Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 9

Working on God
by Winifred Gallagher

(Page 9 of 11)

My new neighbors' services usually began with loud music and praising the Lord, accompanied by clapping and swaying and testifying. Next came ardent prayer "in the Spirit," a sermon, more singing, and some simple refreshments. On special occasions, the whole operation moved outside, where the guitars throbbed and the reverend hollered the Good News through a microphone. I would peek from my window as certain congregants "got the Spirit," doing a kind of nervous dance and even falling to the pavement as if having a seizure. Americans of northern European descent may be squeamish about such overt manifestations of spiritual experience, regarding them as hysteria, neurosis, or fakery, but in many cultures, they are religion's sine qua non, and are understood as expressions of what is beyond words.

Pentecostalism's exact origins are disputed, but Cox traces it to Los Angeles in 1906. Turning from empty rituals and artificial barriers of race and class, William Seymour, a black preacher, and his congregation of the black and white working poor gathered to seek direct experience of the divine. These first Pentecostals were criticized for de-emphasizing the usual church hierarchy and doctrine; some of their modern successors are fundamentalists in their beliefs, but many aren't. "Pentecostals don't have a creed, or even a single denomination," says Cox. "Rather than being written down in a single volume, their theology is diffused among songs, prayers, sermons, and testimonies that challenge the secular worldview. You take your orders from the Spirit-your own experience of Pentecost."

Reservations about Pentecostalism resemble those voiced about experiential millennial religion in general, and not surprisingly, often come from institutional religion. Does a culture prone to search for God in a pill, prescription or otherwise, expect the same instant gratification from "designer" religion? Is the new "spirituality" motivated by a quest for authenticity or by narcissism? By feeling good or doing good? Rather than being shallow or trendy, however, Pentecostalism is just the latest illustration of how Christianity periodically leans more heavily on one of its "four pillars": Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience. The early church's focus on experience gave way to an emphasis on ecclesiastical tradition, which was fought by Luther and Calvin, who focused on Scripture. The Reformation was in turn challenged by the Enlightenment's stress on reason, which set off highly emotional forms of revivalism such as John Wesley's Methodism. In the twentieth century, American Protestantism, like Judaism, became increasingly "desacralized," or rationalis- tic and concerned with social issues. Voting with their feet, many people left mainstream religion for neoagnosticism or the fervent spirituality still often cherished in more orthodox traditions as well as in Pentecostalism.

Nearly seventeen hundred years ago, Gregory of Nyssa, an ascetic father of the early church, wrote, "For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth." Many centuries later, even students at the nation's most elite-and traditionally secular-universities are less rationalistically and scientifically minded than their parents and grandparents. They're not fundamentalists or even conventionally observant, but they are interested in the spirituality of the great traditions. As an example of this "very big change," Cox says that Harvard's Jewish students "generally are far more serious about their religion today, although it doesn't necessarily pay off in weekly synagogue attendance. The young are vulnerable and have a touching need for something for which they're searching, and they go back to see what their ancestors did. The students can be very fond of their parents, but their construction of the world, goals, and values aren't exactly what the young want. They're drawn to the original vision-the core experience-of the different traditions, including the one they might have been brought up in."

Like Harvard students, most neoagnostics will never go to a Pentecostal church, yet they often have important things in common with those who do. Great numbers of Americans now question both secular materialism and religious dogma, prefer the intuitive to the canned, and opt for problem solving over rules and regulations. If he were to rewrite The Secular City, Cox says, he would explain that the sixties did in fact see a real erosion of religion as measured by attendance at church, say, or checklists of creedal beliefs. However, time has proved such standards to be "a very narrow way of looking at religion. What's happening is neither a secularization of, nor a return to, traditional religion, but a change in religion, of which the Pentecostals are one expression."

Despite the booming Pentecostal movement and Jesus' ubiquity on magazine covers and in bookstore windows, mentioning his name remains a highly effective way to cast a pall over a conversation among neoagnostics. Some of this aversion derives from the fact that he has been nearly kidnapped by the religious right, so that Jesus is identified with ranting televangelists, and "Christian" is often used as a synonym for "fundamentalist" or "reactionary." Then, too, a certain intellectual and cultural snobbery mandates that virtually any religion, from shamanism to Zoroastrianism, is better than the homegrown kind available down the street. Despite my ambivalence about Christianity, there's something appealing about its political incorrectness.

Christianity's main problem, however, at least in my world, is that Jesus symbolizes belief in the unbelievable. The unattractive figure many of us encountered in childhood went around saying things like "Blessed are the mournful," demanding that people accept him as God, and separating them into sheep and goats or wheat and chaff. I always knew which group I'd be in, and secretly thought that in real life only a creep would talk that way. On the other hand, Jesus' dour outlook was understandable, considering that he had been born so that he could be tortured and killed to appease his own father's rage at the rest of us, sinful from conception. Protection from this gloomy deity and his ferocious parent depended on belief in his divinity, which in turn depended on believing that Jesus had walked on water and performed other miracles. Within weeks of arriving in the brave new world of college and just in time for the sexual revolution, I left Christianity and its censorious founder behind.

Copyright © 2000 by Winifred Gallagher.

About the Author

Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.