The New Opiates

The other day I went to the community, the church, the family where I grew up and helped make apple butter.  Our congregation in Montezuma, Virginia makes apple butter in order to raise funds for various church activities and once a year, we round up all of the big copper kettles and wide-mouthed mason jars from church members.  Then, on a fall Saturday, a bunch of us stand around in a smoky haze stirring with great big wooden poles.  (They're long so you're not standing right beside the hot fire that one delegated congregant stokes continuously for hours while the hot apples and spice get more and more viscous.)

I traded off stirring duty with many members of our church, sweet ladies and good ol' men that I grew up looking to for the way to talk and be and serve and smile.  A couple hours into the day, though, I looked around, objectively, wondering where all of my cohort had gone.  I grew up playing basketball and pick-up football on evenings with many young boys at that same park where we were stirring the apple butter.  Where did my whole generation go?  Why were they not stirring apple butter and laughing with the elders of the church too?  Several explanations come to mind.  Although some of my old friends have moved to other churches, other congregations close to jobs or family, and some of the others are busy with new families, this isn't true for most of them. Most of my old friends don't go to church, don't have a hometown or a community that they are part of.

I'm no different, don't get me wrong.  I'm as flaky as the next guy, as undependable a churchgoer as anyone else.  I've got plenty of friends and colleagues who disdain organized religion for all of the ills it has caused in the world.  Many other friends mock the absurdity of religion in the face of scientific knowledge.  And still others just never went as children so therefore will never start going to church.  It's always a net loss with church.  It's hard to get new people, but you're sure to lose some.

But, there, as I stirred apple butter, I looked at what we're losing as a culture.  It's not about God, per se, and it's not necessarily about morality, but rather, church is about a unit, a heritage or a greater purpose to be a part of.  (God and morality can come later.)  But, to begin with, it's a group to identify with, and with a large group, there's a lot of security and potential learning and dialogue that can happen.  These days, we group so exclusively along party or interest lines, we don't have much richness or diversity.

Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the people.  Maybe it used to be, but religion has been overrun and the opiate has moved on to be either T.V. or technology, or sports, or media.  Whatever it is, the opiate is certainly no longer religion.  I think that Religion was big, and in the vacuum of the human population and the human mind, it became overwhelmingly powerful, dictating purpose, morals, and laws, and so people mock it now because of the injustices that it wrought.  We, as a culture, have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and lost the beneficial parts of religion due to some unfortunate side effects of mindless religion run a muck.  I think I'm particularly tuned into this element of our modern culture since I'm in an urban area where religion is almost contemptable in some circles.

Maybe our Facebook and twitter communities can somehow, someday take the place of the richness of communities around houses of worship, but I have not seen how this element will play out.  It seems more likely that someday we'll have to explain in e-books how apple butter got made, and how people communicated efficiently enough to all gather on a Saturday, despite preseason games, and work together to make a product for a non-profit organization to continue working as a whole to learn how to live more peacefully, simply, and together.