Another Roadside Attraction (20 page)

Amanda sat still as an egg, but if Marx Marvelous thought she was in silent commiseration for the drug-blown Nearly Normal Jimmies of the world, he was mistaken. She was, instead, in revere; revering the memory of Ba Ba, his bat cave, his ropes of mushrooms drying over the fire.
Dear Ba Ba. You were the first one, the very first. O the wonders of Bow Wow Mountain
.

As it became obvious that Amanda was not going to speak, Marvelous wrenched his eyes again from the dark coils of his chosen banner and resumed his account.

“My investigations—on one level, at least—confirmed the findings of my think-tank colleagues. It was painfully apparent, really. The Christian church was in a state of crisis. To avoid that conclusion, you'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind. In a nationwide poll, only 25 per cent declared themselves deeply religious. Maybe half of those who so declared really meant it. Even church attendance, which has never guaranteed religious commitment in the first place, has dropped in this country to an all-time low. Every doctrine and every institution in Christianity is being challenged. Bishops are openly rebelling against papal authority, nuns are walking picket lines, priests are getting married. Many pastors today spend as much time in the streets as in the parsonage. The mild-mannered eunuch who used to gobble fried chicken and shit platitudes is now endorsing strikes, demonstrations and disorders. Theology has become radicalized. Nihilistic intellectuals once bugged the clergy by telling them that God was dead; now the theologians themselves—some of them—are writing the Old Man's obituary. Prayer meetings have turned into existential group therapy sessions, liturgies into rock-and-roll shows. Missionaries are being booted out of Africa and Asia. The churches are being sued to end their right to tax exemption. Half the people who still consider themselves Christians are dissatisfied with the church because it's too big, too impersonal and too commercial: it doesn't penetrate their lives as deeply as it does their pocketbooks. They're impatient because it isn't changing fast enough. The other half are up-tight because it's changed too much already; they long for that old-time religion with its honest emotionalism, with its rarefied if potent myths uncontaminated by the involving rigors of social consciousness.” Marx Marvelous paused. “I don't know why I'm running through all this. From just skimming periodicals you would be aware of it.”

“Actually,” yawned Amanda, “the only periodical I read is
Al's Journal of Lepidoptera
. It's published in Suez and doesn't recognize Christianity.”

“Oh,” said Marvelous. “Hmmmm? In that case, maybe I've told you something you didn't know, although I don't see how anyone who is half-awake could have missed it. At any rate, all phases of the Institute's investigation, my own included, jibed on that one point: the Christian Establishment, no longer in touch with real life, was quaking and shaking in a crisis situation. Yes, we agreed on that much. After that, however, we moved apart. Specifically, most of my colleagues linked the floundering and chaos in the church with what they believed to be a corresponding deterioration in general ethics. My field work, on the other hand, led me to believe that America's so-called moral breakdown was largely myth. For example, I learned that while the FBI regularly publishes figures showing increases in violent crime, these statistics do not take in account increases in population. The FBI will report something like 'In Los Angeles today there is 22 per cent more violent crime than there was in 1950.' But it neglects to note that population-wise, Los Angeles is almost twice as large as it was in 1950. If you consider population growth in ratio to crime, then crime has actually decreased. Is the FBI willfully distorting the facts? And if so, to what end? I don't know, but I can tell you that I was shocked to learn that a respected government agency would operate that way.”

“I don't know either,” said Amanda, “but we have a friend named Purcell who would consider your shocked reaction a bit naive.” A fresh Puget breeze skidded over the flats and in the front door and worked its way up Amanda's legs. Marx Marvelous imagined that the renegade hair was winnowing. He felt like saluting it. Long may it wave.

