Dear Mister Met
As a way of practicing what it preaches, this letter is messy and full of errors.
What if people can change? What if people can surprise you? What if people are irreducibly complex?
I’m done with dog walking. I’m going back to preaching, to pastoring. Not as many cute doggies, but much better benefits. It’s been over two years and I’m not the same and the church is not the same and the world is not the same.
I didn’t think I’d go back, and didn’t think I wanted to go back, because the church was (is) an anxious and censorious institution. There is not much room to move, especially in any kind of creative way. But a funny thing happened in the two years since I left: everyone got anxious and censorious.
In fact, dare I say, the secular world is now as censorious as the sacred, if not more so. Particularly the progressive, secular world. We were supposed to be the generous ones, but now we’re insufferable, as judgmental as any dogmatic faith, but worse because we don’t (won’t) recognize our dogma as dogma. The church is now the more generous place. The kinder place. Possibly the more creative place.
We are sorting into Republicans and Democrats, yes. Liberals and Conservatives, but beyond these we are sorting into a group that can handle nuance and complexity, and a group that can’t. The coming Nation of Rigidity will be unyielding in the its politics and so brittle that the only possible outcome is splintering into hundreds of millions of righteous individuals.
There was no chance at exception; the righteousness of the antipet movement was at an apex and in the heat of the revolution, purity was all and no exceptions could be made. - From The Every, by Dave Eggers.
Substitute antipet movement with, oh, any and every social issue, and you get what passes for justice: unyielding purity. Purity in thought, word, deed, identity, doctrine, syntax, intention. The path is narrow. No, more narrow than that.
When I was in seminary, I and everyone around me was censorious because we came of age in the 90s, were in our 20s, and we were in seminary. Additionally, we were in a progressive seminary.
I was insufferable and I was in the lower 25th percentile of censoriousness, I reckon. I don’t know for sure. This was before Nate Silver hit the big time, so there was no way to measure such things. I know that I was not the most censorious.
We practiced what I (clever, ever so clever) called abstinence only social justice. It was, after all, in the shadow of the 90s, a censorious decade informed heavily by the 80s. We were talking about sex a lot in seminary, particularly gay sex and whether adults should or should not be having it. Abstinence was still very much a thing that people thought other people should do.
Good liberals of course knew that abstinence only education and sexual ethics was unnecessary and pretty dumb, but boy did we love our abstinence only social justice. Don’t buy this, don’t go there, don’t do that.
Little did I know that we were so ahead of our time. Kids these days have taken up the mantel and run with it. The Discourse, as social movements are now known, is clear that there is absolutely nothing you can do right. You can only do wrong. And you have done wrong, and you will do wrong, and even now, you are doing wrong. You, yourself, by virtue of who you are right now, are doing wrong.
You’re reading a Substack, for one thing, you irredeemable transphobe. You, I, Roxanne Gay, George Saunders, Heather Cox Richardson. We should all go fuck ourselves and reckon it as righteousness, says The Discourse.
Now, the decline of God and the imminent collapse of so many faiths seems tied directly to the rise of surveillance, and the collective enforcement of social norms through instant global shaming. God promised punishment after death. Now it’s meted out in minutes. Karma was vague; digital shaming is specific. And I would argue people prefer the reliable nature of morality-through-surveillance over the ephemeral promises of the gods/Gods of the past.
Prayers to God were rarely answered, while shouts into cyberspace always receive a response, even if misspelled and hateful. Everything God offered – answers, clarity, miracles, baby names – the internet does better. - From The Every, by Dave Eggers.
Look at worship attendance (church, synagogues, mosques), see who it stays more or less steady from the 1930s to 2000, dipping slightly, but more or less staying around 70-75% of the population. Then, stating in 2000, the bottom falls out. Over twenty points in twenty years.
This coincides with the ubiquity of the internet. Not necessarily a causation, but a compelling correlation.
Note that it’s not that people are moving from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and becoming Jains, Sikhs, or Hindus. Other World Religions make up a slightly larger percentage of the population, but most of the growth is in Nothing In Particular.
Nothing in Particular is not great. Atheist/Agnostic (two different flavors, but whatever) are at least Something. This is … Nothing. As The Never Ending Story made abundantly clear, nothing is worse than something. Nothing has no shape, no weight, no breadth, no direction, no identity, no framework, nothing nourishing, no joy, no life.
This is a measurement not of the religious impulse, this is a measurement of how that impulse is channeled. Humans are religious, and no true humanist would deny that. Religion is as human as language, and just because one language dies, that doesn’t mean humans fall silent. Humans tell stories, religions are among those stories. That fact makes them more important, not less.
Religions are dying, but the religious impulse is not. Latin died, but language lived on. The need to communicate with language stayed strong and found new outlets. The same goes for the need to communicate with religion. If the religious impulse is a constant in human communities, and that constant is indeed around 75 percent, that means there is currently 25 percent of the population that is looking for a shape to poor their religion into.
We are a species in contraction. The age of exploration has given way to the age of introspection.
Of fear. Of caution.
We seek nothing.
We invent nothing.
We forgive nothing.
Every new generation purports to be more empathetic, and yet every new generation is less forgiving. And, of course, with every coming year, technology ensures that no errors go unrecorded. - From The Every, by Dave Eggers.
We are beyond Calvin’s Total Depravity. We are Depravity Incarnate, and as such, the only truly virtuous thing anyone can do is kill themselves. Indeed, much of The Discourse advises that very thing: Kill yourself. This is not an exaggeration. Log on, poke your head around. Read for yourself what we now believe.
Total Depravity says that we are such fallen people that no matter what we do, we always make it worse. Even when we try to help, we make it worse. We are inherently incapable of doing anything good. It’s bleak, but at least Calvin allowed for grace. The Discourse has no doctrine of grace. There is no salvation, only purification. There is no forgiveness or redemption or correction or growth, only the purification that comes with the destruction of Depravity Incarnate. We are all eyes and ears and hands and feet waiting to taint. Best to cut ourselves off and throw ourselves into the fire.
Or, we can create.
Let me be yet another person to insist you watch Station Eleven.
Yes, Station Eleven is about a pandemic, but that’s one of the reasons to watch it, not avoid it. First of all, their pandemic makes our pandemic look like small potatoes. Second, the show is also and primarily about how people rebuild after.
What is central to the human rebuilding effort after a pandemic that killed almost everyone? Art, theater, stories. Yes, get the food. Yes, get the sanitation. Yes, get the medicine. But what about after you get those things? What then? Once the nuts and bolts are sorted, we’re faced with the rest of existence, and central to the question of existence is: Why do we exist?
The show (and the book) takes its name from the story-within-the-story, a graphic novel, Station Eleven. Only a few copies were ever printed, but this self-published, limited run novel gives meaning to the central characters. It shapes their existence. It drives them. It makes their life worth living. It keeps them human, and fuels their flaws and triumphs. It becomes religion.
Maybe people should be able to get by with just eating and shitting and sleeping. Indeed, isn’t there a saying that all our unhappiness comes from the fact that we can’t sit still in a quiet room? Maybe we should, but if we could, we wouldn’t be humans. Maybe moles could get by without digging tunnels, but then what would they be? Maybe snakes could get by without their unsettling undulating and fucked up tongues. Maybe, but they wouldn’t be snakes, then.
We are humans. We need stories. We need art. We need to create and be created.
Creation is a dynamic and messy business. Creation doesn’t pair well with purity.
Purity is fixed and rigid. It can’t change. It’s a kind of death. It arrests life and leads to nothing.
Forgiveness is something and can lead to something else.
I release you from the Undersea,
Robert Drinkwalter