There’s only one church in Osyth, and it’s an upstart, just getting going in the second novel. But the world of the Royal Academy is firmly polytheistic, with competition (sometimes cutthroat) between multiple religions worshipping different gods. In this, it’s a lot like the world I live in. The only difference is that in my world, most of the different religions give their god the same name.
In my lifetime attending Christian churches, I’ve been asked to worship Athena, Mars, Hermes, Nobodaddy — all under the name of Jesus. When pastors change, a church can go overnight from worshipping the Awesome Jahweh of judgment to Gentle Jesus meek and mild. When Madam Bixnell in ‘A Lovesome Thing’ sounds off about fickle churches, she is only voicing my own experience:
“I’ve worshipped in this church through eight gods,” said the not-so-mouselike old lady, “and I’ll worship through as many more. I’ll keep coming here if they close it up altogether and I have to worship myself, so there!”
As a nominal adherent of this many-gods-in-one religion, I occasionally angst about things that other people don’t seem to worry about. For instance, when the new Facebook profile asked for a religion, I was flummoxed. I couldn’t list a denomination, because the god worshipped by any church changes according to which pastor happens to preach that week. Nor could I just say ‘Christian,’ because that tells you nothing about what the person actually worships. So I put down Church Lady.*
I may be the first to state it as my religion, but I’d bet Church Lady is larger than many denominations that claim tax-exempt status. It ought to be the religion, and all those male theologian-dominated discussion clubs ought to be the disregarded social circles!
When I mooted this to the ladies at the soup kitchen last Sunday, they agreed in the way Church Ladies agree — that is, in the distracted split second between “We’re out of butter” and ‘The soup’s boiling over!” But in fact, all of those Church Ladies would have put themselves down as Methodist on Facebook without angsting over it, just as the Church Ladies I had spent the morning with would have put themselves down as Presbyterian. The whole point of Church Lady is that theology is irrelevant, compared to what you do in the basement. Here are Church Ladies from A Lovesome Thing, in the midst of a theological argument:
Everybody hushed for a minute and listened to the workmen in the sanctuary. A screech told Rameau that they were dragging one end of a pew along the stone floor. “Oh, my land,” Judy wailed, “What they’ll be doing to those wonderful stones.”
She and Lucia looked at one another with complete agreement, sharing values deeper than any religion. Moral convictions were all very well, their faces said, but who was going to fix that floor?
The very fact that I come to Church Lady from a position of angsting about theology, then, makes me not a true Church Lady. Perhaps I am only a practicing Church Lady, or one of those people like Paul, who will end up talking about the faith others are more truly living. A publicist.
I’ve never aspired to be a publicist for any religion. But I am the only openly declared member of Church Lady on Facebook.
*Never having watched Saturday Night Live, I knew nothing about Dana Carvey — but neither do any of the real church ladies I interact with.
