I like to say I became a Jew the moment I heard the cantor chant the prayer for the dead at Harvey Milk's memorial service at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. I had felt an affinity for Ashkenazi Jews for years, loved the self-deprecating humor, loved latkes, got a kick out of throwing Yiddish expressions into my conversations. What's the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazal? A schlemiel goes through life spilling his soup; a schlimazal is the guy he spills it on.
When the cantor came out onto the stage and translated what I saw as thousands of years of grief and mourning into exquisite sound, though, I took on a connection with Judaism, and not just Yiddishkeit - Jewishness - that went into my bones.
Over the years I have struggled mightily with organized religion. I was baptized in a Baptist church, raised to think of myself as a Congregationalist surrounded by mostly Catholic friends, before becoming a Lutheran during my sophomore year at college after getting special dispensation from the Episcopal bishop of Vermont to take communion in the local Episcopal Church. While still in high school the local Methodist Church lost its organist and I got to replace her for a year. I was up to my neck in religious influences.
The break came when I went to Munich in my junior year of college. I lived in a Lutheran Church dormitory and attended St. Mark's Church, about a 10-12 minute walk away, where the Munich Bach Choir brought home the connection between Lutheranism and Bach. That was the good part of being Lutheran in Munich. The bad part was being shunned by my dorm mates when I made the mistake of telling them I loved drinking beer at the Hofbräuhaus on Saturday nights. I was not prepared for the differences between the cigar-smoking, life-loving, dancing, singing, beer-drinking Germans I grew up with in Connecticut and the cold puritanical Lutherans I was rubbing elbows with now in the catholic city of Munich. I concluded, rightly or wrongly, that it was their sense of being a religious minority that made them circle the wagons around their religious identity, and it wasn't long before the radically different approach to life these two groups of Lutherans, one American, one German, created a cognitive dissonance in me that ultimately led to my leaving the church altogether.
It would take another couple of years for me to realize that I was gay and that even if I had not loosened the once strong ties I once felt to the church, the church was not going to allow me to be both gay and Christian. By this time I was working pretty much full-time on my gay identity and I realized that if I had to choose between them, it would be no contest. I had not chosen my gay identity; it had chosen me. And with almost every new gay friendship I made, or even with acquaintances I engaged in conversation with, came a new tale of persecution or shunning, a new horror commonly centered on one church or another. Religion, remember, played a much bigger part in our lives back then. Over a relatively short period of time, my reaction moved from alienation and shame through annoyance and disillusionment to rage and the desire to burn anything that looked like a church to the ground.
I became a fierce church basher. I joined organizations like the Freedom from Religion Foundation and would come, in more recent times, to feel a close affinity with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other outspoken advocates of atheism or agnosticism. I watched with great satisfaction how catholics began leaving the pews after the priest sexual abuse scandal spread around the world. I got into an interesting discussion once with a prominent rabbi and relished being able to tell him that my favorite Jewish theologian was Spinoza. And another with a Roman Catholic bishop up north somewhere, whom I enjoyed explaining that my problem with priestly child abuse was not the occasional messed-up cleric, but with the Church itself for working so hard to further enable their abuses by juggling them around to other parishes and trying to sweep the whole business under the rug. I rarely missed an opportunity to tell representatives of churches I came across how much I loathed their very existence.
I don't know when it began, but at some point my urge to strike out tapered off. I'm pretty sure the gradual acceptance of LGBT people into American society had a lot to do with it. By 2013, when I was able to marry my life-partner of many years, in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall, next to the bust of Harvey Milk, officiated over by the daughter of the woman who swore Harvey Milk in when he first became a San Francisco supervisor, I no longer felt the need to jump at every opportunity to identify myself as gay. Being gay was no longer my primary identity. These days I see myself as a longtime San Francisco Bay Area resident, a retired university professor with New England and Nova Scotian roots, an old man married to a Japanese guy much younger than myself, and a German-American lover of chocolate and macadamia nuts who is blessed with a wonderful circle of friends, many of whom I consider chosen family and most of whom have no religious affiliation. The church, once so central in my life in my first couple of decades, now crosses my consciousness only rarely, and no longer invokes the slightest interest on a personal level. The only reason for paying it any mind at all is the fact that these days one cannot escape the insidious influence on us all of militant white supremacist Christian nationalism. Historian John Fea has described the leaders of this movement as "Court Evangelicals." Love that term and its association with Court Jesters.
