I grew up in a little pit of prejudiced hell. Physically beautiful, but seething with hate.
I’ve seen KKK guys on a sunny afternoon on Main Street, signing people up on street corners. I knew a woman who had a slave in 1976. That was also a year in which doctors weren’t letting Black people come in the front door and sit in the same waiting room as white people. I knew another woman who bragged about having a “girl” who worked for her from sun-up to midnight for a quarter a day back in the good old days; same woman never lived in a house with a kitchen in it because that’s out in the servants’ quarters. In that town, there was literally “the other side of the tracks” where the vast majority of the Black population lived. I was the only white kid I knew to ever go there and into a house. I was warned to be careful moving to San Antonio because of all “them Mexicans.”
I had the pleasure of being there for our first Black Homecoming Queen and Black-dominated senior superlatives, with the unutterable sadness at “Most Likely to Succeed” being awarded to me and the white dentist’s son. The only white people to win anything that night. I still don’t know what to do with that. What an oppressive crap heap of a culture they grew up in to think that only white kids would likely succeed.
I also personally experienced a lot of religious prejudice. I went to Catholic Mass every week, but was an atheist already, a secret I kept as I honestly thought it would get me hurt. But Catholic was enough. In case it’s not clear: ROMAN CATHOLICISM IS A CHRISTIAN RELIGION. Read a little about Henry VIII or Martin Luther or other Protestant Reformation leaders and get the picture. We were the dominant Christian religion in the West until give or take the 16th century so you guys, you various Protestants, are the new-comers. You were the heretics.
In Ardmore we had all your major Protestant churches: Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist. We had Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostals, and a legit a cult somewhere outside town that didn’t let women cut their hair, but I never knew a lot about that. We even had the occasional Mormon on his Mission – I know. I met that guy since.
We also had a dozen smaller churches, independent ones started by random dudes – who may or may not have studied theology in any legit way – and the 100 people in his congregation were absolutely convinced that they were the only people EVER in the HISTORY OF HUMANITY that had ever gotten it Right. They were the chosen, the only people going to Heaven, and the rest of us would burn. Seems a small heavenly population to me.
I found that most of those people didn’t really have a concept of scope or perspective. Of just how many people were alive right then on the earth, much less how many might’ve lived over the tens of thousands of years of documentable human existence; all those people, including all my family members, were destined for a fiery hell. They were convinced that they, those 100, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, circa 1990 A.D. were the only ones who ever had a guaranteed pipeline to god.
The one thing these churches all agreed about was that the Catholics were not Christians. (Well, maybe not the Episcopalians. They’re my favorite Protestants.) Despite copying the Bible for centuries by hand, despite the crucifix above the altar, despite all the centuries of cathedrals, religious art, religious hymns, and martyrs to following Jesus – definitely not Christians. I get it. Pop culture things like vampires and exorcisms, other religions that borrow from Catholicism like Voodoo, has made Catholicism into some deeply ritualistic, chanty, exotic thing that probably involves magic and maybe Catholics have secret powers to harm you. It is ritualistic and occasionally chanty – that’s the part I like. It’s comforting to know that it will be consistent. I never got to hear a Latin Mass but I would love to. To me it’s a connection to my family, for generations, and an art form. I love the jewelry and the robes and the pomp and ceremony. (But damn it, I’m allergic to the incense. Cut it out! And no, I never learned any special Catholic magic way to harm you.)
For the record, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and the Baptists were not my problem. It was other folks, especially those little, pesky, ridiculous “churches” led by some dude who thought he had discovered the one true path and the couple dozen people who were dumb enough to believe him.
We were called heretics from pulpits, we were subjected to books about having the mark of the Beast on our foreheads, the Seventh Day Adventist hospital marked Catholic patients as having no religion. We are Catholics, not Christians, to these people. I hate to break it to everyone but again, we’re not the heretics. We read the Bible – beyond any private reading, there are different readings at every Mass, multiple ones, and over the course of several years we will have read the whole thing out loud. Yes, some people confess to priests, but plenty don’t. Many Catholics pray privately to Jesus, to god, to the virgin Mary, who I personally think deserves a little more respect from the average Protestant. The Pope is supposed to be the voice of god. I don’t care. Many, many Catholics I know don’t care. There’s that whole transubstantiation thing, and while I enjoy the taste of the wafers, I’ve never bought it was the flesh of Jesus. That’s just creepy and nasty – I give you that one freely. When we say, “Peace be with you, And also with you,” that’s a nice thing. Wishing other people peace. Don’t you want peace? Best part of Mass.
I had lots of issues with one particular church. Plenty of people know about that one and it was because I “got” one of them. Came to a head when a guy from there questioned at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting whether Christians should date non-Christians, like Catholics. Sigh. It just got old, being persecuted because of a basic misunderstanding of facts.
But there was one guy, we’ll call him Tee, who was my arch nemesis. His dad was one of the Random Religious Dudes who had his own “church.” They had a “prayer hut” in their backyard which looked a helluva lot like a garden shed; I presume it was somehow done up inside. One time a friend of mine was at their house with some other kids, shooting hoops. He went inside and asked for glass of water. The mom told him where the glasses were and told him to help himself – we just drank out of faucets back then – and when he went to fill it up she screamed hysterically to not use that tap, but another one. The one he tried to use was holy water because her husband, the Random Religious Dude, had blessed the pipe. Random Protestants with holy water? That’s 1. Our thing and 2. I’ve never heard of a Catholic Priest blessing a pipe so you can have holy water on tap.
