somewhere religion goes to die

Besides the modest, 2-story brick building with a small wooden steeple flecked with curling paint and rotting wood, just under 5 minutes down this freshly paved asphalt that long ago was cut through this saturnian hellhole by some hardy pathfinder, across the street from an old cafe that bore witness to the birth and flourishing of the civil rights era, stands a massive glass-and-cast iron testament to the hubris of the evangelical conservative: a towering megachurch, with large stone statues of angels singing to round the ornate arches and faux waterfalls dyed in a painfully bright shade of blue, a round dome shaped like an upside down soup bowl, cast in gold as if to reflect the scorching sun to the high heavens, so that God himself might be able to see from his domain how we humans have molested his good word into a money-printing machine and a mouthpiece of exclusion. A band-aid of faith for the disillusioned, an amphitheatre for the wealthy to preach to the poor a gospel of prosperity they will never get close to achieving, a megaphone that preaches love to the “lovely” few that the pastor deems to be in the favor of the all-loving but not all the lovers.

There is no Sagrada Familia or Notre Dame here, no pureness of heart or devotion, no expression of faith so passionate and ornate that it might even make the most committed atheist shed a tear or at least take a minute and reflect; no craftsmanship that took centuries to refine and sculpt to perfection. No martyr who gave up their own lives for the people they served, no thought at all served in the ideal of the holy father. There is no piety, no dedication to charity and goodwill that I have come to associate with small-town churches, no food drives or open sermons or book sales or anything that remotely suggests a welcoming environment. There is nobody who waves cheerily from outside the door, no shade outside from the relentless heat. To the unaccustomed, it looks more like an exclusive country club for the ultra-wealthy with a tacky golden cross nailed to the front door than a place for reflection and repentance, neither simple and devoted nor beautiful and expressive. I will learn soon, in less than 6 months, that this has always been the point.

Here, there is only glitz and glamour, fake gold trim and plaster walls and so much purple carpet that it would make a Renaissance trader blush. Faith, commoditized into a strip mall, turned into a political weapon. A gospel of Jesus carried not by the voices of angels and the light of the full moon but by the booming of stereo speakers and the flash of the stagelights, a point which turns, not content with their own spirituality, into a sword that runs through the lives of others, the rule of the law of the land of this state, and soon, all of America. A gospel that is read but never followed by those that scream about it the loudest, used by those who crow about morals and purity from the highest office while committing the sins of the antichrist and giving into temptation and sloth and lust and all those unholy, those that it as an excuse to devalue the voices of the very populace that the testaments swore them to protect and honor, a perversion of His word. If The Boys wrote this in their script, Eric Kripke would be criticized for being too on-the-nose, yet here I am, standing outside of a Saturday Night Live skit, watching lifted Suburbans and Escalades pull up to the front door and deposit balding white men in ill-fitting white suits and silver lapels, little children who know yet not how to think and will soon have their thoughts molded and hammered into the image of an obedient son or a bashful daughter, a god-fearing model citizen. Yet as I watch them all file in, there is no joy in any of their expressions, no small talk or kids playing together; a rigid kind of fear and silence, a learned stiffness, pervades their walk.

I have seen faith crowded into New York alleyways, within restaurants and small regional airports, sleeping beside the homeless, in the last rites of the elderly, in the word of the pope to love every person, in the ideals of my best friend, and expressed, grandiosely, in the churches of Europe. I have dutifully played the part of the Three Kings, then the Shepherd, then Joseph, every December in Nativity, and at the behest of my piano teacher, sung cantatas to celebrate the joy of the birth of Jesus, and prayed, even if I never knew that I would be answered, for the safety of others. Faith, that, to be sure, I have never followed, but always respected. But in no place has it felt less sincere than this shed of moral superiority, this monument to no God but Man, the image of capitalism in its final stage, not holy gift but sinful grift, wherein it feels that a loaded shotgun full of shells marked in the name of Christ has been pointed at my head. In no time, a man shakes his fist at us and yells obscenities we pretend not to hear, slurs that perhaps, later, he will pay for with idolatry and extra-deep reflection and pretend to regret saying. Whoever said indulgence and simony died in the 1600s has never yet seen the face of god constructed with dollar bills and exploitation, a burden lain on the hands of the many starving faithful by the wealth of the few.

 And shortly after, when the flat tire has been replaced, and the security guards have been appeased, we are back on the road, yet I cannot stop thinking: perhaps it has always been like this: perhaps this is the whole point. Nobody came outside to help us, none even looked away from their preoccupation to even bat us an eye, save for the man who threw slurs in our direction after a glance at our obviously un-white faces. And it would have been, if not for that I know better, if I had not seen better, what I would have been led to believe about American religion, what I would have come to associate with all of this pedantic bullshit, this battle of ego and plastic worship, this competition to see who can out-jesus the other, promoted by federal tax exemptions and the pockets of men who have made too much money to do any good. But for now, I sigh, and watch the landscape disappear behind me, and by nightfall, I will have partied too hard to remember any of it. But now, years later, I do, because it matters that I remember how I thought of all of this before it was forced on us as the universal American truth that becomes law.

____

across the street, defiantly, a pride flag hangs from the windows of the cafe, dwarfed, perhaps, by the large golden cross that casts its reflected image into the parking lot in the mid-day sun.

one-thousand-and-two-hundred miles away, in a small town in New Hampshire, both coexist in unison on the same clock tower as the church bells toll the coming hour.