Losing My Religion, part 3

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

This series began with a reflection on my childhood faith and my adolescent doubt, in which I wrote about growing up in a Baptist family, my religious indoctrination, and my misgivings about Christianity as a teenager. In last week’s reflection, I described the fruits of the Bible reading I undertook while trying to come to grips with all my questions and doubts — and how that only raised more questions, graver doubts, with the final result that I became an apostate. Now, I continue the story with my attempts to find a spiritual home in other faiths and my journey into atheism.

Adulthood: Apostasy

Little Mama’s only daughter, my aunt Barbara, competed with her brother Robert to be the holiest person in our Baptist family. (Robert made absurdly long prayers when the family gathered for meals; see the poem in next week’s reflection.) Sometime in my very early twenties, when I was reading the Holy Bible in an effort to allay doubt and make sense of Christianity, I visited Pop and Little Mama in Mystic — I stopped by regularly on my drive home from college to check up on them — and Barbara was there. We sat in the kitchen to talk, and as so often happened in any discussion with Barbara, things circled again and again to religion. So, I was more or less forced to be open about what I thought of a few claims she made about it. As well as I knew how, I referred to Scripture to back my opinions, but my skepticism must have shown. At last Barbara gave me a serious look and said, “But you believe in God, don’t you?”

I wasn’t entirely sure anymore, but I answered in the affirmative. For one thing, “yes” seemed the only safe answer with Barbara — anything else, and she’d have feared for my immortal soul, and kindness only knows what would’ve followed from that! But for another thing, I’d been deeply indoctrinated with certain ideas, one of them being that to deny God (as Peter denied Jesus thrice before the cock crowed) was nearly the worst sin I could possibly commit. Whatever I really believed, it was a bridge too far.

There’s a truism in this story about the psychology of apostates, even long after we go to the trouble of deconstructing our religion.¹ What we were once taught to believe runs deep, and we don’t easily give it up. However reflective we try to be, our religious indoctrination sucks at us like an undertow and often threatens to pull us under. For many of us, despite our best efforts, the undertow sucks at us all our lives.

Desperate to keep their congregations in the pews, preachers, apologists, and other breeds of Bible thumpers — or at least most of their ilk — are fond of caricaturing us as willful sinners selfishly turning our backs on God. We heard that when we sat in the pews, too, and now it echoes in our minds and stirs our doubts, which is of course the point. It’s awful to think of people who once embraced you now despising you for your supposed sinfulness. And, early in my apostasy, every time I did anything wrong, whether by Christianity’s moral standards or mine, I went beyond rebuking myself for it. I took myself on an extended guilt trip: This is why I need God, religion, church. I can’t tell right from wrong by myself! Except, really, I could. It was just that I’d left the faith so recently, and I hadn’t yet had all the experience I needed to rebuild my morality top to bottom. So, in my own mind, I was prey to the Bible thumpers’ slurs.

Decrying the godless, the Bible thumpers take their cue from Paul, who slanders us up and down in his epistle to the Romans. According to Paul, who lumps us in with the wicked, we’ve “exchanged the truth about God for a lie” (Rom. 1:25 NIV). So, he says, God abandons us to “shameful lusts”; tellingly, homosexuality is the only “shameful lust” Paul can think of (Rom. 1:26-27). But do you think Paul stops there? Oh, no! He has to make sure his readers don’t merely pity us for our ignorance and waywardness. They’ve got to hate us, suspect us, fear us. So, “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity” and “full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice,” we’re a lot of “gossips, slanderers, God-haters” who “invent ways of doing evil” and “have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy” (Rom. 1:28-31). Whew! I get up early in the morning — or I just don’t go to bed at all — to squeeze into a day all the nefarious shenanigans Paul and his pupils accuse me of! It really does wear a body out!

This is all just bigotry of the first order. Of course, there are “backsliders” who simply give up on faith. But the truth about many of us — I mean, specifically, folks who left the faith after looking long and hard for God and finding Him nowhere and/or being let down, as I was, by the monstrous God that Christianity really presented when we interrogated it — the truth is, we think deeper about religion than religious people do. No, I’m not saying the religious are stupid. It’s just that apostates have to think deeper about God and faith: if we’re wrong, we’re literally making a hell of a mistake.

But I’m speaking here with the benefit of hindsight. As I first set out — stumbled may be the better verb — into apostasy, it looked like the Great Unknown, vast and lonely and frightening. Of this territory, I knew only what my religion had told me, and that “knowledge” was now all suspect. There were few fellow travelers at hand, nearly no signposts to help me find my way, so I took wrong turns, fruitless detours.

