Laura Ferris

The Thing About Crutches

— Posted September 4th, 2008 at 9:08 am // Permalink

Organized religion is a crutch and a sham for the weak-minded who need strength in numbers. —Governor Jesse VenturaOriginally in a 1999 Playboy interview. He probably read it in Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love: “History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.” Heinlein may have lifted this from someone else: if it was someone famous I should have known about already, let me know.

I don’t know if this is a Berkeley thing, but sometimes I’m a little embarrassed to tell people that I’m a Christian. Saying that I’m going to a church barbecue or that I sing in a church choir doesn’t really faze me, since that has a wholesome, it’s-a-cultural-thing kind of vibe. But when I talk about the fact that I actually believe all that stuff, I kind of get a look. It’s not a hostile look, or even a scornful one: it’s a look of pity. I’m the sort of person who needs that sort of thing; I’m an intellectual cripple whose life of the mind is in thrall to my own magical thinking.

Calling religion a crutch is not an insult to religion: it’s a condemnation of the religionist. It means that a devout person is a weak person who needs their faith just to get around. There’s an additional, rather incongruous connotation to this image of religious belief: that religion is somehow unsubstantial or untrue by virtue of being needed. This negative concept of religion as a crutch is a very common one in our society, and it is also a deeply, deeply weird one, and I want to talk about why.

But first, an embarrassing personal anecdote:

Last semester, I sprained my ankle. Some people sprain their ankles playing contact sports, or saving babies from burning buildings, or when attacked by bandits or something. I sprained my ankle because I didn’t know how to break in a new pair of boots. The boots were a little snug, and it hurt to walk in them, but I figured that was just the price I had to pay for breaking them in. If I took them off, I would be succumbing to weakness unbecoming of a sentient being up against a pair of stylish yet practical inanimate objects. So I traipsed around Berkeley in constant pain for a day, only to discover the next that those size-too-small boots had broken me. I didn’t want to admit it at first—I told myself that I was being a baby, as I almost yelped the second I put the slightest bit of weight on my right foot. The problem with this situation, as all Berkeley students know, is the fact that you have to walk everywhere. Who cares if I’m a cripple, I have places to go, people to see! So, with a grim stoicism, I set off across campus to go to church, because I had no other option: when limping earlier I had dropped and broken my phone and couldn’t call anyone for a ride. I wish I could tell you that I stumbled across campus telling myself “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength,”Philippians 4:13 but a more accurate depiction of my mental state would be something like a cross between Camus’s “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn”Albert Camus. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” and “ow ow ow ow ow.” In front of Dwinelle I met one of my friends, who seeing my pained face asked me how I was: I fell into her arms sobbing. The next day another friend drove me to the Tang Center to get me some crutches.

I did not enjoy being on crutches. Crutches are awkward. There’s a knack to walking with them that I didn’t quite master the two weeks I had them (it was a slight sprain, people). Crutches have distinct limitations for the (inept) novice: stairs had me totally stymied. But I would have been a complete moron if I had refused to use them. It would not have been a show of strength and hardy independence to continue “walking it off”: what was a slight sprain would have gotten worse and worse. The crutches were not a product of my magical thinking either: they were solid three-dimensional objects that were designed by the human race to help us get around while our sprained ankles healed. I needed a crutch because I was legitimately weak: if I had been permanently crippled, I would have needed crutches permanently to get around, and these crutches would have been useful and worthy tools. Please mark also that in our culture it’s considered distinctly bad form to mock people who can’t get around without crutches, leg braces, and wheelchairs. Crutches are good things. And the state of being crippled itself is not something we typically blame people for: it’s a weakness, but not one for which they’re necessarily accountable—it could be genetic, and even when it’s the result of a dumb skateboard move, we still feel sorry for them.

