And Another Thing: Religion and Civil War

By Carole Taylor

Information, get me Jesus on the line.

I’m from the South. I know that might not matter to you, but it does to me. Whether you realize it or not, folks in the South are some of the very few people on earth who survived a civil war and then got on with business within just a couple of generations. Who got over living in an occupied country. My lover is a Yankee. I like Yankees. Only Yankees don’t call themselves Yankees. They won. Had they lost, they’d be as strange about the Civil War as we are.

I would not have been someone fighting for the South in any case. Not a big fan of slavery in any of my incarnations. But Southern identity has more to do with being brought up in a country that lost a war, not necessarily why the war was fought. That’s a whole nother discussion.

You may wonder what civil war has to do with gay and lesbian or even gender issues. Probably everything, given that if certain civil wars now raging continue to get out of hand, there may be nothing left anywhere to have rights about.

With every day filled with news of multitudinous international sibling rivalries/boarder disputes/jihads going on in various parts of the world, I kept asking myself why it was that in America we had a civil war and aren’t still having it. In the Middle East, somebody has been giving the rebel yell almost continuously for 5,000 years. In India and Pakistan, gone with the wind will mean gone with the nuclear fallout. In Ireland, it’s supposedly over, but it lasted over four centuries. And those are just the most glaring examples.

What do all of those other wars have in common? What did our own civil war lack that let us get over ourselves in relatively short order?

The answer to both questions is religion, that’s what. Our civil war was not about who believed in what god or how to spell his name. Or not spell it. It was over a lot of things, stupidity being one of them, but it wasn’t over religion. Religion was used by both sides in America to justify this or that, but religion itself wasn’t the issue.

It has never, ever made any sense to me to have even a verbal argument over religion, but apparently I am nearly alone in my lack of adrenaline. People the world over are absolutely CERTAIN that there is only one god and he’s on their personal speed dial and nobody else’s. That’s the same certainty that creates Virginia and Kansas “ministers” out of the dust of the earth and drives these holy men to hound gays and lesbians to distraction, and nearly always for the same reason. All these guys know who God is, doncha know. The one thing that nearly all of those religious types CAN agree on is that WE are the enemy. Once they stop fighting the congregation across the street or across the boarder for condemnation rights, that is.

And Godde help you if you suggest that the Deity is a female entity, that the Being isn’t the manufacturer of quantum amounts of Celestial Testosterone. Talk about civil war. Don’t take me there.

So if religion is the cause of the problem, or at least the reason given that all these warring factions can’t come to the peace table, then might it be that we should inspect that issue.

Other than that your mother told you it was a good idea, why believe in a god at all? And beyond that, why beat up your neighbor over it? What good does it do? Here’s a thought: If God is supposedly the embodiment of all that humans aspire to, then it matters how we describe who and what we worship. It matters how we describe heaven. It matters how we describe the diety. Because that is how we would describe who we wish we were, what the best possible Earth could be.

How we describe Godde, if you believe in one, has nothing to do with who Godde actually IS, in the existential sense. I can believe that Godde is a flaming Amazon beauty with a double headed axe and a dog kennel, but if Godde exists, my belief will have no effect whatever on who that being actually is. You can BELIEVE whatever you wish about someone. Your belief might be either flattering or simpering or insulting, but your belief alone will not change who that person is.

But your belief about who YOU are will have everything to do with who YOU become.

If you tell children from the time they can hear that heaven is reached by killing twenty Jews and blowing yourself up in the process, that the reward is 72 virgins (for boys only, damn it all), that women are cattle and only worth anything, however slight, as a virgin, I can pretty much tell you what your society will look like, what your home life will look like, what your wars will look like.

Personally, I believe that Godde is a beautiful menopausal Black lesbian. I used to believe that She was a beautiful 30-year-old Cherokee bravette. Before that I believed that He was a reeeeeeeeeeeally old, unmarried, confusing white guy who supported things like incest, castration and complicated restaurant menus. Who the futz knows. I certainly don’t. Maybe he’s a tiny little gay guy who sings show tunes and occasionally does drag.

And maybe we can’t bring peace to the world by abandoning the pulpit, but it just could be that if we were all a little less certain about that speed dial thing, heaven might look a little friendlier.

As one of my favorite prayers says, “God, please save me from your followers.”

Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.