Protestant Bias

Five years ago, I was playing Sir Wilfrid Robarts (the Charles Laughton role) in the Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution and went directly from dress rehearsal to the Recreation Center, a downtown bar where I often played the open mic. I was still costumed as Sir Wilfrid--a dark suit, a blue bowtie, dark-rimmed glasses, a pocket handkerchief, and a buttonhole flower--dressed far more formally than I ever do as myself, along with a neatly cropped beard and hair. 

Apparently, I clean up well. A young blonde, a stranger, asked me if I wanted to dance. I say young. She was the kind of fifty that passes for thirty in dim light--twenty years my junior, and I assume she was drawn to Sir Wilfrid's distinguished aura and would have ignored my open-collar norm. Her assertiveness was pleasant if at first suspicious, as if she might be a pro, but our conversation migrated out to the bench on the sidewalk, a quieter place where we talked (well, mostly she talked) an hour or so at social distance as if Sir Wilfrid was the bloke to hear her story. I don't recall her name and haven't seen her since, but the encounter was memorable.

The woman was a rarity in northern Virginia, a southerner. Spotsylvania County hovered around 11,000 population from 1790 to 1950, then exploded to 135,000 today, and the newbies weren't local babies. Outsiders like me filled suburbs, most of them from the north. Southern accents are rarities, but she had one. Her story reminded me of Flaubert's ironic saint in "A Simple Heart," an illiterate servant girl whose life is sanctified by a parrot in the lieu of a dove. The woman was single, lived alone, and mentioned no family. She supported herself by cleaning rooms at a B&B and serving at a McDonald's, both part-time and minimum-wage, but she lit up when she talked about work. Other hotel help didn't snug the sheets right or vacuum under the bed, but she took pride in doing the job right. She always had a warm greeting for fast-food customers and listened to their stories, so they came back just to order Big Macs from her. 

Maybe she had another motive. Maybe Sir Wilfrid looked like he might be hiring, but that never surfaced, and, after the initial dancing, there was no hint of sexual hookup, which wasn't on my agenda anyway. I felt she genuinely needed to profess her personal integrity with somebody. Fairly, deep into the conversation, I shared enough of my own story to be present but not to act superior (which didn't seem a problem, proud as she was of her work) and told my age, and she did hers, which skewed us toward the brevity of life. To this she said, simply, "I'm right with the Lord."
    This was the only hint of religion all night, no home church, no denomination, no theological names, but a relationship asserted by somebody who seemed to be, at some absolute level, perfectly satisfied with her spare life. As a Ph.D. who never tenured at a university, an author with only one legit published book, a semi-failure in the circles I've moved in, I was still Sir Wilfrid indeed compared to her, and yet she stood eye-to-eye with me, strong, her life hard but maybe fuller than mine, flushed with integrity in the face of eternity, so I went home in awe of her.

Another woman I know was raised Catholic in a Catholic town with generations of Catholic family and twelve years of parochial school before she left for state college and an interlude of adolescent rebellion--nothing crazy--and ended up marrying a divorced man. For a few years she didn't attend church, finding nothing authentic in protestant alternatives, but, after the premature death of her husband's first wife, she rejoined the Church and attended mass regularly for forty years, lectoring and singing in the choir as she and her convert husband sent four children through Catholic schools. 

Her break with Catholicism, when it came, was on moral grounds, a reaction against the Church's bias against people of same-sex orientation (including an uncle, a son, friends, and a grandson) and its continuing to exclude members from leadership just for lacking a male member. These archaic denials of grace became too much. But these are all my words, not hers. Maybe I'm projecting, but devotion to social injustice was what drove her (with no interlude of being a none) to join a liberal Episcopal congregation, where she embraced charitable outreach and justice activism.

Through all of this, including adolescent rebellion against her mother (her father died young), she seems to have experienced no crisis of faith like mine, no rift with the church on the basis of doctrinal doubt. This was not from lack of exposure to alternative views. She earned a humanities Ph.D. and socialized with faculty hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular. Overall, she was more immersed in secular humanist values and habits of critical thinking than I'd been when, as a junior intellectual, I rejected Baptist orthodoxy as implausible. 

