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how I learned to stop worrying and love listening

bonding

When I applied to grad school, it turned out that one of the classes I’d taken as part of my English minor didn’t count as an English credit at Liberty– it fit into their communications department instead; this led me to taking an online literature course from Regent University: American Women Writers. I decided to write one of the required papers on Louisa May Alcott and argue that Alcott wasn’t writing from a traditional Christian perspective– she was a Unitarian.

As I started doing research for the paper, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about Unitarianism, and I was having trouble wading through online resources or the public library. So, I turned to a forum I was a part of at the time– tarvalon.net (which is dedicated to Jordan’s Wheel of Time series). I knew one of the members there considered himself a Unitarian, and I asked if he’d be open to talking about it.

Looking back at that conversation makes me want to cringe.

While I was respectful and did my best to simply ask questions, my mental state at the time was completely inappropriate. At the outset I made the assumption that Unitarian Universalists couldn’t possibly be Christians and none of them consider themselves to be Christians– without even bothering to ask. I knew what traditional, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christianity looked like, and believed that anything that didn’t look or feel like what I’d been exposed to wasn’t Christian. From the beginning of our conversation I had already dismissed him, and the only purpose for talking to him was to pump him for information so that I could write a paper. I didn’t really care about what he believed, or why he believed it, and I never even really bothered trying to really understand him. Him, as a person.

That was wrong. So very, deeply wrong.

A couple Halloweens ago, when I was in graduate school, I ended up in a conversation with two of my colleagues about the nature of death– and the existence of ghosts. I was unaware of concepts like Monism and annihilationism in Christian theology, but when one of my colleagues who had earned my respect over the two years we’d been in classes together said that he believed in ghosts, it took me by surprise. I’d been so accustomed to the belief that only children or superstitious cultures believe in ghosts– hearing it from an extremely intelligent and orthodox, sacramental Christian bowled me over.

But, I listened this time. And while I didn’t exit that conversation persuaded that ghosts exist, I had taken the time to hear out his argument and the questions I asked were because I was confused, and not because I was trying to eviscerate his argument.

One of the things that I have learned to absolutely adore about the online community I’m a part of is the sheer diversity. I’m getting to know and truly understand all the different ways my online friends approach faith– or non-faith. I have huge respect for people like Vyckie Garrison, Sarah Jones, Adam Laats, and Jonny Scaramanga. When I read their blogs, or their twitter rants, or what they post on facebook, or I have the opportunity to have a conversation with them, I sit down, shut up, and listen. 

And what I’ve learned about this form of listening is that any other kind is really pointless.

The only kind of “listening” I learned to do when I was growing up was paying attention to what they were saying so I could trip them up– to watch out for logical fallacies, for self-contradictions, for places where they were stretching, for times when what they said conflicted with my worldview. The only reason why I bothered ever talking to them was so that I could deconstruct their argument and prove them wrong.

I didn’t understand that when I was talking to someone who disagreed with me, that I was talking to a person. A human being that is worth getting to know and truly understand. I learned that when I was enduring their half of the conversation just so I could respond with a rebuttal that I was dehumanizing people. I didn’t care about them– I only cared about how they were wrong and I was right.

I bought a book on Sunday at a library book fair– The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. I don’t know anything about it, I’ve never heard of the author before, but none of that matters. I want to know. I want to understand.

In the words of one of my favorite Disney songs: if you walk in the footsteps of a stranger, you’ll learn things you never knew that you never knew.

November 5, 2013 by
Theology

fundamentalism as methodology

founation

Last week I wrote a post on “15 things not to say to a recovering fundamentalist.” The reaction I got completely blew me away, and I’m grateful for the response. Rebuilding our lives after something like Christian fundamentalism has torn through it is not an easy thing to do, and I hope that the stories we shared can help in that process for some of us.

