Ron Collins
Aug 28, 2017 · 8 min read

I went to Catholic school through sixth grade, made my first Holy Communion in second, and was given a five-inch high statue of the Virgin Mary for my confirmation in eighth. I did all that because it’s the religion I was placed into. Why would I think anything else?

Someone once told me, in a narrative quite similar to yours: “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” I’ve known a lot of people who were raised in the Catholic faith but no longer practiced it in detail as adults, and to the extent that it’s any of my business to stick labels on folks, I’d have to say, yeah, they’re still Catholics. Just like this new trendy thing starting to appear on Twitter, of “ex-Muslims” expostulating on how (allah be praised) they are no longer Muslims…

You’ll have gathered by now, or you will soon, that I have a very critical view, call it a hostile one if you like, toward ALL religion. But I am no atheist. Quite the contrary: precisely because I believe in a supreme power behind and within all things, I see every form of religion flying whatever flag and kowtowing to whatever idols, as abominations, mockeries of God, ways of trying to place the divine into manageable boxes as if God were the proprietary possession of one form of “faith”, making God not master but servant, causing faith to be invested not in God at all but in the quite mortal demands placed on humanity by the liturgies and superstitions of religion.

To be fair, I was raised in the Baptist faith (and you might fairly ask “which one?”) My father was once by turns a Southern Baptist pastor and an executive for the Southern Baptist Convention doing what amounted to media distribution in the pre-digital sixties out of its widespread and influential “Church Library Department” in a mini-skyscraper in downtown Nashville which belonged basement to roof to that organization, probably still does.

He had this colleague, a lady I’ll never forget named Jackie, whose job it was to read incoming submissions of books and other materials, and accept or reject them as suitable to a proper church library. I learned to read, before elementary school, from road signs, cereal boxes, and the books Jackie rejected and my dad brought home and gave to me because I loved to read. Let me tell you, the stuff not Baptist enough for the honor of gathering dust in some church library in some small town, revealed a lot of things to me. Some of it was just outright New Age nihilism, offering bizarre and nonsensical messages of hopelessness and cynicism, casting reality in an absurd and mocking light, having little at all to do with right and wrong or sin and redemption and more suggestive of an idea that everything is just sort of ridiculous. Not hard to see why Jackie didn’t try and get those volumes past the allegedly Biblical muster of her superiors. I expect she was probably supposed to destroy the rejects, but instead she surreptitiously passed them on to a fascinating little boy who read everything he could get his hands on and never got his questions coherently answered by adults on any of it.

I think Jackie giving me those books was a kind of anti-zealotry on her part, acts of rebellion. She was a single lady with no children, what may have been called back then an “old maid” or “spinster”, and in her time just being a lady with an office job above the rank of secretary at all was a kind of one-woman insurrection. To this day I wonder if being a Baptist at all was anything to her but a way of trading in a childhood credential of church attendance as a way of being employed. She changed my life, and I suspect she meant to.

All my life, I have observed that religion, and faith, have almost nothing to do with one another. The most religious people seem to be the ones who have the least faith in anything but their own self-righteousness. And the people I have known who exhibit the most faith by their actions and attitudes, have been the ones who wanted little to do with the trappings and genuflections of a life of religion. Religion, seems to align people into neat columns of followers of quite human personality cults, be they pastors, priests, evangelists, imams, rabbis, whatever form of shaman-guru-witch-doctor gets their approval and causes them to feel good about themselves by whatever means.

Early in my adult life came a tall, handsome, convincing cowboy figure, an actor by trade though never a very successful one, who had discovered years before that by switching political factions in mid-career, fingering his fellow union members as suspected communists for the FBI and the HUAC, taking up new work as a corporate pitchman instead of a screen idol, he could smoothly transform his schtick into one of Savior of Humanity by playing the tall-riding Tough Guy the times seemed to call for, and ended up President of the United States after being endorsed by multiple high-powered religionists and taking the ingenious strategy of convincing the largely Protestant-Democrat Old South that he was more representative of “Judeo-Christian Values” (whatever that means) than the Baptist deacon and daily Bible student who was his predecessor, fellow name of Carter.

Overnight, the meaning of much of the widely divergent and highly fractured Protestant American faith-brand, came to be that to simultaneously kowtow to the American flag and its fraud of a new President passing himself ignominiously as a Christian (whatever that means), was in effect to express one’s faith in God. God, after all, was an American, the First Republican, and He was born on July 4, 1776, and His job was to “bless” us because in Him we “trust”, etc, etc.

