Long Time Leaving (8 page)

U
p here in the Northeast I spend most of my time in the company of Canadians, Quakers, secular Jews, alumni of progressive schools, media people, forlorn supporters of John Kerry, and consumers of artisanal bread. Let me say, categorically, that I hold these people, and the bread, in high esteem. (We don't sit around using the word
artisanal.
It just crops up lately on high-end menus and food-store labels. It means, I take it, handmade by people whose hearts are really into bread, or at least were when they started out.) I agree with these people that much of what holds sway in America today is deplorable. “What I don't always share is their consternation.

Take the Rapture. I mean the belief, as an appalled Bill Moyers has put it succinctly, that “once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.”

I don't find this scenario very credible myself. If you were almighty, would you want to sit around with all those pious people—each of them wearing nothing but a Reverend Jerry Falwell expression—stretching way off to one side? I have never met anybody who
isn't
almighty who would. How long would it be before the charm wore off even for the right-hand sitters? I know I would be too fidgety. I'd rather live with tribulations. But, hey, different folks hold different truths to be self-evident. I know that much, just being from the South.

Sometimes I run into someone who has just heard for the first time about the Rapture—and that 33 percent of the American people, according to a poll, already know about it and, what's more, believe in it. This person expresses outrage, in a “How dare they?” (how dare they already know about something this person doesn't, for one thing) sort of tone.

“Well,” I say, “it probably would relieve the tedium, come eternity, to
be able to look down on people hopping around having even less fun. But I don't think you have to picture them picturing you, personally, covered with boils, sores, locusts, and frogs. They're picturing maybe Hillary Clinton. Who has dealt with worse. By that I mean, they're picturing their conception of Hillary Clinton, which is important to them. Their conception of you is important to them, too, more important no doubt than it should be, as yours of them may be to you. I don't think they would personally cover you with boils, sores, locusts, and frogs. Though they might think of you generically as the kind of person who, if
they
were covered with boils, sores, locusts, and frogs, would not lift a finger to flick off the first locust. And they might be right, there, because you—who think more along psychological than abominational lines-would regard any such boils, sores, locusts, and frogs as illusory, hence unflickable.

“Then, too,” I tell them, “33 percent of the American people—
at least
33 percent of the American people—are liable to believe anything. Especially if they are asked whether they believe it or not on the telephone, by a stranger in a snide or scientific tone of voice.”

“But it's incredible!” a Northeastern person might exclaim. “It's beyond belief!”

“Not to people who believe it,” I point out. “And nothing confirms the beliefs of the credulous more than for disbelievers to tell them that their beliefs are unbelievable. After all, when you think about it, how would believers expect disbelievers to look at believers? In disbelief. The more you tell them they can't possibly believe such a thing, the more they enjoy looking like the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Where the drastically faithful have gained ground in recent years is in the area of being astounding rather than astound-ed. They have come to realize that a sanctified person who chuckles calmly can get a rationalist's goat. The more you demonize them, the less they have to strain to demonize you. Why should the wild-eyed be insecure, these days? They appeal to far bigger multitudes than the keen eyed do. When it comes to sheer popularity, their books are cheerleader captains and the ones we read are pimply nerds.”

“What I'd like someone to explain,” a Northeastern person may cry out rhetorically, “is how Israel can welcome the support of people whose express belief is that after Armageddon all Jews will either convert or be burned?”

I respond by way of a parable:

“Say you're running a business that is hard-pressed to stay afloat, and
someone cordially offers you substantial backing, and the only catch is, this person subscribes to the prophecy that in due time you will sprout gills and become a fish. From your standpoint, the prophecy is crazy, the due time open-ended and the money for real. Are you going to waste time arguing with them?”

“But Christians,” says a Northeastern person who (like me) worships on Sunday morning by reading
The New York Times
(our faith in it has been tested, but testing to us skeptics is as mud is to pigs), “are supposed to be peace-loving, and inclusive, and…”

“Uh,” I respond. “Read any history of Christian civ lately? And speaking of inclusive, did you ever sing along with Bob Dylan, ‘Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mister Jones’? Not to mention, speaking of irrational beliefs, ‘Everybody must get stoned.’ Not that there haven't been times when I was in favor of getting stoned,
voluntarily.
And speaking of inclusive again, when Democrats have been elected president it's been by an illogical coalition of liberals, labor, African Americans, and the South. Whence, except from blind faith, cometh the assumption that the president of the United States ought naturally to be somebody who thinks like we do? Much as I would like to see it, I can't think of any examples. We need strange bedfellows.”

