Soviet Atheist Fasting For God
In my childhood, the date of January 7th meant two things: first, it heralded the end of winter break, which began on the eve of December 31st, in honor of universally loved “Noviy God” (New Year), and ended one painfully short week later. Second, it was the day my parents stubbornly, inconceivably insisted on celebrating Rozhdestvo — Russian Orthodox Christmas. They dressed the table with the obligatory white tablecloth and vodka, spread out holiday salads and pickles, and scattered salomka – long skinny pretzel sticks — on the table, to symbolize the straw Christ was born on. These pretzel sticks were really the only religiously-flavored part of the whole ritual, and yet, the pageant upset me greatly. What bothered me was its explicit contradiction. My parents were atheists; and I, 9 years old and having not yet declared my own position on the God thing, knew that at least some other people out there really believed and practiced the religion my parents, non-believers, lazily borrowed to have another excuse for a mini party. Their quasi-spiritual appropriation made me uncomfortable, because I felt it was disrespectful to those who honored the day in good faith. Not that I thought those people had the right idea.
Contradiction and discomfort remain my main associations with both religion and its absence. People I’ve known who subscribe to a religious tradition often seem hypocritical, choosing strange practices to adhere to while disregarding others that are situationally inconvenient. On the other hand, those I’ve known to be confidently atheist often possess peculiar superstitions, have a fetishistic love for religious art or architecture, or are boringly dogmatic about some other thing. Most of “my” people — my adult, chosen, family of lefty, artsy, intellectual, queer-ish folk — are generally ambivalent about religion, secular Jews or Christians who have long given up their mandated religious ceremonies and fasts, save a few family meals. Most of the time we don’t even bother discussing our casually assumed atheism.
When Mixed Company took on Religion by fasting for and writing about the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, I felt myself excited to learn, but also palpably nervous: I didn’t actually want to change my opinion about religion. What I wanted was to feel less ignorant and prejudiced about it, and therefore, I thought, more enlightened. As a soviet-born atheist who spends most of her time in secular and scholarly communities, it’s way easier for me to find out someone is gay, transgender, divorced, an addict, or a furry than to understand and accept that they belong to and practice an organized religion. What’s different about this identity than all the others?
Being a white person trying to be woke, I experience a kind of meta-discomfort when something about Other people makes me queasy. I pride myself on being tolerant, open, respectful of difference and diversity, committed to freedom and solidarity. But certain practices not even the tiniest part of me wants to resonate with. I remain especially psychologically distant from practitioners of organized religion, most powerfully the trinity of Abraham’s monotheistic legacy: Christianity, Islam, and (to a lesser extent probably due to its minoritized history and frequent non-observance) Judaism. I reject their male, patriarchal God; the ways they have been used to justify conservatism and violence, or to repress women and homosexuality. I dislike their ideological colonization and bureaucratic institutionalization. I don’t accept any authority that claims itself as absolute, or justifies its rules with “because I said so.” As a knowledge worker, I categorically don’t accept one book as the source of all truths.
But I decided to fast for Ramadan, even though I am not Muslim and I do not accept Allah as my God or Muhammad as my prophet, to push myself into an embodied solidarity with the Muslim world. In early 2017, the president announced that citizens of 8 Muslim majority countries would not be allowed to travel to the United Stated. Learning of the ban, I remembered the discomfort my 9 year old self felt, wanting to protect the religious others — those I didn’t agree with or understand– from mis-representation. And I re-felt the shock my 16 year old self felt, hearing my peers say after 9/11: “If I see a Muslim walk in here, I’m gonna beat the shit out of him.” This “logic” seemed crazy to me, just like the ill-logic of Trump’s aggressive travel ban.
While I wanted to defend the Muslim community, I felt ignorant about what exactly I’d set out to defend. I knew so little about Islam and its practices. I hadn’t even realized it was the second largest religion practiced in the world, because in my worlds most people had been atheist Jews or quietly disillusioned Christians. I’ve learned to tolerate my intuitive discomfort with women who wear hijab (un-feminist!) but spend big money on hair and fashion (more un-feminist!), or the seemingly self-flagellating practice of praying 5 times a day, or fasting for a month mostly without water. These contradictions had stuck in my throat as I tried to swallow them along with a big glass of multicultural tolerance.
I decided to fast for Ramadan, thinking that if my mind will resist this strange faith, maybe I can force my body into feeling and knowing what I don’t agree with. According to the Qu’ran, fasting creates a sense of “God-consciousness” and self-purification — called “taqwa.” I thought that maybe through my hunger and thirst, I could feel what my mind won’t let me.
