Organized religion looms large in each of my books (most recent: Grand Designs). This might be surprising, considering their settings, in and around the auto industry, but in many respects the books are about large, corrupt institutions. Churches in the 1970s fell too frequently into that bucket of slime. Beyond the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, people like Jim Jones showed how far astray moral institutions can get.
Maybe I have a problem with authority. For the better part of two thousand years, churches have held nearly absolute sway over people’s lives, telling them what to think and what they could do. This wouldn’t be too bad if they really had an infallible pipeline to truth, but they have proven time and again to be worse than wrong.
Poor people were robbed of their meager livelihoods by demands for tithes. Women were effectively silenced. Men, especially those in the upper echelons of the hierarchy, enjoyed everything the times could provide, including sexual license and unimaginable wealth, despite their vows of chastity and poverty.
One of the cultural mechanisms that encouraged this to happen was the Western view that there is only one right answer to every question. “I am the one true God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “I am the way, the truth and the light. Walk ye in it.” You get the picture.
This orientation gave authorities the license to suppress all dissent and alternative views as heresy. People who thought otherwise were burned at the stake.
This perspective is very different from the Eastern model espoused by Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Taoism and Shintoism. These systems accept the possibility that there are many paths to enlightenment. There is a saying that a Japanese is Shinto at birth, Christian when marrying, and Buddhist at death.
Talk about covering your bases.
But some things just don’t translate. One of my daughters teaches yoga. She works for a man who fancies himself a swami, a great teacher. While yoga is largely based on Buddhist principles, he seems to have lost sight of the possibility for alternate understandings of truth. He wants all his staff to conform precisely to his interpretation of the way to enlightenment.
He is not alone.
One of the bugaboos of the religious right is that their moral code must be the law of the land. They believe abortion is wrong, so no one should be allowed one, even if only about a third of Americans are practicing Christians. That doesn’t even consider the range of beliefs among Christian sects, some of whom support a woman’s right to control her own fertility.
The bottom line is, churches are fair game. They have amply demonstrated their own corruption. If I choose to vilify them in fiction, what I write contains a ring of truth.
Besides, it’s almost impossible to burn an eBook.
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