In search of my American dream.

I am one of about 38 million Poles who are officially Roman Catholic. We are almost all Catholics because in Poland we don't really have spiritual options any more: we either accept Catholicism from our parents, or Catholicism is rammed into our young heads and hearts by well-fed, well-spoken Catholic priests. As a result, 97 percent of Poland's population is Catholic.

It wasn't always so. In 1931, Roman Catholics made up about 65 percent of Poland's population; in 1791, only 54 percent. Over 200 years ago, Poland was a multicultural royal republic with a long tradition of religious tolerance. Historian Ray Taras points out that in 1573 the Confederation of Warsaw "officially established religious toleration and religious equality, making Poland one of Europe's most liberal societies." Poland was then known as "a country without stakes," as "a haven for victims of religious persecution," as "Paradissus Judaeorum" (the Jews' paradise). According to Norman Davis, Poland was "unique in Europe" because it allowed for a "peaceful coexistence of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Armenians, Judaism, and Muhammadanism." In fact, says Polish historian Jedrzej Giertych, the "principle of religious tolerance was an element introduced by Poland into European ideology."

Today, Poland is no longer a multicultural, religiously tolerant country. It is not moving toward an American-style democracy either, despite what the American government tells the American people. There is more to American democracy than a free-market economy and the dream of material success. However, the two de facto governors of Poland--Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II--have never read James Madison's tenth Federalist paper (the most important American political essay ever written) and do not understand the First Amendment. In Poland, the feeling prevails that Catholicism must not be separated from politics. Politics is religion, and Catholicism is the pursuit of political truths; one cannot be a good Pole without also being a Catholic. Amen.

Any non-Catholic Pole is thus effectively shut out politically and ostracized culturally in Poland by one of the most entrenched, implacable, and affluent bureaucracies in the history of humankind. This is one reason why I had to leave Poland, no matter how much I loved my country, my family, and my Polish friends. By the time I went to college, I could speak and read English well, and this ability (uncommon in Poland at the time) opened up new horizons for me. After I read Aldous Huxley's Island and Mark Twain's Letters from Earth, I decided I would no longer be a Roman Catholic--not even a Christian. Yet, whichever way I looked ahead, the shadow of the Catholic church lay across my path. And so I had to go.

At that time, I had long been intrigued by American culture, which to me is a passionate, sometimes erratic search for alternative (often bizarre) lifestyles. My interest in American utopian communities was first sparked by Alice Tyler's Freedom's Ferment, the only such book I could find at Silesian University, where I was teaching English. American culture, I learned, cannot help spinning off utopian and other experiments by the hundreds in a desperate search for truth and novelty. The Oneida Community was once an excellent example of this obsession with novelty and experimentation. And so are, today, countless intentional communities and various eco-experiments.

So it was that in 1981 I got my first and only chance to come to the United States. At that time, Professor Peter White from the University of New Mexico visited Poland as a Fulbright scholar and taught American literature at Silesian University for a year. We met and talked; he read my essay about Oneida and decided that I should pursue a degree in American studies at the University of New Mexico. Without Professor White's support, I would never have gotten through the nightmare of bureaucratic restrictions--both Polish and American--in order to enroll in a doctoral program at the University of New Mexico.

Since then I have read more about utopian experiments than I would have thought was possible or reasonable: the university's library has hundreds of works on American utopias. But I have also read, among others, Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, dozens of essays by Gore Vidal, Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible, Robert Ingersoll's lectures, and Lloyd M. Graham's Deceptions and Myths of the Bible. And that was that. That was the coup de grace to my lingering Christianity; I knew I would never be a Christian again. That is all it really takes: a few good books, a little courage, an open mind ... and a free country to live in.

So now--when for the first time in 13 years my family and I will become eligible for American citizenship--I look back upon my life and try to define the American dream which beckoned me to take a road not taken, to leave the material security of a tenured position at a Polish university and come to New Mexico with my wife, a seven-year-old daughter, and $200 in my pocket. What America means to me is a chance to get away from the tyrannies and deceptions of the Jewish and Gentile priests and Bronze Age barbarians. It is a chance to get away from the clutches of institutionalized Christianity--"a priestly hoax," as Graham calls it; a religion "invented," as Huxley says, by practically one Jew, Saul of Tarsus, now better known as St. Paul.

"Life is an experiment to a large extent untried by me," Henry David Thoreau once said. America is the last frontier to experiment, to search for the meaning of life anew. And I hope that in America--protected by the First Amendment--I will be left alone to find my own God or gods. Or none. As Thomas Jefferson would have promised me: "In America, it does me no injury for you to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." He would have welcomed me, I like to think, but I am afraid there are many who would not. After all, many Americans are Christians, too; they do think that America is a Christian country, and that non-Christians are an insignificant minority.

But though I may be in a minority, it is not an insignificant one. As Clement Wood points out, many outstanding Americans--like Jefferson--were also not Christians: John Adams, who said, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it"; George Washington, "a tactful disbeliever"; Benjamin Franklin; Abraham Lincoln, a "rationalist and atheist from the age of 29 to his death, despite churchly claims made in his name afterwards"; Ulysses S. Grant; and so on. I could also add James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; H. L. Mencken, possibly the best stylist in the history of American journalism; Clarence Darrow, perhaps America's best-known defense attorney; Robert Ingersoll, that grand old man of freethought; and Gore Vidal, the best living American essayist.

Who is more American--Mark Twain or Pat Robertson? Gore Vidal or Archbishop Robert Sanchez? Thomas Jefferson or Billy Graham? Whom would you choose? I made my choice long ago.

But people in Poland really have no choice. Now that the communist regime is finally gone, the Poles may be economically free, but spiritually they are still enslaved. Perhaps for too long we have been victims of foreign ideologies: Catholicism, socialism, communism. Now, for the first time in Poland's history, we could be genuinely free. But we are afraid to be free, because spiritually we are still in bondage to the Roman Catholic church.