The Prig in Me

I confessed in Religion, Solidarity, and My Need for Approval that my ulterior motive in being a religious person and in instituting this blog's "search for solidarity" has been (I now realize) a deep-seated need for the approval of others.

That seems to go hand in glove with my being a (closet) prig.

Most prigs are (for those who remember the TV show M*A*S*H) like the character Maj. Frank Burns: self-righteously moralistic, Burns was a nitwit who always came off as thinking himself superior to everyone else.

My type of priggery is cleverer than that. I pretend to be a Hawkeye Pierce or a Trapper John McIntyre or a B.J. Hunnicutt. Most of the time, for my own benefit as well as for that of others, I play the role of a "regular guy."

But deep down inside, I'm Major Burns.


A prig is not precisely a prude, but prudery is definitely part of the profile. Major Burns was always furtively hooking up with Hot Lips Houlihan, with an emphasis on "furtively." So there's a big component of hypocrisy built into the priggery/prudery profile.

I'm not gay, but in many ways I feel I'm like the evangelical leader Ted Haggard, recently exposed as a homosexual. The things that Haggard criticized (as it turned out, hypocritically) about today's culture are things that the prig/prude in me tends to criticize too.


That said, I do not understand the culture today.

Maybe it's because I'm a prig and a prude masquerading as an up-to-date kind of guy that I feel so out of it. I feel like (sorry to keep bringing up characters from ancient TV history) Mork from Ork.

Mork wasn't a prig or a prude, but he was an extraterrestrial who never could quite get the hang of Earth's more peculiar ways.

I can't quite get the hang of a culture in which just about every kind of behavior is defended by somebody — by plenty of somebodies — with possible exceptions being made for forcible rape and child exploitation or abuse. Yet when a male member of the U.S. Senate is caught in a sting operation tapping his foot for sex in a men's room stall, he has to resign. Isn't that hypocrisy on our parts?

Or is it that Senator Craig got crucified not for his true sexual nature but for his hypocrisy in pretending to be Mr. Straight all this time, and the furtiveness in his manner of satisfying his gay urges? Is our war on hypocrisy the thing Mork from Ork most needs to understand about today's culture? If so, perhaps there is only one sin left. It is being what I seem to have become: inauthentic.


If that's anywhere close to being correct, then the keynote of the cultural change that has taken place over the course of my 60-years-and-counting of life would seem to be this war on inauthenticity.

Sure, we've seen many other important trends, including the items on this list:

• the growth of sexual freedom
  
• women's liberation
  
• gay liberation
• the civil-rights revolution
• the opening up of higher education to the masses
• a historically unprecedented high standard of living
• a teen-friendly mass culture
• an atrophied public or civic religiosity
  

The list could go on, with many more items. But maybe they are all trumped by — or allies of — the war on inauthenticity and hypocrisy.


I'd better qualify the last list item. When I say that "public or civic religiosity" has dwindled, I don't mean that most Americans aren't religious. I mean that religion has become strictly a private matter. It's no longer allowed in the "public square," except for occasional glints such as when politicians end speeches with "God bless the United States of America" — and even then, atheists howl.

But notice the irony. What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, even (or especially) if it's kinky, is OK to talk about on Jerry Springer, but if it's pious and prayerful, we need to hush it up. Would Mork from Ork even begin to have a clue about that?

Religion, Solidarity, and My Need for Approval

I worry about myself sometimes.

As the proprietor of this blog in which my intention has been to explore ways in which we might all come together with regard to religious belief, I am suddenly aware that I have been acting all along with an ulterior motive. I woke up yesterday morning with one of those occasional profound insights I suppose we all are prone to from time to time. In my case, the profound insight was that I have a near-obsessive need to gain the approval of others.

Or is it that I have a near-obsessive need to avoid the disapproval of others?

Either way, my search for "solidarity" could be seen as a stealth technique of disapproval avoidance. After all, if there truly exists a set of religious views that all could agree on — which is highly doubtful — then my seeking it and finding it, and then leading others to it, would be a surefire way to inoculate myself against disapproval.

The strategy could work in multiple ways. It would put me on the same theological page with all my peers, all of us singing from the same hymn book. Ditto, philosophy: we could all agree on the same (God-centered) worldview. Even more important, such a "universal" belief system with God squarely at its center would necessarily (so I hope) be "correct" or "true" and would therefore put me in the best of favor with the Man Upstairs.

Problem is, when my prime motivation is disapproval avoidance, controversy becomes the enemy. Any imagined version of the truth that raises anybody's hackles gets short shrift. And where religion is concerned, every version of the truth raises somebody's hackles.

It seems pretty clear that, whatever you may think is the correct belief about who Jesus of Nazareth was, he was not afraid to raise the hackles of those around him. Ergo, I'm wrong to claim to be a Christian while really, mainly, being an avoider of disapproval.


I must admit to being somewhat astounded to realize just how strong my need to gain approval and avoid disapproval is these days.

It was not always thus. As a youth and young man, I had if anything an overly cavalier attitude toward the opinions of others about yours truly. Let's put it this way. I didn't go out of my way to curry favor, by any means.

Looking back, that all seems to have started changing with my mother's death when I was 38, then my father's three years later. It's as if as long as they were around, my ego aways had a safe harbor to return to if buffeted by high sea winds.

At my mother's passing I reacted by developing what seem to have been psychosomatic symptoms of perennial dizziness and malaise. After struggling along for a couple of years that way, I suddenly "found God." (What a coincidence!) Then Dad died, and my religious commitment just got deeper. Now it seems that I was unconsciously trying to relocate my safe harbor at a super-cosmic level.

Over time that psychological strategy has worn thinner and thinner, and as it has I have grown increasingly desperate to shore it up by "proving" that there really and truly is a God whom we can all believe in ... and that therefore I ought to merit his approval and that of everyone else too.

Of late, these attempts have grown more and more bankrupt, at least from the perspective of my near-obsessive psychic needs. I have now gotten to the point where I feel my judgments about my own ideas are so impaired that any hope of being objective about them is in jeopardy.

So I fall back on an inner recognition that, like Bilbo Baggins after too many years of hoarding the One Ring, my own soul has grown "thin and stretched." What good is being "right" about religion — if I am right — if it doesn't nourish the soul? If my being "right" is a secret way to serve a false God — my own approval needs — then it isn't right at all.