When I was growing up, my life revolved around singing in an Episcopal (Anglican) church choir. My entire life was organised around the church year, with the major flurries of choir activity happening around Xmas and Easter. Not only was I Head Chorister, but I made it a point to have perfect attendance at all services, rehearsals, and associated musical events, such as singing at weddings, funerals, memorial services, and professional recordings made by the choir, as well as playing in the handbell choir, and even serving as an acolyte on occasion when there was a need.
Although I am an atheist (not a live-&-let-live atheist, but a militant New Atheist in the vein of the four horsemen), I have a deep aesthetic attachment to the music and the rituals of the Anglican church, particularly the ornate architecture, art, vestments, archaic language, and bells and smells of the high church.
Choir of King's College
As a nonbeliever, religion is about aesthetics and ritual for me. When I see photos of modern megachurches that have stark, ugly buildings, either no vestments or plain ones, big screens, execrable music, contemporary language, I cannot see the point for the attendees. I realise for the pastors it is about the money, but the flock who are being fleeced do not care that they are in an aesthetic wasteland.
For believers, worship is not about aesthetics. This is a growing problem. People used to go to church as part of community life. The fact that they did not really believe was largely irrelevant. Several of the rectors at the church in which I grew up were atheists. In the Episcopal church, lack of belief is no impediment to being a priest. If that surprises you, think of all the duties of a priest. Faith affects none of them, least of all the weekly writing of a sermon. Today, church attendance is no longer a regular part of community life so the only people who attend regularly are actual believers, an increasingly smaller percentage of the population, which is in itself a good thing but disastrous for church finances. Churches are closing, consolidating, and simplifying their services to cater to less-educated attendees, as well as attendees who do not speak English well, and they are operating on far smaller budgets. The church I grew up in no longer has a professional, paid choir. There is no budget to hire brass for Easter, no more handbell choir, no more full-time choirmaster and church organist position. Attendance is about ¼ of what it was. And the new rectors do not give a shit about high church aesthetics; they are boring, modern, dull, tasteless philistines.
Today is Good Friday, normally a day of long, somber services, and intense rehearsals to prepare for Easter, the most festive service of the liturgical year. I miss the music, the scent of the incense, the Easter lilies lining every surface in the chancel, the ornately-decorated historic vestments taken out of storage for the occasion, and especially the trumpets and other brass hired to perform with us for the festal services ringing out brightly in the nave. I really loved the trumpets because they were so jubilant. I always hid Easter candy in my pockets and ate waaaay too much that day.
In pre-COVID times, I tried to seek out a high church service to attend at Xmas and Easter but they have gone extinct. We need an Aesthetic Revival!
One last point: I just read this quote about Easter 2021 from an Episcopal rector and it really resonated. It does feel like we have collectively endured a year-long Lent, and the pandemic has indeed highlighted how much is broken in our society. May 2021 be the year of fixing racial and economic injustices, and, above all, building a stellar public education system to prevent them recurring.
“I knew things were broken, but I had no idea how broken. I knew race relations were strained, but I had no idea how strained. I knew there was sickness and disease and that people died, but it’s been humbling to see a nation like ours and others around the world brought to their knees. It feels like we’ve been in a yearlong Lent.”
As I read more about the latest back-to-the-land resurgence, I see certain features crop up repeatedly. Making rather than buying, producing your own food organically, keeping chickens and bees, bartering, community involvement, and homeschooling. All of these are positive developments except that last one. Opting out of the corporate economy for environmental and health reasons, for quality of life and better use of limited time, those are all necessary directions we need to move in to repair the earth, our health, and our sanity. But I draw the line at DIY and self-sufficiency when it comes to education.
I have two main objections to homeschooling. The first is because most (before the flames rise, I am aware that this does not apply to all) homeschoolers are religious and they are not trying to educate their children so much as prevent their education. They want them taught myth and superstition in place of fact in some areas, and they want them kept completely ignorant in others. I just watched the movie "Tangled" for the first time this week. The evil 'mother' keeps Rapunzel imprisoned in the tower by brainwashing her to believe that the outside world is too evil, selfish, and dangerous for Rapunzel to handle. She keeps assuring her that what she is doing is for her own good. When Rapunzel eventually escapes, she realizes she was being misled to serve the selfish ends of her kidnapper. Religious homeschoolers are aware that their children will learn that the superstitions they are being forcefed to control them are bullshit if they are ever exposed to any competing information. The brainwashing can only be effective if development of critical and analytical thinking skills is repressed, and if ignorance is maintained. It is much harder to control people who are educated. Think about it: A girl being taught that she must remain at home until her father chooses a husband for her, that she must go from obeying her father to obeying her spouse, that she must have no ambition beyond being a SAHM, and that higher education and working outside the home are both wrong for women, must be kept away from girls who are being taught that men and women are equal, that she can marry whomever she chooses, or not marry at all, that she can go to college and graduate school and have any career under the sun. If she is not kept isolated and ignorant, how can she be kept down?
