Hey Baby, What’s Your Sign?
The past few months, I’ve had several people try to shove their spiritual beliefs down my throat. In California, sometimes it seems like everyone has an belief system and they are selling their wares. So I’ve been digging into history to understand why California is, uh, like this.
Apparently I’m not alone. Writer Erik Davis is publishing a book called The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. The SF Chronicle has an interview with him about it. I liked some of his observations. For example, he points out how many (most?) of California’s kids grow up without religion, in what he calls a California heathen:
I was not brought up in any religion. I was not baptized, and I didn’t go to church as a kid. We celebrated Christmas, but in a cultural way, the way some Jews who aren’t religious refer to themselves as “cultural Jews.” And other than that, it was just California. It was skate parks and the beach and boogie-boarding and pot and Led Zeppelin. It was just that kind of “land of the body.” I think that’s the sort of generic culture here. It’s a culture of the body, of sensation, of the outdoors and the kind of goofy things that people do in the suburbs.
He also talks about how this left him feeling a little ungrounded and wanting to understand why his culture has such a different approach to religion than everywhere else. Some of his thoughts are pretty interesting and do help explain the weirdness of California weirdoes.