Genesis
I find as I get older that no one really asks me “what Religion I am”, but when someone does, I typically identify as a “soviet atheist” — a label that foregrounds the situated origins of my absent faith. My parents were scientists raised in an environment where religion — the opium of the masses — was replaced by the daily breadlines of a totalitarian communist state. They were a third generation into the Russian revolution, growing up indigenous to soviet secularism — in practice, a syncretic assemblage of ideology, superstition and hushed religious ritual (because people don’t just stop doing things when the government tells them to — they just do them privately). I was born from them and into that state, and was lucky to come to consciousness in a time (early 90s) when it was safe to think a little more freely.
As a small child, I’d bet on the possibility that God might exist and that I ought to pray to him, sensing that my faith was the only currency I had to invest in things I wanted to happen. Mostly I prayed for safety. When mama was late coming from work, I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and thought: Please God, let my mama be safe and I promise I’ll believe in you forever!!!! Mama was always safe (thank God), but each time I thought, maybe she would have been anyway?
I moved to the States when I was 12 and was enrolled in 7th grade at a Catholic school (my parents were subtly advised not to trust urban public institutions in America). At St. Peter’s Elementary, in addition to learning English, I got enculturated into American Catholicism. I wore a plaid skirt, recited “Our Father, who Art in Heaven” and the Pledge of Allegiance (both memorized purely by sound and not meaning), took mandatory religion class, and attended Catholic Mass every week. At church, I copied my peers’ internalized motions–kneel, sit, say amen, sing some gospel verse–a game of mimicry. While my classmates prepared for their confirmation in class, I had to do a research project about my supposed religion; since soviet atheism wasn’t an option, I learned, for the first time, some actual facts about the Russian Orthodox church: the meaning behind the slanted “footrest” on the orthodox cross (it represents the fates of two men crucified next to Jesus, one’s downward path to hell and the other’s to heaven), and the circling and crowning rituals of a Russian Orthodox wedding.
Some time that year, a 4th grade boy from our school drowned in a local pool. A young, handsome priest came to talk to our class about it. I stared at the foreign authority of his perfectly pressed clerical collar as he attempted to make sense of a senseless tragedy, but he couldn’t seem to say anything that would console the tall, beautiful, deer-like Christine weeping in the back of the class. Soon after Columbine happened and we all walked around feeling suddenly like nothing has changed but everything was different, no place safe or innocent again. A few weeks later, I sat in the passenger seat of my dad’s car and said to him, unprompted: “you know I think people believe in religion to feel better about the things they are scared of.” He didn’t celebrate or debate me, just let me express this revelation. At that moment I established my official relationship to religion: I would always watch it as a distant, collective lie.
After 8th grade, we moved to a “good suburb” with a “good school,” which was diverse in its collection of model minorities. I hung out with my “Gujju” (short for a person from the Indian state of Gujarat) friends while they waxed their upper lips, not knowing if they were Hindu or Muslim. I ate matzah at my Jewish best friend’s house during Passovers. Religious backgrounds were no longer compulsory, as in Catholic school. They were just funny cultural staging for the important things we all shared and cared about: gossip about hook-ups (or lack of them), friendship drama, the exegesis of all things that were and were not “cool.”
Then, at 14, browsing Barnes & Noble’s New Age section, I discovered Wicca, a contemporary form of paganism. Probably because its gothy aesthetics and mystic practices were marketed to my exact demographic of misanthropic proto-feminist, Wicca made perfect sense. Unlike the patriarchal religions, witchcraft connected me to the earth and my own feminine power, to herbs and energies and elements that were both material and intuitive. And it was so customizable and pretty, like a grown-up, slightly dangerous version of dollhouse play. As my own priestess, I could invent my own rituals while drawing on centuries-old traditions of spell-making and magic. The first spell I cast, asking the goddess to make me menstruate for the first time, yielded positive results in exactly 3 days. Maybe that too would have happened anyway, but I felt powerful nonetheless.
While Wiccanism, with its pentacles and candles, was a decidedly western set of practices for me to adopt, the underlying ideas of spiritualism and shamanism are no stranger to the Russian constitution. Through centuries of enforced religions or secularism, Russian people have always believed in a soul, in the power of plants to heal, in ghosts and the paranormal. More contradictions: My mother, an atheist with a pharmaceutical engineering degree, made me herbal tinctures from sage and buckthorn when I was sick, while my father, a PhD in metallurgy, was the resident applicator of cupping therapy. When people die, they “visit” us in the form of birds and dreams, but to the question of what happens to us after death, my parents always resignedly shrug and answer: “Nothing.” When my Wiccan phase went out with the bathwater of chokers and black nails, its diffuse earthy magic remained.
Since then, I’ve vacillated between being more and less spiritual and witchy. For some time when I was 18 I felt the benevolent presence of what I could only think to describe as a guardian angel. But still I knew that my angel wasn’t a pale, haloed messenger of a patriarchical God, because I know in the deepest place, the center of feeling-knowing-being, that there isn’t any God that has one worshippable shape. There is just everything: life and love in millions of wild forms.