The difference, as I understand it, is that I was raised with the protestant bias that religion is about morals and accurate belief. In Baptist and related practice, congregations are independent and rituals are avoided as if the most rambling improvised prayers, being "sincere," are superior the Gloria or the Prayer of Saint Francis. Such religion is fundamentally neither communal nor liturgical, but individual, and only secondarily about tradition, which claims to be limited to scripture. A religion, protestant bias assumes, is the sum of its canon and its members' beliefs, the latter judged true insofar as they effect private salvation. There is social support--more active in informal gatherings than in services--but little sense that members are one mystical body. 

The parochialism of this view turns toxic when protestant missionaries meet practices like Hindu popular religion, which centers on festival recitations of Vedic hymns with carefully preserved phonetic accuracy even though the reciting priests understand ancient Sanskrit imperfectly and it is gibberish to everybody else. Outside these festivals, the people know tales of gods and heroes, but nothing like a creed. Blind to sacredness of this kind, early missionaries in America thought that Indians had no religion because, though they had transcendental and collective festivals, dances, chants, ceremonies, and legends, they had no theology--nothing structured in the categories of Greek philosophy--as if systematic theology were essential to religion. 

As a young biased protestant, I too conflated theology with religion and left my childhood church after I saw that its doctrines couldn't be verified. Its only proof was the Bible, a text that, besides being self-contradictory, was only one ancient text among thousands, special only because I'd been born in a culture that revered it, which made its authority a blind accident of birth. Once I left the First Baptist, there was little in that brick hall for me to miss--a lack of beauty, ritual, or mystic community, only the desiccated shell of hollow faux-literal promises.

Returning to the case of the second woman, her experience seems to have differed from mine because her bias was Catholic. There were, of course, creeds and doctrines, a catechism, but these formulas floated in a soup that included sacraments, cultic duties, and a sacred calendar, language, and liturgy along with the living examples of men and women who had left "the world" to devote their lives to God, especially the nuns who taught her. These were spiritual exemplars leading beyond words, and, of course, throughout her pre-college years, the mass was celebrated in Latin as it had been for 1700 years. Here were words older even than the cut of priestly vestments, giving the mass mysterious gravity and performative grace. 
     Mass wasn't just neighbors gathering to share their devotions. It was an incantation that brought God-as-man into the worshippers' bodies as sacrificial flesh, united them all in that one body, and sent them renewed back into the world--a ceremony not much different, I imagine, from a Vedic chant or Muskogean corn dance. Add to this the examples of priests, brothers, and nuns (the best of them anyway) modeling religion as a way of holy living, not just as doctrines and deliverance, and it's easy to see how the "truths" of the Baltimore Catechism can slip into metaphor and leave such Catholicism intact.

She has a conviction of providence, a feeling that everything happens for a reason and that sometimes, if she listens, she can understand and this will lead her. She has a deep sense of justice and loving kindness, but she is anything but fundamentalist. The terms of antique orthodoxy aren't hers. She dislikes the Lord's Prayer's description of the Source of all Being as a masculine monarch but understands how Father and kingdom would have worked in Jesus' world--that the loving Abba was a more nurturing figure than the storm god of earlier tradition. The old bronze-age smiter of Moses infected her imagination far less than it did mine, and she seems to sense the presence of a God (seldom called by name) and commune without words. She finds transcendence in creative work, especially communion with nature as a sanctified world.

Again, I may be projecting into her. This may be a composite portrait, but I'm impressed that we arrived at similar places by dissimilar paths. Because she settled in place, never fleeing the tradition of her childhood--or at least its unconscious foundation--her experience (much like the woman at the bar) seems more profound and less conflicted than mine even as we agree in principle. She understands all religions as branches of one divine root but never found it necessary to cut off the Christian branch that nurtured her (indeed, orthodoxy allows this in the doctrine of the virtuous pagan). Unlike me, she never weened herself from the faith of her mothers to wander hungry in a wilderness and learn trust from strangers, but seems to have found a depth of demythologized mystery within her tradition. 

And so have I. I too, albeit without what I believed to be belief, have skulked around  Christianity with few intermissions for more than sixty years, trying to understand. For me, and I think for her, an essential mooring has been ritual: ancient gestures of transcendence that don't pretend to engage logic. I could never return to ad hoc prayer in churches like school auditoriums. I could never be a Baptist like I was as a child. For me (and I imagine for her) there is something real in the weekly eucharist, prayers older than nations calling down presence in ceremonial pomp.