I Was a Religious Icon for a Dozen Years (Part 2)
Note: You're reading the second half of this essay about singing in church choirs as an atheist... the first half came out last week, and you can scroll down to "archives" and read it. Also, while I'm telling you things, please pick up New Mutants issues 31-33 and pre-order Promises Stronger Than Heartbreak, the final book in my YA trilogy! Or else the anhedonists win!!!
During my time at Cambridge University, I sang in a few different chapel choirs. And around that same time, I got heavily involved in a local non-profit providing services to unhoused people, and also helped to run a student group to help the unhoused. In the intersection of those two things, I feel like I saw a lot of how religion shapes people's worldview, for good or for ill.
Like, a lot of the best volunteers helping to run a food distribution truck and night shelters for that homelessness nonprofit were deeply religious people, working tirelessly and giving everything they had to make people's lives better. I could see their faith in action as they worked by my side. On the other hand, I sat through endless board meetings where some self-professed Christians held everything up because they wanted to make sure we were only helping people who "deserved" our help, or people who were properly grateful. As if only the unhoused people who lived up to their personal morality, or who acted "nice," should have food or a place to sleep on a winter night. And at one point we were running a night shelter in a church building during a truly brutal winter, when we were informed that we would have to clear out immediately (in the middle of a really nasty cold snap) because the regular vicar was coming back from his sabbatical, and he'd be upset to see all this mess.
I saw a similar duality among the folks I interacted with in those chapel choirs.
I sang in a different choir each year, partly because despite my training and experience, I wasn't quite a good enough singer for anyone to keep me around. My second year at Cambridge, I sang in the chapel of one of the smaller colleges, where the Dean would sometimes skip the sermon --- instead, he would bring in an anti-racist activist or criminal justice reformer to speak to us for twenty minutes. Around this time, there was an HIV-positive unhoused man, who'd lined up a place to live, where he could afford the rent but he didn't have enough for the deposit. (I'd previously let this guy sleep in my dorm room, which was against so many rules, so I felt he was pretty trustworthy.) Anyway, I went to the Dean of the chapel and told him about the situation, and the need to come up with the money for this guy's apartment deposit. Without missing a beat, the Dean opened a cash box and said, "Well, I guess the Bible study group is going to do without supplies." He handed me a wad of cash to give to my friend.
Around that same time, there was a guy singing in the choir with me who was a pretty serious evangelical Christian. He used to explain very calmly that he saw gay and lesbian people as being basically the same as murderers (in that queers were committing a mortal sin, but could be forgiven if we only repented and changed our ways.) This guy, who we'll call Gerry, had a crush on a woman, whom we'll call Lucy. Lucy was a good friend of mine, and was also a very devout Christian. Anyway, one time, I was hanging out with a group of people who included Gerry and Lucy. At one point, Lucy got up to go to the bathroom, and grabbed her purse to take with her. Gerry demanded to know why she was bringing her purse with her to the bathroom, and when she didn't want to answer, he started heckling her and making fun of the ridiculous frivolity of women insisting on taking their purses with them everywhere. WHY WOULD YOU NEED YOUR PURSE, YOU'RE JUST GOING TO THE BATHROOM. The rest of us just sat and squirmed, helplessly, well, this dude made poor Lucy more and more uncomfortable, before she finally escaped. Needless to say, I don't think Gerry and Lucy ever got together.
At the time, those two people seemed to me to personify two very different aspects of religious faith: on the one hand, generosity and selflessness. On the other hand, homophobia and thinly veiled misogyny. Being aware of the latter only made me cherish the former more.
Toward the end of my singing career, I got to meet two important theologians.
One year, I joined the choir at Emmanuel College, because the choir director had promised me I could sing alto — which felt a lot more comfortable to me, for reasons that I now realize had to do with gender, as well as my boredom with the tenor parts I'd been singing for years at this point. (He lied, of course. Tenors are always in short supply, and altos are plentiful.)
