It’s Easter weekend, as the surfeit of chocolate and bunny imagery in store fronts attested to yesterday–and also the heavy-handed Christian parade running down King St., Waterloo, midday. “God Exists!”, “Jesus Loves You!”, and a host of more didactic banners about Christ’s tomb and eternal life were held high by members of a large throng of young families, with a few elders walking steadily in their midst while a marching band played on. Many participants were smiling. Others looked preoccupied.
I was on lunch break from one of my part-time jobs, reading from a collection of short stories centred around the lives of church members in a shrinking Anglican congregation. I’d picked up the collection on recommendation from a coworker, but all the while I was reading, I caught myself musing over how little any of the characters seemed to harbour genuine religious beliefs. In one story, the rector, after an interview where he evades a question about belief, makes confession to a sweater he stole. In another, an old man realizes he’s always had more of an emotional connection to a long-lost war buddy than to his wife of sixty years. In another still, a younger woman is too preoccupied with an ovarian condition to make much of the dust-to-dust rhetoric of Ash Wednesday. And then I heard the Christian parade’s marching band, and looked up, and found myself torn between two competing views of the world: the sneaking suspicion that most Christians don’t actually believe in a god, but simply use the language therein to navigate the human world; and the wonder that so many of my fellow human beings might actually be believers in the fantastical–that is to say, “magical thinkers”.
I’m not absent an imagination myself, of course. No writer would ever admit to such a mental gap, and I do thoroughly enjoy exploring what-ifs–a useful pastime for any sentient species attempting to anticipate future problems and opportunities. Nor do I believe it is always easy to differentiate between magic and the mundane: In a first-year class I TA’ed for last fall, for instance, dragons existed in Beowulf, and Beowulf was presented to the class as a kind of historical document; ergo (with no small thanks, I suspect, to recent HBO programming), many students discovered that they had passively believed dragons to have existed in the real world–just in another age.
The difference that makes for magical thinkers, I would therefore argue, is the active maintenance of a set of beliefs that would not otherwise accord with one’s day-to-day experiences within the world–beliefs, that is, for which the narrativizing of other realms, other sensory input, and other explanations must be almost incessant. If one’s car is barely functioning because the gas tank seems to be at zero, and then it manages a last gasp–enough to get you to the gas station, say–then this is a set of events for which mundane explanations exist. However, if one adds in a single factor–the assertion that one prayed to their god when they saw the needle at “zero”–then suddenly these facts take on a magical dimension, and one can narrativize the last gasp in the tank as a god’s “answer” to their prayer.
(Nor do I choose this story lightly; in my time as an undergraduate, I met many people who fervently asserted their belief that a god was responsible for their car starting in poor weather conditions, or their ability to pass a given test, or the discovery of a much-needed fiver in their coat pocket.)
In some ways, then, this fascination with the possibility that I live in a world with so many “magical thinkers” necessarily plays into my answering doubt about how many people “really” believe in such things, and I have to be careful not to let incredulity that someone might think a god planted a fiver in their coat pocket entirely skew my thinking towards this skeptical end.
That said, I often find myself doubting whether most people who identify as theists (friends and family included–people whose word I would normally take at face value) actually believe in a god, or an afterlife, or any of the fantastical notions that go with both concepts. Rather, it strikes me that many recognize the whole kit-and-caboodle as a social vocabulary they were given as children, and as a useful framework for more easily defending all manner of authority-claims as adults.
It’s not so much, say, that almost half of Americans do not understand evolution (as a surface reading of the most notorious recent survey would have us believe); it might simply be that when asked whether human beings evolved from other species with or without the involvement of a god, Americans recognize what checking any of those boxes would mean–for their politics and their general sense of communal identity–and side with their preexisting allegiances over what they may or may not understand to be more empirically accurate.
This is not to say that I suspect all theists maintain a claim to their beliefs on purely sociopolitical or communal grounds. I do not doubt the existence of credulous people–folk, for example, who hear tell of demons and angels in the Christian canon, and thereafter expect the presence of demons and angels in the world at large. It’s simply that my experiences with a range of religiously-identified people leaves me feeling this number is far smaller than made out by North American media.
