The Great (Bed, Bath and) Beyond

I often wonder whether I should not attempt to write my way out of my present predicament.  I think that if I could stop thinking for a moment, and only write page after page of nonsensical prose something more meaningful might emerge from all of the dross.  I have a blog that nobody—except for you, gentle reader—notices.  And who can wonder why my blog doesn’t reach more readers?  I confess here that the purpose of my blog was never well formulated.  After several years of work on Soviet Roulette, I can scarcely explain its premise to friends or new acquaintances.  Why does Soviet Roulette exist?  For whom is it written?  What pretense of authority does it possess?  

I can answer none of these questions with any degree of certainty.  When a friend recently asked me what Soviet Roulette was about, I answered that it was an investigation of everything that connected my own life experience to the Bolshevik Revolution and the history of the Soviet Union.  His response—“but your life is not related to either of those topics in any way”—was not without merit. In many ways, my own life, filled with long stretches of stagnation and occasional trips to supermarket, is the antithesis of Soviet history, with its drama, upheaval, and bloodshed. In fact, I had no response to that criticism, that my life bears no resemblance to Russian reality, and I often notice that the two halves of my blog posts (the first half dealing with some memory of mine, and the second half analyzing some Russian history book I’ve recently read) are obviously, even crudely disjointed.  When I re-read a post, I cannot help but be jolted by the rough transition between personal reflection and public history; indeed, it’s as if the seems of each essay were sown together by a blind person.  

One or two readers (and there aren’t many more than that) have suggested that I try to solve the problem by dropping one part or the other of the blog’s general act.  While the blog might never be a huge success, if only I’d stop mentioning Russian history I might manage to say something interesting every now and again.  The comment reminds me of something Shock Jock Howard Stern used to say all the time to guests.  After listening to somebody for a period of time, he’d finally hear something that interested him, exclaiming with inexhaustible supply of condescension, “NOW you’ve said something,” as if nothing that had been said up until that point had been worth saying at all.  

The point of course is that this attempt to fit one’s personal narrative into a grander narrative about human beings in general is worth doing, even if one fails in the end to make the case.  At any rate, it’s how my mind functions.  I go to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to buy a waste basket, storage bins, and shelf dividers, but I think simultaneously about what I’ve read recently, what I may have read long ago, or what I’m currently reading, which in this case is Paul Froese’s The Plot to Kill God, about Russia’s great secularization campaigns of the previous century.  While I’m in Bed, Bath, and Beyond, I fall in love with the kitchen utensils, colorful shower curtains, clever closet organizers, and ingenious tie holders.  

(Sidebar…The genius of Bed, Bath, and Beyond’s tie holders reminds me my fiancee’s criticism of American ingenuity:  she says after decades of educational softness and mathematical decline, modern Americans now believe that adding a cup holder to a sectional sofa is received as a major invention. The episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which revolves around the idea of adding a periscope to cars in order to navigate around stalled traffic, and also includes Larry David’s idea for skies that travel more easily by screwing apart in the middle, mirrors my engineer-girlfriend’s point.  But I, unabashed, reply that I have my own plans for adding to the storehouse of global intelligence by unleashing virtual shopping experiences that combine Facebook-like social interactions with video game-like graphics.)  

But to return to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, when I shop I’m looking for the latest and greatest in home storage systems (my exasperated ex-wife once asked the condo association board members to forgive me for my rabid insistence that we purchase a dedicated file cabinet—“you’ll have to excuse my husband,” she said, “he believes that all of life’s problems can be solved by putting papers in filing cabinets”).  But while I look for paper sorters, spice racks, and key holders, I’m also thinking about the Soviets.  Why did they get so tired of religion?  Why did they exhaust so much energy attacking that institution when they assumed it would eventually die away under the pressure of education, science, and technology?  And why did religion survive the onslaught?  I assume the answer has something to do with Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  

When you live in the suburbs, you have certain advantages when it comes to analyzing spiritual crises.  You can spend your way out of a day or two of serious thinking, but sooner or later you’re obliged to look for some form of social and metaphysical meaning that’s greater, more urgent than unaltered consumerism.  As Paul Froese points out, even the Soviets soon realized that religion wasn’t just going to disappear under the weight of state-sponsored persecution.  Eventually they recognized why Emile Durkheim and other social theorists have argued, that ritualistic activity is an essential component of what it means to be human.  That is to say, God may not be necessary in the suburbs, but His church certainly is.  

