Religion...or, Paris Hilton Has My Stuff

I live in a small town. There’s not a lot of entertainment here but there are a lot of churches. I like reading the message boards that they have out in front of the churches whenever I drive somewhere. Some of them are silly: “Life if fragile -- Handle with prayer.” Things of that nature. But I saw one today that I liked. It read, “Are the things you’re living for worth dying for?” It does make you think. I suppose the underlying message is supposed to be that you’re probably not living your life right. But that’s not how I took it. I started identifying what it was that I was living for. It wasn’t too hard to do. And I thought very quickly that, yes, I was willing to die for it, too. So, I guess I must be on the right track. But it had nothing to do with God or religion.

You know, the United States is allegedly the most God-fearing nation on earth. Some incredibly high percentage of people claim to believe in God, although considerably fewer people actually attend church. I don’t know if that’s confined to predominantly Christian countries or not since, from what I can tell, many Islamic countries seem to be very fervent, too. It makes you wonder how much religious belief affects things in our country -- things like politics, monetary practices, education, and so on.

When I was teaching I know that it was impossible to discuss literature without some religious context. One time I gave my freshmen students the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” to analyze for an essay. Oh, my! That was pretty much a disaster. Some kids more or less ignored the poem completely and gave me essays about Jesus’s return based on the book of Revelation. I got much more theology than literary analysis from that assignment, which makes you feel just awful if you’re an English teacher. It’s such a great poem and most of my students didn’t get it at all because they couldn’t get past the religious symbolism and references.

So, you have to wonder what other things become misunderstood in daily life because of religious references and miscommunication. Would we have gone to war in Iraq if we didn’t have so many religious differences with the Islamic world? Would we be there if there weren’t a thousand-year history of religious crusades and fighting on both sides? (And we shouldn’t forget that it was not all the West invading the Middle East. The Moors/Muslims invaded Spain in 711 and ruled the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. The Muslims quickly conquered northern Africa.) All of these old religious influences are still at work today.

Here in the U.S. we’re the product or beneficiary of the Protestant Reformation, whatever your individual religious beliefs may be. As a whole, we have a belief in progress -- that we can improve ourselves and earn a Godly reward. This is in contrast to a Medieval belief in a steadier, less changing world. We believe in individualism -- which coincides with the idea that each person can communicate with God him/herself and can read the Bible for him/herself. These are Reformation ideas that opposed Catholic belief that you need a priest intercessor and that Scripture had to be interpreted for you. We even believe in materialism -- the more things we have, the more it is proof of our “goodness.” This comes from the Puritan idea that only the Good are supposed to prosper. Of course, that’s ridiculous. People who aren’t good prosper all the time. Some of the most materialistic people are the worst people in our society. But we still have the belief that the more “stuff” you have, the better you must be -- or you wouldn’t have so much stuff. It’s a purely Protestant idea. So, when you see Paris Hilton or some other celebrity wearing expensive clothes and jewelry and you secretly envy her, you can tell yourself that there’s a religious basis for what you’re feeling. There must be some reason that God has blessed her with all of that bling. If you are just good enough yourself maybe God will give you some fabulous clothes and jewelry, too. Totally Protestant thinking! We equate riches with goodness and God’s blessing.

I could go on but this post has already gotten very long. Religious ideas shape the way we look at everything in our lives whether we consider ourselves religious or not.