends (Bob, Mary Ella, Roger, Dolores, Betty Sue, Bill, Dorothy, Jimmy and Odean) were part of the other trinity -- church, school and neighborhood – through high school and beyond, and are alive in memory still. I sang “Oh What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” dutifully, not well and without conviction. I knew who my friends were.

I was in my early adolescence when the first heretical thought popped to mind. Adults, I suddenly realized, “Really believe this stuff!” The question, “Do I believe?” was sensed more than said, but as Yogi Bera famously knew, when the road forks you must choose. Not being much of a Pilgrim I eased on down the road marked Doubt.

My parents were not overtly religious at first. We didn’t often say grace at meals while I was growing up at home. They began that custom sometime after I moved out.. Gradually their convictions deepened into a conscious emotional commitment; conscious but not especially reasoned, an unquestioned comfort to their deaths.

Meanwhile, I graduated high school and for the first time left home to college. Oklahoma A and M College (Now Oklahoma State University) is a land grant school. It is not Harvard, Stanford or Berkeley. Nor is it Brown, Oberlin or Reed.

But for a young lad from pious Tulsa it was a den of subversion. A course in American history, while biased enough (this was 1948 after all), was vastly more nuanced than the patriotic pablum of high school. A course in World History dealt objectively and comparatively with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other belief systems. Clearly they couldn’t all be exactly right. Perhaps none were. If you thought about it, picking the one best faith was not easy.

Then I simultaneously took a course in the Humanities and, through the good offices of a girl friend, bonded with the campus collection of free thinkers, many of them active Unitarians. We were a scruffy bunch, disdainful of the main campus swirl, drawn to art and literature, stage and screen.

The core of the group we called “The Bohemian Coop.” Three women sharing a home and three men also sharing quarters, pooled our meager funds and ran a common kitchen and social club where the women lived. Others drifted in and out of the swirl.

It was during this two year association that I first began to explore the boundaries of a life of the mind. I had always been an avid reader, but my reading diet had been heavy on less than profound fiction and on “inspirational” articles from the Reader’s Digest.. Overtly philosophical conversations were new and eye opening. Books were cited and recommended (I never did get through Ulysses, though). Those days still reverberate (Joyce remains impenetrable).

Perhaps the most subversive book I devoured during this era was Philip Wylie’s 1942 popular polemic, “Generation of Vipers.” Largely forgotten, it is only occasionally remembered today for a gratuitous assault on “Mom.”. But it deftly and joyously slaughtered whole herds of sacred cows. Though clearly dated and thoroughly opinionated, it is still a useful read by those who are up for social criticism leveled at the way the Greatest Generation fumbled its way to war.

My first conversion was from Republican to Democrat. Franklin Roosevelt, I learned, was a great president in depression and war and not at all a traitor to his class. About this time I began a life long interest in the dismal dogmas of economics. A good dose of John Maynard Keynes and I was cured of free market dogmatic orthodoxy for life. I survived a short intense flirtation with Ayn Rand and the gold standard. Current events have only solidified my interest in economics and my disdain for its contemporary reigning theories.

Gradually I began to think of myself as a Unitarian. As the name implies, the Unitarian God is a unity that requires neither devine Son nor Holy Ghost. Jesus, a truly great human being, is free to teach homely truths about living and letting live rather than wandering around feeding the multitudes from meager stores, curing the ill and maimed, raising the dead, turning water into wine (if only!), walking on the remaining water, rolling away boulders, raising himself from the dead to walk again among the chosen and by all these empty dramatics diverting human attention from the mundane grubby stuff of living that needs doing before we die.

My Unitarian phase lasted through the rest of college, the two years of my required army duty and a while after. I never formally joined a congregation, nor was I too faithful in attendance. The only occasion on which I officially declared my affiliation was prompted by a bored army clerk.

“Religion?” she inquired while filling in a basic form for my personnel file. “Unitarian,” I replied after briefly hesitating and wondering what my parents would think. She looked at me doubtfully and then searched over her shoulder for her supervisor, “Unitarian?” The supervisor nodded and she typed, “Prot.” in the appropriate box. So much for nuance.

Eileen, one of the bohemian co-opers, had parleyed her college Unitarian youth activities into the directorship of Liberal Religious Youth, or LRY, as adolescents of the newly formed Unitarian/Universalist society chose to call themselves. She enlisted me as editor of their quarterly newsletter while I was stationed at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, practicing the waning traditional ways of the field artillery. (The full story of that and other episodes in my brief, episodic army and journalism careers may each get its own essay.)

Three quarterly editions later the army shipped me by train and troop transport to England for the rest of my two year obligation. On the way I slipped the surly bonds of soldering long enough to visit Eileen at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, the venerable home of Unitarians.

When I left for duty in England for not quite a year, I left the Unitarians as well, although I didn’t know it at the time. I am still closer to their ways than to any other named sect, both drawn to and discomfited by their lack of doctrine.