“The crime hoax was just one potato in the basket. Among the young people who are supposed to be so wicked, I found a surprising moral strength. Sure, they were somewhat loose in their sexual habits and sure they ingested a lot of drugs—a risky and foolish business—but they were very careful about not hurting other human beings; they practiced—not believed in but
practiced
—a live-and-let-live philosophy of tolerance and tenderness, they adhered to an almost severe code of ethics. Their protests and demonstrations, while they may have gotten out of hand at times, were never mindless acts of rebellion; they were aimed at improving conditions for all mankind. The young radicals weren't seeking personal power or economic gains, they were agitating for a more honest, healthy and democratic society. It wasn't confined to the young, either. Across the nation, people of all ages, people who had grown disenchanted with their churches, people who never had established religious affiliations in the traditional sense, people who had gone so far as to reject the transcendent, these people were engaged in overt acts of moral commitment. For the first time in our history, a significant portion of Americans were actively protesting one of our periodic wars. Some of these pacifists sacrificed a great deal to make their stand. People aren't hungry for spiritual knowledge and guidance? Then how explain the widespread interest in astrology and yoga and those other primitive pastimes that you romantics are fond of reviving whenever the mainstream of religious tradition loses its authority?”

“You may refer to me as a romantic or a mystic as often as you find it helpful,” said Amanda, “but please remember that the labels are your own.” That is all she said and she said it amiably, but to herself she thought, “This darling Marvelous has eaten at many tables and has not been nourished.”

“I apologize if I classify you falsely,” said Marx. “I apologize, in fact, for classifying you at all.” His apology was halfhearted and he knew it. But he didn't care. He had other things on his mind. “I alerted my fellows at East River to the prevailing paradox: here in the U.S.A., religion was at an all-time low but holiness was at an all-time high; at the most shallow ebb of Christian influence, the search for the ultimate had probably never been more intense. Well, they weighed my report carefully. Such is their discipline. The director promised to give it due consideration when drafting the Institute's final recommendations. But I sensed that it was not destined to receive the emphasis that I was positive it required. No, they were missing the point. Some of the quickest minds in the country, and they were missing the point. They thought we had entered, spiritually speaking, a kind of Dark Age. They couldn't see that it was the beginning of a Golden Age. We had a Reformation by the tail and didn't know it.”

Marx was becoming a trifle agitated. He paced the floor as Amanda's big green eyes (a feature she shared with the tsetse fly) followed him curiously.

“I got myself to my suite, where I devoted the next few days to reading and thinking, mainly thinking. Along about that Friday, it hit me full force. I had missed the point, too, although not as widely as my fellows. They, in general, believed that the instinct for religious involvement results from a projection of unconscious materials and processes which, diverse as they might be, are universally common. What had happened in contemporary society, they surmised, was a blunting of this universal instinct by technology, a fogging of our unconscious projections by the ubiquitous paraphernalia of affluence. In an electronic technology, cultural changes occur more rapidly than value systems can accommodate them, and in the resulting confusion technology itself becomes a surrogate religion. Christ, the core symbol of Western religious tradition, is unchanged and unchanging, but we have lost sight of him in the buffeting and confusion and must be trained to recognize the Christ Idea again, albeit in the context of complex Space Age technology rather than a simple agrarian arrangement. That was, in essence, the prevailing consensus at the Institute. As I originally saw it, however, the fault lay not in modern man's blindness but in an outdated church's camouflage. How could contemporary man be expected to recognize the Christ Idea as a viable part of his daily experience when the Christ Idea was mincing around on the fringes of society dressed in those old Sunday-school robes and speaking in that quaint King James English? He was pale, puny, archaic, aloof and though richer than a dozen Rockefellers he always had his hand out. In no meaningful way did he fit into the modern picture. The problem wasn't with man but with his religion. I saw all around me a voracious spiritual hunger, but the paleolithic mush served up by the church was neither nutritious nor appetizing. More significantly, I saw people living matchlessly ethical lives without the guidance of clergy or the comfort of organized doctrine or common symbols. Man was doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances. It was the church that needed overhauling—and fortunately, there was evidence that an overhaul was on the drawing boards. Eventually, I thought, a streamlined, fully electric model will roll off the line and people will flock to it and ride it to salvation. Wasn't I ludicrous?

