Because You Never Asked

(6/05)    

     In the June 7^th edition of the International Herald Tribune, an AP article used a polling organization called Ipsos to compare religious belief primarily between the United States and Europe. Not surprisingly, the results showed Americans to be more religious than Europeans, but to a suspiciously exaggerated extent. Although I can't quibble with the grade of non-belief registered in Europe, what can almost be described as the "religious fervor" attributed to America is something that cannot go unchallenged in these pages. Sometimes it takes the vaguer path of common sense to rebuke the "infallibility" of numerical precision (and manipulation).

     The poll itself seemed to revolve around 3 basic ideas: 1) the importance of "faith" in your life; 2) your belief or not in God; 3) should politics and religion be mixed.

     Before going any further, shouldn't we ask ourselves if religious devotion can really be judged by asking people to give a yes or no answer? Can the idea of "faith" be adequately summed up with an adjective or two (important, very important, etc.)? Aren't someone's ideas of "faith" or "God" more complicated than that?

     Asking someone if they do or don't believe in God has about the same intellectual pedigree as the question, "who is your favorite actor?"

     Who hasn't gone to the refrigerator, opened a carton of milk and found just enough odor to doubt its drink ability? This article left me with a similar feeling of sniff test uncertainty. God only knows (if one were to believe this article, the odds are now overwhelmingly suggestive of my being an American) why the Associated Press asks some polling company to do what it did for this piece of journalism, but a completely accurate picture of reality is not always what motivates such rubbish. There was one sentence in particular where my "this is a crock of anal waste" antennas began receiving signals in abundance. I quote:

     "Nearly all U.S. respondents said faith is important to them and only 2% said they do not believe in God". (Underline provided by this writer).

     I don't hang around with a particularly radical crowd. As I wend my way through the daily machinations of life's routine, I deal with a fairly ordinary cross section of the "Grand Comedy" --- friends, acquaintances, people at work, relatives, the crowd at the tennis courts, people who provide goods and services for me and vice versa, etc. This includes all races, sexual preferences, age groups, and a multiplicity of religions, ethnic identities and national affiliations. In spite of this cosmopolitan environment, I rarely deal with people who are vastly different from what people generally are. I can't remember the last time I shot the breeze with a Basque terrorist or an Amish chic.

     If the sentence just quoted above from the International Herald Tribune is true, I must be living, unbeknownst to me, in one of the last surviving hotbeds of religious infidelity in America. I'm generally not wont to ask, but I always get the impression that there are lots of people out there who don't arrange their lives around concepts like "faith" or God. Who knew that all those people drinking cascades of beer and dropping F-bombs into their less than Shakespearean dialogs; that all those louts spending their portfolios on porno while trying to find anyone willing to fornicate with them; that all the "ho" with tattoos just above their barely visible anal cracks; that all those "cheese heads" and Red Sox fans hemorrhaging joy and agony for their beloved teams, were all religious fanatics? Who knew?

     The 2 places in the world I am most familiar with are the United States and western Europe. My intimacy with both places is undeniable. In living both realities so deeply over the course of what is becoming a long life, the "big picture" shows a socio-political backdrop that is not too far from identical. Setting aside any purpose or goal this religion poll may have embarked upon (and polls have a tendency to do this), if it has somehow found a great disparity between religious belief or practice in the United States and Europe, it only serves to show how little religion matters in effecting actual behavior.

     God knows (he's American) what nebulous cultural dictate developed over the course of American history makes it more difficult for your average American to utter the fact that he or she doesn't believe in God, or that, yes, he or she feels compelled to profess some kind of "faith". But this does not change the fact that their world outlook is almost identical to that of the European who might answer these questions in an opposite fashion. Both the American and the European bow to the same gods and they are secular gods, not religious Gods. People on both sides of the Atlantic profess to almost identical forms of governmental and economic apparatus. Their ideas of legal justice, who's criminal or not, what's permissible or not, as well as that romantic stew of ideas dealing with freedom of this, that, or the other, makeup a bloodline on the same family tree. Both the American and the European have very similar concepts for life fulfillment, driven heavily by the consumerist goals of the economic schemes they adhere to. With some allowance for minor local deviance, both sides of the Atlantic dress the same, eat the same, find similar cultural and artistic outlets, and generally entertain themselves with the same devices. TV, perhaps the greatest cultural galvanizer and catalyst ever created, now has a similar look everywhere from the Aegean west to the Pacific. Even more telling is the similarity of our behavior pertaining to sex and romance. Fidelity or lack thereof, marriage, divorce, levels of prudishness and promiscuity, pornography, the rights of women and homosexuals, and basically everything having to do with the sexual energy that is the great motor of human behavior, reflect almost mirror-like across the Atlantic.

     A poll telling us that Peter and Mary believe more in God than Pierre and Maria is an almost meaningless observation. In all 4 cases, generally speaking, their behavioral patterns are being far more influenced by the secular wallop of market provocation (and that also means the political decisions based on these market factors) than by the sermons received in a Sunday morning pew.

     The poll in question claims that Americans are far more likely to accept the mixing of politics and religion. This is the part of its accuracy I find most believable, but it should not be construed as a sign of increased religious devotion, but more the result of political opportunism. It's hard to know exactly how this all happened --- dumb luck is a plausible possibility --- but the Republican Party began to realize that the small minority of Americans (though sizeable enough to effect elections) with true religious zeal (which, in America, means little more than a desperate attempt to deny our erotic impulses) could easily be swayed there way. The pandering to this voting block has become prodigious and it has delivered the whole southeast region of the country to the Republican Party. If this poll finds Americans more receptive to the immersion of religion in politics, it should be seen much less as a part of American socio-political culture, and far more as an artificially induced strategy carried out by a segment of American politics.

     History bears this out. I will not get into any esoteric debate as to the American Constitution, but I will say that anyone with the literacy skills necessary to read it and a minimal amount of deductive capabilities, can only come to the conclusion that its authors were deeply concerned in formally keeping religion out of government. This came at a time when every other government in the world was umbilically tied to its religious institutions. Not only has America always had a strong tradition of such separation, it was in the vanguard in proposing it. It proved to be such a good idea, that the rest of the western world, bit by bit, eventually followed suit. By consciously trying to insinuate religious matters into government, the Republican Party is doing something patently un-American . beside being intrinsically stupid.

     I constantly find American media (and European media too, but more as a way to snidely belittle us) overstating the depth and extent of American religious practice. In actual behavioral practice, religion seems no more or less a factor in America than in Europe. But I will say this: the more religious America supposedly gets, the more it seems to revel in war and physically aggressive behavior in general. War and religion have always had a wonderful relationship.

     For more, see essays, "Michael Chang or Christians Revisited", "More on Religion", "Jessie Ventura", and "Jonesboro".