with theism, and so the fantasies of children as no longer admissible, as they were in Salem. Yes, you do have to put your hand on the Bible when you testify in court, but after that something resembling reason kicks in.
So while that Satanic ritual abuse phenomenon was horrible, it was also short-lived, because at a certain point it became clear that the accusers didn’t have cases, that they had run out of evidence, and that the children themselves were being manipulated. Anyone who knows even a little bit of child psychology would recognize that these kids were telling their supposed deliverers what they wanted to hear. The motto of the people who thought they were acting in the alleged victims’ interest was “Believe the children.” Well, it turns out that what they really meant was “Believe the children unless the children say they haven’t been abused.”
It was a terrible abuse of the trust that a child naturally has in adults, ironically in the name of protecting children. I think virtually no evidence emerged that ritual Satanic abuse was actually occurring. But, yes, it was hysteria, and one can certainly psychologize about it, as one can do about Salem. My novel is about the fact that at least we’ve gotten rid of fantasy, private delusion, and religious mania as admissible evidence. It suggests that, in certain public contexts, theism is a luxury we simply can’t afford.
Q: Then again, you’ve written about God being dead and found floating in the Atlantic. I can’t imagine this has been published in, say, an Arabic translation.
Morrow: [Laughs] Not likely. But I have to say I get quite a bit of fan e-mail from believers, and that’s very gratifying to me. I think I value those letters even more than the ones I get from militant atheists, who cheer me on and say, “Go for it, Jim. Give the carcass of organized religion another kick in the groin.”
I’m pleased to find there are a lot of readers out there, people of faith, who enjoy my novels as theological speculation, as thought experiments that satirize the misuses of religion. You can be part of an institution and still perceive its dark side. You don’t have to resign from an institution to critique it. You might actually be doing the world more good by staying within your church and trying to reform it. In that regard, I may be in a worse position to do good than believers. I’m not actively trying to change the homophobia that seems rampant in so many evangelical churches, but there are people inside those evangelical churches, I am sure, who are making arguments against that kind of bigotry.
Q: At what point in your life did you abandon God and discover his corpse was floating in the Atlantic?
Morrow: It’s true that I was once a believer, as a kid. My parents were not aggressively religious, but I think they did have an inoculation theory of church-going. You should give your son a small and harmless dose of religion, lest he discover one day that he had no natural defenses against it. I imagine they were afraid that otherwise I would show up and say I’d decided to become a monk or something.
So they gave me a generic, white-bread religious education, dragging me to a Presbyterian Sunday-school in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Naturally I ended up believing. How could I not? This was suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s. God was the default assumption. God in the air. God was in the water. I never thought of God as a thesis, a hypothesis about how the world works. I thought of God as a fact. Adults seemed to agree on this fact, and adults don’t lie, so they?
Luckily, back then suburban Presbyterianism was a pretty tepid thing. It was not salvationistic. It did not threaten us kids with images of eternal damnation and fears that our sins would catapult us into the fiery abyss. But I do remember assuming that God was behind it all, and I know I prayed for good fortune in my own life.
My inverse road to Damascus was the World Literature course I took as a tenth-grader. Those of us in the honors English class at Abington Senior High School found ourselves suddenly confronted with the miracles and splendors of Western literature: plays and poems—and especially novels—that were alive with ideas, usually subversive and skeptical ideas. We learned that novelists were often people at odds with the received wisdom of their day. They were contrarians. These voices stood outside of their cultures and critiqued them—and, above all, they were honest voices: at least, that’s what I found in Voltaire’s Candide and Camus’s The Stranger and Kafka’s The Trial and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Even a believer like Dostoyevsky—we did Crime and Punishment—even Dostoyevsky dramatized belief as something that is troubling and paradoxical and terribly complex.
The honesty of these writers—the voice of an anguished atheist like Camus—that struck a chord with me. It really was a kind of revelation. It garnered my respect in a way that my Sunday-school teachers never did. The Presbyterians seemed to dodge all the hard questions. They weren’t liars, exactly, but intellectually, for me, they left much to be desired. Gradually my faith evaporated.
Of course, it also helped that I’d never had an experience with the supernatural. I’d never encountered an angel or witnessed a miracle.
Q: How do you think you’d respond if you did?
Morrow: [Laughs] That’s a really good question. I’d like to think that, if I really believe my own worldview, my first question would be, “Might I account for this angel, or this out-of-body experience, or this miracle, or whatever, in strictly material terms?” But, sure, okay, if my supernatural experience was something utterly unequivocal, fine, I guess I’d try to swallow it.
But let’s remember that most religious arguments about the world are far more optimistic and soothing than the secular-humanist view. We’d all like to believe our deaths aren’t synonymous with oblivion. We’ve all got a built-in—and highly suspect—motivation to believe in the miraculous. We’re predisposed to embrace supposed evidence for the supernatural simply on the grounds of our mortality. Religion solves the death problem, so of course it’s always going to win the battle for the private human psyche.
So I like to think it would take more than one angelic visitation to convince me that angels are factual. It’s often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I hope I would spend a lot of time worrying about whether I was deluded, whether my angel was entirely subjective, whether he was just wishful thinking, whether this was incipient schizophrenia.
I am continually struck by the fact that, whether the argument is coming from the New Age camp—“crystals heal,” “astrology works,” that sort of claim—or by those with conventional religious views—I am struck by that fact that the main thing that’s going on in every such instance is a person, a mere human being, standing in front of you insisting that the supernatural is the case. That’s it. Period. A person. Nothing more, nothing less.
At the last Conference on the Fantastic in Fort Lauderdale, I noticed that our pathetic little convention was happening alongside a presentation attended by thousands of people who all wanted to hear this guy talk about life after death. He had lots of messages from beyond the veil that he wanted to share. The crowd lapped it up. Nobody seemed to notice that all they were actually getting was a person very much like themselves, and in many cases probably better than themselves—more honest, less egomaniacal, less publicity hungry—doling out the inside dope on the afterlife.
There is nothing you can go out and do yourself to corroborate the worldviews of charlatans. In those few cases where those of New Age or supernatural persuasion have allowed a test, some tentative attempt at falsification, their claims and beliefs have always come a cropper. Every systematic investigation of astrology or ESP or prayer suggests that there’s absolutely nothing happening there. This malarkey is not a new understanding of reality. It’s wish-fulfillment at best. It’s stuff that we’d prefer to be the case. But it doesn’t seem to be the case—not in this life, and not in this universe.
[conducted at Readercon, 2007]
JACK
