A Moth Eaten Brocade

Michelle Ma's Notes on Religion and Disillusionment

Dear Republic,

We’ve had Faith Week. Now it’s the turn of the Devil’s Advocates. Michelle Ma addresses the hypocrisy she’s experienced from a variety of churches.

-ROL

A MOTH EATEN BROCADE

While I have rarely understood what faith meant, I think it frequently transposes into a belief in self. Is “God dead” like Nietzsche would say? He’s not dead in the worshipped sense. People continue to go to church, they continue to march quietly into lonely churches and light candles. If you pass by any church on a Sunday, you’ll see families dressed up, young people dressed up, all seeming to delight in holy communion. Sometimes a person just looks bored: for many the church is a responsibility, and not a dedication. It is perhaps written into us to believe, as etched into us as fibre. But we can transfer that belief from God to other things. Some people believe ChatGPT is God, some people believe they are messiahs spreading the message of “holy” AI. Our world has changed and there is no way religious people can just blare the trumpets and say, “we’re right and if you don’t believe, you’re going to hell.”

Maybe they learned to talk and think like that in indoctrination camp, Bible camp. Maybe over s’mores, they talked about the Bible and how much God and Jesus loves us and wants nothing more but for us to forget how insignificant we are in joining in the significance of the divine. While I converted to both Mormonism and Catholicism I currently associate with neither. I never attend Mass. I dread identifying as religious and while fascinated by convent life….I think it’s a harder spiritual journey to be divorced from it. People on religion usually make little sense and act like they’re on drugs. They don’t commit, they go for the icing, they go for the cake, they don’t follow the whole path of Jesus, down to the crucifixion and the long walk, to be crucified.

People don’t just want religion, they want to perpetually belong. Simone Weil says, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Religion as a casing follows that splendidly. Yet in all the churches I have gone to, and one session of synagogue, I have never felt that. Sure, I wanted to meet people, but it just never works out, I get shunned, or told to go away. Not sure why, maybe I’m perpetually damned.

I too, was a bit seduced by the need for rootedness, after all, I joined the Mormons during a challenging time in my life when my roommate introduced me to it. I was living at Emma Norton's halfway house with Anna. She was happy all the time, it wasn’t just that she loved to smile, she was an optimist. She had a boyfriend from the Congo who was also Mormon and we’d bond with Mormon missionaries while eating his chicken and rice dishes. They rarely had conversations about God, just about Mormonism as a religious affiliation and what it meant to be a Mormon.

The Mormon missionary talked about his depression and how he had received a Dear John letter. Many of the best missionaries have a crisis of faith, and then frequently they’ll say they walked back to their desk and opened the Book of Mormon and found exactly the passage that made them feel better. Uniting on belief? We all do it. I studied the questions, I memorized the answers, I read the Book of Mormon. It made little sense to me but the people were so nice, I decided I wanted to be Mormon. I was secretly hoping for a Mormon boyfriend but I think most women in the church are.

I went to the Singles ward. I was invited to a sleepover, where we watched romantic comedies until 3 in the morning and had fun snacks. We had dinner at Olive Garden, just me and some of the “cool” girls. I was invited to a dumpling party during Chinese New Year’s. Shabu Shabu at another time. I had a great time, to be honest, and wasn’t thinking all that hard. I wasn’t really an intellectual during that time in my life and didn’t examine my faith. I just enjoyed the social outings and pretended to pledge my faith.

Then we had a meeting at an Elder’s house. I saw the Mormon missionary who converted me, he looked tired and was wearing glasses. He didn’t even say “hello” to me, he ignored me completely. That was the first time I experienced shunning from those great, nice, people. I was shocked. I felt used like tissue paper, I felt like he notched his “conversion” then didn’t even give a damn about me. I felt like it was all so obscene, I felt like a sheep does after it’s been cuddled with in its prime and then sent to slaughter.

I have this fascination and belief in words, like, “we’re friends.” The missionary told me we were friends, I genuinely thought he was my friend. But did I join the biggest cult in America to get a friend? Yes, I did. Did I feel burdened and blighted? Yes. I take friendship seriously and genuinely try to be nice. Yet after that experience, I mistrusted every other missionary. Recently I met with some Mormon missionaries. I had my say, I talked about a wide array of topics and said things like, “I don’t think you guys are on a religious mission but a social one.” They did not return.

