On Mother’s Day, how about seeing the movie based on Judy Blume’s young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which was released on April 28th? Its lead question is as relevant today for mothers, fathers, and children as it was when the book was released in 1970.
Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have left the city during our pandemic era. What will this mean for religion? At least one strong possibility is that New Yorkers will carry remnants of the religious wave that started growing in the city during the late 1970s and, before the pandemic, was still growing. Thousands of new churches, synagogues, temples, masjids, and the like were built to accommodate millions of new congregants.
But moving always disconnects the movers from their former settled lives. Will they find God outside of the city? Or will they return to the city and rejoin their congregations? Will the pandemic disruption mean another decline in faith?
Judy Blume’s question, Are you there God?, was one of the great religious demographic puzzles in the 1960s and 1970s as New York City’s churches and synagogues were closing or moving out to the suburbs. They were leaving the city by the hundreds, perhaps thousands. In the Bronx, all but a few synagogues out of the hundreds that had been founded there closed. Religion in New York City was literally falling off the map. Could it ever recover? Was God and deep spirituality being lost in the suburban wasteland? Or was a new revival with transplants from New York City going to shake the tract houses out of their ticky-tacky sameness in favor of a more humane, religious lifestyle?
There was despair among the religious leaders in the city, an optimism perhaps in the suburbs, but there were already massive defections of the younger generation from religious worship attendance. The Age of Aquarius was a powerful spiritual time of youth disaffected with their parents’ smug, shallow beliefs turning toward do-it-yourself religions.
The book’s protagonist Margaret worried about leaving New York City. She prayed to God, “Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible.”
The quietness of the suburbs drove Margaret to prayer. “Are you there God? It’s me,Margaret…It’s so quiet here at night—nothing like the city. I see shadows on my walls and hear these funny, creaking sounds. It’s scary God!”
In New York City, religion had become for many a taken-for-granted, fading feature of the social landscape. The move to the suburbs upset that dull status quo. It opened up movers to religious questions.
The book tells the story of religious faith in the metropolitan area in the early 1970s as seen through the eyes of this young woman’s search for God and boyfriends after she leaves the city. Of course, the movie is an edited edition of the book. (When you go to the movie, you can decide how well the director translated the religious aspects of the novel.)
In her “getting-to-know-you paper” for her new school teacher, Margaret mentions that she hates religious holidays. Her teacher Mr. Benedict asks her why she has such a such strong feeling. Margaret reassures the teacher that it was just an offhand remark. But underneath the question reinforces what she was finding out about the suburbs: everyone belonged to a religious institution by which they met new friends.
She reflects, “I lived in New York for eleven and a half years and I don’t think anybody ever asked me about my religion. I never even thought about it. Now, all of a sudden, it was the big thing in my life.”
Margaret decides to go on a year-long study of religion. “I mean not about God exactly,” she muses. Her teacher might not be receptive to that “but maybe about religion” and which religious social circle she should join.
She prays, “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. What would you think of me doing a project on religion? You wouldn’t mind, would you God? I’d tell you all about it…I can’t go on being nothing forever, can I?”
She hopes that “by the end of the school year I’ll know all there is to know about religion. And before I start junior high I’’ll know which one I am.”
The book was an enormous success and helped to start a whole new literary genre, YA, for Young Adult, literature. It also generated an enormous amount of controversy, probably guaranteeing its success, because the girl, Margaret Ann Simon, discovers the secrets of menstruation as she searches for God and boyfriends. The religious angle of the book tended to be overlooked in the hoopla over some of the sexual coming of age descriptions.
Women of faith were as deeply touched by the book as were other less religious women. Erin Campbell, a Christian speaker on living faith throughout one’s life course, wrote to me, “This was the first book I read, cover to cover. I was seven years old when it first came out. Still, my favorite book.”
Author and anti-slavery activist Shayne Moore commented, “I literally just reread this book [during COVID] because my Gen X 50 years-old book club friends thought it would be a hilarious book club selection.” Moore was surprised by how much religion was in the book. “I too had forgotten the religious themes and found them compelling. And also I remember why, raised as an evangelical, it was so scandalous to read. I had to read it at the neighbor girl’s home to not get caught with it.”
For Yale historian Jon Butler, this fictional YA story is a parable about the survival of religion in modern society. At that time, it looked like religion was dying, but Butler says, in his book God in Gotham (2020), look at the little clues in places like a fiction book for teenagers that it actually was living on.
