I never left religion behind. I’m not saying that to say I’m still religious. I’m just saying that because, well, it’s more complicated than a simple moment. Nothing is ever as simple as it’s supposed to be. The fact that I never left religion behind is how I can consider myself non-religious, godless, a fellow traveler with those who are excited by Atheism+ and also not in the least bit excited by or interested in Atheism+.
I never left religion. I left people. This is the key distinction. This is also why Atheism+, as a people-driven idea, has no hold on me and, furthermore, gives me a jumping-off point to explain why I never bothered to give a rat’s ass about atheism as an organized anything, anyway.
It all starts, in a sadly clichéd manner, with my mother. She always told my sister and me that the most important thing we could do was think for ourselves. My sister basically left religion after junior high for reasons that I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to articulate. My mother and father left the church I grew up in some time around my freshman year in high school. I stayed because I was invested in the people at my church. That’s how they getcha, I suppose.
I also went to public schools. I took biology my freshman year, chemistry my sophomore, and physics my junior. I did not learn creation science. I took American history and did not learn that Thomas Jefferson was actually an Evangelical Christian. I read Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Huxley, and Twain in my English classes. I might have hung out at church multiple times a week, but my perspective wasn’t based entirely, or even primarily, on what I learned from pastors.
Still, by my first year out of high school I got it in my head that I was going to go to seminary and be a pastor. I got it in to my head that god wanted me to be a pastor. So I interned at my church, I hung out with pastors, and I spent a great deal of my time studying the Bible and attempting to learn how to be a Bible scholar and also a church leader. I read books on Christian Living. I read books on theology. I read books on ministry. I went to missions conferences. I lead junior highers in youth group. Mostly I just tried to hang out with pastors.
On the eve, practically, of my sister’s wedding one of the pastors I’d known my entire life insulted my sister and her future spouse. He did so because piety required him to. She was, you see, living with her future husband at the time, which is a no-no. He informed her that this was wrong and she was sinful in spite of the fact that she was no longer attending any church, let alone his. He did this via email. He did this while his wife was simultaneously planning a bridal shower for my sister.
My mother went to his house and told him off in no uncertain terms. To this day she’s never said anything nice about him that I can recall. I agreed with my mother’s response because, really, fuck that dude. He didn’t know. I asked a pastor I respected more than any other pastor in the world what his thoughts were. He hemmed and hawed, then came down on the side of the guy who’d told my sister to shove it. He was, after all, dogmatically correct.
That pastor disappeared from my life soon thereafter. I didn’t tell him to shove it. He just lost his job, as happens, and went to a different church, as happens. He also basically stopped talking to me. That hurt.
I had another pastor to look up to at that point, though. He was the pastor I worked with in junior high ministry. When I was in my darkest stretch working for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship he was one of the people I turned to for advice and help and he was always there with help.
When I had serious, legitimate questions about religion he was always there to tell me that I wasn’t reading my Bible enough and I really needed to find an older spiritual mentor to tell me what was what. I was never quite sure how to handle that, as he was also the pastor who had introduced me to the Emergent Church. The Emergent Church, I was given to understand, wasn’t afraid to tackle those tough questions head-on. It was a dangerous theology, really.
There was a pastor I respected the hell out of for my first two years at Western Illinois University. He was a rough-hewn, country version of the pastors I’d grown to know and love in my time in Wheaton. The first Sunday morning of my last semester at Western he did an entire sermon about the evils of the Emergent Church.
I was angry. Specifically, I was angry that someone I thought was pretty cool could attack something I also thought was great. More than that, I was angry that he could be so woefully mis-informed about what the Emergent Church was. The Emergent Church, after all, was a correction of the mistakes of the Evangelical movement. At least, that’s what I thought it was. I sought advice from a confidant who told me to not just leave it at that, but to try to actually see if there was still common ground.
On Tuesday I went back to that church, sat down with the pastor, and tried to get him to see things from my perspective. He wasn’t, after all, attacking an abstraction. He was, on a very real level, attacking a pastor I respected the hell out of. He was, on a very real level, attacking me. He thundered. He told me I was wrong. He ended up informing me on a tangent that Muslims were all violent and Islam was a religion of violence and he knew because he’d read the Qu’ran. I walked out of that church and never again walked back in.
I graduated. I went back to my old church. I tried to figure out how to get Amy to love me even though she didn’t, even though I didn’t, either, even though I was completely and totally broken by then.
I went back to my old junior high youth group as a volunteer. It was my safe space. It was the place where nothing could go wrong. This is the part where the story becomes problematic.
See, the pastor I’d worked with in the past was no longer working with the junior highers. He had, instead, gone on to adult ministry and had been the one to introduce me to the Emergent Church. In his place was a different guy, fully vetted, who had a relationship with the previous pastor that went back years. He was, in short, a made man from the start in my book. We got on immediately and I was excited to work with him. He seemed like exactly the sort of guy who could be around and who I could trust as I was rebuilding my shattered psyche. It took maybe a month for that to get completely fucking ruined.
