Dwindling in Unbelief

mood: accomplished
music: Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’

It is a universally-acknowledged fact that young children, almost invariably, adopt the political and religious beliefs of their parents – and they usually do so without question. Nobody has ever heard a five-year-old ask “But what will the benefit of the new tax legislation be to the American consumer?” As we grow older, of course, we start to realize there’s other people out there with different views. Some people think that God hates homosexuals. Some people are dirty Calvinists. And other, weirder people use Apple computers.

My parents, being white and from midwest Iowa, are, rather unsurprisingly, Protestant Christians. So were their parents and probably their parents, though active levels of involvement no doubt varied greatly. My grandfather on my father’s side, for instance, didn’t give a flying flip about the church so far as I could tell. In contrast, his wife (my grandmother) is a deeply religious woman who still reads Our Daily Bread, keeping her place by pointing at the text with her middle finger, a fact which startled me the first time I saw her doing it. My parents took the “actively involved” route, and so my childhood was one of church twice every Sunday for almost 18 years¹, and once on Wednesday, and a varied sprinkling of church-related activities all around. My parents both sang in the choir. My father served as a deacon and drove a bus full of bickering old ladies and one particularly odd old man named Harold. (“Haaa!” he would cackle, like a hyena with emphysema. “Where’s your girlfriend?”) We were in a “Family Circle” at church, which is what most churches these days would call a small group, except it was big and populated by boring middle-class white people.

Of course in church, the general idea is that God exists and is a very real person, and you are expected to go along with this idea. This I did without too much hesitation – after all, I was told He was real all my life. This particular brand of Christianity is one that sort of…pretends…that all of science is either a huge conspiracy to disprove God, or that science is wrong whenever it contradicts the Bible, or just ignores it completely. I was taught that God literally created the world in six days, that Adam and Eve existed and that their original sin was the whole reason why the world was doomed to a fiery death.²

Religious reasons were also why me and my sister were homeschooled most of our lives. Homeschooling, a phenomenon that exists primarily in the midwest, is chosen by parents for a variety of reasons: mistrust of public school’s ability to teach well, a belief that learning is not facilitated by spending eight hours shut in a brightly-lit room with a textbook, or, as in our case, religious reasons. See, public schools taught evolution, and sending us away to be taught that was unacceptable. So the decision was made to homeschool me and my sister, thereby securing me a place in the Future Socially Awkward Children’s Club.

The curriculum that we used at home closely mirrored what we learned at church, only it was presented in a more academic fashion. The entire learning process was infused with the power of God. In some of the more awful books, cartoon characters with implausible names “introduced” academic concepts in a Biblical fashion and with unnatural cheerfulness.

Think I’m kidding?

“I thank God for his gift of prepositional phrases. Now let’s prayerfully consider these verb conjugations.”

“Hallelujah, Pastor Lovejoy! Now Pudge³ and I know all about long division!”⁴

This was annoying in the extreme, but nothing compared to the fundamentalism I would be exposed to in our next church, Christian Life Worship Center, when I was thirteen.

The church I grew up in was fairly tame as churches go. Drums were “edgy”. Clapping was okay, but nothing too extreme. The services went like clockwork. You knew the service was close to over when the pastor gave the uncreative missive “…and with this I close.” and Mike the Organist would pop like a mild-mannered assassin out of his Secret Hatch, sit down, and start a soothing chord progression. Christian Life Worship Center was different. They were a bit more…wild. Clapping was not only encouraged, so was dancing and shouting and all manner of hootin’ and hollerin’. A team of middle-aged women waved banners and on the song “Walk By Faith”, the congregation would often literally get out of their seats and march in a circle around the seats like some kind of upholstery-covered Jericho. They were a little more anti-gay, a little more “If you’re sick, it’s a faith problem”, a little more…out there. They placed a particular emphasis on finances, and believed that if you weren’t blessed with money, you were doing something wrong. (They never actually articulated it that way, but it was the general idea.) But it sounded good to us, and I went along with it, for nearly six years.

