White Collar Dreaming

Filling The God-Shaped Hole

Whether you’re loving it, losing it or looking for it, religion can fill many spiritual void. But who’s to say which faith is right for you?

When I was little I became a Christian in a family of atheists. It lasted about five weeks. I prayed every night, organising my stuffed animals to kneel with me beside the bed. My brothers would snigger behind my bedroom door and pretend to be God, answering my prayers in their shrill, breaking voices. I prayed for all the things dear to a child of a nervous disposition - that mum would always love me, that Tiger (an orange stray kitten we found) would live forever, and that `the boys' (those giggling Gods behind my bedroom door) might leave me alone. Then I would say amen for each of my stuffed animals in voices I imagined they had.

Finding little familial support for my new-found religion ("She thinks she's a Christian," my guffawing father liked to say to our butcher or our milk-bar man), I ended up returning the Good News Bible to the library. In Australia, it's no sin to change your spouse or your religion (but, for God's sake, not your football team). Elsewhere, of course, renouncing your faith can have far more serious consequences - former Catholics may be excommunicated, while in some Islamic countries the death penalty awaits apostates.

Many Australians, it seems, are religious only by default. According to the national census, while 67% belong to a Christian church, only 9% attend church regularly. The proportion of Australians who categorise themselves as Christian has been falling steadily since the first census in 1901. And, in the last l0 years, non-Christian religions have seen the largest­ever proportional increase.

Marian Dalton, a theology historian at Melbourne's La Trobe University, says she can imagine the panic the traditional churches must be feeling but that, in today's multi­faith society, Christians risk coming across as sore losers. "It must be frightening to see numbers draining away, but that is what happens when people have [religious] freedom," she says. At the age of 16, Dalton became a born-again Christian. Her parents and brother were agnostic and Dalton says she found she felt more at home among the evangelicals. Like sprinkling a sachet of Sea-Monkeys into a bowl of water, it provided instant friends and a new-found sense of purpose.

But six years on, Dalton fell in love with a fellow churchgoer and they decided to live together. Her priest, aghast that the couple had not married, sent Dalton scathing letters of Biblical verse and threatened to mention her `immorality' in his sermons. She was no longer welcome as a youth-group leader, Sunday school teacher or choir member. "I became quite disillusioned with the whole thing and we left the church. But I was left with a`god-shaped hole'," says Dalton, echoing the words of French scientist and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said: "There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart."

For Rachel Woodlock, an Islamic scholar at Melbourne's Monash University, the question of what dwells in our hearts isn't always so mysterious. Walking down the street recently, her hijab flapping, a carload of men slowed down to yell "Go home you fucking Arab!" at Woodlock. "I'm a sixth-generation Australian," she says. "Where am I to go?"
Woodlock was raised in the Baha'i faith, a religion with distinguishing principles that include the condemnation of all forms of prejudice. At 24, she married a Baha'i man, only to convert to Islam five years later. For the Baha'i community, this was the worst possible outcome. "So many Baha'i have died at the hands of Muslims," Woodlock says of the persecution many Baha'i have faced, particularly in Iran. "One man said to me `If it were the other way around, you'd be dead.' I wasn't expecting it; I had known these people since I was a baby."

The term `convert' is now generally used to mean any transition from one faith to another, but in older usage it implied a transition from sin or `false religion' to `truth.' In many Orthodox traditions, commitment is often for life - but in our `tolerant' Western environment, a convert can assume a new identity without necessarily negating the past, by viewing conversion as God's will. But for the religion that has been left for another - it is like being jilted at the altar.

Lewis Rambo, a professor of psychology and religion, and author of Understanding Religious Conversion, says conversions from one faith to another are often seen as an act of treachery. For example, if a Jew becomes a Christian, this may be viewed as a betrayal because of the persecution many Jews have experienced at the hands of Christians. This errant convert may be defined as `dead' by the Jewish community, whereas if the situation were reversed - a Christian converting to Judaism - it could be seen as an "interesting eccentricity or curiosity," Rambo says.

As a Hindu priest, India's Swami Dayananda Saraswati regards religious proselytising as barbaric. "Everybody should be given the freedom to practise his or her religion," he says. "That's religious freedom as I understand it, and if I put down that religion to convert that person to my religion, I consider it is very gross violence because it's a violence against something more deep than mere physical violence... In the process, a lot of people get hurt; their whole culture is destroyed, and we have wiped out cultures in Egypt, in Greece, in South America, everywhere. This has been going on for a long time, and it has been because of this conversion alone." According to the Swami, religion's universal message should be `Love God' as opposed to `Love my God.'

While several faiths, including Islam, have been known to share the Christian view that converting people is acceptable, others are less prone to proselytising. The Jewish tradition, for example, holds that a prospective convert should be refused three times. As for the Buddhists, the Dalai Lama has stated he does not want to convert the West, but rather he aims to teach the art of happiness and raise awareness for Tibet's plight.
For `Sam,' a regular contributor to the internet chat site Muslim Village Australia, his conversion to Islam was made all the more meaningful by a close Muslim friend who tried to talk him out of converting. "He told me that if I convert, it should be for the sake of Allah only, and not to become part of a 'club' or any other thing like that," Sam says. "Here I was, ready to convert, and I had a Muslim telling me iiot to, unless it was for the right reasons. This left a deep impression on me... It was the best advice anyone ever gave to me."

Yet the biblical command to "go and make disciples of all nations" (a biblical quote falsely attributed to Christ, according to some scholars of the historical Jesus) remains a tenet of many Christian groups. Others, such as The Church of Scientology and the Hare Krishna movement, are similarly committed to spreading their own particular brand of consciousness.

