“Of all horrible religions,” G. K. Chesterton once observed, “the
most horrible is the worship of the god within… . That Jones
shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean
that Jones shall worship Jones.” We had occasion to ponder
Chesterton’s remark on Sunday, December 7, when The New York Times
Magazine favored its readers with a special issue on
religion. Elsewhere, the media was full of recollections about the
bombing of Pearl Harbor—
the event, as Franklin Roosevelt put it,
that made December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.” For its
part, the Times gave us “God Decentralized,” a miscellany of a
dozen or so short articles by divers hands on subjects ranging from
the problems of interfaith marriages, young American Muslim girls who
wear nose rings and baggy jeans, and the monthly meetings of the
“Freethought Association” in Talladega, Alabama, where “devout
atheists gather for their Sunday social.”
Interleaved among these articles and the usual advertisements for
Clinique make-up, Lexus automobiles, and jewelry from Tiffany’s were
a handful of brief interviews—
with Donna Rice Hughes, for example,
who flickered momentarily into public consciousness when her affair
with Gary Hart became public and spoiled his aspirations for the
presidency, and who now campaigns against pornography; or with Gail
Turley Houston, the Mormon feminist who believes that God is
half female and who was denied tenure at Brigham Young University
for “publicly contradicting fundamental church doctrine.” Max
Frankel, former executive editor of The New York Times, devoted
his column to explaining that the American press is too “pious” in its
treatment of religious matters. “All too often,” he wrote, “what
passes for religious coverage
is a ritual celebration of papal tours
or
holy ceremonies.” (It was unfortunate, we thought, that Mr.
Frankel had neglected to read the consistently anti-Catholic
coverage dispensed by the Times, especially its unremittingly
hostile treatment of the current Pope.) The weekly food column was
titled “Our Daily Bread” and was given over to soup and bread
recipes with names like “St. Genevieve’s Soup” and “Brother
Juniper’s Roasted Three-Seed Bread.” (“In the simple act of baking,”
a caption informs us, “we
can experience grace.”) Finally, the
magazine’s Endpaper canvassed a dozen celebrities from Geraldo
Rivera, the talk-show host, to ex-governor Mario Cuomo on their
views about the afterlife.
What the Times had given us, in other words, was a journalistic
equivalent of Disneyland—a sort of verbal theme park in which claims of
spirituality replaced Tinkerbell. It is not that every article was
an exercise in fatuousness. Here and there were touches of genuine
pathos—in “Alone in a Lofty Place,” for example, Barbara Grizzuti
Harrison’s spare, moving meditation on illness and faith. But the
overall effect of this mélange was to induce that sense of nausea
that comes whenever a serious subject is treated with the utmost
triviality.
Part of the problem was the indiscriminate, all-religions-are-equal
approach that the Times insisted on adopting. Across the page from
Harrison’s piece, for example, was a description of “The Unarius Academy of
Science,” “A U.F.O.-oriented New Age group” that gathers annually
in El
Cajon, California (where else but California?) “to herald the future
arrival of ‘space brothers.’” Elsewhere in the issue we learned
about the woman who became a minister after having a religious
experience at “Womanquest, a Unitarian Universalist gathering on
Lake Geneva,” under the influence of “Starhawk, a leader of the
feminist spirituality movement who had brought us to the woods to
participate in a spiral dance.” Then there was “The Calibration of
Belief,” an essay about faith healers who conducted a study of the
effects of prayer on people suffering from arthritis. After an
initial prayer treatment for everyone, the group was divided in two
with half receiving “booster doses of long-distance prayer, without
their knowledge, every day for six months.” Or the Baptist church in
Louisville, Kentucky, where toddlers sing, to the tune of “Frère
Jacques,” “I am special, I am special. Look at me. Look at me.”
And so on.
The two-sentence caption on the cover of this special issue of the
Times Magazine said a great deal about its contents. “Americans are
still among the most religious people
on the planet,” the editors
informed us. “But these days, they’re busy inventing unorthodox ways
to get where they’re going.” About the first sentence: ever since
Tocqueville, we have been told that America is an unusually
religious nation. Perhaps that was true in the 1830s. But today? In
a page of statistics about the current state of religion, the Times
assures its readers that 96 percent of Americans surveyed
affirm a belief in God. But at a time when such a belief can mean
little more than anticipation of meeting alien “space brothers” such
statistics signify very little. Ninety-six percent of Americans say
they believe in God, but the “big question,” as the title of the
novelist Benjamin Cheever’s column puts it, might turn out to be
“God or BMW.”
Then there is the second sentence, about “inventing unorthodox
ways” of practicing religion. “Unorthodox” is a favorite word in
this special issue—partly, no doubt, because spiral dances in the
woods by Lake Geneva make for colorful copy. But the more important
reason is that on all moral and religious matters the Times long
ago declared itself an enemy of orthodoxy. Hence when it endeavors
to cast a friendly eye on religion it winds up producing a carnival
of psycho-babble in which genuine religious feeling is
indistinguishable from the most flagrant forms of
pseudo-spirituality. Indeed, that conceptual muddle is precisely
their point. For the Times, religion can go unchallenged only if (as
one caption puts it) faith is an “option,” an innocuous item in that
great consumer smorgasbord that includes expensive shoes, exquisite
chocolates, and churches in the Ozarks where real estate
entrepreneurs dispense enlightenment along with mortgages and
bedizen their chapel altars with the Star of David, images
of Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, and John F. Kennedy. We do not doubt that
editors at the Times intended to produce a thoughtful reflection
on religious diversity in contemporary America. What they have given
us with “God Decentralized,” however, is a grotesque parody in which
religion emerges as little more than a matter of lifestyle, the
latest form of equal-opportunity kitsch.
