The Trouble with Sauling Around: Conversion in Ethnic American Autobiography, 1965-2002

Conclusion: Unlinking Religious Belief and Identity

ConCluSion Unlinking Religious Belief and Identity We treat religion on the model of a culture, which is to say, we treat people who belong to other religions not as if they have false beliefs but as if they have different identities. Religious belief as belief . . . is replaced by religion as a kind of identity, from which standpoint, people who believe differently are treated as people who are different. Their religious convictions are redescribed as expressions of their culture, like an ethnic cuisine or, if we want a less trivial but equally disabling example, like a language. Languages are neither true nor false, and if we treat religions like language, then we will regard them too as neither true nor false, just different. walTer benn miChaelS, The Shape of the Signifier ■ “Sauling around” and “Pauling around” are often the result of socially determined religious conversion. Although Rodriguez gives a glimpse of the possibility for men and women to push back against religion by converting institutions over time, the other autobiographers in this book suffer the effects of religious conversion by denying parts of themselves, as with Malcolm X and Acosta, or by hanging on to the trappings of religion even after belief is lost, as do Acosta and Baraka. Socially determined conversion and its resulting behaviors of “Sauling around” and “Pauling around” are not often recognized in multicultural literary criticism, where religious conversion is sometimes feted as cultural emancipation. Kimberly Rae Connor renders African American female writers’ search for identity as religious experience: “Through conversion they have sought not only spiritual empowerment through redemption by God but self-empowerment by affirming qualities of selfhood and womanhood and claiming them as sacred” (4). Lewis Rambo writes that religious conversion offers “the kind of meaningfulness associated with new life, new love, new beginnings,” and he calls the need for renewal “innate” and “universal” (Under1 2 3 4 unlinking religiouS belief and idenTiTy 159 standing 4). But the problem with conflating religious conversion with the normative identity crises and formations that occur regularly both in life journeys and in literature is that religious conversion then becomes naturalized: it is considered as merely one flavor of the many kinds of conversion that life entails. However, the examples of the four resistant, inauthentic converts that I used in my introduction— James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright—reveal the abnormality, even aberrance, of religious conversion. When communities or cultures insist on religious conversion as initiation for membership, it can be viewed as a much more fraught phenomenon than the normative, positive one presented by some religious scholars. My work has been to detect occurrences of conversion or experiences of religion in which the expected movement of self-doubt to harmony, or the anticipated state of harmony (Rodriguez), is marred or torqued by societal and cultural pressures. In the autobiographies I study, ancestral loyalty and the need for social belonging trump both the sense of personal epiphany and the truth requirements of religion. The difficulties around conversion for the African American and Mexican American autobiographers I examine are part of a larger trouble with religion in the multicultural United States, where religion has become a cultural badge or treated as a biological necessity, regardless of its harm, repression, or truth value. The significance of this is that religions attached so muscularly to culture, and thus prized as merely aspects of multiculturalism, are rarely examined and criticized as belief systems. Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera functions as a suitable cap to this examination of the social frame of religious experience in twentieth-century ethnic American autobiography because it provides a good example of the move of multiculturalism toward religion treated as cultural identity. Anzaldúa converts back to the pagan religion of her Mexican Indian forebears, the Aztecs. Configuring Mexican American religion as a palimpsest, with Aztec deities, belief, and rituals pushing up through history and informing Catholic beliefs, she writes that “in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Central and South America the indio and the mestizo continue to worship the old spirit entities (including Guadalupe) and their supernatural power, under the guise of Christian saints” (31). Anzaldúa renders the continuity and sacredness of ancestral belief very personal in her chapter 3, “Entering into 160 ConCluSion the Serpent,” and chapter 4, “The Coatlicue State.” In chapter 3, she shows how the folk Catholicism of her family encouraged her...