Lucid as this analysis is, it wins no converts. Up here, after all, I am someone who is from the South and probably still has a lot of red state in him. As back home I am someone who went off up North and turned blue. In an age of zeal, who can afford to be broad-minded about the more zealous? Sometimes people look at me as if I think I'm the only person who will get Raptured, which would explain why I evidently spend so little on clothes.

The Rapture, I say, is sort of like the revolution during the sixties. That doesn't get me anywhere.

I do believe I score a point against zeal, though, when I wonder whether there are any more readers of Rapture books who actually want to
get
Raptured than there are readers of Gothic romances who actually want somebody to rip their bodice. All this talk of Rapture reminds me of the preacher who cried out to his congregation, “Everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”

Everybody stood up except one old man in the front row.

The preacher looked at him, and repeated, “I say, everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”

The old man still just sat there.

“Brother Henry,” said the preacher, “didn't you hear me? I said everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”

Brother Henry looked around and said, “Oh. I thought you were getting up a group to go
now.
”

I
was born Methodist. Then one morning in Sunday school we were singing “Red and yellow, black and white, we are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I looked around the room and noticed that—although we had a picture on the wall of Jesus being sweet to several easy-to-love-looking youngsters of every hue (shepherds’ offspring, judging by their outfits and the literal lambs in their midst)—the “we” of whom we sang was not the “we” who we were.

“Blond and brunette, also sandy, Jesus finds us fine and dandy,” we could have sung legitimately. But as to skin we were all pretty much the color of that Crayola (since discontinued) labeled Flesh.

This revelation did not convert me on the spot to either atheism or multiculturalism (I was only eight), but it did make me wonder why our elders insisted upon teaching us that song if they didn't mean us to mean it. Perhaps I was being too literal. I was loath to practice hardshell literalism, certainly, because that would have entailed giving up all my worldly goods and loving my neighbors—including Marcella across the street who sat on my brand-new drum and broke it Christmas morning—as myself. Over the years, I became a cumgranosalist: taking things literally but with a grain of salt.

You can't really call that religion. If cumgranosalism can be said to have a rite, it is a joke I told on
A Prairie Home Companion
back in 1995. “Do you believe in infant baptism?” one old boy asks another, who replies, “Believe in it—hell, I've
seen it done.
” That joke set off a chain of e-mail to the
Prairie Home
Web site, beginning with this entry from the Tarheel State:

The first response to this query was from a man who identified himself as “a Lutheran Christian” born and raised in northern California: “I laughed out loud when I read your account. I guess I just never thought of ‘believing in infant baptism’ quite that way before. I doubt that my employer would get it either, so I don't speak for them.” The employer was not specified.

A “Lutheran raised Methodist in Oklahoma” wrote that the joke “cracked me up and also my husband (a Lutheran, raised Lutheran in Oklahoma), although it took him a little bit longer to ‘get it.’ ”

“I'm a Jewess from Chicago and I think it's the funniest thing Ray
[sic]
said all night,” put in a regular listener.

A man who was “born and raised in Texas to a Baptist mother and a Presbyterian father and attended Presbyterian church as a child” testified as follows:

“That's ridiculous,” came a quick response. “I'm a Roman Catholic from the Midwest and I laughed my butt off. *love is real* *imagine* *remember* John Lennon 1940-80.”

However, a man in Houston, who described himself as “not usually humor impaired,” was still puzzled:

Subsequent respondents pointed out that, as one put it succinctly, “some sects like the Southern Baptists only believe in full immersion, at an older age.” Another went into the matter at greater length:

A fine point was raised by a woman associated with a “newsgroup of synchronicity, amulets and talismans,” who weighed in as follows:

Any lingering notion that you had to be Southern to get the joke in question was dispelled by this response:

I kind of liked hearing Southern Baptists referred to as a “sect,” but since none of them contributed to the Web site discussion (don't any of them listen
to A Prairie Home Companion?
If not, what do they do on Saturday evenings? “Water the lawn, thoroughly?), we cannot generalize about Southern Baptist response to the infant baptism joke.

Nor can we conclude that
all
Catholics laugh their butts off and quote John Lennon, that all Southern Presbyterians and synchronistic northern California Jews almost wet themselves, that all northern California Lutheran Christians laugh out loud, that all Chicago Jewesses get my name wrong, that all Lutherans raised as either Methodists or Lutherans in Oklahoma crack up, or that all Mormons pride themselves on their own humor's obscurity. A personal conclusion to which I am led—that you should never tell a joke to anyone who uses the word
bonkers—
may not be based on a broad enough sample either.