As Blume tells the story, Margaret receives mixed signals about religion from her family. Her Dad’s mother Sylvia is a loving delight and tries to entice her granddaughter back to the synagogue by taking her to Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Israel in Manhattan. Margaret figures that her parents moved to New Jersey to get her away from the religious influence of her Jewish grandmother.
On the other side of the family, her Mom’s grandparents, Mary and Paul Hutchins, are insisting that she should go to a Catholic church because she was “born a Christian.” The divided religious aspect of Margaret’s life becomes a burden around the holidays. Her parents are hostile to religion.
So, Margaret doesn’t tell her parents that she actually talks to God. “I mean,” she says, “if I told them they’d think I was some kind of religious fanatic or something.”
The young girl undertakes her religious journey on the quiet, surprising her relatives and close friends whenever she brings up bits and pieces of her search. Before leaving her grandmother to return to New Jersey, she asks, “Can I go to temple with you sometime?” Sylvia is propelled by the unexpected query.
“Grandma,“ Margaret observes, “absolutely stared at me. I never knew anyone could open her yes so wide.”
Her Jewish grandmother gets all excited. “’My Margaret!’ Grandmother threw her arms around me… “I knew you were a Jewish girl at heart!’” Then, she stops smiling and asks if her parents know.
Her Mom’s objections to religion are quite modernist. Indeed, she is a bit angry that Margaret wants to go with her paternal grandmother to synagogue. She exclaims, “That’s ridiculous. You know how Daddy and I feel about religion.” Her Mom campaigns for gardening as good for the soul. Margaret complains that her parents “were really driving me crazy with all that good-for-the-soul business. I wondered when they became such nature lovers!”
Her mother might have been pro-choice as far as abortion went (we don’t know), but she isn’t pro-choice about religion. In fact, Margaret reminds her Mom that “You said I could choose when I grow up!” But Mom thinks that sixth graders are not ready to choose for themselves.
Margaret’s prayer that night reveals that she had never been inside a temple or church. So, she is boldly venturing forth, though she reassures, “I’ll look for you God.”
Her Mom’s objections don’t stop Margaret from going with her grandmother, who lives on the West Side of Manhattan, to Rosh Hashanah worship services at her synagogue.
(The fictional synagogue scene was filmed at Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Charlotte, North Carolina. The movie anachronistically has a female cantor, who would not have been allowed an ordained position until the 1980s; the prayer books are ones published about ten years ago; and the synagogue was built in the 1990s. The rabbi in the movie is wearing an Apple Watch. There is a real Temple Israel of the City of New York on the East Side of Manhattan.)
At the Temple Israel, she doesn’t understand the Hebrew so her attention drifts to noticing that there were eight brown hats and six black ones in the first 5 rows. Back from talking to Rabbi Kellerman after the Manhattan synagogue’s worship service, Margaret faces her nervous parents. “I had to go through the third degree…”
She then goes with a friend to a Presbyterian church. Faced with such determination from her daughter, Margaret’s Mom tacks against the religious tide by admitting, “God is a nice idea. He belongs to everybody.” While patronizing Margaret’s search for God, she offers the advice that it is foolish for a girl of Margaret’s age to be bothering with religion., adding “I am not [being] hysterical!”
Her friends amplify her Mom’s exasperation. They say that they find religion boring and envy that Margaret doesn’t even have to attend Hebrew school.
Although none of her friends seem to have much interest in religion, she persuades them to take her to their religious events. She finds that the Presbyterian service makes no sense to her, so she counts the colors of the women’s hats: eight black, 4 red, 6 blue, and 2 fur hats. Then, her friend Janie, who took her to the church, introduces Margaret to the pastor as someone with “no religion.”
The young researcher almost faints, thinking that the pastor might see her as some kind of freak. She, later, notes that she found some sort of odd reassurance in the pastor’s actual reaction. “Then he smiled with an Aha-maybe-I’ll-win-her-back look.” She had given the pastor a job to do! Still, in her prayers, she apologizes to God that she didn’t find him at the Presbyterian church, because, maybe, she wasn’t trying hard enough in her search.
Margaret finds the Methodist church more pleasant because it had 45 minutes of hymns and no sermons. At the church, the erstwhile spiritual journeyer discovers that the songs are “so beautiful. Still, I didn’t really feel you, God. I’m more confused than ever.” She wishes God would at least give her a hint on which religion she should choose.
