Losing My Religion, part 2

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

This week, I continue the story I began in last week’s reflection. If you haven’t yet read it, I suggest doing so to get your bearings. I ended it on a decision I made after I tried returning to church after a long absence:

Since I couldn’t get good answers from folks around me, I decided to go to the horse’s mouth. For the first time, I began a systematic reading of the Holy Bible.

In this reflection, I’m going to deal out some pretty harsh criticism, but I hope readers will grasp that I’m not out to attack or refute Christianity. This is a personal reflection on my reactions as, at the age of twenty, I tried to read and understand the Bible. So, I focus not on the whole picture of Christian doctrine but on what was made important to me by my upbringing in the faith. As ever, I realize I could be in error, including on the meaning and interpretation of Scripture. I’m not looking for a battle of wits about this stuff, but if you are, be forewarned I’m quick to quibble.

Reading the Holy Bible

I was now twenty years old and back in college. I worked the night shift, midnight to 8 a.m., as a security guard at a warehouse. In the mornings, after work, I went to classes still dressed in my uniform. Afternoons, I came home and slept as best I could. I duct-taped tinfoil over my bedroom windows to keep the sunlight out. In the evenings, Dad and my brother James cracked pool balls on the table they’d set up in the living room, so it wasn’t long before I ran a deficit of sleep, started dozing off as workers arrived at the warehouse in the early morning, and lost the security job.

After a lot of looking, getting desperate for any work, I reluctantly took a serving job in a Mexican restaurant. Now, because it is relevant, let me be frank about why I was reluctant: racism. On some level, I recognized the racist attitudes I’d heard from some people in my extended family were wrong — I took the lesson quite easily about Black people from befriending them at school — but all the same I’d adopted some of those attitudes. I wasn’t keen on working with Hispanics, but of course what I learned from it was that they’re basically no different from anyone else. Working for ten months in that restaurant revolutionized my thinking about race and, incidentally, immigration. It put me on a path towards a political parting-of-ways with most of my family.

I say this is relevant because, when I began attending a Baptist church again, I heard some casual racism from certain congregants, and it forcefully reminded me just how much of that I’d heard at church years earlier, not only at Grace but at other churches Dad had taken me to. As a child, I hadn’t thought much of it. In the Christian South, the culture of “respecting your elders” (per the Fifth Commandment) teaches kids to be silent when adults are talking, even if they say patently wrong things. Now an adult myself, I was forming opinions at odds with what I heard. Freshly back at church and wary of stirring the pot, I didn’t call out these racists, but I had to wonder why no one with standing in the church did, either. Wasn’t this a sanctified place, and didn’t such nasty talk defile it? What of “loving your neighbor as yourself,” which Jesus specifies in Mark 12 as the second greatest of all commandments? If it didn’t apply to this, why not? And if it didn’t apply to this, to what did it apply? Did Christians pick and choose when to follow Jesus’s teachings and when not to? Did we do that all the time, and for the very reason I was doing it now — to avoid stirring the pot?

Just as when I heard people witness during services, I saw a lack of moral reflection or struggle in this. And that prompted the next question: If church is not the place where Christians come together to reflect and struggle candidly with moral issues, then what exactly is the point of it? Community with other Christians? Propping up each other’s faith? Feeling secure in our beliefs?

With these and other such questions rattling around my head, I turned to the Bible for answers. Before I tell you what came of that, though, I should explain how my reading habits had begun to change.

I’d declared an English major during my ill-fated first year of college. I stuck with this major now, albeit just a bit wiser about how hard a row to hoe writing was. Needing a plan for making a living, I thought I’d become a teacher. Dad wasn’t happy with this decision, but he wasn’t paying my tuition now, I was — so I stubbornly went my own way. I also went back to work on the literary magazine as a poetry editor.

The college’s English department wasn’t what you’d call progressive. Various literary theories — deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, and reader-response theory — were never discussed. There was some historical framing of texts, but the professors depended mainly on the formalist theory called New Criticism (now a misnomer, since it dates from the mid-20th century). As explained by scholars John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, the New Critics’ goal was to analyze a text by itself, exploring connections between its formal elements and its meaning through “close reading” — that is, the scholar’s careful parsing of the author’s choices in the text and nowhere else. Neither the author’s life and intentions nor a given reader’s moral and emotional responses were even to enter the scholar’s consideration. The text was all. Nowadays, literary scholars consider New Criticism outmoded and crude — I had no idea how much so until later in college and especially in grad school. But I still think it has enormous utility. Even if myopic, it’s a very disciplined approach. At any rate, learning the New Critics’ methodology had a profound effect on how I read. Among other things, I learned the value of cohesion in a text — and with that, to grasp a text’s structure and its method for conveying its meanings, to compare its different parts, to spot paradoxes and contradictions, to assess how well the text holds together.

If you’ve ever read the Holy Bible cover to cover, as I now set out to do, then given the New Critics’ influence on me, you can likely imagine what hell I was in for.

