The Faith-Void Split

Our early punk canon eviscerated the church in black and white—and rightfully so. But for those of us who grew up in the church, revisiting our personal experience with nuance is a challenge.

Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra has never been accused of lacking subtlety.

I.

My earliest memory of going to school was in 1979. I was in kindergarten, at a small parochial school in Queens, nearing the end of another school day. My mother usually came to pick me up ten minutes earlier than the other students so that we could drive to my older brother’s school and make it in time for his classes to let out. On this day, though, my teacher pulled me aside to say she’d be escorting me to my mother. I packed my things and followed her.

As we approached the door, the faint sound of screaming grew louder. I heard two voices: one person screaming in English, the other in Spanish. As soon as we stepped outside, I recognized the Spanish voice as my mother’s. I stared out into the parking lot while my kindergarten teacher held me. I could feel that she was scared. The English-screaming woman was clearly in distress. She yelled only one thing: “I wish I were dead!”

My mom began praying over her in Spanish, rebuking Satan from the woman’s body with the power of Jesus. I recognized this script from our church; she was performing an exorcism. I tried to calmly explain this to my teacher, but she just gripped me tighter.

The English-screaming woman broke free from my mother and ran towards a car that was idling in front of my school, gawking at the situation. She threw her head inside the passenger side window and screamed, “I wish I were dead!” The driver turned pale and sped off.

By this point, my mom had begun speaking in tongues. She grabbed the distressed woman again and pummeled her with this unintelligible foreign language until there was calm. The English-speaking woman appeared to be waking up from a bad dream. She was confused and embarrassed. My mother prayed for her once more, quietly, and then my teacher walked the English-speaking woman to her home. She was the school’s next-door neighbor, and everyone knew her.

I walked over to my mom and gave her a hug as if nothing extraordinary had just happened. In our family, “exorcisms” were normal.

II.

No one in punk was more brutal towards the church than the Dead Kennedys, so it was no wonder why they quickly became one of my favorite bands as a teenager. In 1981, they gave us the one-two punch of “Religious Vomit” and “Moral Majority” on an album called In God We Trust, Inc., and by the time I first heard it five years later, the lyrics gave me a language for the cynicism I developed early on—even as a believer. These songs came at a time when the so-called “religious right” had ingratiated themselves with the Republican establishment; when politicians and pastors discovered they could use each other for power, and between them, invented the culture wars we’re still living with. These songs were criticizing, presciently and accurately, the financially-motivated political interference from the church and its structural manipulation of the working class. What is difficult for me to reconcile on those early records—and on songs like Minor Threat’s “Filler” or “So What” by Crass, to name only two—is the lack of personhood given to the average churchgoer. The “circus tent con-men and Southern belle bunnies” that animated the contempt in those Dead Kennedys songs, for one, didn’t look like the Sunday mornings of my youth. Because the sight of Latin American immigrants rolling in the aisles and speaking in tongues didn’t convey political power to me. It looked more like a marginalized community in hardship—and their collective need to believe that everything was going to be OK.

In my conversation with End It singer Akil Godsey—the full version of which will be published on Thursday—we come back around to the subject of the church multiple times. He credits his love of singing with the time he spent as a child in the church choir, for one. And while he admits that he otherwise “fucking hated going to church,” Akil also understands why his mother, in particular, needed the community of their Black Baptist church, even though the internet created new modes of connection that would eventually help him find community in hardcore. More practical than that, from a personal standpoint, Akil still credits the church with keeping him out of trouble as a young man.

“There are times where you get emotionally charged in a situation, and you will want to do something violent or reckless,” he tells me, “but you take a second and you can’t do it. Because if you have agape love for the people in the world around you, you gotta just eat that one. It’s not worth it. It gets real messy, real quick, when you just react. So the church maybe taught me a little bit of patience, and that’s necessary. I still have that patience, and as I hang out more, I realize [patience is] the default for most people who actually do things—people with influence, people who make decisions. That wild reckless bastard? He’s going to wind up dead or in jail.”

