New tomes shed light on our relationship to religion

Frank Wilson

is the former book-review editor of The Inquirer

As many of us get ready to celebrate Easter and Passover, it is perhaps worth noting that, last year, a Gallup poll indicated that most Americans - 77 percent - think religion is no longer the influence in this country it used to be. Seventy-five percent think that is unfortunate.

This is the lowest perception of religion's influence Gallup has recorded since it first started polling the matter. Oddly, the annual average of weekly church attendance - again according to Gallup - is 39 percent, which is not much different from 1939, when it was 42 percent.

But one doesn't need Gallup to know that for many in this country, the luster has gone from religion. In the last few years, several atheist tracts graced the best-seller lists, and for some people atheism is now a major fashion statement.

But three recently published books may signal a trend in another direction - a serious look at what religion is like for those who practice it, which turns out to be rather different from the ways its detractors portray it.

In Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, for instance, as irreverent a defense of faith as you are likely to encounter, English novelist Francis Spufford announces that "I . . . reserve the right to assert that believers get a slightly bigger say in what faith means than unbelievers do. It is ours, after all."

Richard Rodriguez says something similar in Darling, which he calls "a spiritual autobiography." His answer as to why he, a gay man, stays in the Catholic Church is that "the church is more than its ignorance; the church gives me more than it denies me. I stay in the church because it is mine! . . . it is my inheritance."

Neither of these books focuses on proofs. As Spufford bluntly puts it: "I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)"

Spufford is perfectly aware that the Creed he recites every Sunday is "a series of propositions." But, he says, it is "a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I assent to the ideas."

Spufford knows full well that emotions "can fool us into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue." But, he points out, they are also "our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe."

Principal among the feelings he refers to are those having to do with what he calls "HPtFtU." You'll have to read the book to find out what those initials mean exactly. It is enough to know that they are his rough-hewn equivalent for Original Sin:

"HPtFtU is . . . what murder . . . has in common with telling a story at a dinner party at the expense of an absent mutual friend, a story which you know will cause pain when it gets back to them but which you tell anyway because it's very, very funny. Little, large, genial, deadly, in hot blood or in cold blood, done actively or allowed to happen through negligence - there's a look the instances of HPtFtU have in common, elusive to summarize but unmistakable when seen: a certain self-pleasing smirk. Christianity wants us to know the look when we see it in the mirror. . . ."

Religion, Spufford says, is "just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal," calling it "perverse . . . to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous."

Rodriguez's intensely personal book is practically a demonstration of this thesis. It is actually a kind of prose poem, layered, nuanced, and complex, not a book to be read straight through, one rather to be paused over and reflected upon. The central image is of the desert.

The Abrahamic religions, Rodriguez reminds us, had their origin in a landscape of rock and sand and burning sunlight: "The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgment within emptiness." The desert, for Rodriguez, really is the ground of faith: "The desert's uninhabitability convinces Jew and Christian and Muslim that we are meant for another place . . . descriptions of Eden, descriptions of the Promised Land, resemble oases."

"The majority of people who are alive," Rodriguez says, "do not find it impossible to believe that a computer can sort and sift, relay, recall, correct, cure, solve, destroy, filch, tabulate, and turn out the lights." On the other hand, "an increasing number of people who are alive believe that an all-knowing God - or let us say, an all-caring God - is an impossibility."

"The computer is a diminishing weight," he notes, made of "synthetic or mineral substances" whose "content is enlarging, unstable, ethereal." And therein lies a problem: "The danger of weightless knowledge is relativism."

Relativism was not a problem for Flannery O'Connor, whose A Prayer Journal, written more than half a century ago, was never intended for publication, and is only 37 pages long (it has been published along with a facsimile of the pages of the copybook she wrote it in). Written in 1946 and 1947, between the ages of 20 and 22, when she was attending writing workshops in Iowa City, A Prayer Journal is an extraordinary testament of living faith, both religious and artistic, though the two seem to have been one for O'Connor:

"Dear God, tonight . . . you have given me a story. Don't let me ever think . . . that I was anything but the instrument for Your story - just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation. . . . I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don't know how, just like I didn't know how to write it but it came."

Dismiss this if you will. But only after reading her novel Wise Blood.