In addition to the tapering off of the power of homophobia over American culture, which I still attribute largely to authoritarian religion collectives such as traditional cleric-centered Roman Catholicism, Mormonism and fundamentalist Evangelicalism, there is a second source for what is the reshuffling of the meaning of religion in my life: my background in linguistics and anthropology. For many years I taught seminars, both graduate and undergraduate, in the meaning of culture. The way I went about it was to explore with my students the many areas that culture intersected with. There was culture and civilization, culture and society, culture and power, culture and morality, and - the area that interested me most - culture and religion. I say "explore" rather than teach, because many years ago I got a chance to have lunch with a well-known professor of linguistics. I noted that she had lined up two courses for the coming semester that sounded terribly interesting to me and I must have sounded like a pitiful sycophant when I told her I wished I could sit in on the sessions. And, by the way, I asked her, how did she ever find the time to acquire the knowledge she obviously would need to be able to teach this course?
"Oh, I never teach anything I know," she said. "If I did, I'd get bored with the gap between me and my students and my boredom would infect my work with them. I only deal with things I'm interested in learning myself."
That conversation was a turning point in my career. I still had to teach basic level courses in reading and writing, but when it came to my seminars, I chose things I wanted to understand better myself. That decision paid great rewards, and over the years I came to a much better understanding of religion, including especially the field of ethics. Over time I began to pull apart the aspect of religion that we can call spirituality, and see it as distinct from doctrinal belief. I became aware of how my Protestant upbringing led me to the conviction that religion was all about sincerity and developing a personal relationship with God. And that meant that prayer was only prayer if it was a sincere attempt to communicate personal feelings with god. And that explained why I used to hear criticism of the catholics as people who simply went through the motions with their ritualistic pre-packaged prayers, their trips around the rosary, where quantity often outweighed quality - or so it was explained to me in my Protestant Sunday School.
I began to look for the many ways there are of being religious. I looked for shorthand ways of putting my finger on the essence of one group or another. I came to see Christianity as the effort to spread love and compassion, the primary goal of Islam to spread an attitude of humility and submission, the essence of Judaism centering on law and justice. I noted that Evangelicals tended to talk with Jesus as if he were their buddy and how they loved to use the word "just," as in "We just want to thank you, Jesus, for coming to our house today to be with us..." And that Catholics could get grisly with their "bleeding heart" and references to suffering and pain. And that Jews (the ones I knew, at least) never seemed to be doing anything with much reverence. Rather, they struck me as carrying on a meta analysis of what they were doing at any given point in time. "This is where we light the candles, turn our heads to the left, say this prayer..." In fairness, that could be because they were so aware of the presence of outsiders who needed such explanations. But outsiders often were backsliding Jews.
The more I learned of the virtually infinite variety of ways to identify with one religion or another, the more my attention became focused on the role of culture in religious practice. Swearing allegiance to the Bishop of Rome makes you Catholic. Refusing blood transfusions makes you a Jehovah's Witness. Praying with your shoes off makes you a Muslim. Excuse the oversimplification; you get my meaning. With some it's belief that counts; with others, it's behavior.
I said there were two things that were important in changing my consciousness of religion, the slow but sure loss of power that homophobes once held in the world I lived in and the gradual awareness of the role that culture played - culture being attitudes, values and beliefs - in what it meant to be religious and how to be that way. There is a third. And that one came to me as I improved, over time, my ability to approach linguistics descriptively rather than prescriptively, as I had as a teacher. And life as an anthropologist, as a neutral observer and not as a religiously indoctrinated Protestant Christian with an urge to carry my missionary message to the world. That urge lasted way beyond my days as a Christian. An example of what I mean by identifying a person by their behavior. I was no longer a Christian in terms of doctrine, but I was still very much a Christian as reflected by the behavior I learned as a protestant kid, the need to spread the gospel. I may not be pushing what is known as "biblical truth," but I'm still pushing truth-as-I-know-it. As a shrink said to me once, "You think you have tossed out religion. You may have, but you're still in possession of the box it came in."
That sounded clever to me at the time. These days I think it misses the point. It's not that I have failed at something - to not scrape the last bit of religion off of me. It's that I've gotten more comfortable with just letting the many varying aspects of religion be. To embrace the positive and go on dismissing its downside. Religion's spiritual side, the one you tie to your emotions, is but one aspect of religion. Another is its intellectual side - or maybe theological is a better word - the one we use in the way we frame the stories we tell each other as a way of making life meaningful.
No less important than the spiritual side of religion and the efforts to create a moral universe and the intellectual/theological narratives we live by is the practical culture aspect. This is probably the one more than all the others which keeps most people going to church. Which shows up in people who say, "It would break my grandmother's heart if I stopped going to confession and to mass." Or "I go for the music." Or "I go because of the fellowship."