“My colleagues and I had made the same dumb mistake. Although they took a negative view of our spiritual unrest while my outlook was optimistic, we both had assumed that what was unfolding was a
Christian
drama. We regarded the crisis as a Christian crisis and presumed that whatever religious changes were occurring were occurring within the framework of the Christian system. How wrong we were, how foolishly wrong. Alone in my study on Good Friday, I had an illuminating insight that I recognized instantly as truth. Christianity is dead! Dead. It is not being overhauled, it has been traded in. What is afoot is not the reshaping of the Christian mode but the development of an alternative mode, a superseding mode. We at the Institute had thought in terms of a revolution of faith, but that wasn't it. We had misinterpreted the signs. There was no revolution. There was
evolution
—an infinitely more profound and permanent process. Spiritual evolution. Yes. But not creepy-crawling along at evolution's regular pace: an evolutionary outburst! I had spoken of a neo-Reformation, but that wasn't quite correct. Christianity isn't being reformed. It's being replaced. We are in a transitional period between religions. That's what much of our discord and pain and confusion is about. It doesn't explain all of our turmoil, of course. The changes wrought by our new technology are almost as mind-twisting as those precipitated by spiritual evolution. In fact, technological upheaval and religious upheaval are always inseparable overlays. Major technological breakthroughs, such as the ones in electronics and psychochemistry that have occurred in our era, inevitably alter man's image of himself, of his environment and his deity. Remember Galileo's starry band. Galileo did more than invent the telescope and develop the first laws of nature based on observation and calculation. He personified a fresh wind which swept Western man out of the medieval halls of sanctioned impotency. He was the spark that touched off the heap of combustible philosophical residue that had been accumulating beneath the backstairs of Popery for centuries. The resulting explosion blew a constipated hierarchy right off the golden pot. But I'm digressing. What is happening today is far more overwhelming than a Reformation, even. We are in a state of no-religion prior to the ascent of a new religion. The discernible activity in the modern church, the modern ecumenism, social activism, militancy and debates about the state of God's health are merely the nervous twitchings of a cadaver. The handsome new church buildings, the plush pulpits and wall-to-wall carpets are no more than funeral trappings. It's all over. The Christian faith is dead. Dead. Expired. Kaput. Finished. Moved and left no forwarding address. Bye-bye. Gone, if not forgotten. Dead.”

Marvelous was pacing and gesturing, visions of public pennant no longer clouding his purpose. Amanda dared to interrupt. “Your theories seem to have brought you a minimum of joy,” she ventured.

“That's true. No joy in them at all. How could there be? In the Baltimore suburb where I was reared, my mother was a ferocious one-woman band for Baptist fundamentalism. Until I was eighteen, I spent every single Sunday in church—bored stiff and scared to admit it. Then, at college, I found most of the intellectually developed people—students and professors—to be atheists. Moreover, they were happily atheists. They delighted in atheism. They seemed to take personal pride in the lack of a Creator. There isn't any God, ha ha ha. Eventually, I also became an atheist. But I damn sure wasn't happy about it. Maybe there is no God, but there ought to be one.”

Amanda looked at him so curiously he had to smile. “Well,” he said, calmer now, “
somebody
should take the blame for all this crap.” His sweeping gesture took in the universe.

“I'll take the blame,” Amanda said, “if you'll just get on with your story.”

“Okay. Accepting the death of Christianity might have been a trauma for me, but it wasn't the end of the world. After all, religions have died before. Christianity was born and everything that is born must die, philosophical systems no exception. Christianity had waxed long and strong and now its turn had come. No point in lingering at the bier. There was work to do. In the past, when a religion has succumbed, another has always come along to take its place. That would undoubtedly be the case this time, too. Another religion would be forthcoming. But when? Where? And more pointedly, what? Was it already here, milling in our midst, waiting to be unmasked? To that question I decided to apply scientific procedure. Up to now, supposedly objective, nontheological studies of religion have been the priority of the behaviorists—anthropologists, psychologists or sociologists—men still capable of believing in such claptrap as souls—”