Under the Charter of the United Nations, "no one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have a religion or belief of his choice." It's fine in theory, yet people the world over remain captive to others' enforced beliefs. In Australia, with its long history of missionary zeal among Indigenous communities, our own Prime Minister wants chaplains introduced as counsel to students in Australian schools. Meanwhile, redefining the very idea of religious freedom, Catholic ministers are overseeing conversions to Christianity in our detention centres.

"Those born into a religion tend not to reflect on the actual meaning of their theological path, whereas a convert has to face up to some serious barriers, from outside and within," says Rachel Woodlock, when asked how converts differ from those born into a particular faith. While Woodlock's husband remained a Baha'i, she never returned to the community she had grown up in. "My husband has always supported me; he helped pay for me to study Arabic in Yemen," she says. "His biggest concern is when we go out people will think he's forcing me to wear the hijab."

But for Woodlock, it is her mother who finds her conversion the most difficult to accept. "She thinks the stereotypical things, like Muslim women are oppressed and it is a backward religion." Woodlock's two-year-old daughter was recently given a two­piece swimming suit by her grandmother. "Neither me or my husband thought much of it, but my mother decided we were against it because I am Muslim and kept asking if I was going to make her wear the hijab instead. But we just didn't like the idea of our two-year-old wearing a bikini." Long ago the Woodlocks decided to leave their daughter's religious status on the census blank. "When she is old enough, she can make her own decision."

For parents of converts, however, it can be that you're damned if you do, an damned if you don't. In the case of `Jonathon,' a 23-year-old whose parents are not religious, being brought up without God came to feel a little like being cheated. Jonathon's conversion is a clandestine affair. Still living with his family, he is reluctant to tell his parents and brother that he is a born-again Christian, and has been for the almost two years. "My family are the kind of people who groan and throw things at the television if someone at the Oscars thanks God," he says.

Fortunately for Jonathon, the church he attends has sermons on Sunday afternoons so he can tell his parents he's hanging out with friends or playing sport. ("They would be suss if I was up early every Sunday morning.") And, while some young men may have a stash of magazines hidden under the bed, Jonathon has the Bible. Not even his friends are aware of his conversion: "All they know is that I am much happier. But I don't want them to change around me and think they can't say the same things any more."

Professor Lewis Rambo likens conversion to falling in love. "It is dramatic; it is intense," he says. "The world looks different. You feel different. For many converts, that early phase is a wonderful liberation that comes of being in love with God or the church or the Jewish community or whatever you are now in love with. But just as in marriage, sometimes there is a let-down once you start seeing the realities - that not all Jews or Catholics are nice people. Then the reality of what you have done begins to take effect."

Converts are often more likely to see the inconsistencies between their new religion and its followers. Jonathon reflects: "Some Christians are pretty ‘un-Christian.’ My nan goes to church but thinks we should leave the boat people out in the ocean. Then there is the whole ‘homosexuality is a sin’ angle. I have a few gay friends and one night a group from my church invited me to have pizza and they started saying some really derogatory things about gay people. I felt like a traitor because I didn't stand up for my friends."

Newcomers to a faith stress the difficulty of losing `the convert tag.' "I've had a taxi driver who doesn't pray but wants to lecture me on Islam," Woodlock laughs. It is often assumed that one's conversion means a sudden transformation, rather than a rational process of seeking and changing one's behaviour. But many modern-day conversions are exactly that - a profound internal experience without the drama of visions and fiery red crosses appearing in the sky.

The danger, in our consumer-based culture, is that belief might be somehow cheapened; that converts, or prospective converts, might find themselves trapped in a ‘spiritual supermarket.’ How do you explain the altars, ornaments, yarmulke, jewellery, adornments, even headscarves? And what makes religion any more dissimilar from other subcultures that require external symbolic gestures? Even Buddhism, a minimalist's religion, could entail a trip to the shops to purchase a water feature, or one of those big clay Buddhas, to help you reinforce your investment in inner peace. A Quaker from Melbourne's Quaker Friends group - which boasts a vast variety of converging faiths - believes there is a risk to all this diversity. "If you claim to be everything, then you risk being nothing to everyone."

Where does this leave all those ofgod-shaped holes'? Does the power of God diminish if  ‘He’ changes in size? Marion Dalton filled her spiritual vacuum 17 years ago when she became a Pagan - a religion that was only removed from Victoria's Vagrancy Act 1958 in 2005. "Most other religions are male; we worship the Goddess. It's only recently that A Current Affair and Today Tonight have stopped using the graveyard backdrop and spooky music whenever they do an `expose' on us," she laughs.

For many converts, a new religion of their choosing can feel like a kind of homecoming after years of trying to fit into the wrong-sized faith. And, while cynics tend to make much of turning to a god in times of crisis, there are more reasons than one to explain conversion; it can be brave, cowardly or even deadly. It can be a crutch or it can be a moment of ecstasy. It can be a relieving of guilt or grief, or a method of overcoming fear. Impending death can often spur one to a faith - there are, for instance, many converts on death row. For others, it is simply a chance for a chat and morning tea. And for many, it is something to hold on to while a wild ocean flows around us.

Rachel Woodlock's Christmas gatherings are a celebration of varied faiths. There's usually a couple of Baha'is, her mother's best friend who is Jewish, her Buddhist brother, a younger atheist brother, children with little persuasion and their eye on a present beneath the tree, and her, a Muslim. "It's like, so, which one of us is Christian again?" she giggles.

Not me of course. I gave that up along time ago, when I returned the Bible to the library and came home with All Right, Vegemite! But there are still times when I think I would like a religion, something to inflate inside my being for when life gets too noisy; something to stop my shoulders from collapsing forward. Like the wooden pegs children play with, I wonder if I will succeed in finding the right fit for my god-shaped hole or if it's just a place for the wind to blow through.