Where I Stand on Faith

Am I just a Conclave stan or is this something serious?

Where I grew up, there was only a church and a pub. Every Friday, the parishioners of that church would come to school and teach us lessons about why God was good. Your parents could opt out of the sessions, but no one ever did.

Some years, they would gather two or three classes into a larger room with balloons at the front. When a volunteer saw a child talking during a sermon, they would pop a balloon with a pin. If we had balloons by the end, everyone got a lolly on their way out the door. I cost the entire class a balloon by telling our volunteer that I thought “That’s what we believe” was a stupid justification. I was 7.

Bible in Schools was non-denominational and therefore very different from the Catholic Masses that Gran and Grandad took us to. Their church was nicer than the one in our town. It was stone, and after years of burning incense, the scent was embedded in the carpet.

The joy of growing up Catholic is that there is plenty to look at when you’re bored in church. There were no balloons at mass, but we would get McDonald’s on the way home if we were good. We always stopped on the way home, and we weren’t always good. I was always jealous that my sister got to go up for communion. My parents never sent me to the classes because they said I was too naughty. I wanted to know what the blood of Christ tasted like.

Contingencies and bribes are distinct. A consequence is presented. If Gran had said, “If you stop knocking the kneeler down, we will get McDonald’s on the way home,” that would be a bribe. But we knew that if we were good enough (which just meant not making a lot of noise), we’d head for the golden arches. During Bible in Schools, the balloons were on the wall before we walked in. Later, when I moved schools due to bullying, I joined the optional Bible In Schools class on Wednesday lunchtimes because everyone got snacks at the end of the lesson. A bribe is used to abate behaviour, but makes it more frequent. The contingencies I was being presented with in religious settings were to turn up, don’t talk, don’t question us, and we will be rewarded.

Even though I attended optional Bible in Schools classes, God was never a constant for me. Because of the conditioning I received from cheap lollies and McDonald’s trips, I felt I should believe in God. But I couldn’t. When I was 6, I gave up on God and started worshipping Satan instead. I tried to recruit other little Satanists but didn’t have any success. At the end of each lesson, the teacher would provide a moral lesson. She told us a story about a boy who ate two chickens before bed and died in his sleep. For weeks, I worried when I ate my routine biscuits before I went to bed. How could a just God let this happen? After trying God for a second time, it was time to explore other options.

The books on witchcraft in my small school library were limited, but I checked each one out multiple times. I overheard the Bible in Schools teacher make a snide comment about my witchcraft collection to the librarian, and I decided to abandon Christianity altogether. Witchcraft seemed more fun anyway.

Because I grew into a goth, my interest in witchcraft and Satanism intensified. Cultural selectionism is a practice in which practices and behaviours permeate a cultural group through modelling and imitation. The worst thing you could be around a group of teenage goths is a poser, so it’s best to know the history of the iconography and symbols you have started adorning your body with, in case they decide to quiz you. Because I saw myself more as a Satanist (more for shock value than anything else), I started collecting crosses that I could invert.

After the death of Jesus, his disciples travelled around the world, spreading the word of their Lord and being slaughtered one by one. When St. Peter was put to the cross, he asked the crucifiers to invert the cross as he felt unworthy to die in the same way that Christ had. I wore an inverted cross to celebrate the fact that I wasn’t anything close to Christ-like.

The benefit of Modern Satanism is that it does not require faith in a deity. Essentially, the Temple of Satan is a libertarian organisation that uses its resources and scare tactics to oppose Christian Nationalism through the guise of religion. So I could access the religious iconography without abandoning my disbelief. Later, my family would joke that I would burst into flames when I walked into a Church.

In the brief time before settling on Modern Satanism, I was trying a little of everything on the spiritual buffet. When I stopped wearing shoes and learned to fire dance, I tried my hand at Wicca. Wicca is a neo-pagan religion that stole its lore from various folk traditions. When I discovered this, I abandoned it. As I discovered my queer identity I turned on religion completely and tried to be one of those hardcore Ricky Gervais atheists who attempted to “school” every religious person they met. I realised that it had become its own religion, centred around shaming the faithful and starting fights online that nobody ever wins.

In 1984, Māori health advocate Sir Mason Durie published a wellbeing model. His model, called Te Whare Tapu Whā, was originally depicted as a wharenui (meeting house) with four walls. The walls represented an element of life that needed to be balanced for anyone to thrive. The four walls were taha tinana (physical health), taha wairua (spiritual health), taha whānau (family health), taha hinengaro (mental health). During my undergrad, we were asked to critique different models of health and then develop our own. The one I created was derivative and received a poor grade. In my version, I omitted any reference to taha wairua. I rejected the notion that spirituality could have any role in your well-being.

After watching The Virgin Suicides as a teenager, I spent the next 5 years on Tumblr reblogging religious iconography from every religion man has created in a ~grunge~ kind of way. I developed a kitsch decorating style that involved many tacky crucifixes. A gold light-up crucifix sits on my dresser, and I think if my house were to burn down, I would try to save it even though it only cost me $3.

Recently, when I drive by a sidewalk full of people exiting mass, I feel a pull to go inside. I walked past one recently. You could see it from the street, and I stopped to watch a bit. I was worried that perhaps I was entering my trad-wife era as I fell down the alt-right pipeline. It all feels like little more than a religious hangover from watching Conclave and an obsession with Ethel Cain. It felt similar to when I tried my hand at Wicca. I was accessing a religion purely for aesthetic reasons, but this time somewhat less earnest. I was being contrary. I could wear my “God’s Favorite” hat and wax lyrical about the virtues of the scientific method.

Because I post a lot of religious imagery on my social media, multiple people reached out to me when the Pope died. When responding to the well-wishers, one got confused because he thought my religious posts were earnest.

Cultural selectionism is why I continuously return to the aesthetics of Catholicism, but I know I cannot give myself to a higher power. I am starting to understand that, aside from my interest in religious aesthetics, I am enamoured with the concept of faith. I have such a fixed and analytic mind that I cannot look beyond what I deem hard evidence, like when I asked for justification from my Bible in Schools teacher. As perplexing as I find it, the idea of believing in something seems comforting. That some things are simply out of your hands. Before, I saw faith as a threat, but now I realise that faith is a gift I didn’t receive.

I remain faith-curious, but know I am culturally excluded. While I may not burst into flames if I walked into a church, I do have a large tattoo of a burning church on my upper thigh, and I would rather not get rid of it. I’ll admire from a safe distance.