In my neighbourhood, for instance, I am surrounded by what I call “street religion”–a form of orally-disseminated Christian faith practised by the hurting members of a marginalized socioeconomic class, many who rely on the social services along and around my street for food, shelter, and a safe place to come down from various substance abuse situations. These folk narrate religious beliefs from often incredibly wobbly understandings of Biblical texts they haven’t personally read–but they do so quite blatantly for practical benefit: as a vocabulary by which to perform rehabilitation for themselves and others, to gain acceptance and favour within their human communities, and to structure the stories of their lives to date in some way that might give them hope of excuse and forgiveness for past trespass.
On a few occasions now (since I’m careful not to identify as an atheist around religiously-identified people who are so clearly, immediately in pain), I’ve had the opportunity to “test” whether religious language is a kind of narrative shorthand more than an expression of genuine belief. In my experience, all it takes is framing conversation in a humanist, rather than a supernatural light, and one sees how readily the narratives change from praising the Christian god to reflecting on all the human beings who’ve helped a given person overcome their circumstances. In other words, the urge to narrate oneself out of a history of pain and past trespass might be universal, but I’ve found that the vocabulary people use to do so is quite clearly context-specific.
Nor do I think one needs to be in such an immediately vulnerable position for faith to emerge as a practical adaptation. After all, the dominant narrative of de-conversion from Abrahamic faiths seems to involve recognizing how one’s human community reinforced a certain vernacular and behaviour set all throughout one’s childhood, and how eventually one realizes they’ve simply been playing along (credulously, even!) for years. Adults, too, routinely use the language of religiosity as communal shorthand–for currying political favour, soliciting personal donations, evading repercussions for wrongdoing, and constructing “in” and “out” groups within society at large.
But while there is a strong case to be made (I would argue) for fewer people genuinely believing in a god or afterlife than the raw number of self-identified religious persons might suggest, magical thinking is by no means the provenance solely of such faiths. To properly encompass all the belief-sets that require relentless human narration to be sustained above and beyond day-to-day experience sets, one would have to include a host of “New Age” notions (including belief in a universal consciousness, or karma, or the efficacy of homeopathic treatments above the level of a placebo, or that one can will the universe a given way by thought alone, or other psychic powers, or ghosts, or reincarnation) and a few other notions that come to us as a direct result of our conviction that we are mostly free agents in the universe, entirely capable of writing our own destinies.
Indeed, even just trying to list all the ways in which human narration sustains belief sets that would otherwise exist in tension with our day-to-day experiences leaves me open to the possibility that any human who narrates is either a magical thinker, or someone who understands the social benefit of performing as if they were. What a world ours then becomes.
I touched on this concept in a short story I posted at the beginning of the year (“Rhoda’s Monsters”), but despite almost a lifetime of reading, inquisitiveness, and personal narration, I still feel ill-equipped to reflect in full on the implications of a world so full of storytellers, most of whom spend most of their narrative potential on stories that are at once very old and very much in tension with so much of the world around us. My intended dissertation, even, addresses the ways in which even science writing (in particular, science writing of the nineteenth century, a time of tremendous ideological upheaval) is always narrated, and in consequence beholden (for all its empirical data) to the underlying figurative language, rhetorical traditions, and cultural narratives that surround and precede any given work therein.
Even my ambivalence, though, is an old one–Hume’s notion of the Is versus the Ought writ large: If the world is filled with narrators (conscious and self-conscious alike), does that mean we ought to glorify narration? Do we even have a choice in the matter, when the great majority of us were born and raised into communities of public talkers, thinkers, and incessant debate?
It might seem strange for a self-identified writer, English literature scholar, and teacher to distrust the exaltation of narration, but on days like today, when some of the more magical narratives that dominate my culture are on such overt display, I find that my aforementioned tension–between skepticism about the extent of magical thinking in the world, and fascination with its existence at all–is predicated on a much deeper set of questions:
Do we know how often we’re telling stories–to ourselves and to others–every waking day? Do we know the implications of those stories–whom they help and whom they hinder? Would we change them if we did? Could we, if we wanted to? Are these stories even ours, to do with as we will? And if we could, and if they are, what is the better balance between overarching social narratives and the ones guiding individual lives? Or between stories more and less at odds with our everyday experience of the world?
Do any of us have these answers yet?
Would we know how to narrate them, if we did?
I look out on Easter Sunday in my city–church bells ringing, streets sparse, stores closed, and children in thousands of households doubtless cataloguing their egg-hunt loot. The world so thick with human stories, it’s a wonder our capacity for narration isn’t fantasy enough.
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