It was 1970, I was 16, and it was the year of the Baptist
Coup.
I was active in church where, like many young people, I was
test-driving spirituality. My family attended the First
Presbyterian Church in Ventura. My mother was in the choir, and the
church itself had a beautiful fresco behind the altar.
It was 1970, I was 16, and it was the year of the Baptist Coup.
I was active in church where, like many young people, I was test-driving spirituality. My family attended the First Presbyterian Church in Ventura. My mother was in the choir, and the church itself had a beautiful fresco behind the altar.
Our pastor, the Rev. Smith, was a Ph.D. who delivered thoughtful, erudite sermons laced with the occasional joke, like the one about Jesus the cross-eyed bear. But the person who really got me involved was a “youth minister,” whose name escapes me, who invited us to his home, listened to us, and talked about the intersection of morality and politics.
In those days, when young men talked about war, they were talking about their own lives, not an abstract conflict in a far-off desert. To us, it was a personal matter of life and death.
It was the height of the Vietnam War, and a lot of kids my age were asking soul-searching questions while trying to plan for a future overshadowed by the uncertainty of a draft lottery that threatened to send many of us to the jungle instead of college. Most of us didn’t have access to Dick Cheney’s deferments or George Bush’s connections.
That year my youth minister asked if I would become a Deacon, a position normally reserved for older members. The job entailed ministering to the ill and needy. It was an honor to be asked, and I accepted, but I was really just a token youth and lousy at it. With my long hair and anti-war politics, I made people who most needed the services of a Deacon uncomfortable – although my mother more than once suggested putting me on a donkey and riding me down the aisle on Palm Sunday.
At the end of my one-year term I was not invited back.
But by then things had begun to change. Rev. Smith, that brilliant, disciplined, rational man, not unlike Tom Skerritt’s Presbyterian minister in “A River Runs Through It,” left Ventura to join a Synod, one of the church’s governing bodies.
Conservatives on the Board of Elders replaced him with a former Baptist. Sermons became – well, sermons, emotional and dark, full of threats of damnation. Gone were the deeply engaging talks about Jesus, the compelling man whose life we were encouraged to emulate. Youth ministering disappeared. Worried about dying in Vietnam? What was important was to get right with the Lord, whatever that meant, not to question the government.
My interest in organized religion ended when patriotism trumped morality.
Many who today are secularists started out in similar religious traditions, and maintain an interest in spirituality that extends beyond trendy experimentation with the mystical flavor of the month. What they tend to have in common is the belief that leading a moral life and conducting oneself in an ethical manner have nothing to do with religious affiliation. The parade of philandering “family values” politicians made that abundantly clear.
Yet when we talk about religious voters, we tend to mean the religious right, an increasingly paranoid bloc convinced there is some kind of “war on Christians” underway. They provide a convenient shorthand for pollsters and pundits, for whom the only things that matters, in the end, are numbers.
But this doesn’t really do justice to the millions, perhaps a majority, who think of themselves as people of conscience, not of religion, and who vote that way. And that means that when we’re trying to gauge the moral climate in America, we’re missing something important if we only focus on the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council.
Recently those two groups, perhaps fearing the last gasp of the Republican majority, starting calling in their chits, mounting a major lobbying push for restrictive new abortion and marriage legislation. But Americans on the whole are more tolerant than the leaders of the religious right would have us believe. Letting that evangelical tail continue to wag the congressional dog may only end up offending the growing majority fed up with politics for broader moral reasons, hastening the GOP’s downfall.
In a week that will see the birthdays of Buddha (Apr. 8) and the prophet Muhammad (11); Palm Sunday (9); Passover (12); Good Friday (14) and Easter (16), it is worth calling attention to the diversity of religious belief in America, not the narrowness of a noisy, demanding minority.
