Spent the weekend with the girlfriend (henceforward to be known as the Clarinatrix, Domestic Partner, DomPart or whatever strikes my fancy) in the Washington, D.C. area, the towns of Fairfield, Leesburg and Chantilly in Fairfax County. We went to celebrate her cousin's wedding. That part of the East Coast is unfamiliar to me, radically different from my Hell's Kitchen stomping grounds and the rural New Hampshire of my youth: Exurban sprawl, gated communities full of looming brick townhouses, multiple malls and chain stores everywhere. In short, the sort of rich, homogenized, faceless, culturally negligible whitebread wasteland that some people dare to call a "neighborhood" or "home." People really like the golf out there. I feel strangely conservative and old-fashioned when I go to such de-luxe enclaves. Give me a viewless, dark studio on a grungy city block or a sylvan nook embowering a clapboard shack that lists ever so gently. I can't have the in-between. As David Byrne once sang: "I wouldn't live there if they paid me to." This is partly my incomplete, belated response to A Poor Player's well-meaning invective against New York-centrist cultural cliques, in which he strenuously encouraged us NYC bloggers to move from the increasingly unafforable and arts-hostile city to cheaper places where locals might appreciate our talents. While I'm no longer an actor or director, believe you me I've started to feel like I could live somewhere else and practice journalism or get back into theater. Albuquerque or Sante Fe I could maybe relocate to. Seattle--there's a theater scene I'd enjoy shaking up. I'd give Portland a whirl. San Francisco is, I hear, quite adorable. But the D.C. area? From what I saw, no effin' way. Admittedly I didn't visit the actual D.C. metropolitan area. I'm aware of the many reputable theaters based in our nation's capital.
Anyway, I meant to post a little about religion, which has been on my mind ever since we attended the wedding at a Catholic Church and returned the next day and caught Jesus Camp at AMC on 42nd Street (disgusting tourist throngs, but thank the gods to be back in NYC).
On Saturday afternoon, we attended the wedding service at St. Timothy's. The church had been built, perhaps in the late '80s, in a kind of drab modern-gothic-Bauhaus style that gave the impression of a corporate compound for stunningly unimaginative but well-groomed monks. The interior was vast and oaky, although a decorator could have done wonders with the altar area (hint: lose the ferns and that tacky, overly literal crucifix!) The service itself was crushingly familiar. It brought me back to those thousands of hours I endured as boy in a crummy, cheap little church every Saturday night attending indistinguishable services by a droning priest, my ass clenched with boredom, praying fervently for the service to end. I served as an altar boy for about a year (no molestation to report which, as the fabulous Kiki DuRane might say, means I was an ugly kid). I think my venomous, kneejerk atheism is a product of the tortured boredom I experienced in church. It may also account for my love of theater, full of novelty, flash, surprise and ambiguity. Drama is the exact opposite of the inert, inculcating homogenity of ritual. Religion, as we all know, is bad theater. The more thriving religious sects--South American Catholicism, African-American gospel-driven congregations, megachurches--coopt theatrical artifice to impress the faithful. I consider that a heinous and contemptible cultural paradox or a kind of aesthetic hypocrisy. The way white metal, for example, exploits the pagan, adrenal rush of heavy metal, but grafts on Christianist lyrics. Either you sit in a cell alone with your damned Bible and believe, or you don't get God. Using the tools of the faithless to ensnare the faithful drives me into a puritanical rage. (Mind you, that's because I abominate God and clerics. But if you will insist on abasing yourself before a concept, I say to you, it shall be a severe and joyless God.)
Which brings us, finally, to Jesus Camp. Last night, as the Clarinatrix and I left the theater, we were fuming. I don't know what I can add to what reviewers have already said about this truly frightening documentary, which centers on a summer camp run by militant fundamentalist Christians, for the blatant purpose of indoctrinating kids in right-wing, creationist, anti-abortion, pro-Bush, extreme theocratic ideology. The obese, dead-eyed harpy who runs this brainwashing camp openly compares her methods to those of the madrassas, considering the warping of young mind and weaponizing of children to be a natural response to the training of Islamic youth. Which leads logically to...suicide bombing? Guess what? If Christians start strapping bombs to themselves and walking into mosques and synagogues, I think you'll see that they'll outpace even your most death-loving fanatic. It's heartbreaking to see these bright young kids--and they are extremely alert, intelligent children--being subjected to emotional manipulation. The kids are hectored, praised, bawled at and cajoled until they weep tears for aborted fetuses or genuflect before a life-size cardboard cutout of President Bush. While I'm all for kids being motivated and encouraged to express their emotions, this is despicable child abuse.
How depressing life looks out in North Dakota or Colorado Springs, the heartland where the megachurches and Jesus Camps thrive. And how the faithful seem to need to obsess over Jesus, repeating His name, invoking Him to butter their toast or roll a friggin' bowling ball, replacing the word "think" with "pray." As in, "Lemme pray about it." This is thought control at the most basic level: language. These poorly educated, self-deluded hypocrites, moreover, are reaping the fruits of science, liberalism and democracy even as they deny evolution and militate to demolish the wall separating church and state. For a secular, anti-religion atheist like myself, the view looks pretty damned scary. Ten, twenty years from now, will national elections be decided by such pious fools? These fascist boobies are organized, people. What can we do?