I separated religion from the pope the other day. He was in Canada apologizing to the Cree Indians for the misery inflicted by the Catholic church on so many indigenous children who thought they were doing them a favor by making good little Christians out of them, no small number of whom actually died from clerical abuse. I saw a tired old man, only three years older than tired old me, and I felt an instant connection. I've always seen Jorge Bergoglio as a kindly old man. Never mind that he runs some awful organization I'd rather not talk about most of the time. I listened to him deliver what I took to be a heart-felt apology. I then turned on the news and listened to all the reports of people complaining what he had to say was too little too late. Poor guy, I thought. People ought to lighten up. They need to blame the perpetrators, not the scapegoat.
You don't have to be an anthropologist, of course, to develop analytical skills. Anybody who values objective truth needs to learn to distinguish the objective from the prescriptive and determine when to use one or the other. And while I found it useful to turn the tool of analysis on myself, and observe my own behavior with more objectivity than I ever had before, I also found it useful to look at the behavior of religious groups, especially the ones I had once judged so harshly because I saw them coming at me with such hostility. I went from being a religious person to being a non-religious person who overgeneralized religious people as potentially dangerous homophobes. And I followed that up with a time, in my initial atheist phase, when I saw them as largely irrelevant largely harmless delusional fools.
Today, I see church goers through the lens of secular humanism. I've come to love what was once called philology in the broadest possible sense, the study of language and literature, history and classical scholarship in general. I no longer view Christians and other religious people as potential killers refueling for the fight against people unlike themselves, but as searchers for meaning like myself. Some are, of course, but I've managed to generalize them less often as "other," and more as just other seekers in the same boat. I can't image coming around to their way of thinking, but I no longer need them to come around to mine, either. I do try to spot the sincere seeker from the phony, and I remember that my father never went to church. "Why should I?" he used to say. "That's where all the hypocrites are." These days I look for - and find - earnest folk seeking communion with others of their ilk and meaning in their lives. I am less inclined to label them "them," more inclined to see them as a variant of "us."
I had an important moment some years ago when I listened to myself ranting away at "those goddam Christians." I caught myself. I suddenly remembered that until I went away to college I lived immersed in a world of people who taught me what it was to be kind, to be generous, to be forgiving, to share my toys, to avoid gossip. To be good, in other words. And these people, if asked to identify themselves, would all tell you they are Christians. (Would have told you - they're all gone now.) I've been making the mistake for years of allowing the worst of their lot to represent the whole. An elementary intellectual error, something I should have learned not to do long before I learned to live without religion.
Half a century ago, I went to Japan for the first time. Almost immediately I met my lifetime friends, Don and Alice. I spotted them as soul mates, and I watched their kids grow up and came in time to see them as chosen family. In 1970 they lived in a wonderful old run-down Japanese house by the beach, and I started the habit of spending much (eventually most) of my free time with them. They had an old rinky-dink piano and they asked me to play. "I'm no good," I told them. "All I ever played, actually, was hymns." Don's face broke into a broad smile and we were off and running.
Don and I have similar views on religion. Stuff and nonsense, as our parents might have described things. But we both understood, without having to discuss it, that just as one can reject religious doctrine but still love stained-glass windows and organ music, just as one can sing the Hallelujah Chorus at Christmas Time and Silent Night on Christmas Eve, one can have a beer in one hand and a hymnal in the other. One can sing the doxology or "The Church's One Foundation" with even more relish than we did as kids. A way of processing nostalgia, no doubt, of getting back in touch with who we were long ago.
I couldn't hold back the tears when I watched Notre Dame go up in flames.
And when I hear a congregation singing The Old Rugged Cross, I still feel goose bumps.
I am a Jew. Not a religious one. Technically not the kind of Jew that most Jews would ever consider a Jew. But I know I am a Jew when I hear Azi Schwartz do his thing. I am a Catholic when I hear a pure soprano voice singing Schubert's Ave Maria. And I am back in my childhood Protestant skin when I hear The Old Rugged Cross.
I used to say I was not Christian, but perhaps a bit "Christianesque." That was me still working out my identity and not quite there yet.
These days I'm quite comfortable proclaiming I am, among other things, a New Englander by birth, a teacher by profession, a Christian by culture.
________
End of sermon.
Now for some of my favorite hymns I'd like to share with Don.
Three sung by the Mormons, one by Dolly Parton, one is Aretha's famous 1972 rendering of Amazing Grace.
Ending with my all-time favorite:
1. Church in the Wildwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2. The Church's One Foundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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