Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion

The New York Times has called Antonio Monda arguably “the most well-connected New York cultural figure you’ve never heard of.” (Fans of Wes Anderson may recognize the name Antonio Monda. He was featured on the “Life Aquatic” DVD in a segment called “Mondo Monda.”) Monda is a filmmaker, critic, writer, associate professor at NYU’s film school, and cofounder and artistic director of Le Conversazioni, an anglophone literary festival held each year on the Isle of Capri.

Monda is also deeply religious (he categorizes himself as “Catholic, Apostolic, Roman”), and, in Do You Believe?, he puts his superior connections to good use. Monda convinced 18 preeminent cultural figures to have public conversations about God and religion. He explains in the introduction: “I asked the people I interviewed to tell me honestly if they think that God exists, and how their answer to this question has affected their choices in life.” Do You Believe?, Monda writes, is “an attempt to reclaim religion’s central place in existence, with a consistent emphasis on how every choice has its origins in the answer to the great question.”

Monda sat down with an impressive array of artists, mostly writers - including Paul Auster, Grace Paley, Michael Cunningham, Derek Walcott, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, and Richard Ford - as well as filmmakers Spike Lee, David Lynch, and Martin Scorsese, actress Jane Fonda, architect Daniel Libeskind, and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. These interviews are a pleasure to read. The subjects reflect on their religious upbringings. Several are able to identify specific moments when they ceased to believe in God, or when they realized that they had never believed. They all speak frankly and eloquently about their faith (or lack of it).

For example, Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate, prefers to speak not of “God” as such, but of “an intelligence interested in what exists and respectful of what is created.” The greater our knowledge, she says, the greater God becomes. Organized religion, in contrast, “ends by defining and reducing [God]…Even the Bible, this marvelous book written by extraordinary visionaries, is small and reductive with respect to the greatness of God.”

Saul Bellow, another Nobel prize-winning novelist, responded to the question “Do you believe in God?” with a simple “Yes.” When asked how he imagines God, Bellow declined to answer. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he explained. “I’m afraid of banality, and I think it’s a subject whose importance is diminished by conversation.”

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author of “Night” - and also, come to think of it, a Nobel prize-winner (for Peace, in 1986) - is especially moving when he speaks of his “wounded faith.” “Hasidism teaches that no heart is as whole as a broken heart, and I would say that no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.”

Monda: How do you conceive existence without faith?

Wiesel: The world has had obvious recent experience of it. The horrors of the century just ended were perpetrated by the godless dictatorship of Nazism and the atheist dictatorship of Communism. This obviously doesn’t mean that monstrosities haven’t been committed in the name of God; the list of believers who are stained with infamy is long. Yet the programmatic absence of a God, or at least the illusion of opposing his presence, leads systematically to horror.

Monda: You believe firmly in God, but you live in a world where suffering, injustice, and tyrrany exist.

Wiesel: It’s the great torment of my entire existence. The question I don’t know how to answer and that I don’t think anyone can answer. But even in these terrible moments I see not an absence but, rather, an eclipse.

Nearly all of the subjects talk of the dangers of religious fundamentalism and the way the name of God is appropriated to justify violence - timely topics since all these interviews were conducted between 2002, when smoke was still rising from the rubble at Ground Zero, and 2005, as George W. Bush’s “crusade” in the Middle East was deteriorating rapidly. The novelist Nathan Englander compares fundamentalism to alcoholism: “a dangerous excess.” Wiesel says, “If it weren’t such a tragic subject, one might ask jokingly every time for a notarized statement certifying that the war about to be unleashed has been willed expressly by the Omnipotent.”

Morrison is more direct:

I think what [politicians] are doing is simply exploitative, if not blasphemous. The situation this president has got us into is desperate, and I’m terrified when I hear him speak of his God. Phrases are attributed to him like “I will never negotiate with myself,” but negotiating with oneself is what is normally called thinking. His religious absolutism is stupefying.

Monda asks several recurring questions, which might be compiled and disseminated like Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire.

1. Do you believe in God?
2. What is the image you have of God?
3. Were you brought up in a religious environment?
4. Then what happened?
5. What do you think there is after life?
6. What artists do you admire in whom you feel a strong religious presence?
7. What is your opinion of Dostoevsky’s assertion “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted?”
8. How do you see a believer? Someone deluded? Ingenuous? A person blessed by grace?

Michael Cunningham had the funniest answer to the last question. He said, “I think that anyone who believes in anything other than shopping is a hero.”

The Monda Questionnaire is good for more than just a random MySpace survey. I grew up in the church; I believe today in a good and personal God. And yet, reading through this book, I found myself struggling to put into words my own answers to these, the “simple but fundamental” questions of life. Do You Believe? is an illuminating and provocative book capable of inspiring conversations both internal and external.

This review first appeared, in slightly different form, on the author’s blog.