A few of the reactions I got were . . . well, let’s just call them “interesting.” Ironically, many of these comments were variations of the “15 Things Not to Say,” which I thought was hysterical. Which, granted, it’s the internet, and you’re totally allowed to disagree with me, but still. Many of these comments were also about what I expected, and, thankfully, I came prepared. However, I don’t want to respond to each comment individually (many of which I did not publish because they violated my comment policy), because my answers would be pretty much the same. Most of the really intense negative reactions came from these sections, so that’s what I’m going to focus on today.

12. “Fundamentalism isn’t really Christianity.”

Oh, boy. I get this one so much, and I’m never entirely sure how to respond to it, because damn. What do they think Christianity is then? It’s a pretty big religion, and it’s got an awful lot of denominations. If believing that Jesus is God, literally came to earth, was crucified and resurrected and now sits on the right hand of the father, and he did all of this to save us from our sins doesn’t qualify you for Christianity, I’d like to see what does. Fundamentalism is an especially pernicious sub-culture in Christianity, but it’s not something totally different. They believe a lot of the exact same stuff that most Christians do . . .

15. “Your critiques of Christianity aren’t valid, because you’re just confusing it with your fundamentalist background.”

However, fundamentalism is really just a microcosm of Christianity in general. It’s not that there’s anything about fundamentalism that is super off-the-radar crazy that makes it obviously bad. All it is, really, is a concentrated version of Christianity. Think of every single thing you’ve ever run into at your completely normal, run-of-the-mill Protestant churches, and I guarantee you that you’ll find it in a fundamentalist church. They’re not different, really, they’re just intensified . . .

Many, many, many people intensely disagreed with me about this. I got accused of a lot of stuff, as well, one of which was “obviously not knowing my history,” which is funny, because I spent over a week writing posts on the history of Christian fundamentalism in America. A lot of people thought that I was being ridiculous, that it is “so incredibly clear” that fundamentalism is, in fact, nothing like Christianity. They bear no resemblance whatsoever.

Which, in the interests of being fair, I do agree with them on one general point: I think the spirit of fundamentalism and the spirit Jesus taught his believers are not the same thing. There are really good reasons why I’m no longer a fundamentalist, but still consider myself a Christian (although a liberal one). In that sense, which one reader called the “essence” of Christianity, I tend to agree– fundamentalism isn’t what Christianity is supposed to be.

However, that’s not the point I made. While I think that fundamentalism falls far short of an “ideal” Christianity, it is not that different from the typical American evangelical or Protestant church. That’s not to say that all of Christianity has elements of fundamentalism in it. I never made that claim, and I found the experience of people putting words in my mouth on that aspect unpleasant. I said, specifically, that in your average evangelical or Protestant church, you’re likely to find something in common with a fundamentalist stance.

If you’re not familiar with Marsden’s book Fundamentalism and American Culture, and you’re at all interested in Christian fundamentalism or the Religious Right, I highly recommend that you read it. Marsden is the one who quipped that a “fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something,” and I tend to agree with him, obviously. Another good book (much shorter and lighter read) is Olson’s Pocket History of Evangelical Theology, and he makes the argument that “Most . . . evangelicals do not wish to be called fundamentalists, even though their basic theological orientation is not very different.”

Which leads me to my main point: the difference between fundamentalism and typical American evangelicalism is not WHAT, it’s HOW.

If you ask the question “what does your typical fundamentalist believe and your typical evangelical believe that’s different?” the answer is going to be, most of the time, not that much. Theologically, they share a lot of the same territory. Christian theology, which I’ve said before, is not a monolith. There are as many theological perspectives and beliefs as there are Christians. There is no such thing as universal agreement about pretty much anything (although, there are concepts like the regula fidei). However, among evangelical Christians and fundamentalists, consensus exists for many ideas.

The problem is not what they believe. It’s how they go about believing it.

I talk about Christian fundamentalism, because that’s what I have experience with. However, fundamentalism, as a concept, isn’t strictly Christian. There’s fundamentalist versions and fundamentalist groups of nearly any ideology. I’ve talked to so many fundamentalist atheists, and fundamentalist feminists, and fundamentalist Democrats, and it all gets incredibly exhausting.

