re: we fear no god but each other

on fear, god, and each other

I grew up in an atheist (sometimes agnostic) household and, through some combination of my parents’ aversion to socializing and my own aversion to noticing things, managed to avoid interacting with religion outside of (1) knowing it existed and (2) knowing many people left the church for various reasons (that I agreed with). Only recently have I started directly interacting with religion¹ and, from this, sprung the inspiration behind we fear no god but each other.

my redrawing of “sacrifice of isaac - caravaggio” in MS Paint

I would like to give a disclaimer in advance that this in REference to will focus rather heavily on Christianity (and a little Judaism). I understand that many people have had negative experiences with religion (and/or specifically Christianity), so please do not read if you feel this would be detrimental to your mental wellbeing. On the other hand, I will not be presenting religion in a solely positive light, so please do not read if you feel uncomfortable about that. That being said, today I’ll be talking about:

we fear no god but each other

i. the Father and the father

My inspiration for this essay was twofold because the essay is about two things: the Father and the father. Weirdly enough, learning more about Christianity — not even in the sense of becoming “more” Christian (whatever that means, to be “more”), but simply knowing more about what Christians believe — has made me understand my actual father (who is very much atheist) better.

the father, lowercase

• Father by The Front Bottoms

I have this dream that I am hitting my dad with a baseball bat
And he is screaming and crying for help

I won’t lie, a big inspiration for the opening lines of we fear no god but each other came from this one song by The Front Bottoms. It’s a song that, whenever you make people listen to it for the first time, causes such a visceral and shocking reaction and I wanted to replicate that.

• Woodtangle by Mary Ruefle

I remember thinking my father was mean but knowing he was kind. I remember thinking my father was kind but knowing he was mean.

• Cut by Catherine Lacey

If you’re raised with an angry man in your house,
there will always be an angry man in your house.
you will find him even when he is not there.

This part of Cut has devastated me for years.

the Father, capitalized

The Bible itself focuses more on father (lowercase) and son (lowercase) relationships, but I have always felt more like a son (lowercase) than a daughter, so it weirdly enough ended up working out for me in terms of experiencing some level of catharsis.

• The Bible, Luke 15:11-32 (the Prodigal Son)

I think this story influence me both in terms of the older brother’s perspective and the younger brother. From the older brother, there’s this complicated mixed-bag of both resentment towards the father for neglect and also a blind obedience that continues even after this feeling of betrayal (I think “blind obedience” describes both how I view Christianity’s views on the “right” way to interact with God and how Chinese culture views the “right” way to interact with a father, lowercase). From the younger brother, I felt an equally complicated mixed-bag of shame towards disappointing the father and relief at knowing the father still loves him despite it all (not unsimilar to my own experience with my father, lowercase, and, again, how I’ve come to see how Christians view their relationship with the Father, capitalized).

• The Bible

I think the idea of “sin” also parallels my relationship with my father (lowercase) — there’s this extreme focus on “sin” in Christianity in the same way I always grew up feeling that my father was hypercritical of me. However, underlying this was my father’s fear that if I did not achieve certain things, the outside world would be too harsh for me to survive; at the root of this fear is love. I think many Christians view God similarly — this focus on sin stems from a belief that God is fearful that his “children” do not have the tools necessary to “survive.” I am still trying to come to terms with my own relationship with my father, but this realization that it stems from a (somewhat misguided) place of love has vastly improved our relationship.

• Churching by Kristin Chang

I’ll be someone else’s
god. Godhood is just

like girlhood:
a begging to be believed.

• The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Why…didn’t you make me good enough…so that you could’ve loved me?

I think what confuses me most about Christianity can be summed up by this one line from this play. On the other hand, I feel these interpretations help me better understand my father (lowercase) — I am simultaneously “made in his image” while also having flaws he cannot control for me.

• rhinestone cross pendant by

  allyson.

I began to strain against them, asking why asking why women couldn’t preach if Mary could carry God inside her.

I never got an answer, which only fed the fury.

and

he’s always said that church could be as small as the thin closet in my parents’ bedroom

I genuinely got so emotional reading this and not just because I love

allyson.

with my whole heart.

• הבל | hevel by Nathaniel Orion G.K.

When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.

Although I have been primarily investigating Christianity, there exists significant overlap between all three Abrahamic religions. Due to this, a significant amount of we fear no god but each other is also influenced by Jewish poetry.

• Sun Bleached Flies by Ethel Cain

God loves you, but not enough to save you

• Neon Genesis Evangelion

This isn’t on here because of how it influenced my writing of we fear no god but each other, but because the Christianity influence on this series is very evident despite not being a work of Christian art. Although it was quite controversial when it came out, over the years it has been seen as relatively respectful, which I hope to be as well.

ii. the Son (who is actually a daughter)

Normally, this would be the section where I go into what got cut from the final draft of we fear no god but each other. Unfortunately, I wrote the essay in one sitting with the only edits being changing from second-person to first-person in a later paragraph. Fortunately, the essay was pieced together from a few old poems I wrote, which do have lines I don’t intend on using anymore. Here is an original stanza:

There is a conversation we keep having in my head.
You speak in words much kinder than I remember,
You speak in words so kind I forget
they are imaginary.

I ended up turning this into just prose, although sometimes I miss the enjambment. There was also these lines that I felt deviated too far from the original “vibe” while simultaneously being a bit of an overkill in terms of hammering the point:

These conversations are the absence of ghosts,
a haunting begging to be born.