People everywhere and in all historical circumstances seek to participate in something greater than their immediate surroundings.  They want to be reminded that they are part of something much grander and more intense than spending time with soccer coaches, real estate agents, contractors, mail carriers, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond store clerks.  They want ritual to make them feel that their lives have real significance.  So that’s why the Soviets didn’t merely undermine the Russian Orthodox Church and traditional Islamic courts.  Rather, they created what many have seen as a new, Marxist-Leninist religion.  

In what ways was this creed religious?  Paul Froese reminds us of the many parallels that can be drawn between the Soviet Union’s official creed of so-called “scientific atheism” and religious thinking.  The obvious place to begin is the Soviet Union’s sacred texts, written by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and eventually Stalin.  These texts, like religious texts, could be interpreted but never critiqued.  Beyond, the texts, Lenin, Stalin, and other state-sanctioned leaders were treated like religious prophets.  With more deliberateness than often credited, the portraits were nearly ubiquitous, but found with special frequency in the corner of peasant homes that had traditionally been reserved for Orthodox saints.  Marxist-Leninism displaced Christianity as a religion in many other respects.  The Communist leadership created a new calendar of semi-sacred worker holidays, new rituals of initiation and status, new atheist songs and catechisms, and new atheist organizations.  

The Communist effort to create a new form of collective worship met with mixed success.  Traditional Soviet religiosity, measured by church attendance, certainly declined precipitously.  And Froese is quick to remind us that all fifteen of the Soviet successor states have, up until now at any rate, avoided any overt conflation of church and state.  On the other hand, the Soviets did not quash the religious instinct in their citizens.  While Russians and other Soviet peoples largely (but not entirely) stopped attending churches, synagogues, and mosques, until the 1980s, they did participate in many forms of ritualistic if Communistic worship.  And when Communism collapsed, they quickly turned back to the old forms of religious practice, with new Protestant and Islamic sects outpacing even these impressive gains.  In the end, the Soviet experiment with secularization proved what suburbanites instinctively know:  sometimes one needs Church to make life in the suburbs (or life on the Steppe) bearable.  `

The Triumph of Atheism

One of the Revolution’s crowing achievements was atheism.  After centuries of cruel economic and ideological exploitation by the Orthodox clergy and its political allies, Russians finally liberated themselves from an outmoded belief in God.  This liberation was at the heart of the Revolution’s appeal to the liberal-minded, urban intelligentsia.  How free must men and women have felt to be able to escape centuries of magical thinking and religious mumbo-jumbo in one spontaneous moment of rational action?  How joyous an epoch:  to overthrown a god as well as a tsar in one tumultuous year?  Rasputin, the tangible link between God and tsar in the last days of the old regime, was the living embodiment of everything that had been eating away at Russia for so many centuries.  For many educated Russians, Rasputin’s mysticism and magical thinking were inextricably tied up with his depravity and amorality, which, in turn, were firmly linked to the charismatic but bizarre man’s autocratic, reactionary politics.  Religious Russia meant Grigory Rasputin, or worse. 

I remember the moment in time when I first realized there was no God.  Strangely, my religious education occurred in public school during my freshman year of high school.  Assigned two essays about the existence of God—one theist, the other atheist—I was immediately and totally convinced of the truth of the atheist document.   I was shocked and upset by my conversion to godlessness.  Until that time, I had been a believer from a relatively liberal Protestant sect, Methodism.   Looking back, it’s clear that the collapse of my faith had very little to do with the essayist’s arguments, and everything to do with my mother’s recent death.  Reading the essay, I was left with that simple question everyone must ask himself in the wake of a personal tragedy:  if there is a God, how could he have taken away my mother?  My answer was as simple as the question:  there cannot be a God. 