So, why on earth would we call religion a crutch with such disdain? Humanity, realizing its weakness—the fact that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”Thomas Hobbes. The Leviathan: Of Man.—invented something to help itself get around: pretty darn solid normative ethics, a “transcendent” community of believers past and present (“a great cloud of witnesses”Hebrews 12:1 or straight-up ancestor worship), and a God that loves us and punishes people we don’t like. Call this religion, call it a meta-narrative, but it’s quite useful to human society, and even atheistic, agnostic, or “post-religious” people still use it: call morality survival instinct and God the greater good and you’ve neatly side-stepped the fact that because everything is meaningless, “everything is permitted.” Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. Jean Paul Sartre on the subject: “The existentialist…finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven…Dostoevsky once wrote, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.’” This is probably an accurate summary of Ivan Karamazov’s position, but Ivan’s use of the phrase “everything is permitted” (especially since in my translation this phrase is surrounded by quotes) may be a reference to 1 Corinthians 6:12. Or should be. No, the reason why we scornfully call religion (that is, the religion or meta-narrative we don’t happen to subscribe to) a crutch is a very bull-headed and nonsensical one: we’ve somehow come to believe that weakness is not undesirable or even bad but in some way illegitimate or untrue.

This is very, very strange. Weakness, after all, is kind of intrinsic to mortal, living beings. Even if you have the physical abilities of Michael Phelps and the mind of Albert Einstein, you’re still going to deteriorate and die if sudden, unexpected disaster doesn’t kill you in the next minute. But we don’t want to think about this because we want to think that weakness is a choice. I used crutches for two weeks and I felt much better. I was able to walk normally again and without pain. But those boots I wore are still in my closet: there’s nothing that can really stop me from putting them on again. Or I could trip on a curb and roll my ankle. Or a bicyclist could clip me on Bancroft, or a car could hit me, or I could fall down stairs, or…you see my problem. The crutches ameliorated and in some ways corrected my weakness as defined by a sprained ankle: they can do nothing about the fact that my way of walking is finally flawed, weak. And nothing can: bipedalism actually works pretty well for us, but it doesn’t work perfectly. We’ve never experienced a single perfect moment in our whole lives. I can’t even envision a world in which just the act of walking was perfected: where nothing would ever trip us, where we would never stumble, where we would never grow weary and our feet would never ache. We strive for perfection, we’re American after all, but we can’t know what that really looks like. Improvement is asymptotic: we’re always getting closer or moving away from…what exactly? So we play a desperate game of make believe every day, making fun of cripples (for mockery and pity are both a form of condescension) in order to convince ourselves that we’re not one of them: that there doesn’t have to be something bad, wrong, or undesirable about the world we’re stuck in.

Our anger at crutches is misplaced: we’re not in a snit because people use crutches; we’re upset about the fact that we’re the sort of people who can at any moment sprain our ankles. Religion, though it makes us feel better about some aspects of our lives some of the time, does not address our underlying problem: we don’t know how to walk properly, let alone live. And going to the churches we built isn’t going to show us, praying the prayers they taught us isn’t going to fix anything, and praying prayers we make up ourselves isn’t going to do any good either. Religion isn’t enough. The God or truth that we encounter in our religious or cultural milieus isn’t enough.

“All I’m talking about here is blasphemy—blasphe-you, blasphe-everybody-in-the-room.”From comedian Eddie Izzard’s show/album Circle. He goes on to say: “I don’t believe that religions are religions, no, I believe that they’re philosophies with some good ideas and some f— weird ones.” Or am I really? What if there was something about this world outside of our own powers yet not beyond our observation that actually interacts with us? And what if this something knew what perfection really means, what goodness means, what walking means? What if, you know, God actually existed? All right, all right, you’ve caught me: I’m a Christian, this is a blog of Christian thought, it was always going to eventually be about Jesus. If Jesus lived the sort of life the Christian scriptures describe in the gospels, we might be in business here. According to Christian reckoning on the subject, Jesus was perfect. Jesus was (is, will be) God incarnate, who came not only to show us the Way, the Truth, and Light but to be those things. I could go on and on, and I don’t mean that flippantly. The Christian story is a powerful one, and those who think it’s stupid or simplistic haven’t been paying attention for the past two thousand years. The reason I don’t want to preach the gospel to you right now is not (just) laziness; I have a purpose: I could tell you the greatest story you’ve ever heard, but you know what? Just because a story is wonderful, just because it makes sense, just because we need it, cannot alone make that story true. So instead of a story, I leave you a question: what would?