They did not call me back. When I, in my fit of loneliness called them, they still didn’t call me back. I said something far worse to the sister missionaries when they visited me a year ago, “Men just use your purity to masturbate over after you leave.” I knew I had said something goddamn awful, I never wanted to talk to a sister missionary again.

I think most Mormon women are just lures for hard working men to get the perfect wife. They’re pure, virginal, and wear pioneer era clothing sometimes, like Little House on the Prairie. They’ll scrub the pots, feed the baby and look pretty doing it. It’s a fucking slave trade. Mormons are really centered on wealth and family. It’s the caveman ethos, “must build a cave castle for family, must feed them antelope!”

The men wear pressed, nice shirts and go into fields like Engineering in high numbers.

Yet they can be damn racist. I was their token Asian. Yet I think even if I were white, they wouldn’t want me. They like me making light jokes and going to their parties. They don’t like my mental illness, nor do they ever talk about mental illness. When I was in the psychiatric ward, it looked like a dungeon. I had no idea why I was there. I called Eliza and she came along with a friend to visit me. They saw me in my scrubs and looked down on me. I was on strong meds and needed food all the time, even though I was gaining weight.. They brought me a few pieces of chocolate and a shitty book on praying for the dead souls of the Holocaust at the Mormon temple. Their faces were fixed, they looked pissed to be there, like they had already fulfilled their Christian duty and were just waiting for the best time, i.e. the earliest time to leave. They didn’t even ask how I was doing, or how I was suffering, and man, I was suffering.

I think they stayed for five minutes. My atheist friend Jonas from Sweden, he came to visit too, he stayed. He brought me hummus and pita from Holy Land, a Middle Eastern bakery. While he wasn’t happy to be there either, he biked all the way from Minneapolis to downtown St Paul to show up. My best relationships have been with atheist men. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever really had a Christian boyfriend. They avoid me like the plague, like I have the sign of the devil on my forehead.

At the bottom of all things I am a truly spiritual person, but it’s a lonely decision. There is no one I can talk theology with. There is no one I can attend church with and feel enlightened, transfigured even. I think almost all religious people are walking frauds or baby machines. Maybe both.

According to Kierkegaard, “The crowd is untruth.” This is devastating. He believed truth was radically individual, that faith begins only when you leave the herd behind. So maybe I’m scared of the truth, that we’re all going to die, either burnt into ashes or swallowed by worms. Part of the great unknown is scary, even alone I cling to some figment of religiosity, while knowing….it will never be. Maybe like the Larkin poem, religion is indeed a “moth eaten brocade.” It has served its use, and no longer placates anyone in a world filled with doubters.

Most Christians would say anything is true about how devoted they are to Jesus Christ. Yet they never show it. Never truly show it. Never sacrifice until the end to show it. Paraphrased from his lectures on religion and enlightenment, Adorno utters, “In many churches, the proclamation of the Gospel has become a substitute for its content.”

People listen to the preachers and then do not question why they are not like Christ. Why do they sound like they’ve taken hallucinogens when you meet with them to discuss the Bible? I met with a Methodist minister and she was downright wrong, she said all people get endless grace, like endless bread. She started ranting about “grace, grace, grace” and I was hesitant to say that I disagreed. Never disagree with a religious fanatic, they get mean.

The minister herself didn’t read the Bible well. Just like most Muslim people don’t read the Quran, which is sort of a commentary on Jesus and the Bible…..most Christians are not good readers either. They don’t explore the diversity and richness and even ambiguity of the Bible. They swallow what is sweet and avoid what is bitter. Jesus performed countless miracles, ministered to all, and died on a Cross, with nails attached to his palms and feet. What did you do, if you consider yourself “like Jesus”? Maybe you sang to nursery school students, acted in a passion play, but did you suffer the way Christ did, in an existential testimony of dread? No. So to all the religious people out there, don’t moralize to me, look at yourself first.

Michelle Ma studied Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Chicago. She was a Mellon-Mays Fellow. She's worked in book PR for a branch of Ruder Finn in New York City. She wrote the book, Spirit of Art, and its sequel, The Return of the Lover: Thomas Levin and his Story. Both are available on Amazon. She loves exploring art fairs and paints, herself, with acrylics and pastels. Michelle lives in Minneapolis and loves exploring the cultural institutions in the area, taking walks, having long conversations and exploring the vibrant food scene.