Tee had, purportedly, been told by the God, in the prayer shed, that he was the Second Coming of Christ. No joke. He heard God tell him he was the second coming. He thought he was Jesus reincarnated. I’ll just let you mull that over. He was also a power lifter. I never saw him in anything other than “power lifting for Jesus” t-shirts. Such patches were also all over his letter jacket. He weighed 115 pounds. I know that from the patches.
He started a prayer circle at school. It met in the library before school severy morning. I think there were, being generous, a dozen kids in it. Fine. No skin off my nose. I’m not burning to deny other people their faith. Then he joined my Debate Class senior year and tried to execute a coup. He wanted to be elected Chaplain of Debate Club, a position we did not have for what I thought were obvious reasons. “Chaplain” is an inherently religious office – the teacher handed me the Dictionary open to the entry – and there is a Separation of Church and State. This is a public school, an institution of the state and therefore a religious office is an offense against that segregation. Then he ran against me for President, where he continued his original platform of reforms including: as President he would be the designated person to present the point of view of the Founding Fathers (of America) in any class conversation. (Yeah, that’s what he’d argued a “Chaplain” was.) Along with the laughable absurdity, he could not explain why he was uniquely suited to perform that duty.
I confirmed that he was free to present his opinion of the Founding Fathers’ p.o.v. in any conversation. You don’t need an office or title for that. (The conversation I remember having many times before class there that year was whether Kyle MacLaughlin in Twin Peaks or Alec Baldwin in Hunt for Red October was more attractive. I don’t think I know where Washington or Adams would fall on that topic.). He lost, I won. He never brought up the Founding Fathers.
In English – an AP class he was not qualified to be in, which is why she also wasn’t qualified to teach it – we were all supposed to present our persuasive papers. He went first. His was an anti-abortion paper, all about personhood and it beginning at conception and the pandemonium that followed (I admit I was at the front of charge) was such that no one else read their paper aloud.
He also was constantly passing around, guaranteeing I would see them, “Christian” comic books. One said there were tunnels between convents and monasteries where nuns and priests would have sex and abort/murder their children. One said we offered blood sacrifices to Mary. The capper for me though was: “The end of the world will come when a ‘superchurch’ takes over the world. This church will be the Roman Catholic Church.” I remember it exactly. It was from a comic book - one that purported to cover the whole Bible and was the size of your average comic book. (It wasn’t a multi-volume graphic novel is my point.) That quote was followed by a citation from the Bible – no, I don’t remember what book or verse it was supposed to be from. Like it was direct quote from the Bible. The blood sacrifice/secret sex rites bullshit was laughable, frankly, but that one tried to legitimize itself. (One would think, for people who claim to spend every waking hour reading the damn thing, they would realize they’d never seen that passage.)
Do I need to point out that at the time the books of the Bible were supposed transcribed direct from the voice of god there was no Roman Catholic Church? And buddy, Catholicism is already a superchurch. Beyond your little megalomaniac dreams. They were long before you showed up, they had mostly taken over the Western world, and the rapture didn’t happen so calm the fuck down.
And of course, doesn’t that mean you should “support” us like you do Israel? Don’t you WANT the end times? At this point I should probably reiterate: I went to Church for many non-religious reasons. I am not trying to write a defense of Catholicism, but an account of how I was subjected to harassment and belittling and exclusion because I was not Protestant..
Tee was constantly chirping in my ear, bitching at me, picking at me, and one day I found the first of two methods guaranteed to shut him up, which is all I really wanted. I was standing in that English class at the board, talking to a friend of mine who happened to be a very large football & basketball player. Tee was yipping like a small dog, running around us. (Which is an insult to small dogs.) We were ignoring him, as usual, and suddenly there was silence. I looked over and my friend was holding him suspended in the air - by his face. He had palmed Tee’s face and picked him up, without ever breaking the flow of conversation. Tee never came near my friend again. I’m a non-violent person but I gotta say, that was epic.
The second way to scare him into silence was simple. I took Latin for four years. A muttered “Pax Vobiscum” (Peace be with you, btw) or the conjugation of a verb or the Pledge of Allegiance and he would run screaming. Literally. He thought I was putting one of those famous Catholic curses on him. The joy of a classical education, such as can be had in Ardmore.
Point is, this week has seen two of the things I depended on back then cut off at the knees: the right to a safe abortion and the Separation of Church and State. The assholes who want these changes are not a faceless mob. They are Tee. Spitting and yipping and power-hungry, status-hungry, desperate for control and things his own way. Manipulative and possibly dangerously mentally ill. Abusive, misogynistic, cowardly. He has his own church now I hear – do they believe he was called to be the new Jesus as a teen-ager? Does that make them a cult? Or just part of the American tapestry of Christo-fascists, a minority of Americans, but currently the most frightening, vicious, and unrestrained, frothing at the intersectionality of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and trans and gay phobic.
Tee's been waiting. All this time. And this time, he would have arguments I couldn’t defeat nearly as easily. I don’t know the answer. I don’t think a murmur of Latin is going to turn SCOTUS around. The people we worked so damn hard to elect seem content to sit back and let it all happen. I kinda wish some one would pick Thomas or Alito and YES! Kavanaugh up by the face. Maybe it would get someone’s attention.
But I’m afraid nothing will.
To everyone I love from Ardmore, and my other friends of various faiths: I don’t begrudge you your faith. I’m happy you have it. My anger was never toward you – they know who they are. I believe in the values of kindness, hope, love, and courage, and so do you.