Nones

There is no other time of year when I am more acutely aware of my religious status, or lack thereof, than the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I usually (one, two and three posts from two out of the past three Christmases) find myself contemplating my place in a secular celebration of a religious holiday.  Although there's certainly no harm in assessing my faith every so often, usually it leaves me feeling relatively uneasy. 

Yesterday, reading an Op-Ed by Eric Weiner ("Americans: Undecided About God?"), I finally felt like I could relate to something:

"For some of us, the season affords an opportunity to reconnect with our religious heritage. For others, myself included, it’s a time to shake our heads over the sad state of our national conversation about God, and wish there were another way.

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones."

One can be a None?  It was like some part of my internal dialogue said, "Ah ha!"  Why have I spent years trying to decide my place on the spiritual spectrum, between Hesitant Humanist, or Spiritual-but-not-Religious, or Worshiper-of-Science, or Ambivalent Agnostic, or Angry Atheist, or Daughter-and-Granddaughter-of-Christians-so-Christian-by-birth?!  I can opt out of the whole discussion, if I so choose.  To be honest, I'm a little embarrassed that this is some sort of revelation for me. 

Perhaps if you are not a "None," then it is difficult to see the importance of a null categorization.  For me, though, it comes up more often than one might think, and generally at fairly inopportune moments.  For example, during my second interaction with Mr. A's mother during which she asked if I was Lutheran (I am not), Methodist (no), or Catholic (not that either) before, after squinting her eyes in a look of confusion, either she or I was thankfully distracted by something else and the conversation was not revisited.  Generally, these lines of questioning continue until I uncomfortably confess that, since I was neither baptized nor confirmed as any faith, I respectfully abstain from religious practice -- and generally the person asking the questions is unsatisfied by this reality.  Weiner's conclusion was a refreshing reminder that, although every aspect of life has been thrown into the public spotlight (think about what we share with each other via Facebook, or blogs like this one), it needn't be that way:

"Religion and politics, though often spoken about in the same breath, are, of course, fundamentally different. Politics is, by definition, a public activity. Though religion contains large public components, it is at core a personal affair. It is the relationship we have with ourselves or, as the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “What the individual does with his solitariness.” There lies the problem: how to talk about the private nature of religion publicly."

He then makes some odd, simile -- that religion in America requires an endeavoring spirit like Steve Jobs to revamp our religious space -- which I found detracted from his overall message, that what is missing is "a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us." 

A celebration of doubt -- how wonderful!  (But not at all a part of the traditional holiday experience -- though my past blog posts may suggest otherwise.)