Scouting gave me my first small taste of religious bigotry.
By the time I was in Boy Scouts, I had thought a bit about this whole “God” thing and pretty much didn’t get it. This was before the years of exploration that I mentioned, mind you. I was probably, as I described my father, “vaguely agnostic.” Religion was Weird Territory, something so different from my experience that I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
The first Scout Leader I had was this very, very religious man, Dr. Johnson. We’re talking hardcore here. His son was in the troop, a very serious kid who all the other guys secretly despised. I think the Johnsons were Methodist, of some weird offshot where the vaunted method apparently involved a very long, very rigid rod implanted firmly up one’s ass.
Oh man, was the religion thick in the air. Understand, up to this point the religion in scouts thing had been nonexistent for me. Cub Scouts? Never really came up, except for some words you had to say every week. We had more important things to do, like pinewood derby cars and drowning wolf spiders. But with Dr. Johnson, religion, his religion, was very much there. It pretty much went right over my head, though. I didn’t know my Jesus from my Good Samaritan from my John the Baptist. He might as well have been talking String Theory.
And then came summer camp, and the Sunday he told everyone we *had* to go to services (led by him, of course, and his son). Two things I remember from this — one, he was staring at the Jewish kid the whole time, like he was daring the dirty Christ-killer to say no. And oh, the stories I could tell you about that kid. My weird isolation in life meant that some of the things he talked about in our tent at night were New Territory for me. But I digress…
The other thing I remember is this: someone asked Dr. Johnson, “What if someone doesn’t believe in God?”
“If I discover that anyone in this troop is an atheist, they won’t be in this troop any longer.”
Even as young as I was, I had a sense — incomplete, too much new to be processed, what’s this don’t believe in God at all thing? — that something wrong had just happened. The Spidey Sense for Injustice was tingling.
And there was that idea, never contemplated before. Fuzzy agnosticism I had some idea of — at least in the sense of understanding not knowing whether God existed or not (I’m not sure I knew the word “agnosticism” at that point). But the idea of saying “I don’t believe in God,” that was new! And so Dr. Johnson introduced me to Atheism.
4 Comments
17 July 2008 at 2:13 pm
whoa. i had no idea he was like that. or that he SAID that. yoikes. whoa. wow. (insert other “w” words of amazement.)
i also want to know what that kid said in the tent at night that was so shocking. we did lead fairly insulated lives for a bit there, didn’t we?
(p.s. — i LOVE this blog of yours. good show, mate.)
17 July 2008 at 6:23 pm
Yup, the man was that bad. I mostly remember him as being dreadfully tedious, never smiling, and always scowling. Really, he was like a male version of those overly religious, bitter spinsters Dickens sometimes threw in his tales.
23 July 2008 at 9:25 pm
[...] of young Gregory’s haphazard relationship with religion (last recounted in “How my scoutmaster introduced me to the idea of atheism“). Yes, my friends, it’s time for one more Boy Scout story. This is foundation for what [...]
1 August 2008 at 5:14 am
[...] How my Scout Master introduced me to the idea of Atheism [...]
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