A few decades ago I was awakened at seven o’clock one Sunday morning by the persistent droning of my downstairs door buzzer. I was living then in a back apartment on the top floor of an East Village walk-up that was without an intercom or the capacity to buzz visitors inside. This circumstance made it necessary for me to descend five flights of stairs and to personally unlock the frosted-glass front door to see who it was.
Standing there were two Jehovah’s Witnesses.
At the time I bore no animus toward people who presented themselves as fervently religious. Though I deemed them delusional, I respected both their right to their delusion and their need of it. The proselytizers I encountered were more likely to draw pity from me than to provoke my ire.
So if I had good reason to be put out by the inconvenience they’d caused me, an inconvenience compounded by the ungodly hour they’d picked to pay a call, my reaction to the elderly and finely attired black couple with soft Georgia accents who greeted me — he with a bible in one hand and a straw hat in the other; she wearing a hat bedecked with white and yellow flowers — wasn’t in the least bit hostile. In fact, while I made it clear that I had no use for the message they were delivering, I was as courteous as I could be. I didn’t want to tamper with their fantasy or hurt their feelings and when I closed the door on them it was very gently.
But that was a while back, before religion assumed the weight and influence that it has in our cultural and political affairs and before I understood just where the so-called “True Believers” are coming from.
We tend to allow that, unhinged as we may judge them to be, evangelicals, in their efforts to make converts or to bring “more religion” into the culture, are doing the work of a God they feel with genuine confidence to be real. Some of us might even imagine that they care about our salvation. But this isn’t what’s happening. Dealing with their fear of death, a fear exacerbated by 9/11 and the destruction of the myth of American invincibility, and wanting desperately for a God, and the potential for eternal life implicit in the concept of God, to exist, the real mission of these people isn’t to share a revelation but to validate beliefs they’re not sure of by securing the agreement of others. To prove the existence of God to themselves by achieving a universal consensus on the matter is the true aspiration of the religious right. And I resent the manifold ways in which their ambition to make a formal theocracy of America — a more than adequate means of certifying their beliefs — is already poisoning the lives of the rest of us.
I’m speaking, of course, of their interference with homosexual marriage and a woman’s freedom to end a pregnancy. I’m also talking about the brakes they managed to apply to government sponsored stem-cell research and the role they played in obliging us to endure a George W. Bush for two terms (not to mention what his presidency has left in its wake) because he professed to share their faith in Jesus Christ. And I’m referring as well to what turned out to be a politically pivotal quantity of Tea Party candidates that they were instrumental in electing to Congress.
And, again, none of this has been, at bottom, to the purpose of spreading a vision (which could maybe have claimed some level of legitimacy), but rather to, in their own minds, ratify by numbers, law or custom, the presence of a deity.
Since there remains a sufficient population of heathens to challenge their beliefs and to keep their uncertainty alive, reaching their unspoken goal will only become more urgent for the evangelicals. They will get louder and more insistent. And their successes will be more pernicious. Is a President Billy Graham completely out of the question?
I should say that having a few issues of my own with the prospect of death, and quite capable myself of twisting and distorting reality in order to live in the world with a semblance of equilibrium, I can, even under the present conditions, experience some empathy for the Christian right’s agenda. (And I can also appreciate the necessity and durability of religion itself. I’m always taken aback when people whose minds I admire predict that human beings will one day “outgrow” the need for religion, as if it were merely a stage in our evolution. Like the biologists who are looking for a religion gene, they miss the point. For as long as death is a precondition of life, a need for some kind of invented deity, with a plan for mankind — and a collection of rules and practices which, if scrupulously followed, offer the promise of an afterlife — is going to prevail for a large percentage of humanity.)
But while I’m not insensitive to the evangelicals’ cause that doesn’t make its increasing encroachment on the lives of the secular any more acceptable to me. I repeat: Is a President Billy Graham out of the question? No. If there was once a time when we could indulge the folks of the Christian right at no substantial cost to ourselves, that’s not the case any longer. Their quest to conscript us into their immortality project has gotten too much out of hand and leaves no room for such generosity. At this point there’s little choice but to do battle with them; to fight their actions at every turn. The consequences for those of us who live for this life rather than the next one have become too dire to let them slide.
Levin is a writer of short fiction as well as general commentary, with multiple published collections. He is also a prominent jazz writer. See the About and Front pages.
Called by Nat Hentoff “a writer from whom I always learn something,” Robert Levin is a jazz critic whose work focuses on free jazz. Writing since the 1950s, he has contributed to Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, All About Jazz and Downbeat. He’s the coauthor of two books on free jazz and has penned more than 100 liner notes for major labels like Blue Note. They include albums by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. His criticism and memoirs reflect long-standing, first-hand engagement with the musicians and movement he documents.