HAPPY EASTER, MRS. HIRSCH

I live just outside of Detroit. This is a town where business telephone conversations with strangers and routine retail transactions often end with the sign-off, “Have a blessed day.” Having moved here from Chicago, I have often found the environment, particularly the religiosity, to be oppressive and rather arcane. However, I have found an ironic comfort in the fact that this atmosphere is reflective of the social conservative air of the Bush administration. However, the other day while watching CNN, I was reminded that “only” 50% of Americans regularly attend church. We can question this statistic (what does the word “regular” mean? what about those whose faiths that are more home-based or focused on communal gatherings, like Baha’i? did this “survey” include Muslims who attend mosques and Jews who attend synagogues?), its accuracy (were the respondents’ independently verified?), and its relevance (whether regular attendance is a true reflection of one’s faith). But for the purposes of this rant, let’s take this at face value and in doing so, ask the question, “What about the other 50%?”

I decided to do some Internet research on the topic but was quickly stopped dead in my typing by a 1998 article from C. Kirk Hadaway and P.L. Marler that was originally published in the Christian Century (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=237). Their primary conclusion was a question of how respondents formulated the Gallop poll question in their own minds. They found that respondents defined themselves as regular attendees by combining occasional attendance, along with turnout for major holidays, and volunteer efforts. Okay. I get it. Folks figure they SHOULD be going to church, so they do some emotional gymnastics for the pollster and make themselves look good where the truth is that most of us are really a bunch of slackers (these researchers, who used more objective resources to find more accurate statistics, found the attendance figures to be much lower and closer to the attendance rates in Europe). Yet, as I read on in this piece and started looking at other research, I found that my real question was not being answered.

Let’s stick with the CNN number of 50%, just for yukes. I found myself asking lots of questions about this mysterious 50% who at least have the balls to honestly state that they don’t regularly attend. Do they believe in a “supreme being” but not in the God outlined in most faiths? Are they agnostics or atheists? Are the spiritually lazy, another reflection of our national failure as parents to teach our children? Or, are they like my partner, a disaffected/lapsed Catholic, angry with a faith/a god who makes no sense and embittered that their youth was wasted on a lot of spoon-fed hooey with a touch of emotional/physical abuse? I think the answer is lot more insidious and troubling than that, particularly in that this is the question most commonly ignored by the evangelical right (of all religions ilk) vying for control of our country’s social life.

The evangelicals take an arrogant and, I would argue, dangerous stance toward “nonbelievers” as either folks to aggressively recruit or to harshly ostracize as dammed. The nonbeliever is left feeling defensive and guarded, either needing to justify the self-segregation to protect what is viewed as an assault on their person liberty OR they lie to protect their superegos. Believers fair no better, particularly within interfaith families, where one attends church, mosque, etc. and the other thinks the whole thing is a joke. The believer paints her/himself into a corner of constant justification for what is seen within their faith community as a routine action (whether it is communion or bat mitzvah) by either diluting or heightening a moment just to get the other to care like they do. It’s kind of like the wife who starts a fight with her emotionally distant husband just to hear “Yes, I love you after all”.

Why is this annoying me so? It started last Monday when I had to ply my nonreligious adult stepson and his girlfriend to enjoy Passover dinner by employing six bottles of wine into the Seder. It ended this Easter when I became irritated that a store I needed something from was closed for the Christian holiday and while at the cashier’s station of another, someone asked me if Passover was the “Jewish Easter” (I became more irritated when I later realized that my answer was slightly inaccurate, but that is for another rant). I found myself hurt by loved ones’ lack of interest in something that is important to me (psychologist’s translation: “Do you love all of me or are you just tolerating my existence?”) and frustrated by egocentric ignorance (teacher’s translation: “Didn’t you pay attention during your comparative religion class or did you opt out of that course for a more important one, like [fill in the blank]?”)

Let’s go back to the Hadaway and Marler article because there is something more important here than just my 15 minutes of whining. The authors noted something that is illuminating:
“A middle-aged woman we interviewed in Connecticut—let’s call her Carol—is typical of many people who continue to see themselves as "regular" churchgoers despite increasingly irregular attendance. She was raised in the 1950s and 1960s by parents who were United Church of Christ members and active churchgoers. Carol went to church or church-related youth events almost weekly through her teens but dropped out during college and the early years of marriage, childbearing and raising children. In their early 30s Carol and her husband returned "for the sake of the children" to a Presbyterian church (a compromise between his Episcopal background and her own Congregational one).
Before long, however, Carol’s kids lost interest in church school and the youth group to which few of their best friends belonged. Neither she nor her husband was inclined to fight their children’s (or their own) competing interests. Carol, however, retains a lingering commitment to the church and likes to see herself as a "regular" member. She continues to go when she can, and she has managed to stay connected by donating her silk-screening services for youth retreats and other church events. Now the family attends church together only at Christmas or Easter or for other special services, and even then they may opt for the local Methodist or Episcopal church, depending on service times, the preacher, the music or which family members are going.
Carol and her family don’t know the current minister or many active church members very well. There is less and less pressure to attend. Still, the church seems welcoming and familiar whenever they do go. And if a pollster calls? Well, depending on the time, circumstances or the question, Carol will either say she’s Congregationalist or Presbyterian. And if asked about her church attendance? Considering her volunteer work, her own solo attendance and participation with family members for special observances, she may easily reason that she’s pretty active. She may even, if pushed, say she went "last Sunday." After all, she went the week before and made quite an effort to do so—and there was that memorial service at mid-week at the Episcopal church, and she was expecting her daughter to visit this weekend and certainly they would try to go together...”

Maybe that other 50% are just more honest than “Carol”. Maybe the attendance isn’t the issue but connectedness is and this society provides other ways for people to feel connected to one another. The evangelical would like all of us to be connected through them and their house~most likely, my partner would say, so they can better control that connection. Yet, the distance between those who do regularly attend and those who don’t is leading to alienation amongst the factions. The gap is widening to the point where we don’t share the same language or accepted level/type of defined “common knowledge”. The evidence for this problem is highlighted in the emotional reactions accompanying genuine attempts to bridge these gaps, whether found in an invitation to a Passover dinner or honest attempt to eliminate personal ignorance. The true “cultural divide” is not, as the media would have you believe, between liberal nonbelievers and conservative believers. Many conservatives don’t attend a church regularly and many liberals are very active in theirs. The divide is between those who have found comfort n a place of worship and those who have not. Ah yes, yet another division added to a long list of bridges within the U.S. We so readily find reasons to break apart; it is a wonder that the second Civil War hasn’t started already. We are big fish flapping around in the mud puddles of our own importance, failing to learn, let alone care or consider the bodies of water around us because we fear that to do so would somehow diminish who we are.

I remember several years back hearing about a study of “religious people” across the major world religions. If my memory serves me, the researchers found that uniformly the “truly faithful”, no matter their religion of origin, share an enormous amount of tolerance for others. Maybe Aretha taught us to spell the wrong word.