A Born Atheist

I’m the only person I know who was born an atheist. I never went through any crisis of faith, so I’ve never had anything to say when I’ve been with a group of acquaintances who, in the small hours after a number of drinks, have started to confess the wrenching feelings of desolation they experienced when, in their teens or beyond, they slowly began to realize there might not be a God.

I’m not sure about the reason for my precocious lack of belief. Neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned the word “God” as I was growing up, or ever observed a religion in any way, with one exception for each of my parents. My mother had perhaps not completely abandoned her Catholic upbringing, which she said she had done when her favorite aunt died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, despite all my mother’s fervent prayers. But I don’t think my mother quite made it all the way to absolute atheism. I remember she had me baptized when I was a toddler, rather late in the game. I think she might have been pressured into it by her brother and other still devout relatives. But she told me she had finally agreed to the baptism… “Just in case.”

Then when I was in my late teens, I happened to drift through the kitchen where my father was sitting while I matter-of-factly muttered some statement of disbelief to myself. My father caught my under-the-breath remark. He startled up from reading the newspaper and said to me, “What? You don’t believe in God?” I said “No, of course not. What? Do you?” In a shocked tone, he answered, “Yes.” We looked at each other in wild surmise for a moment, realizing how little we’d known of each other all those years. Then, in resignation, my father went back to reading the paper. And I went on out the door to go sit in the yard and read.

Those were the only two times that religion was mentioned in the house. But I knew from the start that all my other relatives were religious, and I knew that included an over-arching belief in an omnipotent God. Before I started kindergarten, I would often stay the weekends with my grandmother. We would sleep together in her king-sized bed. But she’d set the alarm for 5:00 A.M. so that she could get up and go to early Mass. One of my earliest memories is of me thinking, at the moment that alarm clock went off, “Thank goodness I don’t believe in all that. I can go back to sleep.” I’d snuggle back under the covers while my grandmother trudged off through Chicago’s wintry streets to St. Michael’s.

I’ve wondered about this lack of any religious feeling on my part, this lack of any sense of a directing higher power. Perhaps, in addition to the fact that there was no religious atmosphere in my house, I grew this way because there was a lack of any hierarchy in my house. My parents talked with me as they would talk to an adult from the start. I can’t remember a single instance when they told me what to do, when they issued an order or made a rule. They never told me to go to school or do my homework. I went to bed whenever I was sleepy. I ate whatever I wanted. I watched anything on TV for however long I wanted to watch it.

My parents had started a small mailing business just before I was born, and I became a full partner from the start. By the time I was 2-years-old, I was amazing passers-by as I sat in our front display window on my little chair, collating flyers and stuffing them into envelopes at lightning speed. We had a financial struggle. I think it must have been like growing up on a farm where the children often become needed partners from the start. At the dining table, family conversation centers around how they are going to bring in the harvest against daunting odds, rather than around the delivery of orders and options to the children. So our family conversation centered around our customers’ foibles and demands. There was no hint of, “OK, you can either do your homework tonight and skip the movie, or else you can get up early tomorrow and do it.”

This pattern of treating me as an adult was carried down to the smallest detail. How different other families were from mine in this regard was brought home to me with a seemingly insignificant incident. I had never liked toys or playthings of any kind. I almost dreaded Christmas because it meant more distant relatives would be bringing me novelty gifts that I really didn’t want but that I’d have to seem delighted with for a long period of time in order not to hurt anyone’s feelings or squelch their joy of giving.

But there fell one brief exception to this opinion about the tawdriness of toys that I held. For some reason, a little Farmer in the Dell musical contraption that Art Linkletter was hawking on TV caught my attention. You’d turn the handle on the tin box, and as you turned – farmer, farmer’s wife, child… mouse and cheese would pop out in succession. They’d advance around a little proscenium stage, then would go back into the recesses of the box again, all to the ditty of “The Farmer in the Dell.”

I expressed a desire to own such an animated box. My mother was rather surprised by this. I’d almost never wanted anything before, and this seemed an unworthy object on which to expend such an exceptional longing. My mother did mention that the toy would likely become boring in a short time. It had very limited versatility; it allowed for a very limited play of the imagination. I could see a bit of regret shadow my mother’s face – and perhaps also a bit of fear that I might be turning into a trivially demanding little brat. She had almost never signaled any kind of disapproval over my actions before. So this in and of itself was a departure of attitude for her. But I persisted. I made a case for the enjoyment this type of toy could offer.

So at our family Christmas gathering that year, the duly wrapped Farmer in the Dell appeared “from Aunt Hazel and Uncle Carl.” Sitting off to one side of the adult circle, I eagerly started to crank the handle of the box and bring the farm family onto stage one-by-one. I went through the “Hi-ho the derry-o” ditty once. Then I launched the parade a second time. When I showed signs of cranking into a third go-round, my uncle leaned over and somewhat sternly ordered, “Ok, you can play it one more time. But then you have to put it away.”

This assumption of command over me sent a shock wave through me. I was torn by a multitude of emotions. I suddenly realized that the repeated rattling of the ditty was annoying the people around me trying to hold a conversation. How thoughtless I’d been! I also realized at that moment that I’d have made that third go-round the last one of the day of my own accord. I had already realized how right my mother had been about such a toy. I could myself already see how tedious the toy would soon become.

Most of all though, the emotion that gripped me was one of utter shock over being issued what was tantamount to an order. Since I hadn’t started school yet, I’d never before been addressed that way. My utter equality had always been assumed, as well as my capacity to intuitively know what was right and proper. My parents would no more have told me how many times I could do a thing than they would have ordered their own parents or an adult guest to stop indulging in a relatively harmless enjoyment. How strange!

Of course, when I started school, I was hit with the pervasiveness of that pattern of adults telling children what to do. Children had to be lined up, had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, had to comply with an endless stream of instructions, rules, orders, commands. I never came even close to getting acclimated to that alien way of relating to people. Not that I was ever a rebel or a trouble-maker. I became a slavishly meek, compliant person – not always so much out of niceness as out of sheer fear of that drive I saw in other people to assume dominance and control over others, or else to be dominated and controlled.

My point in relating this piece of autobiography is that I’ve sometimes read that there’s a correlation between the degree of people’s religiosity and the amount of dominance they experienced growing up. People raised in an atmosphere of strict hierarchy, particularly within the intimacy of their nuclear families, often seem to become the most fanatically attached to fundamentalist religions. Those who have experienced households in which the father is boss over the mother and in which both parents are in agreement about the need to boss their children, to the point of controlling them with harsh physical punishment – quite often become people committed to the concept of a punishing God. They grow up convinced of the need for discipline in the form of continuously imposed rules and order from above. What they experienced in microcosm, they project onto the macrocosm.

Whatever led to my assumption of atheism, it’s provided me with the only answer I can give to Oprah’s interview question, “Tell me one thing you know for sure.” My one thing is, and has always been – there is no God.