Losing My Religion, part 1

Reflections on my journey out of Christianity, through apostasy, and into atheism.

In last week’s reflection, contrasting Alnasl’s faith with Quibble’s apostasy, I talked at length about the pitfalls of poorly examined beliefs and briefly about the egotism into which we may stray once we’ve left such beliefs behind. Doing so, I was aware I might offend someone. In fact, I revised “Atheist & Believer” several times to weed out the least hint of unwarranted generalizations. This week, I want to expand on this theme, and for candor’s sake I’m laying all my cards on the table. I’m telling my personal story of faith, doubt, spiritual questioning, apostasy, and atheism.

Another reason for writing about this: chapters 14 and 15 of Quibble are so weird and loopy, you might like some realistic memoir for balance. Now that I’m over my bout of COVID, I plan to resume recording audiobook chapters soon.

Childhood: Faith

This story must begin with family, and so it begins also with the south Georgia village of Mystic, where my grandparents lived. I once wrote a poem about this place:

Mystic, Georgia

A clump of houses, sheds, a boarded-up
industrial school, two Baptist churches:
now you notice you’re passing a town,
having barely seen the green sign, its name
underscored by “UNINCORPORATED.”
In the canning plant’s windows, grates
rusted shut—a half-century shut down.
A squat convenience store, an oil-stained lot,
pumps with dials. You turn up Bugle Lane.
Now here’s that damned monolith: a real
old country store, keeping its quiet vigil
over a weed-thick junkyard of VW Bugs.
The store’s also out of business. You park
the car behind it, get out, stretch your legs
under trees. Oaks, pines, here and there
magnolias, all jostling limbs—a skirmish
for more sky. The houses stay silent.
Everyone here’s more or less poor,
sending kin for pills, planting gardens.
Sit now, put a hand to the ground, feel
for the town’s pulse. Rattlesnake round-ups.
Stray hens. That screen door wants mending.
Around you, already vast, night expands.

Mystic has only two claims to any fame. For several decades, long before I was born, it was the site of the Royal Singing Convention, an annual gathering for Sacred Harp music (or “shape-note singing,” as it’s often called). At the church I once attended, the musical notation in hymnals had shapes — triangles, circles, squares — to indicate the parts for groups of singers. Sadly, this tradition was going into decline by the time I arrived on the scene, and I don’t remember ever hearing shape-note singing at Grace Baptist Church. But here’s a sampling of what this music was:

Mystic’s other claim to some fame is that it’s the setting for Harry Crews’s A Feast of Snakes, which centers on another, quite gruesome Southern tradition — rattlesnake roundups, at which the snakes are ferreted out of their burrows, collected, killed, and eaten. As a boy, I did hear tell of a local rattlesnake roundup, but I never went to it. And though I believe Crews got something right about the violence bubbling under the surface of the rural South, honestly I can’t see Mystic in his novel. I don’t know if Crews ever spent time there. I suspect he just liked the name’s symbolism.

When I was five years old, my father moved our single-wide trailer out of the pecan orchard in which we lived on the outskirts of Mystic (here’s another poem about that) to the other side of Ocilla, eight miles away. But my grandparents — Granny Carver on my mother’s side, Clifton and Pearlie Mae Gaither on my father’s — still lived in Mystic, so I spent much of my childhood there and I think of it in a deeper, spiritual sense as my hometown. We called Clifton — actually my father’s stepfather — Pop, and because she stood barely four and a half feet tall, Pearlie Mae was known to all the family as Little Mama. She died this March at the age of 102.

Pop and Little Mama attended both churches in Mystic, alternating between them. The older wooden church — I know it’s the older because of dates on gravestones in its cemetery — is Mystic Baptist, belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention. The newer brick church, Grace Baptist, was built in the 1920s to be the town’s high school. By my time, almost all the kids in Mystic were attending school in Ocilla. Grace is an Independent Baptist congregation. I have no idea which of the two churches is the more “fundamentalist.” I went to Grace, never the other church.

Well, first my father shopped us around to various Baptist churches in Irwin and Ben Hill counties, but we finally landed at Grace because family was there. Dad raised me according to the teachings of Paul the Apostle, who in his book had better — that is, more conservative — things to say than Jesus. For her part, Little Mama sometimes read the Bible to me. Her eyesight was poor, so her Bible was large-print and she read it with a magnifying glass. She went to school only through the seventh grade, too, so her reading was halting and not very nuanced. All the same, she took the trouble.

When I was eight or nine, my uncle David got divorced. It left him penniless. Dad had just bought a new house, so he let David stay in our old single-wide trailer on a lot he owned down the road and gave David a Chevy S-10 to drive around. Also, he stopped taking me and my brother Jacob to church and turned that over to David, either to lift his spirits or make him feel less indebted. Jacob and I loved David, a fun uncle (he’d been a drill sergeant in the Army and gave me his old sergeant’s hat), so suddenly we were keen on going to church (and Captain D’s afterwards).

Things turned a corner when I was eleven. Our neighbors found David hanging from a light pole in his backyard. When we cleaned out the old trailer, we found the coffee table laden with overdue bills. I don’t believe the financial ruin of his divorce hurt him as much as losing his children. I also found a dogeared paperback copy of The Hobbit in a cardboard box in the bedroom; this was my introduction to Tolkien and fantasy. David’s suicide devastated the family. As we were Baptists, it was also shameful, so no one would talk about it. Beset with grief and no doubt wondering what more he could have done for David, Dad took up smoking again.