{"id":8630,"date":"2020-03-18T15:57:06","date_gmt":"2020-03-18T22:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=8630"},"modified":"2022-03-21T15:03:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T22:03:59","slug":"my-religious-upbringing-such-as-it-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2020\/03\/18\/my-religious-upbringing-such-as-it-was\/","title":{"rendered":"My Religious Upbringing, Such As It Was"},"content":{"rendered":"

My upbringing was not especially religious; my parents attended church, and took their kids to Sunday school, but more out of social habit and propriety, was my impression, rather than from any deep-seated faith. My parents both grew up in small-town Illinois, where they attended Methodist churches. When they settled in Apple Valley in 1958 or so, when I was perhaps 3 years old, we attended Church of the Valley (http:\/\/www.churchofthevalley.net\/<\/a>), a Presbyterian church along Highway 18; it didn\u2019t seem to matter much that they switched from one Protestant sect to another. My single memory of that church\u2014I was only 6 years old before we moved away from Apple Valley\u2014was that we met Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, popular TV stars of the 1950s, now likely forgotten, who\u2019d retired to Apple Valley and who also attended that church.<\/p>\n

When we moved to Reseda in 1962 we attended another Presbyterian Church, called almost identically Kirk O\u2019 the Valley (https:\/\/kirkval.org\/<\/a>), on Vanowen down the street from the large public library. There I attended Sunday School, where we were read children\u2019s versions of stories out of the Bible, with pictures. My mother sang in the church choir, and did two services each Sunday morning. After the first service, and Sunday School, my father took us kids to the nearby supermarket Piggly Wiggly\u2014long gone, but I think at Vanowen and Tampa\u2014where we ate donuts, until the second service was over. It was during these years that I attained some rite of passage\u2014confirmation?\u2014and was given my very own Bible, bound in red, which I still have.<\/p>\n

In early 1968 we moved to Glen Ellyn, Illinois. There we attended Southminster Presbyterian Church (https:\/\/www.southminsterpc.org\/<\/a>; north of us on South Park Blvd., halfway to the center of town). I don\u2019t recall attending services at all, but I do recall attending youth group meetings on Sunday evenings, and I recall some of the projects we did, including visiting nursing homes to pass out magazines or, once, to put on a play. One meeting I remember distinctly is when the group leader walked us through the lyrics of Simon & Garfunkel\u2019s \u201cMrs. Robinson\u201d as if they held deep theological significance (never mind the ironic tone they struck in the film, which I didn\u2019t see until years later). During the three years we lived in Glen Ellyn, we took frequent weekend trips to Cambridge, where my parents had grown up and where my grandfather, aunt, and cousins still lived, and on those Sundays we attended the Methodist church in town.<\/p>\n

And one other youth group meeting I recall. I was thinking that throughout all these various Sunday Schools for children and youth groups for teenagers, they were never about instruction into what the church believed and why. They were about stories and dressing up on Sundays and hanging out with one’s tribe, learning its ways, to define itself distinct from other tribes; about ritual, not intellect. But I do recall an except to that general rule, at the Illinois youth group. The leader was discussing how Presbyterian beliefs were different than those of other Christian sects, the Methodists maybe. I think the example was about predestination, but it doesn’t matter. The point was that he explained what *our* beliefs were, and what the *other* beliefs were, in such tones as to make it *obvious* that we were right and the others were misguided. His intonation and body language left no doubt, and the youths listening had no choice but to agree; it was a groupthink, not a matter for discussion, certainly not one of reason or evidence.<\/p>\n

Earlier in California and especially in Illinois I had discovered books. Not just science fiction books, but astronomy books and general science and puzzle books by various authors. (I went through a very brief phase of being fascinated by UFOs and various supernatural mysteries, through the books of Frank Edwards and others. This was cured by discovering the nonfiction of science fiction authors, ironically \u2013 I say that because of the popular impression, at least then, that science fiction authors \u201cbelieve\u201d in UFOs or whatnot, when in fact science fiction authors, being educated or at least familiar with scientific methods, are far less credulous than the average citizen. But more about this another time.)<\/p>\n

We returned to California in the summer of 1971, in between my 10th<\/sup> and 11th<\/sup> grades in high school, just as I turned 16. After an interlude of some weeks in Apple Valley, we settled in a neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley then called Sepulveda, now called North Hills (despite the conspicuous absence of any more than half of one hill in the region), coincidentally half a block from my Uncle Bob\u2019s house. My parents dutifully sought out the nearest Presbyterian church, Valley Presbyterian Church (https:\/\/www.valleypresbyterian.org\/<\/a>) on Haskell, right across the street from my high school. I may have attended once. I told my parents the next week that I\u2019d prefer to stay home. They weren\u2019t surprised, given my reading and the topics I found interesting. They did stage a kind of intervention, though: a pastor from the church came to the house to visit me. We sat on the sofa and he talked and invited me to pray to Jesus, or accept Jesus into my heart, or somesuch. I didn\u2019t roll my eyes or burst out laughing; I probably just sat there uncomfortably and said nothing, and he got the hint. No doubt he checked in with my parents and the subject of my attending church never came up again.<\/p>\n

