I was in the middle of reading Dinty W. Moore’s new book “To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-inducing Inferno” from the University of Nebraska Press when the news broke that eight people were murdered at massage parlors around Atlanta. In addition to the Asian racism, the misogyny, and the foolishly easy access to overly powerful weaponry for any putz with a grudge, the shootings featured an alleged culprit, a 21-year-old named Robert Aaron Long, who claimed he did it because of his immense guilt over his desire for sex.
And I thought, “Wow, that throws the message of Moore’s book into sharp relief.”
That is because, as the book’s subtitle makes clear, Moore dives into Dante as an entranceway into criticizing – in a humorous and eccentric but nonetheless intellectually compelling way – Catholic doctrine. He carefully and slyly dismantles sexual guilt, hell, original sin, and everything else in the bag of tricks religion uses to induce shame and self-loathing.
As charming as he is, Moore is relentless in his attacks because the shame and self-loathing damage well-being, send people into therapy for the rest of their lives, and occasionally cause people, like Long apparently, to take up a gun and start shooting in a desperate attempt to quiet the voices in his head telling him what an evil person he is.
Not that Moore would be so explicit in his arguments as to bring up extreme examples like Atlanta. He prefers to approach the dismantling of religion’s psychological oppression sideways, through personal memoir and historical anecdotes, through wit and satire and letting others quite nicely make fools of themselves thank you very much.
In some chapters he makes it clear that a lot of church doctrine is not original to the religion but the product of a handful of Johnny-come-lately writers like Dante and St. Augustine, who were inspired less by divine insight and more by petty resentment of others, embarrassment with their own shortcomings, unseemly concern about where their penis had or had not been, and an indulgence in specious logic.
In other chapters he uses his personal childhood experiences with his Catholic education and his troubled family as the lens through which to view the church. Sometimes he illustrates his point through lighter stories, such as an ill-advised participation in a chicken wing eating contest at a festival in Kentucky.
Even as his narrative shifts from comical to eye-opening to emotionally moving, he keeps bringing us back to the damage that religious teaching can do.
Which kept me repeatedly thinking about Long and the Atlanta shootings. Because it quickly surfaced that the alleged shooter was a seriously devout young man, a prayer leader, someone who brought his bible with him to high school every day and carried it with him walking the halls between classes. Friends described him as “super Christian.” He gives every indication of being an empty vessel into which his church poured exactly the kind of highly toxic self-hatred and crippling guilt Moore is talking about.
We would all be much better off, Moore makes clear, if we took that religious teaching a lot less seriously and treated ourselves with a lot more forgiveness.