One of the weird undercurrents of my Evangelical experience was the paleo-Pentecostalism that coursed through the entire thing. Pentecostals, to the uninitiated, are the folks who believe in prophecy and speaking in tongues. Evangelicals, in their official stance, give no shits about prophecy and speaking in tongues. They’re the pseudo-cerebral Protestants, preferring to stand on a faux intellectual, literal interpretation of the text of the Bible as the only revelation from god to man. It’s far more complicated than that in practice, however.
I learned some time during junior high or high school that I could get god to talk to me. I think of it now as a form of bizarre spellcasting, but at the time it was just a logical progression from prayer. You talk to god because you have a personal relationship with god through Jesus. Obviously that means that god wants to talk to you, right? If you know that, all you have to do is learn how to listen. This was a thing that just kinda, y’know, hung out at the periphery of my religious experience. Then I went to Western and ended up hanging out with Pentecostals.
That nearly broke my brain. I, having no fucking clue what I was doing, started thinking I could get god to tell me what was goin’ on. I, having no fucking clue what I was doing, started thinking it was working. I, having no fucking clue what I was doing, nearly went insane. It’s the old joke, I guess: when I talk to god it’s called praying. When god talks back it’s called insanity.
One thing saved me from an actual psychotic breakdown: being a damn good historian. I focused harder on my studies than I ever had before. Well, I suppose my favorite pastor back home helped. I suppose the pastor that I would not yet give the ol’ heave-ho to also helped, since if he didn’t like the Emergent Church he sure as shit wasn’t about to hang out with Pentecostals. Mostly, though, I think it was a combination of luck and sheer bloody-mindedness.
I tried to leave Christianity the following summer. Instead I met Amy. My objections to Christianity melted away nearly overnight.[1] In retrospect, that was less than ideal.
Basically, things went pretty much fantastic for the first three months or so. Then I went back to school for my last semester. Sometime during that stretch she decided she didn’t want to, like, date me anymore but she still wanted to, like, be friends and stuff, with occasional benefits. I’d say I’m mad about that, but I’m not. We were two people in our early (for her) and mid (for me) twenties who’d lived sheltered lives. I was also still pretty much fucked up in the head, which probably didn’t help.
Either way, I graduated, went back home, tried to re-capture the magic of the previous summer with Amy, and tried to rebuild my faith. All of that put me alone in a cabin in Baraboo, Wisconsin on the coldest day I’d ever experienced. It’s one of the absolute most important moments of my story of my own self-creation (or, I suppose, re-creation). I figured out,
thanks to a Saw Doctors song, that Amy and I were destined to go our own separate ways.
Later that night, or maybe the next day, the new junior high pastor introduced his special guest speaker for the weekend. It was some pastor I’d never met who had been his pastor back in the day. We did the standard praise and worship thing and then special guest pastor started a prayer thing, as is the custom on church retreats. Finally he told everyone to be quiet, because he was going to teach everyone how to ask god to speak to them.
It is to my everlasting shame that I did nothing. If I were the man I am now I would have stood up and said, “No, you cannot do this. You cannot start these kids down this path. I started down this path some time when I was about their age and last year it nearly caused me to lose my mind.” Of course, if I was the man I am now I wouldn’t have been there at all. The man I was then sat silently, tried to avoid freaking out, and then braced for the inevitable.
God spoke to me that night, as is god’s wont in those situations. God told me to hang on, that Amy and I would be together. That god wanted that to happen.
The previous year and a half of my life came crashing in. The fragile peace I’d made with god broke. The various stories I’d told myself to explain away the horrifying nature of everything that had happened the previous school year suddenly went hollow. All that remained was me, god, the Saw Doctors, and the knowledge that the only one I could trust in that whole mess was an Irish rock band.
I stuck it out with the youth group because I’d made some commitments. Once the school year was over, though, so was I. Somewhere in there – possibly pre-graduation, possibly post – was a second-to-last memory. Yet another pastor (who, for the record, I also liked at the time) was talking about the Kingdom of God and how great it would be when we all lived under a perfect king who decided everything for us. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There was no such thing as a perfect king, after all. That was the entire point of the Enlightenment, that the only proper rule was that which gave us responsibility for ourselves, that gave us a country governed by the consent of the people and with the good of the people in mind.
When my obligations were met I left. I had one last conversation with that pastor who had been so important to me during the dark days of leaving church at Western and quitting InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I told him that I had to leave and that I was going to try the (really rather liberal, as far as Wheaton was concerned) Presbyterian church my parents had started attending.
“You’ll like it there,” he told me, “They don’t teach the Bible.”
I left the church I’d grown up in with a bad taste in my mouth.
