Taki's Mag

It’s been over six years since I last attended a church service. I maintain a proper humility toward large questions about the universe and human self-awareness, but I am a functional atheist. It seems highly improbable that my personality, known to undergo striking changes after four or five glasses of Old Crow, will pass intact through my physical annihilation’s more demanding rigors. So here I am: no gods, no afterlife.

The matter can be argued, but it’s been a decade or two since I heard an argument I hadn’t heard before, so I am not much interested in disputation. I am settled in my opinions and expect to make it through my dwindling supply of days without further changes.

I suppose people convert into faith or lapse out of it, but neither thing ever happened to me. Setting aside the usual experience and, one hopes, wisdom that come with a few decades of stumbling around in the world, I am as I was at twenty: skeptical, empirical, and self-sufficient.

My occasional churchgoing was esthetic, sentimental, and tribal. I loved my Anglican church’s liturgy and splendid old hymns. I got satisfaction contemplating the continuity, both personal and historical, I was plugged into at a service. These are the hymns I sang as a child. These are the verses my ancestors heard parsons read on frosty Jacobean mornings in the country churches of Lancashire and Staffordshire. This is the Creed that saw my civilization through the Dark Ages.

I never had any interest in theology. How many people do? Nor have I ever felt the least warmth toward Jesus of Nazareth. I identify with George Orwell’s remark that “I like the Church of England better than Our Lord.” Kingsley Amis’s poem to the Savior, “New Approach Needed,” also had me nodding in agreement when I first read it thirty or so years ago:

Should you revisit us,
Stay a little longer,
And get to know the place.
Experience hunger,
Madness, disease and war.
You heard about them, true,
The last time you came here;
It’s different having them….

Atop all that was a faint, cloudy hope that I might eventually get something that other people seemed to be getting. “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you,” said the Gospel. I wasn’t too clear about the actual technique of knocking, but nothing was ever opened unto me and my hope faded. Many other people seem to have some faculty I don’t have. Spiritually, I am tone deaf.

The Creed is what killed off my churchgoing. Not the “We believe in one God…” part. There might be such an entity, I supposed, and the term “we” diluted the affirmation and lightened the doubt, spreading both out among the congregation. What got to me was the part about “he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary…”

Did he? So at some actual moment in historical time, at some actual place on the Earth’s surface, an invisible sky spirit (“he came down from heaven”) impregnated a human female? Not only (it seemed to me) was there no evidence for such a thing, it was hard to see how there could be any.

I tackled a man of the cloth—though Russian Orthodox, not Anglican—on this empirical point. He: “Why, we have Mary’s word for it. The Mother of God could hardly be lying to us, could she?” Sometimes the clergy are not very helpful.

All that remains of my marriage of convenience—or habit, sentimentality, and civilizational solidarity—with Christianity is the monthly diocesan newsletter they still send me. I didn’t bother with it much when attending church, yet now I read the whole thing with an anthropological fascination. Here is a report from St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church in the nearby town of Selden:

An interesting annual event is the Blessing of Automobiles. As in annual blessing of fleets in seashore communities, the blessing of automobiles involves prayer for the safety of the drivers. Additionally it raises the profile of St. Cuthbert’s….

I was once shown a book—one of the Gospels, it was—that had belonged to St. Cuthbert. The saint died in 687 A.D. after a life devoted to God’s service. The book survived somehow, ending up at Stonyhurst College’s library in northern England. I was teaching at a school nearby and accompanied a rugby team to play at Stonyhurst. The school gave me a dinner and showed me around the library.

A book, a Gospel, nearly (at that time) 1,300 years old. How many books were in England in the seventh century? Now they are blessing automobiles in the guy’s name on a continent he never dreamed of.

Continuities, civilizational foundations, personal recollections. Did I fret too much about the Creed? I was an Anglican, after all. They don’t insist on your actually believing anything. Sir Martin Rees, a British astronomer, told Richard Dawkins that he attended church “as an unbelieving Anglican…out of loyalty to the tribe.”

That’s my tribe, too. Perhaps I’ll drop in at St. John’s one Sunday.