Fundamentalism, at its core, is a methodology. It’s a framework. It’s a way of thinking. It’s human pride and arrogance. It’s the belief that I’m right and everyone who doesn’t agree with me exactly is completely, utterly wrong. Modern fundamentalists believe that there are some things in their ideology that simply are not open for discussion. There are certain things that cannot be challenged, no matter how badly they need to be debated. Anytime that that ideas come before the needs of people, what you’re probably dealing with is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is rigidity, inflexibility. And it’s about advocating and promoting that inability to bend– about proselytizing some into agreeing that these are the ideas that we will fight for no matter how much we hurt people.

That is what I mean when I say you can find aspects of fundamentalism in pretty much any American church. Because, unfortunately, human nature seems to want to get fundamentalist about things. We like confidence and certainty and believing we’re the only ones who got it right. We don’t like change. Having to work through very hard, difficult questions can be a painful experience– and avoiding those questions is easy. That’s how fundamentalism can creep up on virtually anyone, even me. I have to watch out for it, too. I can get just as fundamentalist about my belief that it’s important to admit you don’t have all the answers as a traditional Christian fundamentalist can get about knowing all the answers.

Avoiding Christian fundamentalism isn’t about making sure you don’t believe the same thing they do. It’s about remembering that God is Love, and God loves us, and that Jesus said “they shall know you by your love,” and that he never said anything about “being recognizable by your correct theology.” The greatest commandment, after all, is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

September 17, 2013 by
Theology

15 things not to say to a recovering fundamentalist

facepalm

There have been plenty of things I’ve heard since I left Christian fundamentalism after spending 14 years (more than half my life) in it, and most of them make me want to tear my hair out. So, I put out a general call for some of the gems you have heard, and here’s a few that I got back.

          1. “You just need to work through your bitterness.”– Teryn

Bitterness. It’s a good idea to pretty much never use that word in particular. Bitterness, in fundie-speak, is a tool to silence anyone who is being critical. If you’re accused of “bitterness,” it means that you are incapable of viewing any situation or person “correctly,” that you lack the capacity for love and grace, and what you actually need to work on is yourself. You’re imagining things, nothing bad is happening, and you have a screw loose. This is actually a form of gaslighting– convincing the person who’s being attacked that they’re just crazy– and we’ve been beaten over the head with it for years. Just because we’re saying things about the Church that aren’t pleasant doesn’t make us bitter. Just because we sound angry doesn’t mean we’re bitter.

          2. “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” — Lydia

There are a lot of variations on this one, but it all boils down to this idea that Christianity is fine, it’s really just our personal experiences that we have to get over. And, I get why this one comes up a lot. For Christians who haven’t experienced either a) fundamentalism or b) spiritual abuse, their religion is one of the best, most wonderful, spectacular things in their life and they couldn’t imagine living without it. For us, though? It’s not even remotely the same feeling. When Christianity has been the weapon used to beat you, sometimes, throwing the whole thing out is the only healthy thing left to do.

          3. “You were never really a Christian.” — Libby Anne

It’s the teachings of “eternal security” and “by their fruits you shall know them” taken one step too far. And, frankly, it’s codswallop. By any measure, people who grew up in Christian fundamentalism, prayed the sinner’s prayer, loved God, loved Jesus . . . they were Christians any way you look at it. Just because they’re not Christians now has absolutely zero bearing on if they were Christians then. The same thing goes if they don’t fit your particular criteria for what you think a “Christian” is.

          4. “If you’re not currently attending a church, you have walked away from God.” — KR Taylor

People usually come to me armed with Hebrews 10:25 — “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together,” which is really just code for “real Christians go to church.” Which, seriously, asking some of us to go back to church is like asking a soldier with severe PTSD to go back to the battlefield, or asking a battered wife to go back to her abusive husband. You’re telling us that the only way we can be a “True Christian” is if we go to a building where all the other “True Christians” are once a week, and aside from sounding ridiculous, it’s inconsiderate and displays an astounding lack of compassion. If you’re telling someone who you know has been spiritually abused to get their ass back in church, all it means is that you haven’t been actually listening to us. If you were listening, you’d know exactly how hurtful and dismissive you sound.