----------------------
It didn’t surprise me to learn that
Bruce Gerencser’s reaction to his introduction to Atheism+ was
similar to mine. I suspect it’s because we come from similar places, but Bruce has been known to show up in the comments from time to time and can explain himself if he so chooses. Still, he, along with the
late, lamented Ken Pulliam, was one of the pastors I found and with whom I identified after leaving Christianity.
I don’t say this to claim that I have the same ministry experience as Bruce or Ken, but there are those of us who left the ministry and joined the non-religious ranks and who understand all too well the dangers of the cults of personality we left behind. Christianity, for me and those like me, isn’t just a thing we do on Sunday or a collection of dogmas and affirmations. It’s a set of relationships and memories. It’s an affirmation that this is true and correct because that person believed it and I know that person is a true man of god. It’s a set of agreements and social contracts. Sometimes it’s intellectual, because a pastor or mentor convinced us, and sometimes it’s emotional, because believing it is the only way to make sure that beautiful girl sticks around.
My lack of belief is nothing like what my beliefs were. I stopped believing in god because I had no reason to continue believing in god. PZ Myers had fuck-all to do with it. The only Christopher Hitchens book I read was
God is Not Great and I was not even remotely impressed by his obvious sophistry in formulating his arguments. I own but have not read a book by Daniel Dennett. I have no urge to ever read anything by Sam Harris. Dawkins was really the only surprise in the whole bunch, but that was because
I watched his interviews for Jonathan Miller’s A Brief History of Disbelief and was shocked to discover that he was a polite gentleman and not a firebreathing asshole.
Even Richard Dawkins has lost a lot of points in my book. He lost them last year when he pulled the standard misdirect during Elevatorgate by claiming that we shouldn’t care that women get propositioned by creepy guys in places we can stop such things because other women in places we can’t really do anything about get killed and raped and stuff. It is, in fact, because of Richard Dawkins that I have a standing theory that anyone who belittles an attempt to change an injustice you can change by pointing out a different injustice you can’t really doesn’t give a shit about either injustice.
I had no real interest in atheism as a movement from the start. I’d already had my fill of movements. Culture wars and infighting and the endless personality conflicts inherent in such things had burned me out.
I also didn’t really change any of my main viewpoints in the shift from Christian to atheist. I accepted evolution as far back as my freshman year in high school. I accepted the basic underpinnings of Enlightenment philosophy by the time I graduated and was defending it against Christianity while I was still a Christian. I was introduced to feminist thought at Western while reading a book by a feminist rabbi and almost immediately accepted most of what she said as valid.[2]
Atheism was, in short, just an inevitability. I already had a system of morals and beliefs and affirmations wholly separate from Christianity that didn’t fit the framework of Christianity particularly well. So I discarded Christianity. I had no particular need to look for a different external framework and had no particular reason to look for an extra-natural prime mover. So I became an atheist by default.
I was also a storyteller. I think that matters a great deal, mostly because I figured out somewhere in there that Christianity, Greek myth, Norse myth, and all those other things were really the same thing. Eventually I realized I could call myself a follower of Coyote without actually believing there was a Trickster god. That’s probably a thought for another day, though.
Overall, my point is this: I agree with the tenets of Atheism+. I agree that as long as you’re going to have an atheist movement you probably ought to try to make sure there aren’t any assholes running roughshod over the whole show. I also think that PZ Myers is a total asshole for telling me I have to agree with him and calling me stupid if I don’t. Atheism matters to him on a fundamental level. Atheism doesn’t matter to me much at all. We can agree on 99% of the things we believe (which, really, might be true), but if we’re going to disagree on the importance of things that PZ Myers thinks are important, well, hey, c’est la vie.
It’s not really concern trolling, either. I have no intention of derailing A+ and wish them the best. I think that they’re fundamentally wrong in their assertion that atheism inevitably leads to a belief in equality and classical liberal thought, however. I think that atheism provides a jumping off point, but provides no framework for philosophy, sociology, economics, or politics. Anyone who says it does is deluded. Anyone who says it necessitates a world that’s exactly what they think is just trying to become a pastor of atheism.
I left all that shit behind for a reason.
---------------------
[1]And, you know what, fuck you. If you’d met Amy then without knowing what I learned in the following two years, you’d have made the same decision.
[2]The stuff I didn’t was based on my lack of belief that it mattered. Said rabbi had a whole thing about the importance of reclaiming Jewish ritual as feminist ritual and I kinda rolled my eyes at that. She also had a whole thing about the sacredness of the menstrual cycle, which caused my professor to assign a question about how we, personally, dealt with our own sacred bodily cycles, which caused me to write a paragraph about how I had no idea what the hell that meant, as the closest thing I had to a sacred cycle was the baseball season. This got me something in the neighborhood of 0 points.
I told that to Amy and her response was something to the effect of, “Anyone who thinks there’s something meaningful and divine to having a period is a moron.”
Recent Comments