Generación / generation

By: Carson Jane Robles

Beneath the gazebo outside of the New Hope Inn and Suites in New Hope, Pennsylvania, my date and I are discussing God with two handsome strangers. My date is a friend of mine, but I have a habit of calling her my date, and she has a habit of clarifying that she has a boyfriend at home. 

The two strangers are Damian and Milly. Damian is a music producer in flared pants and an orange paisley button-down. He works for some big name producer who he refuses to name out of an apparent abundance of humility (though Milly assures us we would recognize many of their songs). Milly is Damian’s close female friend — they are sleeping in separate beds, Milly assured me in the car ride home — who runs intimate dance parties for two sibling DJs called Samson and Tin. The location of the parties is never announced ahead of time and you will only know that you are invited if you receive an Instagram DM on the day. (I asked Milly if I could be invited and she said she would “check with the twins.”)

There are three wooden stumps around a metal table underneath the roof of the gazebo. Milly and my date sit opposite each other, talking about politics and the World Cup. I am seated on the table in a pink cocktail dress that (I discovered today) is too lightly-hued to wear to a wedding. Opposite me is Damian, brown suede mocassins kicked up on the table. I am interrogating him about God. 

Between long drags on his hand-rolled cigarette, Damian reveals to me that he is a practicing Christian. He is not homophobic (I guess he understands from my demeanor that he should clarify that upfront), but he believes in the tenets of Christianity firmly and attends church weekly. Though he was raised in a strict Roman Catholic household, he now attends a Jesuit church on the Lower East Side.

I ask him why he attends a Jesuit church and not a Roman Catholic one, and he tells me that he prefers the humble spirituality of the Jesuits to the “pomp and circumstance” of Roman Catholics.

Milly groans from her end of the table. “You’re talking about God again?”

“She asked,” Damian responds.

I tell Milly that I am writing a piece on modern mythology and I am theorizing that society — or maybe young people? — have replaced religious fervor with new gods: work, astrology, consumption. Damian is a living counterargument. Young, hip, and always working, he is indistinguishable from any other twentysomething New York creative. Except that Damian makes time once a week for a weekly visit to the chapel.

“What an American way to think,” says Milly, who is European. She and Damian defer to her Europeanness like a New Yorker blames the MTA or an Angeleno blames traffic:

Earlier, Milly told us she doesn’t like Cape Verdeans. “Not even the goalie?” I asked. 

“I like the goalie, but none of the rest,” Milly replied.

My date tried to protest, but Damian — without looking up from the cigarette he was rolling — reminded us: “she’s European. That’s just how they talk.”

Milly tells me that my thesis is too American and of course people still believe in God. I’ve been spending too much time around New Yorkers. I ask Milly if she believes in God.

“Of course not. It’s silly,” Milly says. Milly has a way of painting the entire horizon in front of her with an ambient disdain: Cape Verdeans, the wedding invitations, and now God all massaged into one unbecoming and uninteresting landscape.

Try as I may, I cannot compel the conversation in any scientific direction. Maybe we’ve had too many drinks or too many cigarettes, or maybe Damian and Milly are not the type of people to get scientific about their beliefs. Damian believes in God because he always has and so it is significant to him. Milly seems to not believe in God because she never has and so it is insignificant to her. 

When my date and I eventually abscond to our room — we are sleeping in separate beds — I ask her if she believes in God. She gives me a shrug. She sort of does and sort of does not; it’s never been that important to her.

My three conversation partners share an apathy for God to which I cannot relate. To them, believing in God is an incidental decision. This does not agree with me.

When I was raised in the Mormon church, God was a certainty, rules were nonoptional, and the stakes of disobedience were eternal. According to Mormon doctrine, hell only exists for those individuals who know the truth (Mormon doctrine) and shirk it. That is, a woman like me.

I joke with my friends that my history with Mormonism is a second date conversation, but I usually end up revealing it earlier. I’m partially embarrassed by it, but I live in fear that it is somehow written on my face already for all to read. Three months into my freshman year of acting school, I revealed to my cohort that I was formerly Mormon.

“Oh, well, that explains a lot!” said my professor, earning a hearty laugh from my peers. Since then, I have made it a note to reveal this fact earlier on.