          5. “You need to work this out with trembling and fear.” — Dani

Also known as, “Are you sure you want to be asking these questions?” Questions, in many arenas of Christianity, make a lot of us uncomfortable. The unfortunate thing that I’ve encountered the most is that I grew up understanding more about the God of the Old Testament than a lot of “typical” Christians I’ve encountered since getting outside of fundamentalism. Questions like “is God really a genocidal megalomaniac?” or “How is it fair or loving to hold millions of people accountable for something they’ve never heard of?” are legitimate, but they’re also not easy. As fundamentalists, we tend to be intimately familiar with an angry, jealous, righteous God, and trying to figure out how that’s the same Person that is also supposed to be Love is hard. Beyond hard, at times. It’s downright impossible for many of us.

          6. “I wish people just knew that if they remembered how good Jesus’ love for us is, these things wouldn’t seem so hard!” — Hännah

This one feels . . . empty. I’m super happy for all those people who have had amazing experiences with Jesus in their religion, but how good God or Jesus is doesn’t really change the fact that a lot of people’s lives are hell holes or that a lot of people who claim Jesus’ name have done some heinously evil things. And telling us just to ignore our “hardships” because “Jesus loves you!” is basically meaningless. It’s like splashing orange juice on a bullet wound. Sure, orange juice is awesome, and Vitamin C is good for you, but it’s not going to do anything to help.

          7. “Why do you have to criticize the Church? Do you hate Christians?” — Boze

Probably more than a lot of these, this one makes me want to tear my hair out and beat my head against the wall. I think this is another example of the Christian persecution complex gone crazy.  There’s this perception that Christianity is under constant, brutal attack on all fronts, and it’s a battle we’re all gloriously and nobly fighting, but it’s going to overwhelm us at some point and then everything will be terrible. This results in any form of criticism whatsoever being perceived as an “attack.” If what we have to say about the Church isn’t all happy-happy-joy-joy, then we should just stay quiet because we’re just making Christianity look bad. To ex-fundamentalists, this is a line we’re more than familiar with. Defending the reputation of the organization at the cost of actual people is a line we know by heart.

          8. Quoting Jeremiah 29:11. Or Romans 8:28. Or pretty much any hand-picked verse about God working everything out. — Abi

Proof-texting. If there’s one thing that a lot of Christians, but fundamentalists in particular, are exceedingly good at, it’s this. Most of the pastors and preachers I’ve heard are the Kings of Taking Verses out of Context and Making it Sound Good. First of all, using verses like Jeremiah 29:11 (“I know the plans I have for you”) is bad hermeneutics.  Also, throwing single verses at us isn’t very helpful, and is really just frustrating. When Bible verses enter the conversation like this, it usually means that whoever we’re talking to is done listening, and they’ve decided the most helpful thing they can do is use a trite cliché we’ve heard exactly 164,455,795 times before.

          9. “You’re hurting the church. We need unity, not division.”

If I had a nickle.

It’s related to the “do you hate Christians?” comment, but this one is specifically an order to shut up and color. Criticisms of Christianity are not sowing division, just to be clear. There are all kinds of things that sow division– like telling the people in Moore, OK that they should be grateful that God deigned to destroy their homes, or covering up child molestation by pastors in your churches for over 30 years– but standing up for the broken isn’t one of them.

          10. “I’m a/my church is fundamentalist, and I’m/we’re not anything like what you’re describing.”

I run into this sentiment a lot. In fact, when I put out my request for this on twitter, one of the people who responded said “I’m a fundamentalist. Please don’t throw stones.” Which, was just . . . ironically funny, but also made me sigh. I use the words fundamentalist and fundamentalism to talk about a specific Christian movement, and I use the accepted term to describe it. I know a lot of people who claim the label “fundamentalist”– in fact, one of my best and dearest friends does– who don’t actually fit. There is a difference between traditionalism, religious conservatism, and adhering to “fundamentals,” which is really just Protestant orthodoxy, and fundamentalism. I’m using the term as it is modernly defined.

