Most of my professional life was spent working as the religion reporter for a big city newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. Metropolitan dailies, especially before the great downsizing of print journalism, had a variety of beats. There was sports, politics, crime, transportation, science and, yes, religion. One of the landmines on “the God beat” appears when the person you’re interviewing starts asking you about your religious sympathies. More often than not, that question comes from an evangelical Christian.
“Let me ask you something, Don ” Pastor Bob might say. “Are you a Christian?”
I had a variety of ready answers for this question, all of them true and most of them designed to keep the interview going with the least amount of attention focused on what I believed. Sometimes, the answer would depend on the mood I was in or how much I needed the interview to complete whatever story I was reporting. I might say, “You know, Pastor Bob, I write for a secular newspaper, so my beliefs are not all that relevant. Think of my religious affiliation as ‘journalist.’ ”
That answer could backfire. So I might reply to Pastor Bob’s question by simply saying, “Yes.”
I could say “yes” because I am a card-carrying Christian. In the year of our Lord, 1954, an infant named Donald Arthur Lattin was baptized into the First Presbyterian Church of Ramsey, New Jersey. But that simple “yes” might not satisfy Pastor Bob. He might ask, “What church do you attend?” or even “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”
When I was in a wicked mood, I would pull out one of my snarkier answers.
“Well, Pastor Bob. I guess you could call me a Jewish Presbyterian Buddhist. My mother’s Jewish. My father sent me to Presbyterian and Congregational churches until I was twelve and our family decided we’d had enough of organized religion. But today, if you put a gun to my head and made me pick one of the five major world religions, I’d probably have to say ‘Buddhist.’ ”
Later in my career, I came up with my best true answer. It seemed to work in all almost all situations. “No, Pastor Bob, I would not really call myself a ‘Christian.’ I’m more of a Skeptical Universalist.”
“A what?”
“A Skeptical Universalist,” I’d explain. “In my travels over the years I’ve come to see that there is some truth, some good, and much hypocrisy in all forms of organized religion.”
About fifteen years ago, I retired from the God beat and the daily newspaper business. Retirement inspires one to look back on one’s life, to ask oneself some deeper questions.
Why did I spend more than a quarter of a century working this beat? Few of my friends and colleagues would call me “religious,” but something always fascinated me about the subject, not just as a journalist, but as a human being.
Why wasn’t my religious heritage passed down to me? Am I a Jew, a Christian or none of the above? Am I one of those people who calls himself “spiritual but not religious?” What does it really mean to be a Skeptical Universalist?
My search to answer those questions led me on a journalistic journey into my own background, into the lives of ancestors going back hundreds of years to the European Wars of Religion and the battle for the soul of America. I discovered that the roots of Skeptical Universalism go back at least that far.
My ancestors — both the Christians and the Jews — had been running from religion for centuries. That flight brought us to the New World, but not only that. A deeper look into that history led me to the realization that I am both a Christian and a Jew, and that the tradition of Skeptical Universalism goes all the way back to another Jewish Christian, a skeptical Nazarene who could have easily called himself “spiritual but not religious.”
My family’s religious heritage — and the centuries of bloody turmoil pushing us ever westward — swirls around that age-old question, “Who was Jesus?” Or more to the point, “Who gets to decide?” Was he the Jewish messiah, a Palestinian revolutionary, a charismatic faith healer, or a gnostic mystic? Was he the founder of the Roman Catholic Church or my personal Lord and Savior? Was he a wandering wisdom teacher, the only Son of the One True God, or the semi-mythological founder of a Greek cult formed around the ingestion of an entheogenic potion. The answer appears to be “all of the above,” so maybe it’s time we finally stop fighting over him.
Or, as Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), the medieval mystic and accused heretic once said, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
This hand-painted icon was given to me by a Russian Orthodox priest on a frigid day in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1996.
Researching the socio-religious context behind my ancestors’ stories has given me a new appreciation for some other relatively obscure prophets, mystics and misfits from centuries past. They emerge as key players in this tradition of Skeptical Universalism — a sort of “tradition of no tradition.”
They are people like the mystic Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), the first woman author of a surviving book written in English; Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1566), the great Christian humanist; Hendrik Niclaes (1501-1580), whose Family of Love was one of the most despised sects of the Protestant Reformation; Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the Dominican mystic burned at the stake; Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), the Puritan prophetess and convicted heretic; and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch philosopher and renegade Jew. They’ll help light our way from twentieth century America back to fifteenth century Europe.
In our collective understanding of the origins of the United States, we tend to overestimate the role of the religion and downplay how economic forces make us who we are. Frontiers have always attracted misfits, scoundrels and opportunists, and New England was no exception. We forget that tens of thousands of early colonists were criminals forced out of England and Ireland by criminal courts.
Sure, religious persecution was a major factor in the flight of many Europeans to the New World. And, yes, ten of the thirteen original American colonies had state churches. They were officially religious, but as sociologist Rodney Stark has shown, only about seventeen percent of the colonial population was “churched.” His statistical analysis also reveals that a third of American births from 1761 to 1800 were from women who conceived before they were married. “Single women in New England during the colonial period were more likely to be sexually active than to belong to a church,” Stark reports.
Most of our founding fathers — inspired more by the Enlightenment than by Christianity — were not particularly religious in the conventional sense of the word. Yes, there have been a few “Great Awakenings” of religious revival in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they were relatively brief and somewhat regional in nature.
Polls of religious belief and affiliation are also suspect. In the second half of the twentieth century, sociologists have shown that millions of Americans lied when asked how often they went to church. Only in the last few decades have large numbers of people felt that it was socially acceptable to reply “none” when asked their religious affiliation.
For the three decades that I covered the God beat, statistics on religious belief and congregational attendance changed very little. But that began to change in the fifteen years since I left the newspaper business. Telephone surveys in 2018 and 2019 revealed that the percentage of American adults who see themselves as Christians dropped by twelve percent in one decade, down to sixty-five percent of the adult population. Meanwhile, those who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” now stands at twenty-six percent, up from seventeen percent a decade earlier. The number of self-described “atheists” has doubled, but it is still pretty low, from two to four percent. But a deeper look at these findings by the Pew Research Center reveal that the “spiritual but not religious” folks now find themselves in the fastest-growing category of belief — or non-belief.
So, this story is not just about my spiritual journey and my ancestors. It might also apply to you and yours. Journalists are taught to know their audience, to put themselves in the position of others and ask, “Why am I reading this?” I’ve asked myself that same question as I wrote up the stories of my ancestors, the saga of the Protestants who fled the Low Countries of Western Europe in the sixteenth century and the Jews on my mother’s side who came here from Russian three hundred years later. “Who cares about the ancestral saga of the Lattins and the Kubeys?” Good question, since even some of my own relatives don’t seem all that interested in our family’s ancestry.
What I hope the reader will see is that this is not just my story. This is not just the story of the Puritan migration of the seventeenth century or the Jewish diaspora of the nineteenth century. Understanding how our ancestors were “running from religion” gives us empathy for the plight of today’s refugees — whether they are fleeing Islamic fundamentalism, global warming, plague or poverty.
This is our story, no matter when or why our families came to these shores.
That’s why I use a plural pronoun on the front page of this website — what the actual lives of our ancestors teach us about “traditional family values.” What I found in my research is that the actual family lives of my forefathers — including the life of my own father — were not the stories that had been passed down to me. I’d assumed — even hoped — that I’d find some skeletons in my ancestral closet. What I didn’t imagine was that those skeletons would lie so close to home.
So, dear reader, think twice before you start poking around the myths of your families. You may find the picture is not quite as pretty as you’ve been led to believe.