Perhaps my schism with religion began one windy night in September 1998 when I was kicked out of CCD for cackling like a hyena at an anti-abortion speech that my entire CCD class was forced to attend. Perhaps it was New Years 2000 when Alex Krofta and I were dared to make out, the first time I ever kissed a guy, the moment I realized I was gay. Maybe it was afterward when I realized that the religion I had been brought up in viewed my love as “evil.” Perhaps my anger felt vindicated when I read about Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope on national television.
I’m not sure exactly when I realized that the “love” that religion supposedly fosters in the world is actually hollow, bigoted, marketed, hypocritical, sexist, homophobic and strangling.
The war that is in our midst today is a war fought over religion: “My god vs. your god.” Neither religion is right; neither is glorious. Neither side of followers is more worthy of going to whatever “heaven” is supposedly prescribed in centuries-old texts that the blind followers adhere to with frightening relentlessness.
I wanted to vomit last week when I saw pictures of our evangelical president and his old fat-faced fellow politicians smiling while looking on at the aforementioned “man of God” as he signed documents that control organs that don’t belong to his gender.
The look in those men’s eyes as they smiled was eerie and strange, as though they thought they were carrying out the will of God. Fine, ban whatever form of abortion you want for whichever deity you choose. The ones with the fetus inside of them, no matter what you do will always have the final choice, whether afforded by law or not.
We, as a campus, learned that lesson two years ago in the form of a dead infant left in a trash dispenser in a dorm. Is that not a kind of abortion? You can jail these women, take away their rights, but then you will just be rescuing them from what they wholeheartedly wished to be saved from: unwanted, unprepared parenthood. The slain children and the mothers killed by secret, unsafe abortions are victims of religious violence.
My only sister’s salary is paid by a church of child rapists. Her job is teaching theology at a Catholic high school. The scandal-hiding, child molester-enabling Catholic church pays my sister to teach teens that people like me are sinners who God hates and will damn to hell. My sister is forced to place religious violence on me because of her employer’s literal belief in a centuries-old text that has been pilfered, slanted, perverted, distorted and shamed. It hurts her heart that I cannot find myself safe within the church that we grew up in. It hurts my heart that she could believe in men that abuse children, that she could believe in the word of God said through the mouths of men who forced intercourse on young boys and girls. It hurts my heart that she could believe in a church that includes me in an afterlife with mortal sinners because of the sex of my lover.
Why must we, as a society, be motivated by religion? Some readers will contend that our country began as a faith-based nation, that our reason for colonization was religious freedom. However, during that time, as in the dark and middle ages, religion was used as a way of controlling the people who believed without question that their actions would be judged stringently by God.
Religion has faded into the background in the modern day when compared to the fervor of the past, but it remains a motivator, instigator, separator and mis-educator of the people. Our wars are still fought over religion. We still uphold religious monarchs like the Pope. I don’t believe for one second that whatever higher power up there or anywhere talks to that old man, he is not a representative of God in the flesh. He is a figurehead of the oldest monarchy in history.
You will ask: If not God, if not religion, what will we have to believe in? To answer that question will be the most political, social and spiritual act of revolution that history will ever see. Start searching now.
Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.