I tell you all this to set the story up. None of this was weird to me, at the time. Of course, now I look back and wonder how anybody could walk into a church like Christian Life and not run screaming from the room. But at the time, it was perfectly natural. And it was when I was maybe ten that I distinctly recall having my first faith-questioning experience. Nothing big or earth-shattering, I just remember asking my mom why God didn’t do signs (miracles) anymore, and that it would be nice to see one to know if He was really there. Mom was not terribly pleased – I believe she pulled out the Bible verse where Jesus rebukes some people for wanting the same thing, calling them a “wicked and perverse” generation. I let the matter drop, and whatever doubts I may have had got buried and ignored for the next eight years.

Eventually, me and Christian Life had a rather dramatic falling out, facilitated by the pastors son’s rampant egotism. I left, and went with my friend Kamper to his church, a megachurch called Point of Grace. And it was here that my faith would begin to slowly dissolve over a period of four years.

The story is quite familiar to anyone who knows me. I eventually became the technical director at the church. The leadership at Point of Grace was underhanded and more interested in making money and being a showman than on leading people to God. It was obvious to all of us who worked on the production team – I showed at at the very beginning of what was a very fast downward spiral. This eventually led to five firings, and multiple resignations, including my own. The biggest thing that POG showed me was that pastors do not necessarily lead a life of virtue, something I’m sure I knew but had never thought about before. Now, I was in the midst of a church where a team of leaders met once a week to pray that Jeff (the then-executive pastor) would not be made lead pastor. (Think about that for a second.) There were multiple acts of stupidity, but the point is that for the first time, I suddenly realized that what went on behind the scenes of a supposedly virtuous organization could be just as corrupt as any corporation.

Around this time I also met Emily, a wonderful young girl with cystic fibrosis. I met her a few months before going to work for the church, when I was working at Methodist hospital. Emily was (and is) a very cool kid, and I distinctly remember as I walked out to my car one night after hanging out with her being hit by a rather sickening feeling of remorse. Suddenly, all the reasons that Christians always give for people’s illness no longer made sense. Here was this child – this innocent child – stricken by a horrible disease likely to claim her life before she was 40 and there was no reason for it. A simple string of malfunctioning DNA copied a horrible mistake to every cell in her body. All the Christian-ey reasons fell short. I eventually rationalized the incident away, but the seed of doubt was there, and it grew.

Finally in March 2007 during the midst of more massive stupidity at POG, thing started finally clicking – I remember suddenly thinking “The evidence is ambiguous, at best. Why should I believe in God?”. I put my thoughts into a blog post⁵. It was sort of the beginning of the end. I started re-reading the Bible, this time not dismissing the inconsistencies and injustices with the Christian platitudes I always used before.

These days I consider myself an atheist, in the sense of “I do not believe in a God or gods.” I believe there is a non-zero chance that a god exists, but that chance is very small. I’m open to new evidence, new ideas that might lead me to God, but so far I haven’t found that evidence. I remain unconvinced by the idea that God simply remains outside of “the box”, because Christianity almost invariably paints a picture of an interventionalist God – and intervention can be measured and tested. In fact, the Bible makes some claims that under any other circumstances, we would (rightly) regard as extremely unlikely and place a heavy burden of proof upon the person doing the telling. With the Bible, this proof is lacking.

As I said, I want to follow wherever the evidence leads. I’m not one of those militant atheists who wants to belittle and creative divisions. Our society is already severely Balkanized with regards to religion (and many other issues), I see no reason to draw more hostile lines in the sand. If Christianity is true, then so be it. Let the evidence speak for itself. As for me, until that happens, I’ll keep dwindling in unbelief.

Exit, stage left.
Sparks

^{1)I particularly hated Sunday evening church. It was so boring.
2) The fallen nature of man was also invoked to explain why Tyler Camus was such a huge ass to me the entirety of my time at that church. But that’s a story for another time.
3) Yes, he was the fat kid.
4) I am not making this up. They were apparently not aware they were using the name of a Simpson’s character. And in case anybody is wondering, no, I wouldn’t change my upbringing for anything. It’s why I am who I am today.
5) This post.}