Looking back, I am struck by the oddness of losing one’s religion as a response to death.  For religion is nothing if not an elaborate attempt to give people solace in the face of death, or mortality in general.  Yet my mother’s death opened up a curtain on existence and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God was no longer a factor in my mortal life.  The irony perhaps is that my mother went into the final weeks of her life as a Christian, even calling for a minster to visit her sickbed to sing Christian songs with her.  That’s my memory anyhow--forgive the distortions that have accumulated over the course of twenty-five years.

One doesn’t really lose one’s faith in a single instance.  There are no “road to Damascus” experiences, as it were.  When I learned from my grandmother than my mother had died, I went to seek solace from my father, asking whether it was true that Mom was actually much better off being in heaven.  My father’s look, filled with pity and a certain incredulity at my naivete, said something different than his hesitant words:  “Yes, Derek.  She must be in heaven.  Yes, she must be better off.”  He probably never meant to deliver such a condescending message.  He may not even have meant anything at all.   Although he was a half-hearted believer at best, attending Church for his wife’s sake, his answer couldn’t have really turned my mind away from  the depressing fact of my growing distrust of the Christian response to tragedy.  The truth was this:  I didn’t really trust in God’s existence.  The bible picture book Mom kept downstairs seemed as relevant to my life as my book of Greek mythology or any Dungeons and Dragons book. 

Being freed from religion was an awesome responsibility, and one I couldn’t handle for many years.  At first, I wondered whether I even needed to bother about morality and ethics if God wasn’t around to punish or reward me.  Of course,  leaving religion had its upside:  I had a confident, independent, open-minded, and even creative approach to my surroundings and toward men and women from other religious traditions .  I also eventually started to think more deeply about right and wrong:  since the bible wasn’t inherently right or wrong, one had to think very deeply about what separated the good from the bad.  And of course I soon realized that Christians, and religious folks in general, were often capable of doing very bad things at the behest of their god.  As Kurt Vonnegut said, and I can only paraphrase him:  sooner or later gods have got to be held accountable for the actions of their followers.

In Russia, state-sponsored atheism led to ideological coercion, anticlerical cruelty, and anti-religions brutality on a scale not even the pogrom-tolerant autocracy could have imagined.  Godless Russia, it turned out, was even worse than Godly Russia.  In my own life, atheism didn’t make things better.  In some ways, atheism merely became the mirror image of my earlier Christianity:  I became as intolerant of different religious viewpoints as Christians generally seemed to be.  To me, Christianity itself—a religion I was born to—seemed as strange as the cult of Santaclaus, if people had continued to believe in Santa after entering adulthood.  At times, I barely understood how people ever maintained their faith in the supernatural in the face of overwhelming scientific and physical evidence.  

Just recently, an erudite Catholic friend came to visit and attested that there simply was no evidence that Jesus had NOT risen from the dead, or even evidence that he or his disciples had intended to perpetuate some kind of hoax that he had done so.  The absurdity of this line of reasoning even now overwhelms me.  If this friend, one of the smartest people I know, is able to frame a problem in such an illogical way, how much less thought do other Christians use when thinking about the existence of God?

Notwithstanding my occasional incredulity, over time I have mellowed.  I’ve come to think that atheism and theism are two sides of the same coin;  and that the quest for ultimate, metaphysical truth, must necessarily involve both a belief in transcendent reality and some kind of paradoxical belief in the physical sameness (and therefore anti-religious structure) of the universe.  Little by little I’ve made room in my life for a little religion.  I’ve lit a votive candle or two, spoken to my dead mother from time to time, and fallen for the Hindu god, Ganesha, whose small statue stands on my bookshelf as a reminder of how little I know or will be able to know about life and the cosmos.  Somehow an elephant-headed God, rather than an historical man-god, seems like a better indicator of the inner truth of religious sentiment. 

