[Vision2020] Rethinking His Religion

[Art Deco]

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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March 24, 2012
Rethinking His Religion By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

I MOVED into my freshman-year dorm at the University of North Carolina
after many of the other men on the hall. One had already begun decorating.
I spotted the poster above his desk right away. It showed a loaf of bread
and a chalice of red wine, with these words: “Jesus invites you to a
banquet in his honor.”

This man attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie,
feeling that church deserved such respect. I kept a certain distance from
him. I’d arrived at college determined to be honest about my sexual
orientation and steer clear of people who might make that uncomfortable or
worse. I figured him for one of them.

About two years ago, out of nowhere, he found me. His life, he wanted me to
know, had taken interesting turns. He’d gone into medicine, just as he’d
always planned. He’d married and had kids. But he’d also strayed from his
onetime script. As a doctor, he has spent a part of his time providing
abortions.

For some readers his journey will be proof positive of Rick Santorum’s
assertion last month that college is too often godless and
corrupting<http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/santorum-college-students-are-ridiculed-for-being-conservative>.
For others, it will be a resounding affirmation of education’s purpose.

I’m struck more than anything else by how much searching and asking and
reflecting he’s done, this man I’d so quickly discounted, who pledged a
fraternity when he was still on my radar and then, when he wasn’t, quit in
protest over how it had blackballed a Korean pledge candidate and a gay
one.

Because we never really talked after freshman year, I didn’t know that, nor
did I know that after graduation he ventured to a desperately poor part of
Africa to teach for a year. College, he recently told me, had not only
given him a glimpse of how large the world was but also shamed him about
how little of it he knew.

In his 30s he read all 11 volumes of “The Story of
Civilization,”<http://www.amazon.com/Story-Civilization-11-Set/dp/1567310230>then
tackled Erasmus, whose mention in those books intrigued him. When he
told me this I was floored: I knew him freshman year as a gym rat more than
a bookworm and extrapolated his personality and future from there.

During our recent correspondence, he said he was sorry for any impression
he might have given me in college that he wasn’t open to the candid
discussions we have now. I corrected him: I owed the apology — for
misjudging him.

He grew up in the South, in a setting so homogenous and a family so
untroubled that, he said, he had no cause to question his parents’
religious convictions, which became his. He said that college gave him
cause, starting with me. Sometime during freshman year, he figured out that
I was gay, and yet I didn’t conform to his prior belief that homosexuals
were “deserving of pity for their mental illness.” I seemed to him sane and
sound.

He said that we talked about this once — I only half recall it — and that
the exchange was partly why he remembered me two decades later.

Questioning his church’s position on homosexuality made him question more.
He read the Bible “front to back and took notes of everything I liked and
didn’t like,” he said.

“There’s a lot of wisdom there,” he added, “but it’s a real mistake not to
think about it critically.”

He also read books on church history and, he said, “was appalled at the
behavior of the church while it presumed to teach all of *us* moral
behavior.” How often had it pushed back at important science? Vilified
important thinkers?

Even so, he added to his teaching duties in Africa a weekly,
extracurricular Bible study for the schoolchildren. But the miseries he
witnessed made him second-guess the point of that, partly because they made
him second-guess any god who permitted them.

He saw cruelties born of the kind of bigotry that religion and false
righteousness sometimes abet. A teenage girl he met was dying of sepsis
from a female circumcision performed with a kitchen knife. He asked the
male medical worker attending to her why such crude mutilation was
condoned, and was told that women otherwise were overly sexual and “prone
to prostitution.”

“Isn’t it just possible,” he pushed back, “that women are prone to *poverty*,
and *men* are prone to prostitution?”

He has thought a lot about how customs, laws and religion do and don’t jibe
with women’s actions and autonomy.

“In all centuries, through all history, women have ended pregnancies
somehow,” he said. “They feel so strongly about this that they will attempt
abortion even when it’s illegal, unsafe and often lethal.”

In decades past, many American women died from botched abortions. But with
abortion’s legalization, “those deaths virtually vanished.”

“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so
many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access
the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow
toward the illegal and dangerous methods,” he said.

He had researched and reflected on much of this by the time he graduated
from medical school, and so he decided to devote a bit of each week to
helping out in an abortion clinic. Over years to come, in various settings,
he continued this work, often braving protesters, sometimes wearing a
bulletproof vest.

He knew George Tiller<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/us/26tiller.html?_r=1&ref=georgertiller>,
the Kansas abortion provider shot dead in 2009 by an abortion foe.

THAT happened in a church, he noted. He hasn’t belonged to one since
college. “Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and
anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral
progress,” he said.

And in too many religious people he sees inconsistencies. They speak of
life’s preciousness when railing against abortion but fail to acknowledge
how they let other values override that concern when they support war, the
death penalty or governments that do nothing for people in perilous need.

He has not raised his young children in any church, or told them that God
exists, because he no longer believes that. But he wants them to have the
community-minded values and altruism that he indeed credits many religions
with fostering. He wants them to be soulful, philosophical.

So he rounded up favorite quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, Confucius,
Siddhartha, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Martin Luther King and more. From the
New Testament, too. He put each on a strip of paper, then filled a salad
bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they
can discuss it.

He takes his kids outside to gaze at stars, which speak to the wonder of
creation and the humility he wants them to feel about their place in it.

He’s big on humility, asking, who are we to go to the barricades for human
embryos and then treat animals and their habitats with such contempt? Or to
make such unforgiving judgments about people who err, including women who
get pregnant without meaning to, unequipped for the awesome responsibility
of a child?

As a physician, he said, you’re privy to patients’ secrets — to their
truths — and understand that few people live up to their own stated ideals.
He has treated a philandering pastor, a drug-abusing financier. “I see life
as it really is,” he told me, “not how we wish it were.”

He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever
encountered, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that
her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him
and other doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.

One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He
walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and
had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the
procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose,
unprincipled.

She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my
relationship isn’t where it should be.”

“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”

A week later, she was back on her ladder.

•

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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