The Perennial Question: "What Religion Are You?"
What My Students Always Asked
From 1989 to 2023, I was a full-time college professor. I taught courses primarily in Comparative Religious Studies - World Religions, Religion in America, Religion and Political Controversy, Women and Religion, Religion and the Arts, etc. etc. My goal was always to be equal in my presentation of each religion - I would present their systems of beliefs and traditions objectively, but reserving the right to point out the historic weak points, and the liabilities inherent in how each religious system was constructed. I knew I had done my job when a practitioner of a religion would thank me for the fair treatment of their faith, while noting that my exposition was, um, not the same one they had received from their minister/imam/rabbi/guru!
One of my all-time favorite in-class dialogues went thus:
Student question: “Don’t you ever get confused about how many versions of Christianity there are, professor?” And before I had a chance to construct an answer, another student barged in to say “Oh, she likes it this way! She likes ‘em all!” I laughingly agreed.
(As I see it, religious diversity is a job security guarantee for Religious Studies professors.)
But always, every semester, at some point (especially at the end of the semester), some student would try to unmask my carefully maintained professional agnosticism. Some students would call this question in class - but I was unwilling to answer it publicly. Others would seek me out in office hours, or after the final. Those I decided on a case-by-case basis. It was sometimes fun to have them guess. Various students thought I was Catholic (though my proud apostate status was something I had frequently mentioned in class), Mormon, Quaker, Unity School of Christianity, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Pagan, and Atheist.
None of those were right, of course.
Yet I couldn’t be mad at the students for wanting to know. As one put it, obviously looking for a shortcut to truth, “You’ve studied so many religions, can’t you tell us which one you think is right?”
I love that Charles Ives also left the question “Unanswered”
Except I couldn’t possibly tell them which one is right! I’m pretty sure I know which ones are wrong (minimally 99.9% of them), but likewise, all the religions I have studied have something positive in them, some lesson(s) to impart. Religions are like dogs - there are no bad dogs; there are bad owners who create bad dogs. And most religious organizations and systems have fallen into the hands of bad human owners along the way. So I long ago left the major institutional religions behind. I frankly haven’t missed them.
That being said, I did and do know what interpretations of the universe matter to me, what I hold near and dear to my heart, and what informs my commitments. I also knew that sharing this with the students with unstinting candor might come across as needless obfuscation. But really, it is all true!
You see, I’m a Marxist-Humanist Lesbian-Feminist Neo-Neo-Platonist Immanentalist Panentheist Revolutionary Anti-racist Musico-Poetic Dialectic Philosopher, fascinated by Lichens, Birds, Basketball, Counterpoint, Cats, Baseball, Diet Coke, and Pizza. Isn’t everybody nowadays?
From Perfect Chaos
I came up with this formulation about twenty-five years ago, and the only modifications since then came with my enlichenment (I really wish I had come up with that pun myself, but alas, I did not), and when the Coca-Cola Corporation mistakenly changed the taste of Coke Zero, forcing a retreat to Diet Coke on my part. Life is the land of necessary compromises.
I will save the explication of each term for later posts. Every word up to and including “Philosopher” deserves a post! But let me add two caveats here. First, I AM THE MARXIST THAT THE RIGHT-WING DETESTS! YES, I EXIST! OUTSIDE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, NO LESS! AND PROUD OF IT. And you wanna know how dangerous I am? Mwa-ha-ha! Like Socrates, I have poisoned the minds of the youth…with critical thinking skills! When I stopped teaching and retired, my evil queer plot to destroy the family continued apace: I moved to be near my aging mother and my sister (I am so evil!). I also participate in our family book club, I visit all my relatives, and host them when they come to visit our matriarch (c’mon! admit it! you see my evil horns and tail appearing now!). I practice Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Anti-Racism, in everything I do - AND I research the history of America’s greatest heroes - the Abolitionists, the radicals, the Civil Rights Pioneers, the Women’s Liberationists, and the Fabulous Activists of the various Queer Movements. Even other Marxists like Harry Hay. Furthermore, I am a tree-hugging (well, actually a tree-staring, because of the lichens), bird-watching old lady who loves the environment because, you know, I live in it. And you can’t be a good Marxist-Humanist Lesbian-Feminist Neo-Neo-Platonist Immanentalist Panentheist Revolutionary Anti-racist Musico-Poetic Dialectic Philosopher without spending a lot of time appreciating the natural world. And, of course, because I am some sort of witch, having passed the initiation in which you say three times that you are a witch. So, as you can see, I am well on my way to destroying all of civilization! Bwa Ha HA!
