A balcony-side table in this small Wisconsin college town coffee shop. A cavern of brick that I wish for my town. The closest occupied seats to me contain a couple of young (younger than me) pastors having an all-in heart-to-heart. I’m impressed. The greater part of me feels: this is the kind of person I’d like to hold forth with– get real with– they’re damn good at talking about this stuff, they practice. They can be choking up in one sentence about the pain of the world and come out of the next in a burst of shared laughter. I’m all about that. Then they talk about being prophets. I didn’t catch all that: do they consider themselves prophets? Each believes that god talks to him. What do they mean?

Interesting to suspend my judgment of Christianity for a minute, to think of it less as blindness than a sort of traditional regard for the way people related to meaning before people stopped believing in meaning altogether. I realize I could make some qualifications to my objection to religion, limit it to the culture I inhabit (How could anyone like me possibly believe those stories are true?), and revisit the respect I hold for belief as I imagine it among the participants of a Sun Dance, the potato famine Irish, the Buddhist farmers. It seems likely enough that the belief system I am observing right now is simply the most efficient way to find community in the disjointed culture I do inhabit, and that the personal costs of a fallacious belief in god are much smaller than the rewards that come with a community adept at sharing in this way. So I ask: Why this requirement of belief? And I answer: Maybe there is no requirement. Maybe I could hop right into this community and be welcomed; I could listen and share and benefit from its insights into my fellow humans and find companionship and never feel judged for it; I wouldn’t even be surprised, not right now, given the two guys I’ve been eavesdropping on. Yet I’ll never do it. I’m a visitor to Wisconsin, and a lot more young people appear to be religious here than in the area where I live; that’s one excuse. Why else? Maybe I don’t value community like these believers do, even though I suspect I should.

When the talk was of prophets I started a teacannery post dedicated to a pair of nonbinary (to judge purely by looks) students sitting between me and the pastors; I thought, you might not be annoyed with these guys, but I am, and I was all the more in my perceived solidarity with those two. But I don’t know how they felt and I wouldn’t be surprised if I got everything wrong. When another hard-to-categorize person walked up the stairs (brown skin, dressed all in black, gender judgment suspended), one pastor said, “I like your shirt.” They stopped, graciously, and then he said, “Is that a bible in your hand?” It was. They pulled up a chair, and a spontaneous 10-minute check-in followed. “Do you have a community here?” They did. “Good, because if you didn’t, you know, I’d say, Come to church!” Laughs. A cordial parting. The lively flow of conversation among young pastors resumed.

Yes, I can think of god as just a symbol, a word that works the way all the other words work. We talk as though words are real, as though they point directly to absolutes that exist in the world– even if we can’t physically place the things signified (or even define those words)– but the fact we can’t pinpoint referents doesn’t tend to change the value of those words for us, the power they hold in the culture and relationships we create by sharing. And by acting as though the concept of god does have a specific form and literal presence, we have greater success talking to others about the things that matter to us. We can go a long way with the word god, I don’t question that– so far that the word god can, in a sense, become real– realer, even, than many words that have more tangible meanings; so far that a believer in the good and the true need not trip up on it. Not trip up on it, that is, until the great distinction starts to form, the distinction between those who believe that god is not only good and true but realer than anything else, and those that don’t believe “he” is real at all. And this distinction becomes all important– it’s the one that extends straight into the soul– and on judgment day it will spell the difference between those who deserve to be welcomed to god’s holy kingdom, and those he condemns to burn, forever, in hell. The appeal to fear: that’s what’s pathetic to me.

“He had a dream that he was laying on the floor, with an angel holding a sword to his throat, and he said, ‘Until god sends word to you, you don’t move…'”