The Catholic confessional booth at Saint Bartholomew’s is a little scary.
She recounts, “I stood in front of the door that Laura came from. What was inside?”
“It looked like a wooden phone booth. I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I waited for something to happen.”
“Finally I heard a voice. ‘Yes, my child.’”
“At first I thought it was God…and my heart started to pound like crazy and I was all sweaty inside my coat and sort of dizzy too.”
It takes a moment for Margaret to realize that it “was only the priest…”
She flings open the door and runs out.
Later, she reports on her investigation to God, “And today, I looked for you when I wanted to confess. But you weren’t there.”
Margaret concludes that finding God is an intensely private experience, which means, first that each person can have their own personalized God. And second, she recognizes that she still needs church or synagogue as an institutional path into suburban social circles that will lead to a boyfriend and peer acceptance. One can imagine that this assimilation into religion becomes a pathway for her secularization. Might her experience of God decrease as her social life increases?
As one of Margaret’s friends puts it, the question is “if you aren’t any religion, then how are you going to know if you should join the Y or the Jewish community center?” And if you don’t know that, you can’t meet anyone to hook up for sex. So, Margaret goes back to God with a prayer. “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God. You know where. I want to be like everyone else. You know God, my new friends all belong to the Y or the Jewish Community Center. Which way am I supposed to go?”
All through the book, Margaret’s prayer life stands out as an open, friendly conversation, though it is mostly about finding out how to fit into her social world. Believing or thinking religiously is less important for Margaret than belonging to a religion. Over and over again, she says, “I just want to fit in.”
“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. Gretchen my friend got her period. I am so jealous God…Oh please God. I just want to be normal.” “I’m going to be the only one who doesn’t get it. Just like I’m the only one without a religion…Please…let me be like everyone else.” So, it was not surprising that the minds of young girls and boys could hardly conceive of a deeply rooted spiritual life. The young girl’s knowledge of religion is sketchy at best, and it seems that the religious groups with which she came into contact had little of interest to offer.
This ignorance of religion was particularly true of religiously mixed marriages like that of Margaret’s parents, the father with Jewish parents and the mother with Catholic parents. According to the 2013 Pew survey data, among Jews who married before 1970—and this would include Margaret’s fictional father—only 17% had a non-Jewish spouse. Very few fictional books for Jewish young adults covered mixed marriages; this is another way that Blume’s book stirred controversy.
Margaret loved her paternal grandmother except for grandma’s habit of “always asking me if I have boy friends and if they’re Jewish…what would I care if they’re Jewish or not?” The young girl likes her maternal grandparents far less because of their rigid opposition to intermarriage.
The central dividing line is over the grandparents’ objection to an interfaith marriage. There is no other clue to the content of the teaching of the religious groups. It doesn’t seem to matter. Margaret flees the Catholic confessional as if about to be assaulted by a sex abuser. She erupts in anger at her Catholic grandparents for interrupting her vacation to Florida. Put off religion, she declares that she doesn’t need religion and God and stops praying to him for a while. We find out later she is also scared of entering the YMCA because someone might mention Jesus. Messianic Jewish ministries like Chosen People didn’t have much visibility then, and Jews for Jesus didn’t exist.
New York City Jewish teenagers rebelled in the 1960s and 1970s against their parents’ religion which was empty of content or their no religion, middle-class conformism, and earnest, prissy liberalism. Their emotions would become attuned to Paul Goodman’s screed against “growing up absurd.” Jewish parents were often offended by their children’s rejection. The parents felt that they had survived the Holocaust, sacrificed for their children, left the Old World religion behind, and joined the American dream.
Mixed marriages of people disaffected with religion meant the children received no cues into what religion they were born. The result was that the children were uneducated about religion. Margaret’s knowledge of religion was sketching at best, and she had never visited a congregation before her religious experiment.
To her teacher, Mr. Benedict, Margaret says that she didn’t enjoy going from religion to religion wondering about where she belonged. She confides to him, “I don’t think a person can decide to be a certain religion just like that. It’s like having to choose your own name. You think about it a long time and then you keep changing your mind.”
As a result, she advises, “If I should ever have children I will tell them what religion they are so they can start learning about it at an early age. Twelve is very late to learn.”
At the end of the book, she tells her non-descript God that what really matters is loving your friends and family. Processing her conversations with her grandmother about religion, Margaret concludes, “As long as she loves me and I love her, what differences does religion make?”
