On Religious Fascination
...when you're not religious
I’ve always been interested in religion.
But I didn’t think of it that way. I found that I just happened to make friends through the course of my life for whom religion was an enormous or at least a sizable part of their lives, from—
—M, who keeps kosher and takes care to observe Shabbat and the High Holy Days to
—H, who fled a tiny Lutheran sect for whom movies TV birth control nail polish music with a beat etc. is forbidden, & everyone in the Church has their name printed in a small paper phone book that I have seen with my own eyes to
—A, a Mormon living in Salt Lake City who scrapbooks with the Project Life system and got me to also try the Project Life system (designed by Becky Higgins of the LDS church) and worried about raising her teenage girls with smartphones to
—L, the daughter of an evangelical megachurch pastor who was one of my very best friends, but fell from grace during a terrible scandal that broke my heart and eventually caused her father to leave the megachurch that he knew so well and caused L to lose her literary agent, who could not bear the implications of the scandal to
—C, my husband, who was an observant Catholic when I met him; I spent a year deeply searching myself and the Catholic faith in order to decide whether or not to convert to Catholicism so that we could have a Catholic wedding ceremony.
SO.
There are some other people I have loved for whom religion was a Big Part of their lives, but the above are the most significant examples that I can think of. When I was friends with those people (one of them, M, is my BFF, but the others are no longer in my life) I sometimes felt like I was living in the bell jar of their religion with them. I asked L for things to read because even though L was an evangelical Christian, she did not proselytize to me; simply being around her made me curious about her religion and her faith. I asked A to tell me about Mormonism and what the Mormon faith meant for her life and the life of her family. I spent Thanksgiving with H’s family and got to know the bubble of the sect that she had left; because she was still close to her family, she was not completely free of the church. I sat in her parents’ living room after dinner and listened to her many siblings sing hymns (all eight of them had perfect pitch, a phenomenon that was studied by scientists from UC Berkeley).
These days, I obsessively listen to a podcast hosted by an extremely devout evangelical Christian. I’ve also listened to her two audiobooks, both about the importance of accepting Jesus as Lord and inviting the spirit of God into your life. I’ve listened to her episode about purity and the importance of purity before marriage so many times, I can’t even tell you. I don’t believe in the tenets of purity culture, in case that’s something that I even need to say; I’m simply fascinated by her beliefs. Nor am I gawking, per se. I’m not scoffing while I listen, pointing an invisible finger. “Jesus changed my life, guys,” she says, and I 10000% believe her.
I get to know the lingo: “I want to have someone to do life with”; “I have this on my heart”; “Can I pray over you.”
I have so many friends who are exvangelicals, including the author of Heretic,
, and the author of God Spare the Girls, (also known as the host of the podcast Normal Gossip). I know how toxic and awful the evangelical Christian church is. Still, I listen because I’m interested. I listen because… I don’t know if I have the answer, exactly.I think it might be because I feel jealous of people who have faith.
My grandmother on my father’s side had a television miniseries made about her (the above image is one of the posters for the series) because she went from being a gambling addict to being a well-known Buddhist figure in Taiwan. I joke that I’m technically a Buddhist because when I was a child, she insisted on having our family climb a mountain atop which stood a temple, in which we sat for hours and chanted and recited the vows to become Buddhists. We even got certificates! But I’m not a Buddhist at all—I eat meat. I rarely meditate.
Yet I saw all the things that my grandmother’s faith gave her. It gave her life’s arrow a way to aim. It gifted her with an absolute lack of fear of death because she believed that she’d lived her life so well that she would have a peaceful passing on, and something amazing would happen to her after it. I don’t know what that thing was, but she was so ready to die for the many years that she lingered in bed after her stroke. She was not afraid.
Nor was my grandmother-in-law, a Catholic who had a room dedicated to Pope John Paul II, the person in the family to ask for prayers when they were needed. She was ready to leave this earth, and she was not afraid.
Maybe I’m interested in religion because it seems to give people a road map for their lives when I feel comparatively unmoored and unconvicted (see? I have been listening to the evangelicals). I do not know what I am doing. I am not spending my days meditating on Scriptures that tell you exactly how to live your life because they are exactly God’s Word.
