As this week marks Religious Freedom Day. I thought I’d share a little story about how I came to understand the meaning of Religious Freedom.
I was born in 1956 in the deep South state of Georgia, then as now part of the “bible belt”. I was the product of what would have been considered a mixed marriage at the time. My Mama was the daughter of a United Methodist Minister and my Daddy was the son of a Southern Baptist lathe operator at a textile mill. He was also the first person in his family to go to University, thanks to a scholarship and later the GI Bill. Consequently, he was able to shake the dust of his and Mama’s small hometown from their feet and embarked on a career with J.I. Case, a major corporation manufacturing farm equipment.
After a near decade spent selling, and sometimes repossessing, tractors to hardscrabble farmers across the state, he made the move into management. Accordingly moving us all to Atlanta where Case’s main Distributorship was located. He bought a home in an upscale neighborhood called Morningside and we all set up house. My Mama, myself, my big brother and our two older sisters.
It was a lovely place to grow up. Leaf shaded streets. Picturesque Tudor Revival, Georgian Revival and even some Mediterranean Revival homes with spacious, greenery bedecked lots. These giving way to comfortable, if less ostentatious, bungalows that tracked the economic travails following the roaring twenties. All warmed by the sleepy sunset of the 1950’s.
As it turned out, taking up residence in Morningside was one of those seminal events that shapes you in later life. For while it may sound like a postcard drawn from ancient back issues of Southern Living Magazine, it had features that were far from stereotypically southern.
To begin with, we lived only about a mile from The Temple, the reformed Jewish Synagogue made famous by the play and film Driving Miss Daisy. More, within walking distance of our house were not just a Southern Baptist, Presbyterian and United Methodist Church but no less than three different neighborhood Synagogues. This was a circumstance not to be found in small town, rural Georgia.
Unsurprisingly, many of my earliest playmates and later school mates were Jewish kids. In fact, during the High Holy Days our Grade school, which normally had three classes per grade level, could only partially fill one.
So I had the invaluable gift of experiencing being a religious minority among my peers. Of course i was under no confusion as to what the dominant religion of the larger world was. Regular Church going, visits to my country relatives and the tutelage of my Mama, her sisters and my Maternal Grandmama saw to that. I was quite a devout little Christian from the age of two on.
For me, babe that I was, this posed no real contradiction. I was a big eared child and paid close attention to the conversations my Mama had with my siblings, as I considered her the fount of all wisdom. I still recall hearing what she said when one of my sisters asked what the difference was between us and our Jewish neighbors. Mama replied without missing a beat the there was no real difference. We all believed the same things. It’s just that they didn’t believe that Jesus was the son of God. That seemed entirely satisfactory to me.
As time went on, of course, I learned that not everyone saw it that way.
From TV, Movies and Radio I gradually became aware that something terrible had happened before I was born. Something so horrible I had difficulty wrapping my mind around it. That not so very long ago, some people had hated Jews so much that they had tried to murder them all.
This was a hard thing to accept. It was like the Bible stories my Grandmama would tell me. But those were tales of long ago. Not part of the same world as I lived in. I was comforted though, by the understanding that a war had been fought and those wicked people had been defeated and punished. That their evil no longer threatened.
So the years rolled by and I grew. Eventually I entered the Fourth Grade. That’s when it happened.
It was one of those days when the tedium of the school routine was relieved by the absence of our regular teacher and the appearance of a substitute. This was usually a grand opportunity for goofing off and acting up, as no one was particularly intimidated by the authority of a one day replacement.
In this case though, our substitute was an older woman than was usual, with a manner and speech that I readily recognized from my trips to the country. She was as familiar to me as folks, including some of my relatives, that knew from visiting there. As the morning progressed it became obvious that she was out of her element. She completely lost control of the class which devolved into near chaos. At last she lost her temper and in a loud and angry voice, succeeded in intimidating everyone. She ordered us to sit silently at our desks with our hands folded for what seemed an eternity, staring at the clock as it ticked down the minutes until lunchtime.
Finally the hour arrived and she ordered us to line up, still silent, to go to the lunchroom. It was at the exact moment when all were prepared for her to tell us to go out when she did the totally unexpected, I have never forgotten the malicious , malignant gleam in her eye as she did it. In a voice dripping with poisonous sarcasm she said “Oh! I almost forgot. The most important thing. Our prayer!” With that she folded her hands, bowed her head in a mockery of piety and began intoning a prayer to Jesus.
I was shocked and stunned, or as close as a 9 year old could be to being shocked and stunned. I knew that what she was doing was not only illegal but was an attempt to abuse and humiliate my classmates. Not just because they had misbehaved but because they were Jewish. I glanced around the room and saw their faces. More than 50 years later I can see them as though it were yesterday.
I think that was the day that I began to realize that the evil wasn’t banished at all. That it was in hiding, waiting for an occasion to emerge. That an adult in authority could be so dead to both shame and decency as to inflict such bigoted abuse on a group of children in their charge. More, that the name of one I had been taught to think of as the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Love could be used as a weapon. That someone could do something so vicious and still imagine themselves a good Christian.
I have never forgotten it. I don’t think I ever shall.
I doubt my schoolmates did either.
These days I think of myself as a Christian Agnostic.
Why?
Because although I lack the gift of faith based certainty, the fact is that the entirety of my moral/ethical convictions are rooted in the Christianity I was taught as a child.
That Christianity wasn’t a license to pass judgement on others but a commission to mend a broken world.
Then the King will tell those on his right hand, ‘Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you; or thirsty, and give you a drink? When did we see you as a stranger, and take you in; or naked, and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?’
“The King will answer them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Despite my lack of faith, these values have animated my life and any good, however small, I may have done.
They don’t allow for religious bigotry or bigotry of any kind.