Second, I am a Lesbian-Feminist, but I am Trans-affirming. Very early in my time as an out queer person (1992), I watched in horror as the mounted LAPD officers intentionally turned their horses on the one obvious transgender person in our protest. We rescued them from this institutional murderous fury, but the basics of solidarity moved from abstract to real for me at that moment. After that I listened to the humanity and the pain - and the urgent philosophic reflection - of transgender people. I cannot claim to have arrived at my current support all of a sudden. The entire LGBTQ community had open debates and discussions in the 1990s and beyond. I made mistakes, and I made some positive changes in my consciousness too. But I do not want my trans friends to see “Lesbian-Feminist” and presume the worst, nor will I surrender that school of thought that is Lesbian-Feminism because of its low point when it failed to make the leap from its own particular to the universal of human freedom in all particulars and diversity. Similarly, I do not dismiss Marxism because of the crimes committed by those state-capitalist tyrannical parodies of Marxism that existed in the USSR and Maoism; I do not dismiss Hegel because he fell short of the clear trajectory of his own dialectic; I do not dismiss the wisdom of religions because they have all fallen short of those ideals. To me, balancing these real-world histories with the clarity of knowing who you (singular and plural) are and what our vision of a more human future is, what guideposts have helped us to articulate that and yet being forced to accept that none of them have been perfect in their real-world forms yet, all of that is simply what it takes to be a mature, realistic idealist motivated and working to change the world for the better.
So I didn’t explain all of this to my students when they asked me what I believed. Why? Because I wanted to give them, instead, the same body of information that I had in coming to know my own beliefs, commitments, and directions. I did not want to impose, by the force of my personality and brief authority, my view of the universe. They deserved to search among the available resources as much as I had previously done. I stand by that decision ultimately. In fact, his unwillingness to allow others the liberty of searching that he had so enjoyed fuels my ongoing love-hate-hate-HATE relationship with the (so-called Saint) Augustine. If there is an after life, and if I run into him there, I’m going to take him out back and give him a verbal dressing down like he’s not had in centuries…but I disgress.
One last story. There was one time that I came close to violating my rules of professional agnosticism. I had an assignment wherein students were asked to attend a religious service of a religion other than their own. A particularly sweet but naive student came to me during a break in class, profusely thanking me for this assignment, because she had found her church home! It was a well-known local far-right evangelical church, one that had called for the firing of all LGBTQ people from positions of public trust, like teaching, and that preached the doctrine of female inferiority. Remembering all those lessons from Star Trek about the prime directive, my resolve still teetered when she profferred a gift, “Here, Professor, I brought you something! A free Bible!” (as if Religious Studies professors wouldn’t already own that book, but, whatever; as I said, this student was sweet but naive). After she walked away to enjoy what remained of her break, I stood holding this poison-vinyl Bible from a source that wished to strip me of all my work, my freedom, and quite likely my life. The subject after the break concerned the musico-religious contributions of African-Americans through the period of their enslavement and in the decades following the Civil War. So in my introduction to the topic, I opened the Bible the student had brought me, to read the Biblical passages used to oppress and enslave - the Curse of Ham from Genesis, and the “slaves obey your masters” from Ephesians. I think my small act of religious resistance flew over the gift-giving students’ head. Whether I wanted it to or not. And which it was…will remain a secret.