I guess I’ve come to understand that atheism will not make him a happier person.  It didn’t transform Russia into a utopia, nor did it lead me to inner bliss.  To the extent that I remain an atheist, I do so because atheism is a true doctrine and not because it leads to paradise on earth.   Where my son is concerned, I hope to teach him something that is neither theist nor atheist, or is perhaps both.  This is a complicated task.  I guess if I have my way my son will be something akin to the characters in an Isabel Allende novel, rational people who believe in ghosts and spirits and operate in a world of magical reality.  

Reading a book by Abram Tertz on Russian folklore, I see the kind of person I’d like my son to become.  Tertz was a deeply analytical man who applied the tools of anthropology and literary criticism to collect and objectively assess the religious traditions of the Russian folk,  a people who believed in all manner of major and minor religious, mythological, and spiritual activity.  Tertz did not merely respect the Russian peasants’ ability to incorporate the sacred into his daily life.  Rather, he crossed that threshold on occasion and saw life through their pantheistic gaze.  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James said that men and women were either religious or irreligious;  that is, they either lived in an enchanted world or they lived in a rational one, but never both.  But Tertz showed that it’s possible to live in both worlds at the same time, which is all that anyone should hope for.  

Giving Atheism a Bad Name

How do you know you’ve had a Revolution with a capital “R?” I’d say when your new government overturns 800 years of Christianity or so and makes a cult of atheism. Worse than that, you know you've had a serious cultural event when you've turned atheism into a sort of mirror image of the very theology it hopes to elude. (For analogous American trends, See James Wood's recent article in the 31 August 2009 New Yorker: "God In the Quad: A Done Defends the Supreme Being from the New Atheists").

How atheism established itself—even in the context of political and economic upheaval—is a mystery to me. Apparently Russian revolutionaries took their Marxism seriously. Religion was the opiate of the masses, a symptom of the false consciousness that covered over class oppression and obscured the true economic and political interests of the working classes. Even so, a political party has to have a very low regard for the notion of democracy to dethrone a common religion. (It was actually illegal for an atheist to sit in the British Parliament right up through most of the nineteenth century--See Walter Arnstein’s excellent monograph on the subject, the Bradlaugh Case--and few if any self-professed atheists could win any significant election in America today.

Evidently Russia’s official religion, Orthodoxy, was so corrupted by its contact with autocracy and aristocracy that it had lost much of its charm even for Russian peasants. Perhaps Russian peasant cared more about occupying church lands than they did about following church doctrine. Part of the issue is that the Russian peasants were never as Christian as they were sometimes made out to be. Although Christianity has reemerged in the wreckage of communism, historians such as Bruce Lincoln have argued that Russian peasants were as polytheistic or pagan or superstitious as they were Christian. Without literacy, and without educated priests in their midst, peasant understanding of Christian dogma was extremely fragile.

In any event, Soviet atheism quickly became an oppressive force. The religious were scorned and marginalized if not harassed. Were Soviet atheists as intolerant and oppressive as Western Christians continue to be in countries like America? It seems hard to imagine that this could be possible. It’s a tragedy really, since the novel phenomena of overt agnosticism, deism, and atheism had traditionally been allied to the Enlightenment principles like toleration, openness, free inquiry, skepticism, and equality. In fact, the word “freethinker” was a synonym for agnosticism throughout the nineteenth century. And atheism had no history—except perhaps in the French Revolution—of torture, anti-Semitism, bigotry, and warfare, as Christianity and theism in general had.

Yet somehow the Soviet Union managed to do the impossible by giving atheism a bad name. The great experiment in mental freedom was, alas, a failure. Perhaps the problem was that communism became a religion itself. Perhaps people are doomed to some form of religion—the real Original Sin--regardless of their aspirations.