It was disgusting. And that is an overused word today that I seldom set down in a sentence. But the Reagan era, as seen from someone who had grown up both reading the Bible and attending church, and reading the church’s rejects passed on to me by a closet feminist-in-her-own-right working for it, showed me a degree of hypocrisy and intolerance and self-righteousness among people I had once considered my own, that did, yes, disgust me.

Along my journey I encountered many people following many religions, and many more following little more than their own ambitions as mitigated by the limits of whatever consciences they had. I began to realize that any one religion, or none at all, is as good as another in terms of being used to enable naked greed, posturing sanctimony, unconscionable intolerance, preposterous magical thinking, and disclamatory moral relativism.

Another movie star (this one a better actor anyway, he got it from his dad) taught us, that “greed is good”. During that particular time I was living and working in a hyper-liberal college town and the faith du jour among a lot of people I knew was a kind of hybridized Buddhism with sweat-lodgy faux-Native-American overtones. Seeing people (quite greedy in their own way, but claiming not to be because they were Democrats) kneel and pray to a photo of some old guru, or hang on the every word of some charlatan claiming one-sixty-fourth-blood of some tribe nobody ever heard of while learning how to light a bundle of sage with a candle, seemed so very similar to other people saluting their allegedly-godly starsy-stripey flag and excusing atrocities in Central America as the struggle to save the world from communism, that I realized there was no real difference between them other than the rhetoric and symbolism of their chosen liturgies.

And I also had this visceral sense even way back then in the ancient analog world of another millennium, that any one of them might either give me the shirt off their backs, or stick a knife in mine, given the circumstances and whatever tweaking of whatever moralistic code any of them might pretend to be following. The one thing that would motivate either extreme of behavior, I came to grasp, was how they would feel about themselves for choosing the one or the other. And that neither God nor country nor any version of ideology had anything to do with why people do what they do: what motivates us all, is whatever it takes to be able to live with ourselves.

The problem I have with the Catholic thing, and admittedly this is certainly among my most intolerant prejudices, is that from early childhood, infancy even, this un-holy “Church” in faraway Rome and hiding inside a castle full of absurdly-clad old bachelors, assures the faithful that it has what it takes to live with oneself thoroughly covered, in detail like a really solid insurance policy, and that the individual need not trouble themselves with maintaining any real connection to the divine for their own part; just go through the motions, let the nuns beat you and the priests rape you if God ordains that they must, never feel good about your own body or its desires, just intone the liturgies and don’t worry about what they might mean or who wrote them down for you, and whatever goes wrong, just say your ten Hail Marys and collect your ergo-te-absolvos before going right back out and being as sinful or unenlightened or ignorant as life requires you to be, because Holy Church has it covered for you and always did. God, after all, is a Catholic, He lives in Rome (or Jerusalem, or someplace like that), He speaks Latin, and Father Pedophile has it on Good Authority that what the Church wants for you, is what God wants for you.

I find every other religion just as revolting and intolerable as I do the Roman one, so don’t feel picked on. One might say that the Roman one has the arts of pageantry and architectural delusions and endless idols and graven images down to a far more polished and impressive form than most of the others, but other than that I really can hardly tell them apart: they all make God into a servant of human caprice, and they all create systems of obedience to it for the faithful to obey that creates and enforces vast distance between humanity and its Creator, and by intent and design.

The other day I got behind a police car in this tiny little cow town full of evangelical Republicans, folks I have great regard for and honor that by not going into my own views on religion-versus-faith with them, what would be the point? On the tailgate of the official SUV were emblazoned the words, “In God We Trust.” Every time I see that I wonder, who decided that in my behalf? Who’s this “we?” Which God? Trust how, exactly? What if “we” don’t but just pretend to because Ronald Reagan is still the Sub-Messiah in these parts?

Whatever. I just don’t make an issue of it. But I also decline to attend any of the dozen-odd churches within ten miles, every one of them non-Catholic and more or less “evangelical” (whatever that, after all, even means). What goes on between me and God, is my and God’s business and always has been. I never could get why anyone requires more than that from their faith, and will part company with common sense and basic neighborliness in order to buy into what amounts to a brand name claiming special ties to the divine that the others don’t offer. I have no use for any of it, and see every bit of it as ungodly idolatry and self-exonerating superstition.

)

Ron Collins

Written by

Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s