Hometown News: Newsprint Jesus

In a weird way, an amicable common ground has been found between the religious community and the paper over the past decade we’ve owned and run the publication. A world somewhere between theirs and mine. We support them through a cut in the cost of ads, and coverage of their news, and they support us by advertising. I get the occasional e-mail or letter when I capitalize God, or don’t capitalize it, but on most Sunday mornings, I’m reasonably sure no congregation in Johnstown or Milliken is praying for the destruction of The Breeze.

By Citizen Correspondent Matt Lubich

Date Posted: 12/07/07

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I’ve never been baptized. Never read the whole Bible for that matter, either through desire of faith or literary lust. The handful of times I went to church with my friends as a kid it was more about being given a reason to dress up in our teenage leisure suits and buy a pack of cigarettes to smoke on the walk home. So complete was my lack of religious knowledge as a kid that once, on one of those trips to Holy Family with my buddies, I actually went up and took Communion.

My parents broke away from the Catholic Church just before I was born. My mother found out she was pregnant with me and freaked. Scared and confused, she went to church.

The priest told her abortion was a sin. If she had one, he said, not only would she burn in Hell, but so would the baby. Distraught, feeling trapped, she went home and took a fistful of aspirin -- probably hoping to induce a miscarriage. When my father found out what she had done -- and why -- he went and raged at the priest. They never again went to church, and eventually, I was born.

I grew up thinking I was raised basically areligious. Nobody told me I had to go to church, but nobody told me I couldn’t. It was neither a good nor a bad thing. Just something that was simply and apparently unnecessary for respiratory function in my world. The sun still rose, I still got to watch “Dragnet,” and life as I knew it went on. I grew up with the attitude that I didn’t need religion.

Probably now, in adult retrospect however, I see I grew up believing that at the moment when my mom was so desperate for comfort, a man of God had nothing but rebukes and threats for her. And for me, pronouncements of damnation for an act I had no control over.

I had enough judgment, anger and vengefulness from the people around me in the steel town of Pueblo, Colorado, where I was growing up. I didn’t need more from my God.

My wife, Lesli Bangert, grew up in the United Church of Christ. For a time while we were in college she was a practicing Buddhist. Any religious training or knowledge I have comes from Lesli.