I suspected my childhood churchgoing gave me only a scattershot familiarity with the Bible. I’d read the expurgated Children’s Illustrated Bible cover to cover many times. Also, I’d read these books in the King James Version, though not in this order (which is the order in which they appear): Genesis; Exodus; Joshua, of course; Judges; Ruth; 1 Samuel and part of 2 Samuel; Job; Psalms, most of them anyway; Proverbs; Jeremiah; Lamentations; Daniel; a few minor prophets, I forget which; the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John; some of the epistles, I forget which, except for 1 Corinthians; James; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2, and 3 John; Jude; and Revelation. So I knew the Children’s Illustrated was not the true Bible but a redacted retelling of its most popular stories. However, as suggested by my having read books out of order, my previous Bible reading had been rather haphazard. I’d read books when for one reason or another I’d gotten interested in them. There was nothing systematic or studious about it. Thus, I had no real sense of the Bible itself as a whole. And so I felt that I didn’t understand Christianity on its primary terms. I would now correct this.

While reading the Bible, I stopped attending church. I still wanted to go for the sake of community, if for nothing else, but I worried my Bible-reading program would get derailed by other people’s explanations, interpretations, or rationalizations. I had to read for myself, without clutter. I also did away with the Bible reader’s practices of cross-referencing — that is, comparing passages in the Bible’s different books — and using a concordance (a list of thematic words and every passage where they appear). I was not to be drawn into a literary labyrinth. I would read straight through each book, depending on note-taking and memory to connect the dots. I was confident a cohesive picture of things would emerge if only I was diligent and attentive.

The four canonical gospels are the heart of Christianity, so I started there. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — simple enough. How much trouble could I run into?

I was a bit bothered by some of the things I read. In Matthew 10, Jesus makes twelve of his disciples into apostles and commissions them to preach to the Jews but not the Gentiles and Samaritans. Why not? Wasn’t his message for everyone? Well, no matter: at the very end of Matthew, he sends the remaining eleven (Judas has betrayed him) to “all nations.” But later in Matthew 10, he says the apostles will not have finished their ministry in Israel “before the Son of Man comes.” I’d always heard that phrase used by preachers to refer to Jesus’s return to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth, a return for which Christians are still waiting now. If Jesus promised to return before his apostles finished their ministry in Israel, wasn’t he running late? A fluke? No: later, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. 16:28 NIV). According to that pretty direct and unambiguous prophecy, Jesus is running way behind schedule.

I’d long ago embraced the messages of charity and tolerance implicit in the parable of the Good Samaritan. But what was I to make now, in Matthew 15, of Jesus refusing to hear the plea of the Canaanite woman, then refusing to help her — “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” — and, when she begs him on her knees, implicitly calling her a dog? And Jesus only relents, praising her faith, after she bests him in witty banter by arguing she is a dog but even a dog deserves mercy? It looked rather as if Jesus relents only to save face in front of his disciples. Especially with the racist talk I’d lately heard at church fresh in mind, that story made me squirm.

Matthew was very familiar to me. As I read Mark, the shortest gospel, I noticed some elisions in the story Matthew had given, but I liked the plain language. After Mark’s economy, reading Luke was a bit of a slog. Again, I saw things I hadn’t seen in Mark. I was not then aware of biblical scholars’ theory of Marcan priority — to wit, Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke were later cribbed independently from Mark as well as one or two other texts, now lost. But I was taking careful notes, and I saw that Matthew and Luke disagreed on a plethora of points. No matter: they were in accord about the basic shape of Jesus’s life and its meaning, never mind the details.

Then I read the Gospel of John, and suddenly it was as if I was reading another story, a different story. Where Mark was plain and brief, John was poetic and verbose, but the differences went beyond style and economy. John’s Jesus was basically a different character than Mark’s Jesus. They were not the same person.

The differing pictures of Jesus culminated for me in his final words before dying on the cross. In Matthew and Mark, he cries out in despair, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I was moved by those words. They were the words of a man dying in the cruelest torment for what he believed, yet they ripped at the fabric of the belief itself. It was a very human thing to say. Luke gives us a stoic Jesus with more resolve at his death: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” This was not as moving, but I thought it was in keeping with a man who had begged God to spare him but also said, “Yet not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). In John, however, Jesus doesn’t even pray to be spared. Instead, he delivers a lengthy, self-glorifying prayer for the success of his apostles in proselytizing for him, and then he goes to the garden only to be at once betrayed by Judas and arrested — as if John has to put Jesus in Gethsemane merely for the sake of the plot. And the final words John gives Jesus before dying, “It is finished,” are not stoic but again self-aggrandizing. I couldn’t imagine a real person, capable of suffering, who would say those words at that moment. But maybe a god who was above suffering would. Yet wasn’t Jesus’s suffering the very point of this part of the story, the reason he was crucified? If only his death was demanded, not his suffering as well, couldn’t God have struck him with lightning and achieved the same result?

While the Gospel of John contradicted the others about what sort of person Jesus was, it didn’t contradict itself — because only when reading John did I at last find the fully formed, unequivocally stated idea that Jesus was God Incarnate sent to Earth to die in atonement for mankind’s sins.

Only there? Yes, only there.

Jesus’s message to his followers in Matthew, Mark, and Luke appeared more or less to be: “The End Times are coming soon. The Kingdom of God is at hand. No one knows just when, but it’ll happen before your lifetime is over with. So get your spiritual and moral house in order, and be ready to deal with God’s judgment, like Israel used to do back in the times of the Prophets.” In those three gospels, does Jesus acknowledge he will be betrayed by a disciple, he’ll be put to death, and then he’ll resurrect? Yes. Does he say he’s dying as a sacrificial lamb to atone for all mankind’s original sin? As far as I could tell, no. Only by cross-referencing the other gospels to John could I infer that anything Jesus says in Matthew, Mark, or Luke has anything to do with that idea.

This realization floored me.