However, there are a lot of people who are fundamentalist and fit exactly what I’m describing, and still say this. Which, just . . . boggles.

          11. “If you are truly seeking God in this time, he will lead you to the Truth.” — Trischa

And if I’m led to believing in universalism? Or atheism? Or neo-paganism? Somehow, I don’t think they’ll believe me, because “Truth” usually means “whatever I think the Bible says.” The catch in this statement is “If you are truly seeking.” And they get to determine what “truly seeking” entails. If I don’t eventually end up agreeing with them, welp, I must not have been truly seeking!

          12. “Fundamentalism isn’t really Christianity.”

Oh, boy. I get this one so much, and I’m never entirely sure how to respond to it, because damn. What do they think Christianity is then? It’s a pretty big religion, and it’s got an awful lot of denominations. If believing that Jesus is God, literally came to earth, was crucified and resurrected and now sits on the right hand of the father, and he did all of this to save us from our sins doesn’t qualify you for Christianity, I’d like to see what does. Fundamentalism is an especially pernicious sub-culture in Christianity, but it’s not something totally different. They believe a lot of the exact same stuff that most Christians do– which was a huge shock when I eventually figured that one out. But, they take the hard-edged stance that they’re the only true Christians. So, it’s always funny to me when a non-fundamentalist says the exact same thing a fundamentalist would say about them.

          13. “Be careful you don’t lose your faith.” — Hännah

People are genuinely concerned about us, and just want to make sure that we’re ok. However, the concept that we could be “ok” without religion, without Christianity– it’s a little bit too far outside the box for a lot of Christians. To a lot of the people I know, living without their faith would be pretty unthinkable. Thoughts like “I don’t know how people survive without Jesus” (which is a modern remix of “you can do all things through Christ”) are pretty common among Christians– and they mean it. To be honest, I’ve said that sort of thing on more than one occasion. But, let me assure you: we are just fine. For a lot of us, “losing our faith” was the best– and hardest– thing that ever happened to us.

          14. “I’ll pray for you.” — Lana

And what they mean by this is “I hope God shows you exactly how wrong you are soon!” (Thanks to Angela). Also, please avoid this one. If there’s a more empty, meaningless phrase in all of Christianity, I’d like to hear it, because I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist. When someone says something like this, what most recovering fundies hear is “I don’t care about your problems, I want to exit this conversation, and please don’t even mention the fact that you’ve had a bad experience to me ever again.”

          15. “Your critiques of Christianity aren’t valid, because you’re just confusing it with your fundamentalist background.”

And, for me, this is the one that makes me want to rage-stomp. Because yes, my background was pretty bad. Yes, the church I grew up in was pretty crazy. Yes, the easiest way I have of describing my experience is by calling the whole thing a cult.

However, fundamentalism is really just a microcosm of Christianity in general. It’s not that there’s anything about fundamentalism that is super off-the-radar crazy that makes it obviously bad. All it is, really, is a concentrated version of Christianity. Think of every single thing you’ve ever run into at your completely normal, run-of-the-mill Protestant churches, and I guarantee you that you’ll find it in a fundamentalist church. They’re not different, really, they’re just intensified. Because of that, my background makes me more qualified to speak about some issues, because I have more experience with more aspects of it than your typical church-goer. I actually know what some of these teachings do when they’re consistently enforced.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And . . . that wraps it up for me. What about you? What are some things you’ve heard that just make you go crazy?

UPDATE: I’ve written two follow-up posts. One is on the things you should say, and the other explains more about fundamentalism as a sub-set of Christianity.

September 11, 2013 by
Theology

struggling to find a safe place in church

church building

Every time I walk into a church service, I feel fear.

Every time I listen to a sermon, I wait. Wait for the words to cut and make me bleed again.

Every time I open my Bible, I flinch at the voices in my head.

This is what being a Christian has become for me. I’ve been avoiding writing about this, because anytime I think about it, I feel exposed and raw. But… church, and Christianity itself, rarely feels safe for me anymore. I don’t feel protected, I don’t feel valued, I don’t feel loved.

