There is a very strange assumption, utterly pervasive in this culture, that everybody is interesting. From reality TV to the sweet old lady who wants to talk to you at length about her gout and her grandchildren, the evidence is everywhere.

"We have so many wonderful old people around," she said. "They have such wonderful stories. We could capture them on tape, then maybe transcribe them. Don't you think that would make a wonderful record of the area? My father, for instance, is in a nursing home--"

Her father, of course. She was not interested in the past, but her past.

"If I wanted to listen to old people nattering on," I told her, "I would ride a Greyhound bus across country. Such things get boring rather quickly, don't they."

I am a historian, just the sort of person that Elizabeth McCracken is satirizing in this passage from her novel The Giant's House. But the difference between me and the well-meaning amateur folklorist in this dialogue is that I don't care about anybody who was born after the fifth century.

This means you.

Back when I was in graduate school and still honestly believed that anyone who enjoyed reading stuff should become an academic, I would joyfully announce to anyone who asked (along with plenty of people who didn't) that I was a scholar of religion. The response was always the same.

"Really?" they would say. "Well, my mother was Lutheran and my father was Catholic, but I sort of went adrift as a teenager so I tried Buddhism for a while, and I even moved to Japan for a few years in order to find myself, you know, but now I'm married to a Jew, and we're trying to decide what to raise the kids, and..."

Replace the hardlinks with whatever you like. They don't matter, because the structure of the conversation never changes.

There are three possible endings to the above sample paragraph:

"... and then I found Jesus."
"... and then I decided that religion is bunk."
"I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual."

(Occasionally, my conversation partner will go on to ask if I've read Richard Dawkins or The Da Vinci Code, but I have never encountered anyone who actually listened to my answer.)

When I was a bit younger, I mistakenly took the unsolicited autobiographies to mean that these strangers were actually interested in religion. Over the years, however, after hundreds of situations in which I tried weakly to explain that research in comparative religion is not the same as a theology degree, and that knowing some stuff about St. Thomas Aquinas is not exactly the same as being able to tell a total stranger whether there actually is a hell or not, I realized that people don't really care about religion at all. Rather, they take my professional interest in religion to be identical to a fascination with every tedious detail of their lives -- which, for some reason, they think is totally unique, and worthy of study.

It is, of course, tempting to think that each of us is somehow beyond the reaches of history: that our "spirituality" is purer, deeper, and wiser than the "religion" that everybody else blindly follows. Of course, anybody who has spent any time studying history will know that that temptation is itself a product of history; that we cannot break out of the historical cycle that presents us with certain choices and nudges us toward the ones it deems "good"; that being a nonconformist and an individualist is a desideratum in North American culture (even, ironically, for fundamentalists); that the religious marketplace is not neutral and that our choices are not entirely our own; that "spiritual but not religious" is itself a very firm religious stance.

I would rather not believe any of that myself; like all the people I'm complaining about in this writeup, I like to think of myself as a free being who makes informed choices. But the ploddingly predictable sameness of all these airplane conversations deprives me of the luxury. Let's be honest, shall we? We are all tedious and predictable people.

All this, of course, drives me further and further into the sanctuary of the fifth century, where I don't have to think about the religious struggles of the boring people around me.

Hatefully dedicated to paraclete and Halspal.