Loco Parentis: He’s a Believer
There wasn’t any Road to Damascus moment when our son announced his conversion. It was more something we inferred from reading between the lines. He lobbied for a crèche at Christmas. He asked questions about religious stuff he saw in movies or on TV: catacombs, seraphim, the Holy Grail. He devoured Dan Brown’s books, with their mystical Christian arcana. He started downloading songs by rock groups with names like Lifehouse and Creed.
Maybe the problem was Boy Scouts. Jake’s troop meets in a church — albeit the basement. They have a Law and an Oath, which are sort of like prayers; they’re said in unison, and smirking or poking during the recitations is frowned on. All of this, plus the uniforms and flag-folding and parade-marching and paramilitary layers of organization, seems to feed a basic need in our son. At home, bereft of sacraments, he invents his own. His bedtime preparations are a litany of steps followed in precise order, right down to the number of times we exchange “Goodnight, I love you” as I head down the stairs from his room. And he saves everything — ticket stubs, price tags, junk mail, the wrappings from computer games. Reality is somehow validated for him by these ephemera; it’s as though they serve to keep him from tumbling into a void.
Marcy, in stark contrast, is wholly unsentimental. She is forward-facing, caustic, impatient, harshly judgmental of those who don’t meet her strict standards of beauty and personal upkeep. (That would include Jake, who leaves a Pigpen-esque fog of empty soda cans and used tissues and gum wrappers and dirty socks perpetually in his wake.) Marcy cheerily announces to anyone who inquires about our household’s religious affiliation, “We’re atheists!” In her worldview, this is something exotic that sets us apart, sort of like being Lithuanian, or having red hair. I’ve never heard Jake make a similar pronouncement. When I ask him what he thinks about God, he shrugs. But then, he shrugs when I ask him what he thinks about anything.
For most of human history, Doug’s and my overwhelming concern for our children would have been the state of their souls: Are they saved? Among the blessed? Now, we worry whether they’re happy. This is progress, I guess. We have the luxury of not fixating on Marcy’s and Jake’s prospects for the hereafter because they’re far less likely to die than kids were 100 or 200 or 5,000 years ago. And that’s because of science, not religion. Religion builds cathedrals. Science discovers vaccines.
Yet it was a monk, Gregor Mendel, who uncovered the theory of genetics that eventually led to Watson and Crick and then to the decoding of the human genome — and to cloning. The Lord does work in mysterious ways. If He’s working at all.
Take this matter of the God gene. It was the subject of a cover story in Time last year — a newly mapped gene, vmat2, that inclines humans toward spirituality, the sense of a vast, greater Other of which we are only a part. We feel this oneness with the universe when a nucleic acid known as cytosine is present in a certain spot on the God gene. Have the cytosine mutation? You’re a spiritual sort, favoring religion and its transcendent ecstasies. Lack the mutation? Animal House. Some of us, it seems, are hardwired for belief.
So what, exactly, does this mean for Martin Luther and free will? If there is a God, and He created us, double helix and all, then He cheated by inserting the God gene. What kind of all-powerful Being has to stack the deck?
