The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (14 page)

Masturbation is such a basic and universal activity that control of it cannot be the real objective. Even the fundamentalist James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, admits that 99% of adolescent boys masturbate. He admits it is a useless fight in adolescents, but claims masturbation has no place in marriage because it detracts from sex in the marriage.

What is the purpose of prohibiting something that cannot realistically be prohibited, something that cannot even be monitored? The purpose is to create religious guilt. Even though it cannot be stopped, it invokes the guilt cycle that bonds the person closer to the religion, as we just saw.

In the political climate in the United States today, the term “family values” is thrown around a lot. Its meaning is a code for a strict or narrow interpretation of family and sexual behavior. Hence, family values do not include gay marriage. Family values means no to abortion. It means abstinence and not discussing birth control with teenagers and much more. Most religions espouse some kind of family values, but often not for the good of the family. Family values means, “The family has value for the virus.” When the family does not have viral value, the virus may dissolve the family. The focus is on keeping the family as an intact, functional vector for the virus. Choosing a religion different from your family’s may get you ostracized,
if not worse. A Muslim woman who tries to convert to Hinduism may be the target of a so-called “honor killing.” An adult Nazarene who converts to Buddhism will not be treated the same in his or her family as the sibling who becomes a Nazarene minister. A Nazarene child who expresses interest in becoming a Catholic might get a quick and unpleasant dose of “family values.”

Family shame is a key part of this viral defense. A family member who acts against the virus shames the whole family. The virus hygienically deals with this by making the family feel intense shame, which in turn motivates the family to take action against the offending member.

In Luke 12:51-53 Jesus said,

Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth: I tell you, no, but rather division: for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two, and two against three. They will be divided, father against son, and son against father; mother against daughter, and daughter against mother; mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

Cutting people out of the family and social structure is an effective way to intimidate those who remain to keep in line, thereby eliminating potential contamination.

In the United States, strong fundamentalist families often disassociate themselves from wayward family members. A Mormon child who becomes a Catholic might not find a welcome place back at home. To choose another virus is to invite tension and rift within the family as the dominant religion fights to expel the invading one.

Imagine a strong Baptist family and a wayward adult child who is now a Pagan. At Thanksgiving dinner the Pagan adult child gathers the family around the table and says,
“
Let us all say a prayer to the goddess for the bounty she has bestowed upon us this past year.” How would the family react to that prayer? What would happen next year? How might they treat him or her?

The virus is concerned with the value of the family for propagation; anything else gets a strong negative response. Families have a hard time staying together when there is a strong opposing viral infection in one or more key members.

Rational parents want to raise well-educated and well-balanced children with full logical and critical faculties. But once infected, no parent is rational. As a result, parents are unable to teach their children critical thinking skills with respect to religion, especially their particular religion.

As any parent knows, children have minds of their own. They are susceptible to whatever god viruses are present in the environment, especially fundamentalist and cult viruses. One of the many parental nightmares is to have an adolescent or young adult enticed into a cult and taken from the family. No wonder most religions spend a good deal of time and resources on giving the young defenses against other cults and religions. Many a youth sermon or Sunday School lesson carefully teaches the particulars of a given religion as opposed to others. In my denomination, it was baptism by immersion. Unless someone was baptized properly, she may not go to heaven. They also taught that baptizing a baby was immoral (à la Catholics) since a baby cannot make a decision for Christ. The Baptists taught that you had to be baptized by them or it didn’t count.

At age 16, Amish children go out to live in the world until they decide to be baptized. After some time of running around (called
rumspringa),
the young adult must make a decision to be baptized or forever live outside of the Amish community, and largely out of contact with family.

The Amish practice of rumspringa is brilliant. Tom Shachtman, in his book
Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish
, writes:

The Amish count on the rumspringa process to inoculate youth against the strong pull of the forbidden by dosing them with the vaccine of a little worldly experience. Their gamble is also based on the notion that there is no firmer adhesive bond to a faith and way of life than a bond freely chosen, in this case chosen after rumspringa and having sampled some of the available alternative ways of living.
⁴

It is interesting to note that Shachtman uses the viral metaphor. The Amish recognize the need to inoculate their children and recognize that like
some kinds of inoculation, it may not take, or it may backfire and cause the disease. Nevertheless, it is considered worth the risk of losing some.

4
Tom Shachtman,
Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC., 2006), 1.

For the Amish, the children who do not come back are best gone so as not to have a problem in their midst. Expulsion of a defective host keeps the virus healthy and strong. The fact that most Amish children are wholly unprepared for the modern world almost guarantees that they will come back. Thus 80-90% return to be baptized and stay the rest of their lives. Some would say that it is cruel to abandon those who don’t come back. But this is not a relevant concern. The issue is not humane treatment of people, but purity of the Amish god virus. If that means some must be sacrificed, so be it. Religions have functioned in this way for centuries. Shunning, ostracism and excommunication are all versions of maintaining viral purity.

Parents worry that they need to do the best in the eyes of other parents. This is more related to shame than guilt.
⁵
Heaven forbid that the minister would think I was not raising my child in the way of Christ! Is he in Sunday school every Sunday? Is she doing her Bible lessons each week? Am I reading the right religious books to him or her before bed? The virus feeds off anxiety, guilt and shame to ensure that every available resource is used to infect the child.

