Conversations from the Teachers’ Lounge: ‘Religion Is Stupid’
I’d rather be a humble student than a proud teacher.
PRINT PRINT PRIIIIINT! I’M NEVER GONNA MAAAAKE IIIIIT!!
Every one of my tensed muscles (which is all of my muscles) is dead-set on prying my stupid, overly-revised worksheet from the sinister claws of my clunky classroom printer. It’s t-minus 16 minutes until 37 amped-up 17 year olds will burst into my sardine-can classroom, and I desperately need this worksheet to avoid a mass upheaval.
The printer gurgles its song of hope, and I snatch that hard-earned sheet up like some Olympic baton. I race across campus to the photocopier every teacher wants to kill and punched some buttons.
Knowing I won’t be able to pee for the next 110 minutes, after pressing “start,” I race through the staff lounge to the bathroom, *hoping* the machine will spit out all 84 double-sided copies before it inevitably jams for the 232nd time today.
Throwing open the bathroom door, I mumble, “what’s up” to the hideous potato bug that lives under the sink and fling open the door to the handicap stall--the only place a teacher can catch her breath without interruption. I wipe with toilet seat covers for the third day in a row, because education funding rocks.
I emerge from my dingy yellow-lit oasis, pausing in the doorway and squinting into the sun-lit staff lounge and the 10 or so worldly colleagues who eat lunch there daily.
Everyday from 12:22–12:57, they discuss politics, current events, and Sportsball. I generally steer clear of that space because everyone knows teachers are supposed to be highly informed and strongly opinionated on anything NPR talks about.
To my secret shame, I don’t know what station it’s even on. And then as a Bay Arean (?), I’m expected to worship the Warriors (they’re the baseball team, right?), Giants, Raiders, or maybe the 49ers (apologies to the A’s). So for lack of knowledge or the courage to admit it, I generally steer clear of staff lounge discourse.
But among that handful of worldly colleagues is Sarah–my hyper, Spanish-teaching, margarita-drinking girrrl–and she is waving me over to her table. I decide to derail my stress-induced power walk and swerve toward her table. I land in the blue plastic chair next to her. Across from us sits Joe and a few other colleagues.
Joe is the one who thinks religion is stupid.
He’s also a legend on our campus. He’s got a Ph.D. from Cal and something like 30 years of teaching experience. That’s just credentials, though. The real impressive thing about Joe is his sharp wit, sagacious spirit, impenetrable confidence and the cool demeanor with which he pulls it all together.
He also pulls together the year’s hottest gossip and scandals in his much anticipated stand-up routine at the end-of-year staff party. He headlines it, every year.
If teachers had a homecoming court, he would be the senior class king, and I the timid freshman busy getting regular beat-downs from class-clowns who do things like fast-pitch massive spit wads whenever I turn my back. (I’m pretty sure my first year of teaching qualified as trauma.)
Sarah and I are laughing about our students’ daily exploits when all of a sudden an ominous silence fell like a blanket over all conversations. Joe seized the opportunity to make an intellectual announcement. Leaning back with his legs extended, feet crossed, and fingers laced loosely across his lap, he authoritatively announced to the room that “Religion is stupid.”
Nobody had been talking about religion or philosophy. His claim sounded like a piece of trivia he taught in history class–unquestionably factual.
With those six syllables, he dismissed the meaning of life and love and why for people of all cultures of all times in all places.
I wasn’t offended–just shocked. We are educated educators. Surely there is a place for religious studies at the University of California campuses we’d attended. Surely religion is full of nuance, and symbolism, and value, and culture, and the meaning of life–it is arguably the lens through which we view the world, whether we consider ourselves “religious” or not. (For more on that, check out this book.)
In short, the words burst into the lunchroom with all the drama of Kool Aid Man.
We all exchanged uneasy glances while Joe basked in the center of attention.
“Hey Tiffany, you’re religious, aren’t you?”
My friend, Sarah, is blunt and honest, and I’m sort of relieved to be outed: the burden of concocting a respectable yet honest response was no longer mine.
So I start staggering through semantics:
“Wellllllll... I don’t know if I’d say I’m reliiiigous... buuuuuuut I try to follow Jesus… soooo yaaaaah… you could say I’m Christian.”
There it was. Joe had just handed me my name-tag and I slapped it to my chest: “Hello, my name is Stupid!”
Satisfied, his blue eyes narrowed as he coolly sized me up. Behind them, he was brewing a potion of words to build his case that religious people (coughcoughme) are ignorant, irrational, and simple-minded. Without blinking, he looked me square in the eye as he poured his next words out as smooth as jazz:
“God is a black lesbian who rides a unicycle while listening to reggae.”
As he waited for me to take his bait, he couldn’t quite maintain a poker face. I spotted a slight smirk that sneered at the history of ugly reactions he must have reeled in from people *like me.*
And speaking of people like me, aren’t we all guilty?
Guilty of generalizing, of building straw men. In the sketchy shadows of our human nature, something lurks that subtly whispers, “I am more human than they are.”
It’s like we see our own complex, nuanced humanity through incredibly sharp, 20/20, HD-enhanced vision, but when it comes to accepting the full, complex humanity of others (especially *certain* others), we’re suddenly wearing someone else’s prescription glasses, and all we can see of our brothers and sisters is basic and blurry enough for us to deem them “stupid.”
Joe was waiting for my “stupid” to come out and play.
What was he expecting? An angry glare? Would I tear-up with condescending pity for this poor misled man? Or would my mouth gape in shocked personal offense? Would words fall from my mouth that reveal a distaste for lesbians or female divinity or black people or unicycle riders or reggae?
I met his aged blue eyes and scooted my chair closer to his.
A genuinely intrigued and impressed “Huh!” escaped my lips.
I wasn’t offended–why would I be? His views are just that–his.
And last I checked, God has no ethnicity or sexuality. God is outside of and Beyond all of that.
Plus if Jesus was born in the age of the unicycle to carnival-workers rather than in that manger to Mary and Joseph, he probably would have trained as a unicycler rather than a carpenter. He and his carnie-disciples would have had a heck of an easier time getting around.
And everybody likes reggae! Why wouldn’t God? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s the devil’s music, because weed and stuff. Puh-leeeease.
What else was left for me to say to Joe? Nothing. There was only wonder. In the *fat chance* corner of my brain, I hoped his claim was some bizarre metaphor. Really though, I knew the sad truth that he was just trying to get my goat. Just in case though, I said,
“Elaborate.”
But alas, moments passed, and no elaboration came. There wasn’t even a word. He was as speechless as I was to his “religion is stupid.”
I did, however, catch a nearly imperceptible nod of approval from him. Then a corner of his mouth grew into the faintest hint of a smile. I like to think that in his mind’s eye, I metamorphosed from a caricature to a beautiful mess of a human being, just like him.
The bell rang just seconds later. Joe and I, along with our small audience of colleagues, marched out toward sixth period. But first, I had to pick up those photocopies. On them, Frederick Douglass joins the conversation from his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,–a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,–a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,–and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection… For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.
Then in a few days, my students would discover this in Douglass’s Appendix:
“between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
You can’t reduce religion to simple stupidity. It’s not black-and-white. We’re supposed to use the brains God gave us. We’re meant to think critically, not generalize; we’re better humble students than we are proud judges.
We’re best when we treat our *others* not as Strawmen, but as the complex masterpieces they are. We are meant to call out hypocrisy just like Jesus and Douglass did. But above all, you and I must remain open to being found by Truth every new day.