A close high school friend practiced Wicca. He told me all about it in our rambling philosophical conversations and loaned me a few books about witchcraft. They were interesting reading, but the more I read of Wicca — and of the occult, astrology, New Age spirituality, etc. — the more I felt I was slipping into a fantasy again. I’d just got myself free of one! No, this wasn’t for me.

The summer I turned 23, I took a course called Western World Humanities. In spite of that title, the textbook had several chapters about Eastern cultures and religions, and I became intrigued by Buddhism, particularly by its art. In a paper, hypothesizing that Alexander the Great’s campaign in the Indus River Valley may have brought some of the fashions in Greek sculpture, e.g. volumetric folds in clothing, to the East, I traced this influence in Buddhist sculptures from Bactria to Japan (not a deeply researched claim, just my overeager stab at connecting dots; I likely saw what I wanted to see). So I got interested in Buddhism. There were plenty of books about it at the public library, but the closest place I could go to meet Buddhists and learn from them, not just out of a book, was a dharma center in Atlanta, a three-hour drive away. That wasn’t feasible, not on my budget, not with the demands on my time. I visited once and took part in a meditation ceremony. It was very relaxing, but I didn’t have an aha! moment.

Was I going to have any such moment?

After exploring Buddhism, I just left the question of my religion alone for a few years. It was a very busy time in my life — editing one literary journal and then working for another when I went off to finish up my bachelor’s in Milledgeville, learning to write songs and performing at open mics, immersing myself in the reading and writing of poetry, meeting a girlfriend who didn’t run off to Florida at the drop of a hat — and I didn’t have the bandwidth anymore for struggling with spirituality. I still thought of myself as a spiritual person, but vaguely, without any reference points. If I was asked where I went to church, I half-jokingly told people I was “a cursed apostate.” At times, I referred to myself as an agnostic, by which I meant God’s existence was not a closed subject for me (an inaccurate interpretation of agnosticism giving too much ground to religious apologetics), but mainly I did this to put believers at their ease.

After college, I taught high school for a year near Milledgeville. That kept me just as busy. But then the Great Recession came, the state of Georgia hit a fiscal crunch, and education budgets shriveled up everywhere, so my contract wasn’t renewed and I had damn little chance of landing a teaching job elsewhere. I moved in with my brother in Knoxville, Tennessee, and began trying to build a career there as a singer-songwriter while waiting tables at an Olive Garden. Briefly, recalling my reading of Emerson and Thoreau in college and thinking Transcendentalism might be the thing for me, I went to a Unitarian church. I liked the spirit of inclusion there, but I soon came to think of what else it was as wishy-washy Religion Lite, which I wanted no more than I wanted fundamentalism. If I could get no answers to my most profound spiritual questions, it was better to face up to that fact than to pretend the questions didn’t exist.

A few times during grad school and shortly after, I visited the Washington National Cathedral. The gorgeous singing I heard at an Easter service there would later inspire me, writing Quibble, to give the Ones and Dazed a culture of song. (You’ll get some of that in a later chapter.) I was intrigued by High Anglican ritual. From rubbing elbows with Episcopalians, I’d gathered they were largely a liberal, even progressive lot. If any Christians were “my sort,” they were. But, by this time, my worldview had shifted well away from Christianity. I couldn’t overlook my objections to the religion’s substance. I wasn’t coming back.

The Space Window, my favorite stained glass window at the National Cathedral.

The National Cathedral is a beautiful building, replete with mesmerizing stained glass windows. I recommend visiting if you’re ever in D.C. On one visit, I found a religious library downstairs and, within it, a small, dark, quiet room. The only light came from a narrow window facing east. Just outside the doorway was a basket with rolled-up rugs and a note which read, “For our Muslim friends.” It was a place for Muslims to pray, a refuge for them in a Christian church.

If only Brother Darrell could see this! I thought. To me, it was the most touching proof that people can practice religion without making it a bone of contention. It might be the only reason that, in these dark times when the most stridently religious people are on the warpath and theocracy seems possible in America, I still hold out hope for an inclusive, religiously diverse society.

I believe such a society must have room and tolerance for nonbelievers as well. That’s why I’m now so frank about where I stand. It’s why, after decades of soul-searching, I no longer call myself “a cursed apostate.” For the sake of my soul, if I have one, I now unambiguously claim atheism.

I see no reason to, so I don’t believe in any god.

Rebuilding My Morality

Though, after my study of the Bible, I decided I was no longer a Christian, I was God-haunted. I had enough maturity to know my morals were still fundamentally Christian in character, too. I didn’t dive into sin overnight. I kept expecting to be tempted into a life of abandonment to immoral impulses, but I never was. I found it hard even to stop thinking of certain things as “sins” I had to avoid, despite having logically worked out that there was really nothing wrong with them.