There is no ambiguity in Mormonism. It is a strange mythology, but a straightforward one: your idols include individuals like Nephi, Abinadi, Ammon, Mormon, and Samuel the Lamanite. Your ideals include traits like obedience, self-restraint, family, marriage (one man, one woman), and diligent scripture study. 

As a child, I understood everything within the walls of the church as fact. But then, to a child, fact and fiction blur together as watercolors: Joseph Smith is as real as Toy Story is as real as the solar system is as real as Hannah Montana is as real as germs; vibrant realities coalesce into one muddygreybrown truth.

In growing up, these watercolor truths turn acrylic. Fact ossifies quickly and the muddy colors siphon into black and white as the rules of the adult world become clear. Hannah Montana and Toy Story exit the palette and germs and the solar system remain. By some miracle of logic, the science fiction mythology of Mormon doctrine stays on the side of Fact. And, until February 2018, that is where it lived for me.

My uncle shared a video on Facebook when I was a sophomore in high school. The video is titled “THIS IS NOT AN ANTI-MORMON VIDEO.” In Mormon culture, criticisms levied at the church or its gospel are categorized as “anti-Mormon,” and set aside as biased and untrustworthy (for a more truthful source, church leaders recommend lds.org or the Book of Mormon).

In “THIS IS NOT AN ANTI-MORMON VIDEO,” a practicing Mormon named Taylor Christensen makes an earnest plea to a shaky camera, underscored by a heart-rending piano score. Over the course of the seven-minute video, Christensen reads from a sheet of paper the grievances that are most often levied by ex-Mormons against the church: the contradictory and multiplicitous accounts of the church’s origin story, the “strong signs of plagiarism” present in the Book of Mormon, the existence of violent doctrine like the Blood Atonement, and the infamous and nonconsensual marriages between Joseph Smith (the founder of Mormonism) and adolescent girls.

Christensen closes his monologue with a message of hope; the piano responds in wistful arpeggios. This is what Christensen decides:

“There are still reasons to believe. And as long as history allows for even the slightest possibility that it could be true, I will trust in my faith.”

The version of God that Christensen articulates is the only one with which I am familiar. I do not understand Damian and Milly’s modern version of faith, which is agnostic and unstructured and personalized and trite. I do not understand people who are “spiritual, but not religious” or people who believe in some ungendered, amorphous deity. 

God is or He is not. 

Until that day in February, when I locked myself in the bathroom to Google “Blood Atonement” and “Joseph Smith child wives” on the private search bar, God was. And it was in that bathroom, after deleting my search history and drying my panic-laden tears, that I decided God was not.

Since February 2018, my faith has been in a state of free fall. I ask people on first dates what their religious associations are. Do you believe in God? Do you go to church? What does it mean to you? Are you homophobic?

I love to hear people talk about their belief in God. After years of fruitlessly trying to convince my neighbors, parents, and classmates to research the history of the church, I am becoming enamored with God-fearing folks who are confident in their faith. The religious zealots, the preachers on the sidewalks of Times Square, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the doors of Carroll Gardens brownstones. These are the believers that make me long for my old faith; I envy their conviction and long for it for myself. 

My heart made cavernous space for profound and utter belief. Eight years ago, my belief spilled all over the bathroom floor. I try to stitch the gap with many little faiths: reverence towards rainy days and train delays, blind trust in strangers’ restaurant recommendations, complete acceptance of the declarations on fortune cookies and the poems Sharpied into the walls of bathroom stalls. 

Mostly, though, my faith comes back to me when I feel deserving of punishment. On the morning of the day I planned to break up with my girlfriend of five years, I got a text from her teenage brother. He was hoping to visit the city this year and wondered what I thought of the Natural History Museum. He had not texted me in two years, and I have never mentioned to him any feelings on the Natural History Museum. I broke up with my girlfriend of five years a few hours later.

That day, it rained. The next day, I received two rejection emails for jobs I had applied to.

I understood all of this as punishment from God. I have tried to cement logic over the chasm that religion left me with. But in times of crisis, I still find myself going to God on my knees for forgiveness.

Damian and Milly and my platonic date’s indifference towards religion will never make sense to me — I will never understand their apathy. The God I knew as a child is the God I will be stuck with forever, whether I believe in Him or not. For my own sake, I hope that faith is misplaced.