Responsibility

Oh I try to get some distance I try to escape But this nightmare’s so persistent In a Shakespeare kinda way Be not afraid? No, fuck that, be very afraid --Raine Maida, “The Snake and the Crown” “I think I might be an agnostic,” I said. This was probably about two years ago. “No, shouldn’t be an agnostic,” she replied. “Why not?” “Agnostics can’t accept responsibility for anything.” “Have you met me? I accept responsibility for everything, even stuff that isn’t my fault.” No, seriously, that was a conversation I had once. It was back when I was leaving religion, but still hanging around primarily with fundies. It was seriously believed by people I used to call my friends that only Christians knew how to take responsibility for the things that happen. The idea made me want to laugh then. I think it kind of makes me want to cry now. Christians suck at taking responsibility for anything. Well, at least the fundies do. Everything is the work of god or Satan. Most of the Christians I used to hang out with took as little responsibility for the things that happened around and to them as humanly possible. Major life decision? Pray. Wait for god to tell you what to do. Bad shit happened? Pray. Beg god to fix it for you. Really bad shit happened? Blame it on Satan or call it a test of faith. Really bad shit happened to someone else? Tell them that they aren’t a good enough Christian or that they didn’t pray hard enough. No, seriously. The hypocrisy was strong with my co-religionists. So if the country is going to hell in a hand basket, we all know whose fault it is. The gays. The country is built on the institution of marriage, after all. And marriages are already failing in record numbers. So if the gays are allowed to marry then it will be all over, man. They just don't get it. After all, everyone knows Christian marriages are the best, most successful marriages of all. Wait, what’s that? They’re not? They actually have the highest divorce rate? Must be the lies of Satan… Okay, for serious, let’s unpack this one. Christians are more likely to get divorced, but Christians are the most likely to obsess about marriage. Why is that? Back when I was hanging out in the shadow of Wheaton College and friends with a lot of Wheaton College kids I noticed a pattern to the lives of my friends. At the end of their junior year a couple that had been dating for about a year would get engaged and set the date for the summer after they graduated. I could often predict who would make that announcement and when. I also remember that of all those couples, there was exactly one I looked at and said, “Yeah, they’ll probably do well.” That particular couple possessed a maturity above and beyond your average pair of 21 year-olds, mostly because they hadn’t had the typical Christian household upbringing and were less sheltered in the ways of the universe. In fact, they were younger than me but I often forgot and thought they were older. The rest, though, trusted that Jesus would make sure everything was okay. This, I don’t think I have to tell anyone, is a bad bet. And even back when I believed in all of it I realized that was a bad thing to bank on. Marriage is hard. Going in to it because you’re supposed to get married the summer after college is just about the worst reason to get married ever. Well, except for getting married so you can finally have sex without regrets. That’s pretty damn stupid, too. So within evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity you have people who are too young getting married for the wrong reasons with unrealistic explanations. On top of that you have the burden of an immediate expectation to start a family. One of my best friends got married last summer to a girl I used to go to church with. My old high school pastor counseled them. My friend had the completely sane plan for the two of them to work for a while, then have kids when they were ready. My old high school pastor told them to start having kids immediately. Mind you, this was the very first time my friend met my old pastor. When my friend said that wasn’t a good idea in his book my old pastor said, “But children are god’s blessing. Are you sure you want god to delay his blessings for you?” Fortunately, my buddy wasn’t having any of that and he and his wife are more than willing to keep their own counsel. Of course they were 27 last summer when they got married, so they were more aware of what people need to have to live. And kids are expensive, no matter where they fall on the blessings from god scale (I’d say somewhere between a pet rock and a really, really expensive hobby, but I’ve never had kids, so what the hell do I know?). But judging by the people I know of who got married young and started having kids right away, I think my friend is the outlier (oh, and for the record, that couple I figured would make it? They’ve been married for five years now and to the best of my knowledge she has yet to get pregnant). Married young for all the wrong reasons and immediately having kids = stress. Of course it made a certain amount of sense back when the Bible was written. “‘Til death do us part” lasted, like, ten years on average. And people had to stick together and start pumping out kids just to help the community survive, right up until he got his head chopped off in war or she died in childbirth. Those ideas aren’t so much important in a world where infant mortality is down, where the death of the mother during childbirth is uncommon, and where people regularly live two, three, or even four times the lifetime of the average bronze age human. Our lives are elongated. The nature of modern, first world society also means that adulthood happens later, so a 20 year-old of today is, on most levels, far more knowledgeable but far less mature than a 14 year-old of two thousand years ago. Of course part of that is specific to America, too. American teenagers seem to be less worldly and experienced than their European counterparts. But that’s not really a cogent point, just a tangential observation. Either way, the institution of marriage is failing, um, according to Christians who believe that sort of thing. Personally I’d say that the number of people who get divorced, then remarried, sometimes multiple times, indicates that the institution itself is just fine and even people who have already seen the bitter side of it think it’s a good or necessary thing. But, y’know, that’s just me. These marriage apologists who see marriage as failing can’t exactly blame it on themselves. So it has to be the fault of someone else, someone who just doesn’t get the importance of involving Jesus in the marriage decision. So it’s those heathens that are doing it. And the next step is the gays, who are only a step above Satan hisownself on the list of terrible beings. Of course to anyone who looks at the data this makes no sense. The worst places for marriages correlate strongly with the places that are biggest in to the Bible. And I don’t think that’s because Satan’s fighting extra hard to ruin marriages in the Bible Belt. It’s a problem with the system and the way of looking at the world that’s inherent in evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. They have an unrealistic opinion of human sexuality and the capability of 20 year-olds to make decisions that will affect them for five or six decades. They have an unrealistic opinion of the difficulty inherent in raising children. But rather than take responsibility for it, they blame teh gays, the atheists, and the agnostics. But, you know, it’s the non-Christians who have no idea how to take responsibility for their lives and actions…