We have all heard about the United States falling behind in math and science and no wonder when increasing numbers of kids are being taught that the earth is 6,000 years old. The purpose of education is to dispel ignorance, to replace superstition with factual knowledge. As a society, we require parents to keep their children in school until at least the age of 16. Parents have some rights but forcing or allowing their children to remain ignorant (and possibly become liabilities to society) is not one of them. There is a movement afoot to raise the age to 18 (or until a high school diploma is obtained) and about time, too. But as long as homeschooling parents meet minimal state requirements for attendance, there is virtually no oversight of what, if anything, they are teaching their children. This is appalling and completely unacceptable. We cannot stop parents from indoctrinating their offspring into their religion of choice (although we should be able to prevent them from performing permanent mutilation on them), but we should be able to prevent religious indoctrination from taking the place of education.
My second objection to homeschooling is how it denigrates the value of knowledge and the role of educated, trained, and skilled teachers in imparting that knowledge. No parent is qualified to teach every subject through the high school level. I will concede that, at the elementary level, there are certainly some parents who could teach their children the very basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, and even some other subjects. But no parent is equipped to teach all subjects at the high school or even middle school level. The Internet is making it easier for parents to get around this problem. If they do not speak a foreign language, they can sign the kid up for online classes, and the same for other subjects. But online courses are no substitute for a proper classroom environment with a flesh-and-blood teacher in front of you, and other learners beside you struggling to master the same material. By claiming that they can educate their children through high school at home, parents are showing disgusting arrogance, hubris, and ignorance of the importance of proper education.
Now, I am aware of the growing horror show that is our public education system. I know that some parents have good reason to fear that their children would not learn anything at school because the teachers are too busy breaking up knife fights in the hallways. Concerns about the quality of teachers, the unequal distribution of resources in wealthy and poor school districts, the length of the commute for some students to get to and from school, and the weakness of a curriculum that is increasingly dictated by sponsoring corporations and standardized tests are all legitimate. But the solution to these problems is not to opt out of the education system. Home schooling provides an escape valve that should not exist, so that parents can retreat from these problems instead of tackling them head on. We need secular parents fighting the introduction of creationism into the curriculum, not withdrawing their children to avoid it.
Notice that I did not make the argument that homeschooled students are under-socialized. On the contrary, since homeschooling has increased in popularity, there are many groups they can join, and local schools often let them participate in sports and extracurricular activities. They can volunteer, hold part-time jobs, and otherwise get plenty of socialization. My argument is with the curriculum itself, not extracurricular activities.
I don't believe that homeschooling will ever be outlawed. As public schools deteriorate, and the Internet offers more curricular options, more parents, both secular and religious, are embracing it. I am just recording here that I think this is a bad idea. It is taking DIY a bit too far. Fix the schools, don't abandon them.
I have remained friends with a former colleague who is a fundamentalist Christian. We simply agree to disagree about, well, pretty much everything. I have a morbid fascination with his bizarre beliefs because they are so irrational that it simply beggars the imagination how he could have attended an Ivy League school and yet hold to some of his nuttier views. His father is a prominent Creationist so, despite his education, he believes the earth is 6,000 years old. One time he came over for dinner and lamented, in all earnestness and with genuine sadness in his voice, that I and my then boyfriend were such nice people that it pained him that we would be going to hell for all eternity because we were living in sin. He also explained that he and his then fiancee had only ever hugged and kissed on the cheek because anything more, such as a kiss on the lips, would be "defrauding". I got the whole scoop on this fun fundie concept from him: The deal is that, in their view, the only legitimate expression of sexuality is within marriage, so looking at attractive people or engaging in any activity that might lead to sexual arousal is "defrauding" because it cannot lead at that time to its natural conclusion, i.e., sex within marriage. This, of course, means that masturbation is an absolute no-no. My Fundie Friend made the critical error of vouchsafing that, although he was not perfect in resisting, despite much prayer, he had gone nine whole months without succumbing.
