CODA: THE ATHEIST CATHEDRAL: Eve

Several years ago I read an account, possibly apocryphal, of a group of atheists who had been raised in the Episcopal church. They met every Sunday in, I think, upstate New York, to enact a pseudo-Eucharist. I think they might even have found a disused church to hold it in. There were incense, liturgical music, priestly garments. Through this ritual they honored their roots, or forged stronger community bonds, or I forget how they explained it. Basically, they knew that the church services of their youth had responded to a network of real human needs--among them the need for beauty, for tradition, for a sense of continuity with the past. Obviously the church had also responded to a host of other needs, like the thirst for God, the need to praise the Creator, the need for a visible gathering of the Body of Christ. These needs--which a Christian would likely see as the core of the experience, the reason for all the "smells and bells" that had so deeply stirred the atheists' hearts--the atheists of course rejected.

I think you can do that for a while. For a while, people who grew up in a beautiful church culture will carry out the rituals in the absence of belief. But eventually, either belief must be rediscovered or the beauty will no longer be enough to compel participation. The more sacrifice the beautiful thing asks of you, the sooner it will be abandoned, once you no longer believe in the core around which its traditions and characteristic lovelinesses accreted. I bet you the children of the atheist Episcopalians were about evenly divided between believers and nonbelievers; but I bet you none of the latter category went to church.

So too with marriage. There is a lot of beauty and a lot of honor accreted around it now. The high estimation in which we hold marriage comes, I believe, from the abundant bounty it provides to society, from how much we need it, and from the frequent difficulty with which it is accomplished. (My favorite line about marriage might be from Maggie's Abolition of Marriage: "It is the Song of Songs, and the Crucifixion.") I think all three options described above for cultural responses to gay marriage (with the possible exception of a), the least tenable option over the long term) will diminish the estimation we give marriage, because its core will have been abandoned. I think even Jonathan Rauch (who is absolutely the best advocate of gay marriage) will eventually look back, if he wins, and wonder where his cathedral went.
posted by Eve at 12:08 AM | Link |

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