There are, of course, several other ways to learn patience. But as young people who were both dragged through the church long before we knew who Jello Biafra was, I appreciated Akil’s willingness to extend some grace to his religious upbringing. Our conversation made me wonder if—disconnected from the divine interventions and the demonic possessions—there was room for any nuance in the generally unforgiving way I think about my own relationship with the church.

When you’re looking for God in India, hanging out with street cows is a feature, not a bug. Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, 1996.

III.

It took several years—and one other serious religious excursion with the Hare Krishnas in the ‘90s—for me to realize that I was never actually looking for God. If I’m being honest with you, I still think the idea of a non-vengeful, non-spiteful, ultimate caretaker of the universe who might possibly hear your prayers is a lovely idea. And I don’t believe I’m belittling anyone’s faith by saying that our impulse to believe that a caretaker like that exists provides an almost existential relief. But whether or not such a being exists is almost besides the point. The reality is that most people—like my family, whether we understood it or not—go to church because it fills other, more basic needs.

When my parents arrived in New York from Chile and Colombia, they had no connections here, and no friends. Interestingly, both of my parents were raised in the Catholic Church. They never actually told me this, but I always suspected that their conversion to Pentecostalism had an ethnic motive: The Latin Pentecostal movement was burgeoning in the 1970s, and in that growth, I can see how they might have felt like our family would benefit from joining a community that was both culturally familiar and distinctly American. The church provided a connective tissue between my family’s native countries and the one we lived in. Nothing else in our lives did that.

The stress of being an immigrant family gave us little relief. My father worked three jobs, for real, and he was still forced to file for bankruptcy in 1987. Going places together that cost money was simply out of the question, so the only time we ever spent together as a family—the four of us—was at church. I understood that we went there as a respite from the outside world, a place where we could imagine a better future. The church gave us both a place to go and the hope that we’d go places.

I also believe that human beings are instinctively in search of rituals—and this is something that Akil and I also discussed. The idea of having another place to be, outside of your home, where everyone speaks the same lexicon and shares the same ways of being is deeply comforting to most people. It’s about the way we wore special clothes, the way we greeted each other in the pews, the way we held the hymnals while we sang, and the way we took communion. This formalism goes beyond “community,” and deeper into a feeling of profound belonging. For a family of first- and second-generation immigrants like mine, that feeling is essential.

It goes without saying that none of this is to provide cover for the pain and suffering that religious institutions have doled out on the public and its own parishioners, not the least of which includes me—who learned how to hate my own queerness, and therefore myself, as a pre-teen Christian long before I’d even brush the arm of another man. That’s real. But it’s worth asking how the hardcore scene’s largely binary criticisms of the the church—from “All religions make me wanna throw up” to “You call it religion, you’re full of shit”—account for those people whose relationship with the church is tied to their social and psychological survival, and not at all to political participation. Especially when simply dismissing them as “weak” does nothing to change the material circumstances that brought them there.

IV.

Part of growing up, for me, has been learning how to let go of the binary thinking that gutted my childhood theology of its potential for compassion. It means trying to appreciate complexity and ambiguity as tools to create a more accurate description of reality, and establishing my connection to the wonder and humility of not knowing. Which is to say that when my mother stood in that parking lot in Queens, demanding that demons leave the body of a woman who I now clearly understand was in the throes of an unfortunate mental health episode, she was acting under the conviction that there are only two sides to our existence: good and evil. And holding firmly to that belief, she completely missed the person directly in front of her, who was genuinely suffering. That is not an act of God. It’s a tragedy.

There’s another famous Dead Kennedys lyric that goes, “Punk ain’t no religious cult, punk means thinking for yourself”—and that’s true. But like Akil, I was also lucky enough to find out that punk, and hardcore more specifically, could actually fill some of those very basic needs that my parents used the church to satisfy. Growing up means I can accept that now. I still have a lot of anger towards my parents for any number of valid reasons, but I can forgive them for needing to believe that—in a world that seemed truly stacked up against us—it had been ordained that everything was going to be OK.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Akil Godsey of End It.

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