Man-Made Magic: How Penn Jillette’s Life and Career

Have Inspired Me to be a Louder, Angrier Atheist Asshole

by C. T.

for Advanced Composition, East TN State U, December 2011

Atheism[1]

        1.  archaic : ungodliness, wickedness

       2.  a : a disbelief in the existence of deity
             b : the doctrine that there is no deity

Author’s Note: Information for this piece has been drawn from the firsthand writings of Penn Jillette, notably from God, No! Signs You Might Already be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.  This essay seeks not to describe Penn Jillette’s entire life, career, or philosophy, but to describe how his life and career have influenced this author to make his atheism a more visible part of his lifestyle.

In what I consider a clear violation of the doctrine of separation of church and state established by the United States Supreme Court, my public high school had a little shrine to Jesus Christ in the hallway outside the one of the janitor’s closets.  No other deity got a shrine. There was no 36 x 36 inch Muhammad plastered up on the walls of Seymour High School. There was no Buddha, no Vishnu, no Zeus.  I’m sure it bothered a lot of people, but if they did complain about it, I sure didn’t hear them.  But considering this was Seymour, Tennessee, a town with a population just north of ten thousand people and where the largest building in the area was the First Baptist Church,[2] it’s just as likely that only a few people even thought it seemed out of place.  Suffice to say, as a teenage atheist in the Bible Belt, I felt alone. 

That feeling of isolation has carried over to my twenties.  I learned as a teen to put atheism in a cabinet in a closet in the attic of my life and to carry on without my lack of religious belief defining me.  This compartmentalization served as a defense mechanism.  However, the older I get, the more I’ve found myself looking for a mechanism that empowers me and allows me to fulfill all of my heart’s desires, including living life openly as a nonbeliever.

Skeptic.  Freethinker.  Magician. Asshole. Atheist.  All words that describe Penn Jillette, author, radio host, television star, film star, professional celebrity, upright bass player, and most notably, magician, with his partner of more than thirty years, Teller.  You may have seen one of their TV shows or one of their many appearances on The Tonight Show, The Late Show, or in several music videos.[3]  God, No! begins with Penn’s birth on March 5, 1955 in a small town called Greenfield, Massachusetts to Samuel and Valda Jillette, both in their mid-forties at the time of his birth.  Jillette describes his parents as sensible, no-nonsense New Englanders.  They had been through the Great Depression.  The believed in privacy and charity.  They were regular churchgoers for most of their life.  They were theists.  His sister, also Valda, was twenty-three years old when he was born.  She was a theist.

            As Penn entered high school, he began to pick-up an interest in rock and roll (playing in a band) which conflicted with his parents early Sunday morning church attendance habits.  It was agreed that Penn could skip church on Sunday morning, so long as he attended the church’s adolescent youth group Sunday school in the evening.  This continued for awhile until, according to Penn, he was asked to leave the church by his Sunday school leader.  He had for several weeks been asking increasingly challenging questions about the validity of the gospels and what he saw as inconsistency and hypocrisy within the texts of the Bible.  According to him, the leader of the group told his parents that he had been eroding the faith of the other members of the group, and because of this, the church thought it was in the best interests of both Penn and the other teens for him to stop attending.  He exclaims in God, No! that he was “the only teen in the world who had a license not to go to church, from the church itself!”

Let’s revisit those New England churchgoers Penn called parents.  Upwards of 90% of fundamentalist Christian parents would attempt to convert a questioning teen to Christianity,[4] but Penn’s parents respected his beliefs and allowed him to end his relationship with theism without comment or question.  He wasn’t quite as easy on them.  For thirty years, Penn badgered his sister and parents to abandon church and accept that there was no God, could be no God, and that attending church functions, indeed believing in God at all, was a waste of time.  Despite the frequent family discussions, his parents and sister continued attending church regularly.

When Penn’s mother was eighty-five years old, she told him that she was an atheist (he had suspected for his adult life that she was) and that she, his sister, and his father would stop attending church.  A fracas had blown up Greenfield over the lifestyle of the new pastor, a woman in her mid-thirties who lived with a similarly-aged female roommate.  When the national church began disseminating ballots to local church branches asking whether or not they would vote to allow gays and lesbians admittance to the church, she signed in favor and sent it back without consulting the church elders.  A group of these church elders “and I mean elders”[5] began to pressure the congregation to force the minister’s resignation.  This was the last straw for Valda and Samuel, who both believed details of private lives belonged to private people.  As far as they were concerned, the only person the new minister’s living and/or sleeping arrangements mattered to was the new minister.  They left the church in protest. 

