On Theism and Hope
Landing in LaGuardia Airport after my two-week trip to the Dominican Republic was nothing short of pure happiness. Thoughts of showers, air conditioning and a room to myself were etched in my mind as I left the airport terminal. These are things that, of course, we take for granted, but are luxuries to people in less developed countries. My trip to the Dominican was under the umbrella of a group called the Foundation for Peace. The activities in which I partook included: interacting with the locals, building a schoolhouse from the ground up (using medieval tools) and setting up a medical clinic. There was one completely optional activity that I found the most interesting, and that was a vacation Bible school.
The week-long program consisted of religious education typically crafted for children. Taking place for half an hour each day under the tin roof of a village center which doubled as a church, VBS was filled with various songs, dances, coloring-book distributions and skits. I decided to participate in several of the sessions, initially in an attempt to polish up my Spanish and singing skills. I am proud to say that as I acted out the part of a lion in a skit of “Daniel in the Lions Den,” (a Biblical tale) I successfully instilled fear into the faces of twenty Dominican children with my ridiculous mask and costume.
I am not religious. Having been raised by mainland Chinese parents born in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, I always placed religion in the corner of my mind, usually reserved for friends who couldn’t make a game of basketball because they had to go to Sunday church, and the Evangelists who showed up at my door every one or two months. In fact, none of the other five teenagers in my group had religious affiliations or held any particular spiritual beliefs. In a country dominated by Roman Catholicism—where we had to wear long pants, collared shirts and skirts out of decency when not on the construction site—each of our teenage selves grumbled internally and chafed under these rules.
When my closest friends and my family asked me what changed me the most on this trip, I would tell them first and foremost, the power of God. Assuredly, each time I would have to follow up with a lengthy description, first convincing them that I had not converted, and then telling them something similar to what I’m about to describe now. Apart from fall term Islam, my knowledge of religion is limited to the statistical and historical. This information includes typical benefits associated with religion, including promoting good morals, regulating behavior, teaching self sufficiency and selflessness, etc.
What I saw in the faces of each of those children at VBS, and even in the older workers that were helping us pour and mix concrete, was distinctive. For me, being there and seeing their prospects in bare and naked reality separated these people from the faces on website home pages and the child mortality figures in UNESCO reports; they seemed more human and less alien to my culture. What I found about the effect of God on these people—who now seemed just like me—was an abundance of hope and aspiration.
Whether it was singing “Alabaré” in perfect synchronization, or the powerful, baritone voice of the village pastor, every sound these people spoke for religion was filled with emphatic trust, trust that God would take care of them and that they were doing something for a reason. Something that made them feel significant in the face of hardships and challenges. I saw people smiling wider than American children ever could, holding their eyes closed in the most silent of prayers.
I got to know one of the construction workers there, a man picking away at the ground to lay foundations. We talked during a water break, whereupon I discovered that he had five children, named Jordan, Dravecky, Phelps, Giambi and Usain. I asked him why he was religious. He told me that he was religious because he needed to hope for something, and that was the reason for his children’s names.
Poverty has always had a sort of correlation with religiousness in the same long term manner that revolutionaries did. It’s only natural to say that finding and discovering spirituality and God helps less advantaged people find reason and rationale in their existence. That certainly could be the case for the Dominicans that I met who toiled away in sugar cane fields to no end. It would be just as easy to say that a high quality secular education could provide better promises. However, after my trip to the Dominican Republic, I firmly believe that people embrace religion not as a second choice to a secular education and lifestyle, but as a way to create meaning and hope in their lives.
And perhaps in that sense, it is a false hope, and not a reality that atheists teach. It’s a false hope I don't hold, because I have never felt the necessity to hold it, to be religious. But it’s false hope that I understand the necessity for others to hold, something is better than truancy. It was a kind of unspeakable false hope that made these bare-footed, parasite-ridden Dominican children smile at me even if they knew that they would have to return home at the end of the night to a straw bed and drink water out of tiny plastic pouches shipped from the United States. I can understand its importance, and I’m glad it exists.