Fasting
Despite my disavowal of religions, I do think that something like taqwa — God-consciousness — is a thing, actually. I’ve had experiences that have given me sense of what might be called “divinity” — a vast and tingling feeling of awe and connectedness. Because I have no church, I’m lucky to feel this sensation everywhere I go in world: visiting the lake at night, gazing into the face of a person I’m in love with, meditating, listening to the wailing 4-saxophone harmonics of Battle Trance’s “Blade of Love” , or looking at a painting of Miro’s whimsical constellations. Sometimes, just walking down a city street, I’m amazed and inspired by the cracks in the pavement, the varieties of plants and critters, the diversity of architecture and urban signage, all forming the playful palimpsest of nature-culture’s site-specific installation. Everything is beautiful and interesting; and it feels so good to be alive.
I also believe that eating, or not eating, done a certain way, can facilitate this experience. A year ago, I stopped eating flesh, eggs, and milk taken from animals. Accepting the inconvenience of this choice, in a world that cheerfully perpetuates and ignores the industrialized rape and killing of living bodies and the systematic pollution of soil and air for its preference for a certain protein, has been rewarded with a feeling that I’ve described as a “direct channel to the Universe.” I feel more connected, blessed, loving, generous, and peaceful in my daily life. There’s no religion that told me to practice veganism; just a personal ethical conviction. I don’t think this decision opens the door into any kind of afterlife or heaven; but I do feel more centered and authentic eating this way. When I ate raw and vegan for about a year at 18, I felt even more spiritual bliss, as if living itself became a way of praying.
So I, too, am full of hypocrisy and contradictions. My personal atheism doesn’t mean I’ve chosen science and logic and material evidence as my true, orienting centers and have rejected spirituality and meaning and mystery. I just haven’t subscribed to a religious tradition; instead I’ve carved my own spiritual practice, out of: the politics and aesthetics of punk music and diy culture; contemporary art and literature; Buddhist and ancient Greek and pagan mythologies; astrology and critical theory, and my parents’ optimistic fatalism and Russian superstitions. I am large and contain multitudes. Just like everyone else, just like the world. So why do I still find Other people’s contradictions and multitudes so alien and confusing?
My first week of Ramadan, I worked hard to observe the exact regimen of fasting from dawn and sundown, exhausting my brain and body in an attempt to experience the God-consciousness of this particular religious order. I tried to open my heart to understand the pleasures of piety and surrender. I felt, with my body, the appeal of ritualized prayer and humility, and developed a curious admiration for Muhammad as leader and prophet. The experience made me feel a new solidarity with — rather than difference from and suspicion of — Islam. I started seeing women wearing hijab (so many in Chicago!) as more beautiful and sisterly. I was unreasonably excited hearing my car mechanic greet a fellow customer with A-Salaam-Alaikum; I didn’t need him to know that I was fasting for Ramadan, but I noticed, to my surprise, that I could feel more curious and safe taking space in his room. This expansion (of self) and inclusion (of others into the self) have been the biggest gifts of this project. A tiny part of me did find a new resonance with a part of the world I once saw as alien.
I also found the same contradictions I’ve seen across other believers and non-believers. Despite the personal peace and an elegant worship structure I’d learn to appreciate in the actual practices of Islam (prayer, fasting, dress, respect), and the intelligence, passion for social justice, and integrity of the actual Muslim people I know, the suras of the Qu’ran continue to confuse and discomfort me — in much the same ways as Old and New Testaments do. They contain prescribed violence against non-believers. Coupled with patriarchy and misogyny, they make it ideologically plausible to justify regimes that forbid women to drive, endorse female genital mutilation, allow men to marry 9 year olds, and to imagine killing people in the name of Allah. I still struggle to understand why people hold on to these harmful texts.
But I also learned that in practice, people approach Islam differently from the scriptures, and differently from one another; some fast just once a week for Ramadan, others observe a 12-hour “morning to evening” fast more in line with the spirit of the practice than the exact timetable of Muslim law. Some drink and smoke and have premarital sex; some pray sometimes while others never. I suppose this should come as no surprise– I’ve encountered the same contradictions with my friends born into other religious traditions, or with my superstitious scientist parents, or with my own atheist witchy self.
Every Muslim person I met I wanted to register as the paragon of Islamic faith, but their inevitable interpersonal variation and human complexity kept stumping me, forcing me to revise my limited stereotype. Despite my liberalism and curiosity, I still can’t help but fix people into limited categories; it’s just how our brains work. In his 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, social psychologist Gordon Allport theorized the evolutionary and cognitive biases that lead us to make the categories of Us and Them– tribal thinking that was critical for early survival. In his book, Allport ranked prejudice on a scale of intensity, from lowest level — anti-locution (stereotyping, jokes) to highest — extermination (genocide).
