Very Superstitious

Neither of my mother's parents were educated beyond the sixth grade, but my grandfather became an ordained Assembly of God minister - a "learned" man of God.

My grandmother grew up in rural Louisiana; her mother was the local midwife and "healer" who believed the power of prayer superseded all.

My grandparents met and married around the time of the Great Depression; their "conditions" colored by poverty, struggle, and Fundamentalist Christian superstitions, they were girded by the hope ("faith"?) that no matter how they toiled or what they endured if they were "[good] subjects" (Althusser 1271), subjugating themselves to the Will of the Subject (1272) in this world, a better world - with more satisfying conditions - awaited.

My mother moved to Colorado, married a law student, and finished a college education in the late sixties and seventies - she was a staunch feminist, and that's the world I was raised in. Consequently, outside of their conditions, I noticed the way my grandparents' Biblical ideologies morphed in direct correlation "to those [perceived] conditions of existence" (1265), and I rejected their religion at a very early age as childish and nonsensical.

I was unable to reject all religion, however:

"Before its birth, the child is ...always - already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration" (1270)

and spent many years searching for the specific explanation of the conditions of existence as I perceived them.

Finally, as I approached 40, I recognized that searching for another belief system to take the place of my grandparents' rejected religion failed to get me any closer to the answers I sought or to the "knowledge of the mechanism [of recognition]" (1269) at all. In a way, this has become the new ideology of my life - and I continue to be the subject.