Well, you can guess what happened next. Every time I saw him, I'd ask, "Still holding out?" "How about now?" I thought this was hilarious. Still do. But I am sure he regretted letting that slip even though he knew my teasing was all in good fun.
The thing is, he and his fiancee split up and he remains unmarried in his 40s. According to the tenets of his religion, if he never marries, then he is expected to never have sex in his entire life. Not only to die a virgin, but to never even have an orgasm. I doubt anyone actually follows these rules for life but imagine how pathetic it would be if someone did really deny himself any form of sexual pleasure for his entire life in a misguided quest to avoid going to a fictional hell. Their only orgasms would be from wet dreams in their adolescence—the one form of sexual release that even the fundamentalists must accept is beyond the individual's control. Scary and sad, isn't it? This is the only life we get, and you only live once. There are no do-overs if you miss out on life experiences. Everyone has to decide what is important to them, what fits their values, but allowing superstition to deprive you is such a waste.
Another frightening point he made was saying to me that he didn't understand how I could be such a moral person, have such strong ethics, without religion. In his view, all morality, all sense of right and wrong, comes from his god. He said that without this external moral compass guiding him, he could go crazy and rape and murder and steal, what would stop him doing whatever he felt like doing? What he doesn't get, of course, is that morality precedes religion. Since humans wrote the holy books of all the world's religions, with their prescriptions for good and bad behaviour, humans must have already had those concepts prior to developing and codifying various religions. But since he believes the Christian Bible was divinely inspired, he doesn't believe that right and wrong existed in human consciousness before being revealed by his god. The belief that religious people hold that they would lack a moral compass without their religion is one of the most frightening aspects of religious belief.
His religion also forbids the consumption of alcohol. It does allow birth control, although it cannot be abortifacient. He does think for himself in a few respects, which is his redeeming feature and why we can remain friends. He surprised me one time by stating bitterly that he wished other abortion opponents would be a bit more concerned with babies after they are born. More recently, when his boss, Pat Robertson, stated that it was ok for spouses to divorce if one contracts Alzheimer's, my Fundie Friend spoke out vehemently in disagreement, maintaining that his Bible says marriage is for life, in sickness and in health, no exceptions. He is not the only Evangelical to distance himself from that particular Robertson pronouncement, but the guy is actually his boss.
Through observing my Fundie Friend, I also learned something about the power of community and socialization in preserving religion. I would be willing to bet any amount of money that, if he became an atheist, if he stopped believing in every last bit of that superstitious drivel, he would never admit it, perhaps not even to himself, but certainly not publicly. Think about it: His entire family is fundie, and his family life is extremely important to him. He has a large, close knit family that he sees as often as he can. Why would he mess that up? He has no family of his own. He is also gainfully employed in a secure job, which he would lose if he failed to tow the party line in any respect, ex cathedra statements from Robertson notwithstanding. And how would he even be exposed to other ideas in that milieu? But the strongest hold is not even from his family or his job, but from the sense of community he gets from being part of a relatively homogeneous group. He has moved around a lot, both domestically and internationally, and he told me that, wherever he goes, all he has to do is find the Evangelicals and he is instantly welcomed, immediately at home, enveloped in the warmth of a like-minded community. What, to him, could be worth losing that? When I think of the pernicious influence of religion, how I want its sexism and control to be eradicated in the world, I always remember that people crave boundaries, rules to live by, and community. If people are to stop believing in superstition, those needs must be met in some other way. Even as a hardcore atheist, I appreciate the role that churches can play in creating a sense of community in an increasingly atomised world. The Anglican church is the only church for any good atheist to belong to. You have the bells and smells, the "thee's" and "thy's", all of the pomp, circumstance and ritual that you could desire, but no-one is expected to believe anything. I grew up singing in an Episcopal church choir and I am quite certain that our rectors were atheists, along with about three quarters of the congregation. Lack of belief wasn't an impediment to becoming an Episcopal priest, or being active in the church. We had great fun, and community. I particularly loved the hand bell choir, and Xmas caroling.
But I digress. My point in mentioning my Fundie Friend is that he asked me a provocative question on Facebook the other day and I will answer it here tomorrow.
