From the time I fell victim to that awkward but inevitable plague called puberty until around my junior year of high school, I prayed to God constantly. My conversations with the Lord were usually as frantic as they were frequent, and I’m sure I heard him saying, on multiple occasions, “Andrew, please calm down, you’re giving me a headache.” What was it I was bothering the creator of the universe with at all hours of the day and night? More often than not I was begging that he reconsider his unfair and inexplicable decision to make me – I shuddered to even think it – gay.
I was raised in a politically conservative, Christian household, which I’m pretty sure is where my reluctance to accept my homosexuality, as well as my belief that praying was the most effective way to deal with my “problem,” came from. Well, God never answered my prayers – at least, not in the way my sexually confused adolescent self had hoped. And for that, I’m thankful.
Now, as a 22-year-old who couldn’t be happier with his gayness, I’m not what you’d call religious. I don’t attend any sort of faith-based service, I don’t read a single religious text, and the frequency of mine and God’s conversations has diminished significantly since I was a teenager.
In this, I’m not alone. According to recent research conducted by Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, the percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has historically hovered between 5 and 10 percent. However, among Generations X and Y, the percentage is between 30 and 40 percent. This means Americans close to my age are three to eight times less likely than the general population to consider themselves religious (i.e. attend church, ascribe to a specific doctrine, etc.).
“Many of (these young people) are people who would otherwise be in church,” Putnam told ABC News. “They have the same attitudes and values as people who are in church, but they grew up in a period in which being religious meant being politically conservative, especially on social issues.”
Over the past 20 years, younger generations have begun to view organized religion as a source of “intolerance and rigidity and doctrinaire political views,” according to Putnam. And this view is, in large part, accurate. Thanks to people such as George W. Bush, who think it’s their responsibility to enforce their own religious beliefs upon the masses, religion has become enmeshed with social intolerance and politicized discrimination.
On the other end of the spectrum is reason. Those who eschew religion as antiquated “superstition” or a vehicle for intolerance argue we don’t need it – that reason and its messenger, science, allow us to cure diseases, develop life-changing technologies and become masters of our environment. Progress, they say – not religion – is where we should put our faith.
But according to the American Heritage Dictionary, superstition is defined as “a belief not logically related to a course of events.” And in his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” British critic Terry Eagleton asks: In its blindness to what is done in its name, does not “progress” fit this very definition?
“The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” Eagleton argues.
“Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: ‘If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world,’” says Stanley Fish in a New York Times critique of Eagleton’s book.
You might think a gay ex-Christian would be the last person to play devil’s advocate for religion. And it’s true, I think organized, mass-imposed dogma has too often led to more harm than good. But while religion has inspired some heinous deeds, so has reason in the name of progress. Take the industrial revolution: Generally considered a leap forward for human civilization, it also led to the degradation of the environment and the quality of life for millions of people who worked in dangerous, often slavery-like conditions to keep the wheels of industry and capitalism turning.
I don’t ascribe to a religion, but I do have faith in certain ideas that reason and science would try to refute. And I think I am better for it: I can look at an issue from a humanistic and morally sensitive perspective without being snared by dogma and religious intolerance. I am able to recognize scientific fact without falling victim to “a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny,” as Fish puts it.
I hope my generation is able to do the same, to draw from both ends of the spectrum instead of glorifying only one, because each provides answers – or, at the very least, the hope of an answer – where the other cannot.
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