I am told, by Christian leaders who have followers in the millions, that my existence as a woman is inconvenient for them, these powerful men. My body is distracting to them, merely a temptation. My feelings are unworthy of their attention– the fact that I have emotions and am willing to acknowledge their rightful place makes me week, inferior.

I am told that even though I am a victim of psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse, it is within my power to bring healing without their help. They only seek to challenge me to grow outside of my bitterness and hatred. Let it go, they say, in what feels like one voice. You are the one holding yourself back. And when I ask for space, for time, for safety, I am denied. We won’t cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s up to you to bring yourself to our level, not the other way around.

So I run to my Bible, and in the Gospels I find peace. If nothing else, I can cling to Jesus, the man who loved the broken. But every time I start feeling comfortable with a book like Romans, a man in my facebook feed uses chapters 8 and 9 to tell abuse victims that we are not living the life God wants for us. We’re not mature. We’re letting our “Christian depression” get the better of us. Let go and let God they say. Or, I try to find comfort in a book like Galatians, but then I reach chapter 5 and all I want to do is run and cry and scream because all I can hear from those verses is Samantha you are wholly corrupt and doesn’t the fact you desire comfort mean you shouldn’t have it?

And then I read an article, and I spend an entire week digging into yarek naphal, a euphemism for miscarriage, and I go searching, begging for answers. From the Christians, all I receive is silence. I send out letters to famous translators, to the committees that decided to translate it miscarry, asking them why, and all I get back is three lines that mean go away and leave us big, important men alone little girl. So I turn to Judaism, and that’s where the peace begins to come. Because I don’t know what to do, what to think about Numbers 5:27 and God forcing abortions, but they speak calm and comfort. Isn’t it possible that God understood their middle-Eastern Bronze age culture? Isn’t it possible that the Sotah meant protection for innocent wives, protection from jealous husbands who had no cause to be so?

And I struggle. I wrestle with God and his church.

Because I don’t want to leave. I desperately want to stay, but it’s hard when on Sunday morning it’s the men who get a four-week mini-series on how to be epic, on how men have a vision to change the world, but women receive thank you for being our mothers. A man can fight and win against the furies to receive honor, but women, we labor to bring new life into the world, and they give us a rose.

It’s hard when on Tuesday night it seems like no one in that room understands doubt and fear and struggle. If you’re an atheist, it’s because you’re denying God. You are blatantly ignoring mountains of evidence. You are “willfully ignorant,” and look, Peter says so and all I want to do is throw my Bible across the room and scream THAT BOOK WAS PROBABLY NOT EVEN WRITTEN BY PETER.

Some days, I can’t believe in anyone besides Jesus, but I don’t even know what it means to believe. I curl up in a ball and weep, desperately clinging to the last shred of faith it feels that I have left. And then I go to church, and it feels like that last shred is being torn away from me in a cloud of dizzying confidence and practiced ease.

I wonder– am I the only one in this room who doubts? Am I the only one who struggles? I see hands being lifted up, and bodies swaying, people around me sing-shouting about the mercies of God, and I want to know do you know what that means?

I feel like a liar, a cheat, a charlatan. I sit in church, I lead Bible studies, and I realize that I can make-believe, I can pretend. The confidence, the self-assurance? It’s coming from me. I can read Esther and try to find something in it, something worth sharing, and I arrive at Bible study with my neatly-packaged truism about being like Mordecai, who didn’t know what to do, where to turn, but who didn’t spend time agonizing over it– he only did what he thought to be best, and left the rest to God. And that should be us, I say– we can only play the cards we’ve been dealt. But, mostly, I identify with Haman, and I try to say that, but there’s a nervous titter. Haman, the man who wanted to commit genocide? And I think yes, because he’s the only human character in this entire book. Haman is the one who feels real to me.

And I hate that the words of the Bible have been used to damage me, that I can still hear the voice of my cult leader screaming in my head, telling me all I need to know, and I hate that I can listen to someone I know beyond all doubt is a wonderful, loving man, who will say the exact same words. He doesn’t scream them, but he doesn’t have to.

