Los­ing My Religion

Edit: Just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding…

1) I’m an athe­ist but I have noth­ing against reli­gion, as long as it’s your val­ues and you don’t try to con­vince me you’re right and I’m a sin­ner blah blah blah. And I’m not going to con­vince you that God doesn’t exist. I don’t know that. I just don’t believe, that’s all. Can we be friends now?

2) I do think reli­gion brought a lot of good things (art, cul­ture etc.) and I’m always curi­ous about dif­fer­ent reli­gions. In fact, I wish I had known more when I stud­ied lit­er­a­ture, because there’re a lot of ref­er­ences to major religion.

3) I’m not anti-American and I’m not try­ing to say Europe way of deal­ing with reli­gions is best. How­ever, I must admit reli­gion in North Amer­ica is a fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject for me: I’ve never seen so many reli­gions and so many reli­gious believers.

4) I truly don’t under­stand blind faith in what­ever. You’ll have to explain that me.

On top of being a bor­der­line Com­mu­nist and a proud Social­ist, I’m also an athe­ist. It’s basi­cally a mir­a­cle I chose to live in North Amer­ica… but I like paradoxes.

Although I’m fairly sure my par­ents were bap­tized (being an athe­ist just wasn’t an option a few decades ago in France), I never ever went to Church and no one in my fam­ily believes in God, who­ever he is.

How­ever, the city where I grew up was pretty Catholic. I started to notice it in Junior High: sud­denly, all my friends attended cat­e­chism classes in order to have their First Com­mu­nion. For a year, they would peri­od­i­cally skip school for a cou­ple of day and come back with brand new watches and neck­laces as Com­mu­nion gifts. When we stud­ied French lit­er­a­ture, I could tell some stu­dents were much bet­ter at inter­pret­ing clas­si­cal books’ reli­gious back­ground. I’d strug­gle: who is God’s son already? Which one died first? Clearly, some of us had had a reli­gious upbring­ing but it was seen as a fam­ily legacy rather than a per­sonal man­i­fes­ta­tion of faith.

In France, reli­gion free­dom is guar­an­teed by the Con­sti­tu­tion and pro­tected by the Repub­lic but it’s a very pri­vate mat­ter. Reli­gious beliefs are not to be expressed in pub­lic. I’ve always assumed Chirac was Catholic, but for all I knew, he could be a Protes­tant, an Ortho­dox or a Buddhist—as a polit­i­cal fig­ure, he just wasn’t allowed to bring up his reli­gious beliefs. France is a sec­u­lar state and prides itself for being so.

As a result, North America’s habit of express­ing reli­gious beliefs pub­licly is weird to most Euro­peans. In France, no one has ever seen the Pres­i­dent pray or refer to reli­gion in his speech… but Bush or Harper openly refers to the Bible.

When I first came to Canada I was shocked by the num­ber of Churches, Tem­ples, Syn­a­gogues etc. It also seemed that every­one started its own reli­gion. I knew Chris­tian­ity, Islam, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Hinduism—and that was about it. I was—and I still am—clueless about Pen­te­costal­ism, Angli­can­ism, Bap­tists, Methodists, Lutheran, Pres­by­ter­ian, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Episcopalian/Anglican, Seventh-Day Adven­tist, Born Again etc. And what the hell is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”? A bunch of peo­ple who believe they will even­tu­ally end up in Heaven because they have the longest reli­gious group name ever???

France is also very para­noid about sects… although one could argue that reli­gion is just a sect that has grown rich and pow­er­ful. An entire reg­u­la­tory sys­tem to pro­tect cit­i­zens against sects has been devel­oped and many reli­gious move­ments are just ille­gal (Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy…) or barely tol­er­ated (Jeho­vah Wit­nesses). The joke in France is that what­ever banned sect is sent to North Amer­ica… thus Raelian­ism and the lit­tle Aliens, kicked out of France, are now liv­ing a happy life in Quebec.

The way peo­ple openly live their reli­gion still amaze me. I’ve seen count­less reli­gious blogs on the web, I read a lot of “we’ll pray for you” kind of com­ments and I heard the Bible quoted more than once. Not that it both­ers me. But it sounds strange to me.

How­ever, I have very lit­tle sym­pa­thy for pros­e­lytism. I believe that every­one on earth rely on a set of val­ues. These can be reli­gious, famil­ial, moral, ide­o­log­i­cal, social etc. Each indi­vid­ual pos­sess a unique con­cep­tion of them. That’s about it. Just leave peo­ple alone. What could be more pre­ten­tious than think­ing one has the right set of val­ues and need to spread them around the world? Meth­ods of reli­gious prop­a­ga­tion are often any­thing but peace­ful and yet a small num­ber of self-called “supe­rior” civ­i­liza­tions allowed them­selves to dic­tate what was good and what was bad through­out history.

A ques­tion remains: why is North Amer­ica so deeply reli­gious? A con­ti­nent so advanced tech­ni­cally speak­ing… yet, appar­ently, 1/3 of Amer­i­cans say that they believe every word in the Bible is lit­er­ally true, the lit­eral hand­writ­ing of God (accord­ing to Susan Jacoby).

And why is reli­gion impor­tant to you?

Related arti­cles:

1. It’s Okay Not To Believe
2. Chicken Buses and Jesús
3. Chal­lenge Your Beliefs
4. Ogdens­burg, NY State
5. The Oh-So-Sexy French Myth