While I am outraged by others’ more intense forms of prejudice towards Muslims and other groups, I still form myths about and implicitly avoid people whose practices and histories are Other than mine. Though less intense than physical attacks, preconceived assumptions about and exclusions of people are instances of psychic harm that accumulate to create larger social, material, emotional and physical consequences for both the victims and perpetrators of prejudice.
Allport also developed a method for reducing intergroup prejudice. His “contact theory” is the idea that under certain conditions interpersonal contact is the best way to reduce prejudice between social and cultural groups, by expanding the definition of the in-group and who is included in its membership. The conditions for productive contact include (1) equal status, (2) a common goal, (3) mutual adherence to a greater law or custom, and (4) informal, casual interaction. These equalizing conditions are important, as we know from weekly reminders that local proximity doesn’t automatically lead to tolerance or understanding. My hypothesis was that Ramadan could facilitate these conditions — as we observe a custom and come together to eat, or to talk while not eating, even with our race and class differences, for the span of a meal, we are on the same level, trying to make sense of each other.
Communion
Ultimately, it wasn’t avoiding food that brought me closer to a world I once considered foreign, but the conversations I wouldn’t have found myself in if I wasn’t fasting.
On the eve of Eid, Saturday June 24, I was invited to an iftar at a home of a Saudi family. We feasted on hummus and tabouli, samosas, a delicate rice dish cooked with fragrant spices and raisins, and two kinds of jareesh (a porridge made of cracked wheat berries and mushrooms). After the meal, we sat on lush burgundy velvet couches, drinking tea flavored with rose water from small crystal cups, and eating baklava and arabic donuts doused with rich date syrup. The family’s two generations of women wore hijab and designer shoes. We didn’t talk about religion. Instead, we collectively ogled the 1-year old nephew in traditional Saudi dress as he pushed around a basketball, and listened to the father tell us about the ancestral migrations of the family through Turkey and Syria. Despite our cultural and linguistic barriers, before the night ended, the mother invited us all to visit her home in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. I was taken aback by the generosity and gratitude repeatedly expressed to us, the white, scantily dressed, gluttonous visitors, for coming over to eat this family’s food on their holy day. And I was confused by the apparent contradiction of the 25-year old friend who invited me, who said he slept between 12pm-7pm the entire month (effectively avoiding the hardest fasting times), but would spend the Sunday of Eid praying at the mosque.
Another new Muslim friend and I talk to while we both skip lunch at a workshop. Tariq, a young Black artist and musician from Chicago, is frustrated that people assume he’d converted because he’s Black and not Arab, and that there isn’t enough analysis of class difference in the Muslim community, or understanding of the differences Muslim immigrants and Muslim Blacks experience in America. As our chat meanders to religious differences more generally, he says “there’s so much brutality in America that people need religion.” I’m not sure what he means, but I squeeze the insides of my brain to try to get it. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up Black in America, or to be a Black man in a Chicago; I don’t personally feel the kinds of brutalities that would necessitate religion. Like Kalonji, I’d always thought religion was associated with more brutality than its absence, but this thinking is as lazy as its opposite. Maybe what he means is that because there’s so much brutality in America (gun violence, hate crimes, polarization), “America” itself isn’t enough for everybody to believe in, and people need something to believe in. A dream, a sense of community, a common project. There isn’t a shared sense of dusha– the Russian notion of the collective soul– in this country based on freedom of and from religion. (Of course, Russia is the same; its supposedly shared identity is deeply exclusionary of various Others — Jews, Central Asians — and there too, the people who feel they need religion are the ones that haven’t been able to profit from the nationalist ethno-cultural dream).
As I feel and think this, I suddenly want the United States, my adoptive home, with its dream of freedom and difference, to better facilitate the conditions for productive contact. Maybe what Tariq means when he says people need religion, is we need something to bring us together around a shared custom, to just hang out.
On August 21st, 2017, I spend the day in Carbonale, IL, lucky to be invited to a friend’s family’s party to celebrate the total eclipse. On a quiet yard with 9 or 10 others, mostly strangers to me, I watch the bright light of midday turn dim and the moon cover the perfect circle of the sun with its own spherical body for 2 whole minutes. We all see it, we see all of it. The collective commentary among my co-viewers is sparse and humble. “Wow.” “That’s so cool.” Long sighs. Silence. After the totality passes, we acknowledge each other with an understanding that needs no words. We know that we all shared the experience of a special and rare thing together. I notice myself wishing that everyone in America could know this same beautiful rare thing in the same shared way. Maybe it would make us a little less prejudiced about our contradictions and differences. Maybe that’s what a God is for.