And I hate that walking down the hallway to the auditorium feels like being led to slaughter, that the only thing that’s waiting for me in that darkened room is all my fears. I sit through the song service because of my physical pain, and I know that people probably aren’t staring, but I don’t want to look around, because I’m afraid that they are. Afraid of the people from my childhood that would have seen, and would have told me that the worship of God deserves my respect. I listen to the sermon, barely breathing, because the pastor is a good, good man, a man I know has lived through brutality, but I wait. Wait for him to say the one thing that could start to unravel me. And that won’t be what he wants, I know that, but that doesn’t help. I shrink into my seat and fight with myself just to listen.

I know I’m not alone. I know I’m not the only one struggling. Here, from my readers, I hear the same struggles. I see them played out all over the internet, on twitter, on blogs, in comments. Slowly, I realize that twitter is more my church than anything else has been. I have more communion in talking to friends I’ve never seen than I do in my church building, with people who are looking me in the eye.

I want this from my church: I want a safe place to come, knowing I am not the only one with questions, and walk with people who aren’t more interested in comfortable answers than they with walking in the gray and shadowy place with me, the place where answers come rarely, if at all.

July 26, 2013 by
Theology

my time as an agnostic

wanderer

I have briefly touched on the few years I spent as an agnostic before, but I’ve never really explored what happened to me in writing. It’s a hard thing for me to do, because I spent those years experiencing intense cognitive dissonance— which is why I describe what I experienced during these years as agnosticism instead of atheism, although it’s more complicated than that.

But, I want to try to stumble through this story because of something that happened last night. If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw me rant about it for a little bit, and I’m glad I got that out there, but I realized that my story could be important for people– especially those of faith– to understand what it’s like to be an non-believer. There are several common stereotypes about unbelief, and many of them revolve around painting atheists, especially, as immoral monsters who reject an “overwhelming flood of evidence” because they “just can’t stand the Truth of God.” That’s certainly what I believed about non-belief . . . until it happened to me.

When I was 16 years old, I developed tendonitis in my wrists, which prevented me from ‘serving’ my church as the pianist. After my “pastor” openly attacked me from the pulpit and then lied to my parents about what he had done, I mentally absented myself from church. I refused to pay attention to any of the sermons. I stopped listening to or practicing Christian or sacred music. I wrote stories during church. I only participated in church activities when absolutely forced to. At this point, I still believed in God, but anything to do with church– I didn’t want any part of it.

Initially, I thought this reticence to engage with church was simply because of what my “church” was– which I now refer to as a church-cult, and was horribly spiritually abusive. Right before I started my sophomore year in college, my parents were finally able to escape the church-cult, but where they decided to attend . . . made everything worse.

Over the years, our church-cult had hemorrhaged a ridiculous number of members– and many of these families began attending another Independent Fundamental Baptist church half an hour further south. The first Sunday I went with my family, I struggled all that morning with what I can now identify as a mild panic attack, although I had no idea what it was at the time. All I knew was that simply going to church made me feel so physically sick (I would get lightheaded, shaky, nervous, and nauseated) that I just didn’t want to go.

My parents forced me out of bed enough Sundays that I was able to get a reliable feel for the people at church, and what I encountered depressed and horrified me. Because, there had been a part of me that had dared to hope that this church would be better. That it would be different. And while it was different and slightly better –the pastor didn’t scream in people’s faces and directly confront them about “sin” in front of the entire congregation — it was still awful.