For there is comfort in settled belief. We all seek answers to a trinity of questions: Where did it all come from? How should we live? Why must we die and what then? As the species dispersed over the planet from our African locus, answers evolved. They were varied in form but strikingly uniform in their essentials. There was a creation moment for the world and its life followed by a fall from grace and a loss of innocence; the divinely conferred lordship of humans over all other life and other riches of the earth; a pantheon of gods on high where rewards awaited the worshiping, pleading faithful at death; a place of eternal punishment for all others; a cosmic struggle between good and evil with good ultimately triumphant.

A Look Ahead . . .

These answers still hang in the air, profound and comforting as ever for many, but fading by the steady light of science  for those who aspire to think scientifically. At least since Copernicus science has absent mindedly embarrassed religion time and again by kicking one stone after another from doctrinal edifices, revealing their essentially mythical basis.

The heavenly spheres faded. as the universe’s cosmology gradually came into focus through the magnified eyes of Galileo and his modern successors. Newton’s elegant equations, Darwin’s magisterial insights; Watson's and Crick's reinforcing thought spiral; Einstein’s and Bohr’s dueling deductions; Mendeelev’s organizing principle; Popper’s philosophy of scientific methodology; Wegener’s insight; Kuhn’s critique; Lovelock’s inspiring synthesis are justly celebrated peaks along the road called Doubt. Which I still endeavor to travel.

But what, you might properly wonder, of spirituality, moral principles and the march of civilization.  I find the methods of science will be sufficient to the tasks of comprehending and guiding all of these just as well as it has led us to an unprecedented understanding of the material world and its origins. 

Feelings of spirituality are stirred by the awe and fear of natural forces from the sudden movements of the earth's crust to the abrupt violence of changing weather, to the wonder inspired by land forms, water courses, rainbows, sun and moon phases, wandering stars, lightening and fire, to the dangers of life competing with other.life.  Scientific understanding dispels the fear and scientific instruments enhance our awe by expanding our senses.

Moral principles attributed to the gods congeal into empty ritual and pious rules of etiquette.  The teachings of great religious leaders, such as Jesus and Buddha, once shorn of their mythic trappings, are better guides, but only that.  Such classics as "love one another" and the Golden Rule, are fearfully hard to apply to the tumult and minutia of daily life.  Our progress is anything but fast enough, but such progress as there is owed to the dispatching of magical, stereotypical and dogmatic ways of thought. 

Civilized living, even in venues of splendor  and ease, has too often removed us from the hardships of  our primitive beginnings by the exploitation of others.  Today we can glimpse, beyond mere dreams, the way a simple but fantastically rich life can be had by all without ceaseless deadening  toil in harmony with each other and other life.  We can even sense the beginnings of a future in which evolution moves at our pace and to our purposes.  We have billions of years before cosmic forces engulf our solar system.  Time to escape before we as a species die when the sun expands to vaporize the earth.

Death.  The great fear exploited by every tyrant, whether armed with sword or sceptre.  Why must I die? How can I possibly cease to exist?  The objective case for death is grounded in the workings of evolution.  One reasoned explanation is that the individual must die so the species may continue to evolve.  In turn species must die to make room for successor species.  It is true that only the most primitive forms of single cell life, which reproduce by cell division, are arguably immortal.  Any life which reproduces by sex can only evade by evolution those causes of death which occur before the end of its reproductive life.  Thus evolution might in due time rid our species of AIDS (or AIDS will rid the world of our species) but it will never lay a glove on Alzheimer's.

There is only one escape from this trap.  Evolution itself must evolve.  More precisely we must take charge of the evolution of evolution.  Unconsciously we began to do this eons ago with the interbreeding of domesticated plants and animals.  Lately we have unraveled the code of life itself and now explore its intricate control of life's molecular building blocks.  This is basic training for manipulating the genetic machinery to our benefit in ways Darwinian evolution cannot.

We will cure Alzheimer's and other patterns of life's decay, extending life's quality in satisfying ways and less probably extending life's duration by decades more. But we will not do so by the worshipful study of ancient texts however profound and inspiring their contents.  By the methods of science we have found life thriving on earth wherever we have looked, from Arctic cores to tropical swamps, from stratospheric clouds to the ocean's  darkest depths, from boiling springs to hidden Antarctica seas.

But this was life at its most primitive, single celled mostly.  What of living symbioses as intricate as ourselves?  Can we so engineer humans for living comfortably amid such extremes.  We must if we are to explore and colonize the universe.  The alternatives are extinction or seeding; i.e. sowing single celled life among the planets and satellites of this solar system and further afield to the exo-plants now being discovered in abundance circling other suns.

But we will not do these things without casting aside all the ancient faiths as future guides.  They are indelibly part of our history, neither to be ridiculed nor forgotten, but remembered for what they were: steps along a long and torturous way.