The `R' Word

"I am the product of 13 years of Catholic education, the last four with the Jesuits," I told my thesis adviser recently when he asked me to tell him a bit more about myself. It struck me as strange to mention my religion as the second piece of information after telling him I was from St. Louis. I could have said any number of things, mentioned a million interests, but for some reason my Catholicism popped into my head. And he seemed satisfied with the information, even pleasantly so.

Sadly, that has not been a response I've enjoyed often here at Harvard. In fact, it would not be so far from the truth to describe the unspoken attitude toward religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as respectfully hostile. Indeed, it is with some apprehension and not a little awkwardness that I mention the "r" word at all, in any of its forms or guises. I have, of course, found ways of expressing my native Catholicism. I attend St. Paul's student Mass nearly every Sunday, abstain from eating meat during Lent, wear an ashen cross on my forehead the whole of Ash Wednesday, and even attend Mass on holy days of obligation every once in a while. But in the classroom and among mixed groups of my friends and acquaintances, I hardly ever utter a word about the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit.

That is not to say that I've been the object of overt religious persecution, an evil whose history and legacy I take quite seriously. It does mean, however, that a palpable sense of the passe has informed almost every lecture that has made mention of God in the three years of classes I've taken. It seems as though my professors and most of my classmates share a common "knowledge" about the inanity of a belief in God and think that some of us have simply missed a great enlightenment. To a certain extent I agree--not with the notion that God is dead, but that something is missing.

What's missing isn't enlightenment, though, not in an intellectual sense. Unfortunately, the group that now speaks for Christianity in this country has all but co-opted it from the rest of us, from what Christianity was at its origins and what it is now, in certain pockets, at its best. Though my Catholic upbringing involved fairly large doses of centuries-old rituals, complete with priests, confessionals, and polyester uniforms, it also included an urgent sense of social justice. One would not know it to hear the "Christian right" (who often could not be less Christian nor more wrong), but Christianity represents at its core a call to love one another. It may seem overly sentimental to a community so jaded as Harvard, but that is really the CRUX of the Christian doctrine.

Christianity means believing in the intrinsic beauty of every human being, the beauty of all that was created in the image of God. It means compassion for children, the poor, the suffering, the sick and the imprisoned. Those who invoke the name of Jesus Christ in this country today often forget that he was the child of a working class family, what we would call a "minority" in the Roman Empire, and something of a rebellious teenager. They forget that this traveling rabbi had no riches to speak of, counted prostitutes, beggars and criminals among his principal acquaintances and was ultimately killed for undermining the prevailing institutions of his day. Our Christian model was a radical, not a reactionary, concerned about the "least of his people," not the privileged, or particularly, the ordinary individual. And Christianity today carries on that tradition.

A prominent part of my own Catholic education was the requirement of community service with substantive reflection afterward. During my senior year of high school, I worked in Our Little Haven, a home for infants born HIV-positive and drug-addicted. I spent three weeks there, and afterward spent many theology classes reflecting on its significance in my life and the lives of the children I touched. That education changed the way I looked at my relatively healthy, affluent and protected upbringing in suburban St. Louis, and it continues to color my observations of a highly individualistic, often cold and uncaring Harvard today. I see religion all around me. But the gods included in this pantheon are named Money, Narrow Ambition, Mindless Competition and Consumption. So the story goes.

I do not imagine that in my last year here I will be greeted with a much warmer reception in terms of my Catholic Christianity. In fact, I feel a great deal more comfortable at Harvard celebrating my heritage as a young black man in the second half of the twentieth century than in trumpeting my religion. I wonder how the Puritans who founded this institution would react to that. Despite my adviser's amiable response, I probably won't mention religion to any great extent in my senior thesis on community service as democratic participation. Nor will I offer the religious answers to secular questions I encounter in sections and discussions every day, answers that not only seem obvious to me but that seem right.

I will continue to wonder, though, what it means to be a believer when believing is no longer en vogue. And I will confidently, if quietly--for I have no interest in proselytizing--continue to echo Joshua, who gave that definitive ultimatum, which I paraphrase: "If it does not please you to serve the Lord, decide today whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Harvardites in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." (Joshua 24:15)

Jason Q. Purnell '99 is a government and philosophy concentrator in Mather House. He is vice-president of the Phillips Brooks House Association.