I know that many of my friends who left the church spent the rest of their lives grieving in one way or another. One of the most remarkable characteristics of H’s former church is that they believe that any member of the church can forgive the sins of any other member of the church. What happens when you leave the church and lose the formal way to receive whole and holy forgiveness? What does it mean to do wrong and sit with it alone?
I am not a religious person. I am often adrift and in the gray of life. I seek and wander.
Amen.
If you’re anything like me, you need a plan to get where you’re going.
Without one, you’ll get lost.
Simple as that.
In the literary world, it's easy to become convinced that you have to have an MFA* or that you need to have been born a genius to succeed. On the other hand, it can be so hard to figure out the right direction to take that you might even give up entirely.
Yeah … nah.
Hard pass.
It’s easy to be distracted by “shiny objects,” or feel downright uncertain of the right next step. (This is how many of our students started out: by buying assorted workshops willy-nilly, without a holistic path to follow to their writing goals.)
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❤️ Failure to Launch —
writes transparently about their least successful launch ever (or at least in a long time). I’ve spoken to so many small business owners who have seen their numbers drop and drop over this last year and the year before. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one and that we’re all struggling. (Even with their “failure,” Cody still had a much more successful launch than I’ve had these days.)❤️ Venezuelan Dislocations in 2024 — I know that so many horrible things are happening all over the world; I hope you take a moment to read this piece by Alex about what’s been happening in Venezuela post-(stolen) election: “I bellow, I gasp, I shake: I sob like I am the child I was when this whole nightmare started. The flash of the last 25 years blinds me: all the death, the destruction, the disenfranchisement, the things we missed, the futures that were taken from all of us.” (Written by
)❤️ Artist Uses Calligraphy Brushes to Create Breathtaking Watercolor Paintings of Birds — I paint birds. Karl Marten is remarkable at it. I love his sweeping brush strokes combined with his tiny, detailed brushwork.
❤️ Why I Kept My Kinks A Secret — Reese is one of my oldest and closest friends, and I was so proud of her for publishing this essay in TIME about kinks, sexuality, stigma, and building the courage to be open about who you are. Her new book, Exhibit, is one of my favorite books of all time.
❤️ Taiwan Stories: The New Cinema of the 1980s — I love Taiwan, the land of my family and of my ancestors, and I’m trying to watch more of its cultural creations.
As an Ex-evangelical, l think l get what you're saying in this post -- l struggled mightily after l left the church (l was born and raised in it and didn't leave until my divorce at age 34). There's something comforting about black and white thinking that tells you what to do, that makes it clear that "i'm right and others are wrong." Although my Evangelical marriage made me ill and i had to leave, really as a way to save my life, my life after that wasn't easy -- i found it complex and difficult to make decisions on my own, to individuate, start over and attempt to find my own moral compass, to figure things out for myself. l wrote a character into a novel once who looks back on what seems to her, the clarity and simplicity, the "known-ness" of her old friends' lives who HADN'T left the church, and mourns for that in a way.
l will say that eventually, in the last few years (I'm now in my early 60's), l have found a middle path -- a belief in spirituality that is in no way connected to organized religion, that has brought me great joy.
l personally think organized religion is trying to touch on a true thing -- that humans are spiritual beings -- but unfortunately, religion ties that up with oppression and fear and judgment in a way that (again, in my opinion) brings great harm. Spirituality, the touching of the divine within myself and others that has become readily available to me in recent years, is purely about love and hope.
I've been going to the same white-majority conservative-leaning church for most of my existence, and I've resented it since I was in middle school, shortly after I figured out that I was queer. I've almost always felt ostracized from the community that I see others--both those my age and older--have found in that church. But my ex-religion (if it can be considered that) still affects me in ways I probably don't understand. I'm still very cynical about Christianity, but that phrase about religion aiming a life's arrow--that resonated. I feel jealous of people who hadn't had religion forced upon them, though at the same time, I appropriate religious imagery into my writing--for no better reason than that I feel I might as well get something out of 18 years of wasted Sundays. In the US, it kinda feels like being a Christian makes you an "insider" in a lot of things: literature, especially classic western literature, being just one example. I've always taken my religious background for granted; I've always taken my "insider" status for granted, even if I've always felt like an outsider on the inside. This is a long rambling way to say: even as someone who could be considered an exvangelical, I get it.