Penn’s sister Valda came out as an atheist at the same time as their mother, being in her upper fifties at the time.  Samuel prayed for his wife and family up until his death, often telling Penn that he would “put in enough good words for you, so we can all be together [in heaven].”  When Samuel died, a pastor administered a graveside service, as was Samuel’s request, but Valda told the man, “Be quick about it.  None of us are believers.”

This strikes me as something I’d like to call the “transformational power of atheism.”  Maybe, just maybe, if you keep chipping away at the magic book[6][7] with logic and reason, maybe you can convince people you love, that you care about, that affect your life and the lives of everyone else on the planet to treat the human race with love, kindness, and respect.  The problem with magic books is that they often speak on one hand of kindness to your neighbors and on the next page demand or exalt the slaughter of your other neighbors.  That Penn was able to unconvert members of his family, or at least make them feel comfortable opening up about such a major issue in their lives, gives me hope that I can do the same.

            Seeing friends and family go to church—some of them even devote their lives to houses of worship—hurts.  I remember the years of sadness I spent guiltily wondering why I was different.  I remember years of feeling isolated and alone in my lack of faith.  I remember how sad and hurtful faith-based comments critical of atheists made me felt as I burned in silent shame.  So when I see people I care about living religious lives, or worse, silently going through the motions, possibly experiencing the inner turmoil I went through, I want to reach out and help.  I want to spread support for the ideas of atheism and skepticism.  I want to spread Bullshit!.

Penn claims that the show he hosted with his companion Teller, Bullshit, was the longest running show in the history of Showtime.[8]  The show was an idea that Penn and Teller had been kicking around for a while.  They pitched it in September of 2001.  The World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 had a profound effect on Penn.  He claims to have said, after the second plane hit, “There go our civil liberties.”[9]  In God, No! Penn described the days following the attacks as the time that he and Penn were convinced America needed a skeptical TV show more than ever.  The nation was vulnerable, and Bullshit! was the perfect vehicle to calm the flames with logic and reason.

This is what inspires me so much about Penn Jillette.  He saw a need, and he found a solution to provide a remedy.  Bullshit! hammered flimsy pseudosciences like astrology, Tai Chi, and homeopathy most often, but also dedicated episodes to debunking myths such as the 2012 apocalypse and various 9/11 “truther” conspiracies.  He has dedicated much of his career to education based on logic, facts, and reason.  He is brash, loud, and abrasive to many people, but to just as many (including some of the former) he is helpful, educational, and caring.  I’ll never be a magician, and I doubt I’ll ever host a TV show, but I’m trying every day, to bring a little more magic and a little less religion to the world.


 

Work Referenced

Jillette, Penn. God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. Simon and Schuster: 2011.

            This is one of the most funny, most inspiring, and most engaging books I have ever read.  Part memoir, part handbook, part propaganda, this is Penn Jillette’s life and career summed up in 256 pages.  He focuses only on memorable instances, not day in the life snippets, so every chapter is packed with an escapade and commentary.  Enlightening and inspirational, I encourage you to read it wholeheartedly, and well, if that sounds like a sales pitch—it is.  Buy it.  Read it. Give it away to a friend, or better yet, buy them one too.

 

 

 

 



[1] Definitions provided by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary

[2] You might think this violates the unwritten East Tennessee rule that the tallest building in every city should be the court house, followed by the First Baptist Church.  Seymour, TN, is unincorporated, so while it does have a post office, it does not have a court house. You’ll be happy to know that in the nearby city of Sevierville, TN, the tallest building is the Sevier County Courthouse, and the second tallest building is the First Baptist Church.

[3] They make a brief appearance in the background of the video for Katy Perry’s song “Waking up in Vegas”.  I recommend watching with the sound off if you’re just dying to catch a glimpse of them. Penn is the absurdly tall one, Teller is his small-only-by-association companion.

[4] [4] Atheism and Secularlity: Issues, Concepts, and definitions by Phil Zuckerman

 

[5] They were really old.

[6] The Holy Bible, The Koran, The Book of Mormon, The Torah, etc.

[7] For added explanation on magic books, please enjoy the musical stylings of Australian comedian Tim Minchin, and his song “The Good Book,” linked here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-fsFT7ZKs>

[8] I checked, and its true. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_Showtime>

[9] When he told this to comedian George Carlin, Carlin pulled out his journal from the same time.  He had written “There go our freedoms.”