"On The Other Claw...."

Maybe it was just a peculiarity of a particular time and place. This post was prompted by a blog post in which an elementary school teacher had to field uncomfortable questions about the topic from a couple of her students after class one day. One of the respondents expressed dismay that teachers these days couldn't answer questions about their personal beliefs.

In my experience, thought, it was never appropriate for teachers to discuss matters of faith with students -- and said "experience" stems from my elementary years in the early '70s.

It Just Wasn't Done.

What really struck me, though, was that back in my day ... the kids wouldn't have ASKED. It would have been BAD MANNERS, and, at least in the places I lived, EVERYONE KNEW THAT. It wasn't something you brought up in public, and it most certainly wasn't something you interrogated an adult about.

I'm well aware that religious prejudice has always been around, and a major issue, but when I was growing up, it was always a truism that Religion And Politics Were Not Topics of Polite Conversation, any more than were Bodily Functions.

(I've always suspected that the reasoning there was the same. "Everyone may have them, but that doesn't mean anybody wants you to share.")

Maybe it was different in places outside of Southern California. I know I've heard horror stories from people about my age about getting abused in childhood, verbally and otherwise, by aggressive evangelism. Maybe part of it's that very small age difference -- those stories seem to come from people only five or six years my junior, but that period covers the transition from the Peace And Love Era of Godspell to the rise of the Moral Majority.

Maybe it's because my grandfather was an Army chaplain, and thus, despite his Methodist ordination, had to minister to an eclectic flock. He died before I was a year old, but I grew up in a house that had a translation of the Koran right next to a Hebrew Bible and old King James.

This is not to say I didn't encounter artifacts of a more aggressive evangelism. I saw the Spire Christian Comics version of Archie Comics on the racks in some artsy-craftsy stores of the time, but Mom was perceptive enough to distinguish them from the regular Archies, and veto their purchase (or even rack-browsing). In kindergarten and first grade, I started going to a fairly evangelical bible studies at a friend's house; my mother's misgivings are clear to me now, in hindsight, but even then, she was very much of the opinion that we had to make up our own minds on such matters.

It didn't take, by the way. That study group also introduced me to Jack Chick's awful little comics, which I have often credited with turning me away from organized religion.

Did you ever notice that Chick's hateful little tracts are about the same format as the old "Tijuana Bible" pornographic comics? This may be a matter of convergent evolution; both the Tijuana and Chick "Bibles" were printed cheaply, transported covertly, and distributed discreetly, because they contain material calculated to be provocative and outside the bounds of conventional propriety.