Sunday School

Religion was never a very big deal in my family. My mother was raised a Roman Catholic but left the church as soon as she was able, turned off by priestly behavior she had witnessed and believed was hypocritical. Her resentment was deep and lifelong, but it did not make her irreligious. She just knew not to take religious matters too seriously. In fact, she had strong beliefs, but they were strictly her own. She never tried to push them on anyone else, least of all my sister and me.

As for my father, I never knew what his religious beliefs were. He was a newspaper reporter and therefore a cynic about most things; I wouldn't be surprised if he went to his grave a doubter, but that's just my guess. He and I nor anyone else in the family ever talked about it.

I went to college in Kentucky and had my first experience of culture shock there, amazed at the influence the church had on peoples' lives, and at the family crises that arose as children went off to the big city and started learning about things outside the hellfire-and-damnation context of their fundamentalist upbringings. (I did have a crisis with my family, but it had to do with race. I haven't figured out how to write about that yet.) My own religious schooling had been entirely pro forma. My parents wanted me to have some kind of religious foundation but I never sensed that they cared much that I had religious belief, just that I learned about it. My family was living here in Arlington when I was born and I've always thought I was raised in the Episcopal church because there was one within walking distance of the Arlington house. I was 2 1/2 when we moved further out, to Falls Church, Virginia. We eventually joined the namesake church of that city, where I was confirmed, again pro forma, at age 12. I stopped going to church as a teenager, when, one Sunday morning as I was getting up, my parents, from their bed, where they with all good sense were sleeping in, told me to get dressed to go to church. I asked them why I had to do that if they could stay right where they were. They had no answer and that was that.

The Sunday school classes I did go to as a kid were memorable, but not for the religious molding my young mind received. My fourth grade Sunday school teacher had been an intrepid explorer of the world's dangerous places. Every Sunday he regaled the class with stories about close calls he'd had with various wild animals. Never a bible or prayer book was cracked, but maybe he thanked God he survived and made it a religious experience. I don't remember. The next year's teacher taught us about astronomy and the planets. At least that had something to with heaven, or at least the heavens, I guess. He had the class out to his house one night so we could look at the moon through his telescope. Very cool. Even my confirmation classes, which are supposed to imbue young people with Christian and Episcopal doctrine, are most memorable for me now because of the questioning spirit in which the young priest-teacher conducted them. In a session about hell, I asked him point-blank if such a place exists, and he gave me the type of answer you'd get from an intelligent philospher. Does hell exist? This priest basically didn't know. I wish I could thank him now for his blessed honesty.

I have friend in his mid-50s who has lately discovered atheism. He has all the hallmarks of a recent religious convert. He's joined groups, goes to lectures, gets into arguments with believers, and, if nobody stops him, will talk, nonstop, all day, about the good sense atheism makes. He'll berate anyone who doesn't agree. I call him a "born-again atheist." He and his arguments embody the polarization on this topic that has taken over our dear country, whose success as an experiment depends on open-minded pluralism. To think the fundamentalists in South Carolina can't vote for Romney because he's a Mormon and therefore "not Christian." To think the discussion is even taking place....

If there is a hell, maybe this is what it's like.