Well, a disconnect from religious faith makes praying pointless, meditation self-centered, hope in the future meaningless, and social interaction whimsical. And for those reasons, religious searching doesn’t stop.
Today, according to the PEW survey, for Jewish couples who married between 2010 and 2020, 61% had a non-Jewish spouse, and that number is much higher if you exclude those who identify as Orthodox, which has a 98% in-marriage rate. Now, young Jews are searching for God in Orthodoxy, Christianity, and other religions.
Two-thirds of Jews do not belong to a synagogue, almost one-third identify with no Jewish religious denomination, and one-quarter (23%) do not believe in God. Even more, Jews disconnect faith in God from being Jewish. Reflecting a long tradition of secularism in Jewish life in the United States, two-thirds of Jews (62%) say that being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture. Even religious Jews mostly do not believe that it is necessary to believe in God to be Jewish.
According to a 2013 survey, 8% of the adults in the New York City Metro area identify their religion as Jewish. This includes very religious, not-so-religious, and even secular Jews. That means about 1.6 million Jews.
The older generation interpreted secularism as a bulwark against persecution and discrimination. But perhaps no longer feeling social hostility, the younger generation is interpreting secularism as a reason to be not religious. A majority (55%) of Jews of no religion also don’t feel emotionally attached to Israel. I wonder how Margaret would have reacted to the programs to take young Jews to Israel in order to build their sense of historically unique Jewish identity.
Among the young progressive Jews of the city, Buddhism or Sarah Sanders’ new, semi-autobiographical one-woman show with music, Ashkenazi Seance: A Group Ritual, feels a bit like a spiritual inheritor to Are You There God?’s Margaret Simon. The show plays for three nights at the end of April at the Union Temple House in Brooklyn. The press materials for the show describe it like this: “Sarah Sanders can’t decide what to do with a treasured family heirloom, and she’s getting desperate—so desperate, she’s turning to her dead Latvian Jewish ancestors for advice.”
The heirloom in question is a spinet piano, previously owned by her father’s mother. The piano has already traveled thousands of miles back and forth across the country, accompanying her parents on multiple moves. And now, her parents are moving yet again, this time to Mexico. If Sarah doesn’t bring the piano back to Brooklyn, they are going to sell it. But dragging a piano all the way from Montana to an apartment in Brooklyn seems more than daunting. What to do? If you’re a multitalented writer-performer like Sanders, you devise a seance ritual and get some help from the other side. The play’s spirituality is embraced by the portrayal of Judy Blume, in a just-released documentary, standing in her bookstore with a display of modern pagan books just behind her.
On the other hand, Jews who are Christian now are one of the major components of the U.S. Jewish population. 1.7 million adult Jews identify themselves as Christians. Only the denomination of Reform Judaism has more support among American Jews, with an estimated 1.86 million adherents. Judaic institutions usually don’t recognize as Jews those who say that they believe in Jesus or Gentile Christians who identify themselves as Jews. However, one finding by the Pew Center researchers suggests that the greater Jewish community is becoming more tolerant of Messianic Jews. 30% of Judaic Jews and 47% of Jews of no religion agree that believing in Jesus is compatible with being Jewish. Maybe, the Margarets of today aren’t as afraid of Jesus
NYC religious Jews range from the Hassidic Lubivatcher Rebbe to the free spirits like Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Some like Carlebach and Schacter-Shalomi started out as super-conservatives and ended up as Aquarian prophets. Others have headed in the opposite direction.
In New York City Jews are equally split between religious liberals and conservatives. 40% identify as Orthodox, according to a 2010 survey of 1282 Jews in New York City by the A Journey through NYC religions Data Center.
The Orthodox are fast growing among young Jews on the West Side of Manhattan and elsewhere. However, other young Jews like Margaret might find the paternalism of Orthodoxy a little shocking.
The Conservatives and Reform denominations are also working hard to adjust to the challenges of secularism. Sometimes, Jews of various denominations find that they have more in common with evangelical Christians, at least in the valuing of religious faith.
So, as a closing footnote to Margaret’s story, let us note the new scene. Temple Israel of the City of New York, the actual Reform synagogue rather than the fictional one mentioned in the movie, hosts the evangelical Redeemer Presbyterian East Side Church. Redeemer has been highly influential in the vast uptick of evangelical churches in Manhattan. The East Side church itself will move to the same block as the influential Jewish cultural institution, The 92nd Street Y.
Where would Margaret go on a religious journey today?