During childrearing years, parents can become virtual slaves of the virus. Their every move and action is examined by other church members, the minister, Sunday School teachers and other parents. The greatest fear of an infected parent is that he or she will fail in sufficiently infecting the child. What if my child grows up and leaves the church? What if my daughter disgraces the family by getting pregnant without being married? What if my son is gay? All of these thoughts evoke tremendous fear that is closely related to the shame of letting god down and failing in the eyes of others.

5
For purposes of our discussion we will define guilt as something contained inside yourself. Shame, on the other hand, requires you to be concerned about what others think. You might feel guilty if you stole something, but you would feel shame if your mother, minister or neighbor found out.

Many parental anxieties center on sexual shame and guilt. However, rather than open discussions about sex and reproduction, often there is no discussion at all. The guilt associated with sexuality is so strong in many highly religious families that it prevents rational discussion between parent and child. The more guilt a parent feels, the less she can actually communicate with the child about sex. This is one of the by-products of sex-negative religion, which we will discuss in Chapter 5.

We must remember that the virus does not have a mind or will of its own; it strives only to propagate and uses whatever resources necessary to accomplish that goal, the same way that a biological virus or parasite works. The more infected the parents are, the more resources the virus can steal for propagation. Most god viruses thrive on guilt, although they claim otherwise. The greater the guilt, the more parents are willing to throw whatever resources they have into ensuring their children are completely infected. The ultimate resource allocation is home schooling or religious private schooling. Not that home schooling or private schooling is bad; they are one way guilt-driven parents ensure they do not fail the virus. God is always watching, so you’d better do all you can to ensure that other viruses or secularism don’t influence your children.

Raising children can be difficult, especially if you have parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles looking over your shoulder saying things like: “When will he be baptized?” “He is going to a Jewish school, isn’t he?” “I’m sure she would do much better in the Christian preschool.” “You aren’t going to let your Catholic grandmother send him to parochial school are you? We have a much better Baptist school right here in town.”

There isn’t an easy way to deal with such interference except to let those around you know your views of religion and what is and is not acceptable with respect to their involvement with your children.

A friend of mine had non-religious children who stayed with fundamentalist grandparents for the summer. During their visit, the children were subjected to all sorts of scare tactics, including such notions as, “When the curtains move at night, it is the devil trying to get in your room. Pray to god to keep him away.” The children were upset for months afterwards. This type of behavior was quite common in my own upbringing and continues in many families and churches today. The purpose is to open the fear portal in children for more effective infection.

While most people respect parents’ rights to raise their children the way they see fit, something brings out the worst in relatives when you say you are raising your children religion-free. It is almost a license for them to do all they can to undermine your goal and infect the child with their god virus. It is as if they see the child as fair game since you are not doing your viral job. Non-religious parents need to recognize this kind of viral behavior in family and friends and deal with it in a way that helps their children see the virus at work.

One particularly effective method is to expose children to a wide range of religions early and often. With wide exposure come opportunities for discussion about the effects of different religions on people and behavior. Children with such exposure see for themselves the wide variety of strange religious beliefs and behaviors. When my children were 10 and 14 years old, we took the Mormon tour in Salt Lake City. The subsequent discussion lasted for hours. I said very little as they talked back and forth about the experience. With little help from me, they concluded that Mormons have a lot of strange ideas like baptism of people after they are dead, holy underwear, becoming gods themselves and much more.

The task is not to protect the child completely from god viruses. It is to help the child observe and interpret religious behavior in many different religions. This may become an inoculation of sorts against many, if not all, religions.

As I reflect on my upbringing, I realize that my family did nearly everything possible to thoroughly infect me. We attended church three times a week, Bible study, prayer meetings, choir, youth group, Bible camp and much more. My aunt and uncle were Quakers with a very different worldview. They were suspect by the rest of the family because they went to a much more “liberal” church.

My aunt and uncle took a low-key approach, never discussing any religious views until I specifically asked them when I was in my late teens. They were open, understanding and quite informative. In talking with them I realized how much my parents and grandparents had not told me. There was a whole world of religious ideas that I had never heard of! I can thank these saintly people for opening my eyes. It wasn’t what they told me. It was the accepting way they listened and discussed without getting fundamentalist and dogmatic. I had never experienced that with my family or anyone else. The result was a life-long openness to questioning religion, including writing this book.

Religion uses mixed messages as a tool to create a cycle of guilt. The natural drive of people to reduce guilt feelings allows religion to step in and promise an elimination of guilt. Since the ploy rarely works perfectly, people are soon back for another fix of guilt reduction. The net effect is to drive people closer to the virus.

Recognize the role guilt plays in religious infection and learn to deal with it proactively. Learn to eliminate residual religious guilt and put appropriate boundaries around socialized guilt. Regular exposure of children to many different religions may be the best inoculation against infection by many different types of god viruses. Openly discuss the beliefs and behavior of various religions and be aware of the guilt cycle in yourself.