  • The pastor was inexcusably racist; he truly, deeply, believed in racial segregation and that interracial marriage is a sin. He told me this, explicitly, to my face, while simultaneously saying that he would “never preach this from the pulpit, because it would step on people’s toes.” This from a man who claimed, from the pulpit, that he would never be ashamed of preaching what he believed. After this conversation, I blatantly refused to ever go back.
  • The young people at the church were . . . abhorrent, in general. They behaved unconscionably toward my younger sister, which I have never tolerated well. Only one person in the entire church made any effort to befriend her. The rest mocked and belittled her at nearly every opportunity.
  • A few specific people –men my age — were exalted in true “preacher boy” fashion. One of them used his position as a police officer to degrade me in front of a huge crowd of people, and even though he was lying, the result was that I was painted as the liar for daring to call the “preacher boy” on his abuse. When I followed Matthew 18 to the letter, I was told by a deacon and the pastor that I was making too big a deal of an innocent remark, that he only meant it in good fun.
  • Certain people obtained celebrity status in the church because of various circumstances; however, while there were two women with severe medical conditions (one who struggled with cancer, another with osteogenesis imperfecta), the only one who received any attention or help from anyone at church was the woman with cancer, while the other woman was completely ignored, to the point of almost being shunned.

I could list many more examples, but the end result was that I couldn’t stomach church any more, because even in a church that was “better,” it was still intolerable. At this point, my aversion to church spread from just my limited experience with the church-cult I’d grown up in, to churches in general.

This aversion extended to my experiences at my fundamentalist college, but this is where it gets complicated. Because it was during my sophomore year in college that I slipped from belief in God to total doubt.

But I hid it.

I hid it so well, that if you asked anyone who knew me at the time, anyone, they would tell you that I was most definitely still a Christian. I walked the walk, talked the talk, everything. Nothing, on the surface, changed. I even ended up engaged to a man who claimed that he wanted to be a missionary. I went to prayer group, I led devotionals, I prayed with friends, I talked about the Bible– hell, I defended the Bible and Christianity. I even talked about some bizarre re-conversion experience that I had during the early stages of my junior year. Occasionally, I even got excited about Christian discussions and theological discoveries I’d stumbled across in research for my classes.

When I chose a graduate school, I chose Liberty University. It was certainly more liberal than my undergrad college, but it was still a Christian school, and I chose it partly because it was a Christian school (but mostly because I knew they would accept my unaccredited degree without a fight). And during my first year, the first time in my life when I had the freedom not to attend church and I didn’t, I was still at a Christian college. I was still surrounded by believers, and I still looked and talked like one. If you asked the people who I interacted with during grad school, they’d be surprised if they found out I didn’t believe 99% of the things that came out of my mouth (or… maybe not. A lot of the things I said were rather ridiculous).

But, all that time . . . I couldn’t believe.

And while it may have started out as disgust toward my church experiences, it slowly developed into a completely inability to believe in God.

I want to make that perfectly clear, because I think it’s one area that many people skip over, or don’t really understand. It’s not that I went away to college and had some sort of Baptist rumspringa. It’s not that I hadn’t been educated well enough about my faith– I was so well steeped in apologetics and logic that I had a doctoral candidate at Princeton and Duke tell me that I should pursue a career in Philosophy of Religion.

It wasn’t that I was angry at God, although in a small way it started there. I was furiously angry at God for a long time. How could he have let everything happen to me and my family? How did he let evil people exist? How did he let totally evil men lead his churches? How was it that so many people who claimed to believe in Jesus were some of the most awful people I’d ever met?

After a while of being angry, though, the anger just . . . went away. And what replaced it was non-belief. I wasn’t angry at God anymore, because I didn’t even know if he existed. Suddenly, it just . . . didn’t matter to me if he existed or not. Not believing in him wasn’t some conscious decision I made. I didn’t have a sudden epiphany where lightning struck me out of a clear sky and I decided that God’s existence didn’t matter.

I clung, desperately, to my belief. I read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, where he calls God a “genocidal maniac,” and that passage was horrifying and so powerfully compelling, because it was an image of God I innately understood. But, even in that moment, when horror rose up inside of me so fiercely I wanted to scream and cry and rage and vomit, I wanted to believe. And for a while after that experience, I thought I did believe.

Until, one day, I realized that I couldn’t believe, and that I hadn’t really believed in God for a long time. In some ways, I clutched at my faith by constant debates and discussions and research. I spent a long time searching for a way to believe in God. And I didn’t find one.

He just . . . wasn’t there.

 

July 10, 2013 by