The Dean of Emmanuel at the time was a guy named Don Cupitt, the author of a famous book called The Sea of Faith, which had been turned into a TV show. (Apparently he's still there, but now he's semi-retired.) Cupitt was famous for being a Christian minister who openly admitted that he did not believe in God, and as an atheist who'd spent a lot of time in church myself, I was pretty curious to see him in action. So I watched him show up, week after week: holding services, reading Scripture and delivering sermons. And... you really couldn't tell most of the time that he was an atheist. At all. According to what I've read of his writings, Cupitt believed that it doesn't matter if God exists or not --- either way, worship and faith bring us together, and make us better people. I never really chatted one-on-one with the guy, but he always seemed very mellow. He was just a chill dude who liked his job and wanted to share something special with his community, even if that something wasn't his own personal belief in the divine. Having a self professed atheist holding services didn't even slightly change the feelings of reverence and contemplation that I got from being in church --- if anything, it made everything simpler and thus purer.
My last year at Cambridge, we were visited by Bishop John Shelby Spong, an Episcopalian from the USA who had gotten a lot of notoriety for ordaining gay ministers and supporting marriage equality. Somehow, I was lucky to be one of about 20 people invited to a private gathering with the bishop, where he fielded questions from some very irate people with total equanimity. At one point, he said something that really stuck with me: commenting on the commonly held theology that Jesus "paid the price" for us sinners, Bishop Spong said it really made no sense to him that God was preparing to take humanity behind the woodshed and give us a whoopin' (he talked in a very folksy way) but Jesus intervened and took the whoopin' for us. Spong just couldn't believe that God would operate that way. Side note: I highly recommend his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.
I'm pretty sure that I would be a much worse person if I hadn't had years of experience of singing in church choirs. It got me out of the tiny college town I grew up in, and exposed to me to people from very different backgrounds --- but also, I gained a new appreciation for how much good religion can do in people's lives. I feel like if I hadn't had this experience, I might have grown up to be one of the atheists I know who only sees the negative side of religion, and just rails against it. I think of religion as a very human institution: extremely fallible, sometimes actually destructive, but capable of wonderful transforming goodness.
Photo of Emmanuel College chapel by Steve Cadman/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
My Stuff
In case you missed it, I helped to create a trans superhero named Escapade for Marvel Comics. She made her debut in Marvel Voices Pride #1 back in June, and she just appeared in three issues of New Mutants (31-33) which I wrote. These four issues form a pretty complete story, and I'm super proud of how they turned out, thanks to a heroic army of contributors. (Artists Ted Brandt, Ro Stein, Alberto J. Alburquerque, colorists Tamra Bonvillain and Carlos Lopez, letterer Travis Lanham, editor Sarah Brunstad, assistant Anita Okoye and many others.) It's probably still pretty easy to find all four comics at your local store, plus they're available in digital formats. If you are craving a trans hero who screws up a lot but just keeps joy in her heart, these comics are here for you. (Plus there's an adorable flying turtle! Hibbert just gets cuter and cuter!)
Also, Escapade and friends are coming back in a miniseries, New Mutants: The Lethal Legion, also written by me. It starts in March, and you can pre-order it now!
Speaking of awesome heroes who screw up a lot, my young adult space fantasy trilogy is coming to an end this April with the release of Promises Stronger Than Heartbreak. This book is twice as gonzo as the first two put together, and it features kisses, betrayals, people voiding the warranty on their space hardware, random acts of sabotage, shocking reveals, kisses, a sinister wedding chapel, kisses --- and a space battle that's (I hope) unlike anything you've seen before. I really worked hard, in this one and in Victories Greater Than Death, to do space battles that felt like they lived up to everything I had loved about Wrath of Khan, the original Star Wars, Galaxy Quest, The Expanse and BSG, and this time around I think I came up with something pretty scary and new. And Promises is also incredibly, unfeasibly queer and inclusive, and it has a lot of stuff about friendship being at least as important as romance. I can't wait for y'all to read this one, and it is also available for pre-order!
