Why We Hate “Very Contented Pagans” (But Shouldn’t)

I think we often hate and fixate what’s opposite of our deepest insecurities.

We attack people who (we think) lack our insecurities in order to justify the things we’re most unsure about (unsurety being a function not only of the genuine gaps in our confidence about some proposition, but also of the strength with which we proclaim – or believe we ought to be proclaiming – our conviction in that proposition).

Our religious (and moral) convictions are obviously center stage, here.

We all carry doubts about what we believe, and someone who seems genuinely happy without any expressed religious conviction (or whilst expressing ones quite different than our own) – “very contented pagans,” per Tucholsky – threatens our self-understanding. Their mere existence legitimates our deepest vulnerabilities. We need them to fail.

So we latch onto every perceived flaw – we fixate on all the ways these “pagans” seem wrong, sad, or confused. We revel in news about their lives falling apart. We attribute all that seems (to us) broken in their lives to the absence of some expressed religious creed.

(Never mind what these people might actually believe on the inside – look too hard and we might learn something we’d rather not admit.)

Meanwhile, we exempt ourselves from these criteria. We ignore the millions of people for whom God was not enough – friends raised and educated in our own religious communities but who fell away. We blame them (”they just wanted to sin!”) but refuse to concede that their desire to stray was something their religious environment probably should have been able to stop.

(It’s pathetic, really, to blame a young adult raised in a thoroughly Christian environment for leaving. It’s a “self-own,” as they say, of the highest order.)

We tell ourselves that we’re not confused, we know what we believe, we’re the “good guys.” Those “other” people suffer because they don’t believe like we do. Their lives are a mess because they don’t openly claim to believe in the same God we do, and with the same trappings and vocabulary.

Of course, we suffer too. But it’s never because of our beliefs, right? We might be chronically depressed or anxious or addicted to pornography, but hey, at least we’ve got the whole “religion” thing down.

(I’m being sarcastic.)

We’re good at moving the goalposts. We call “our people” those who do it like we do. We take pride in accomplishments that, by the grace of God, require little effort for us. We scoff at the thief, the adulterer, and the non-believer from our positions of wealth and health.

Anyways, I think pride is the greatest temptation for religious people today (and, I suppose, always has been) – the impulse to willingly ignore all our own faults in order to lend credence to a religious ideology we desperately need to be “right” because, like all modern persons, we chose that ideology more-or-less arbitrarily (”sunk costs,” if you will) and we don’t want to look or feel like a sucker.

How do we fight this? Back to my first sentence – stop hating. Be relentlessly persistent at seeing the log in your own eye. And you know what? I think a nice side-effect here is that we’ll start to feel less of the shame that is, ultimately, the real fixation of our hate.