And I’ve rarely been in any kind of church ever since, except to attend weddings.<\/p>\n

And my siblings? As I\u2019ll discuss elsewhere, I wasn\u2019t especially close to my siblings, all younger than me \u2013 Sue by 4 years, Lisa by 7 years, Kevin by 9 years \u2013 simply due to age differences, especially between me and my brother. Sue was the opposite of me, in terms of temperament and intellect. For purposes of this discussion, I don\u2019t remember anything about her church attendance. Lisa, on the other hand, took to religion in those Sepulveda years, when she was in grade school and junior high. Yet my impression and remembrance are that she found going to church charming and fun; she liked the carols and the stories; it served as her social group; it wasn\u2019t so much about commitment to a faith. In later years she devoured the C.S. Lewis books. (I suggested Ursula K. Le Guin; she found her books dour.) And my younger brother Kevin, I have little impression at all from this era. But his life has been the major religious drama in our family. Just as I graduated from college, my parents, and Lisa and Kevin, moved to small town Tennessee (Sue and I stayed in LA). Kevin finished high school there and married his high school sweetheart from a devout Christian family, and so converted, and allowed his wife to home-school their three children, in ways I can only imagine (I\u2019ve asked). Kevin once promised to explain to me his conversion from indifferent atheism to committed Christianity, but he never has. (Of course, I completely understand: it\u2019s all about marrying into a religious family and community.)<\/p>\n

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In later years I reflected that none of my church attendance was about any kind of education. Sunday school and church services weren\u2019t about education; they were about stories, and ritual, and communing. The principles of the religion were assumed<\/em>, and repeated so often they became unchallengeable, the way the social principles of one\u2019s community, or country, are absorbed and assumed. Of course Sunday school could never instruct children in the content of its religion, in the way a class in algebra or science would, because there\u2019s no reason or evidence behind the religion\u2019s beliefs. (Parents, I suspect, become adept at deflecting questions about religious beliefs from their children \u2013 e.g. why doesn\u2019t Billy\u2019s family celebrate Christmas? \u2013 in much the same way they deflect questions about sex.)<\/p>\n

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In later years I became fascinated by religion in principle. Writers like E.O. Wilson (in ON HUMAN NATURE) treated religion as a human behavior that could be understood as serving an evolutionary purpose, especially in a group selective way. Where there are two rival tribes or nations competing for resources, the social bonding within each group is strengthened by shared beliefs, especially shared beliefs in the superiority of one\u2019s tribe as favored in the eyes the gods, or god. (The Old Testament is drenched with belief that God, presumably the creator or the entire, incredibly immense universe that we perceive today, had a special concern for one tribe of herdsmen in the Middle East desert, on this one tiny planet. It seemed to me obvious <\/em>that other tribes had analogous beliefs, and it\u2019s only an accident of history, not divine providence, that led one tribe\u2019s beliefs to later prevail. One or another of them had to, and it\u2019s apparent that history is mostly a series of accidents, coincidences, and circumstances.) In an odd sense, the more incredible the claims of a tribal religion, the more resistant they are to ordinary reason, the better they serve as a basis for these social bonds. The cost<\/em> of accepting such beliefs leads to the sunk cost fallacy, where beliefs persist because the cost of giving them up and rearranging one\u2019s life is too high.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also read a bit of comparative religion. A recent insightful book is Stephen Prothero\u2019s GOD IS NOT ONE, from 2010, subtitled \u201cThe Eight Rival Religions that Run the World\u2014and Why Their Differences Matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Prothero wrote an earlier book called RELIGIOUS LITERACY, in 2007, keying off the bestselling CULTURAL LITERACY from 1987, by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.; Prothero argued that most Americans, despite their supposed faith, know very little about the Bible, let alone anything about other faiths. He proposed a high school course in religious literacy, replacing, perhaps, algebra. I appreciated his motive that people should know more about the religions they supposedly believe, but I was not amused by his suggestion to replace a course about how to think for one about blind tradition.)<\/p>\n

Prothero\u2019s 2010 book is to challenge the nostrum that all religions are more or less the same, that they all worship the same god. No, they\u2019re not, no they don\u2019t. His central observation is that all the major religions presume to identify some crucial problem that afflicts humanity, and offers a cure.<\/p>\n