Read Losing My Religion Online
Authors: William Lobdell
When I clicked on my in-box, I was stunned to see an entire screen full of e-mails responding to my story. I checked the next screen and the next and the next—all filled, about 100 messages in just one hour. Fear came roaring back, as I imagined the venom my story had unleashed. But then I scanned the subject lines: “Stay on the Beat,” “Thanks,” “!!!,” “Offering Hope,” “Congratulations on your hard-won spiritual progress.” I opened the first e-mail that had come in:
Thank you for writing so frankly about your journey. This was a truly beautiful piece and I believe that many of us Catholics who are struggling through understanding our church’s horrible decisions to protect itself will be touched.
I opened the next one.
My prayers are with you and your family! I pray as I write this letter to you that God is again working in your life. For without God in our life, we are nothing.
In the first batch of 100 e-mails, only two were negative. The rest, each in its own way, were positive. Atheists welcomed me to their world. Evangelical Christians tried to woo me back into the fold. Jews and Muslims wondered whether I might find their religion more appealing. The vast majority of the senders simply said they appreciated the honesty about my religious doubts and admitted that they had experienced similar uncertainties. As one Catholic priest wrote: “Welcome to the edge. There are lots of us here.”
This kind of response was completely unexpected. It was humbling and comforting. There were people across the spiritual spectrum who had serious doubts. Many said they felt reluctant to express them. Their stories—tender and infused with raw honesty—poured in. More than 2,700 of them, in the end.
I kept trying to go to bed, only to find myself getting up to log in and seeing that scores more had arrived. The e-mails came from everyone: pastors who no longer believed in God but couldn’t tell a soul; a priest deep within the Vatican who voiced his support and his own struggles; a theology professor at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, who said his provost was going to make the story required reading for students; television star Kirk “Growing Pains” Cameron, who invited me out for coffee, believing he could bring me back to Christ.
Hundreds of believers put my name on prayer lists. My newsroom desk soon filled with books, pamphlets, workbooks and CDs that promised to get my relationship with God back on track. I received scores of lunch invitations from pastors and other concerned Christians wanting to keep me in the fold. People sent me links and notes showing how my story had become fodder for sermon topics, radio and television shows, bloggers, podcasts and websites, and university and seminary classes. I received requests to speak on radio and television shows, at churches and atheist meetings and at colleges. The tone of response caught me off guard, but it was what Jesus would have expected of his followers: plenty of love, understanding and gentleness. The outpouring of concern didn’t rekindle my belief in Christianity, but it strengthened my faith in humanity.
My story provoked many questions, but two were asked again and again: In spiritual terms, what did I call myself—an agnostic, an atheist or something else? What did I tell my children about my loss of faith?
How to label myself was the toughest question. People—especially journalists—love labels. They are a convenient shorthand to put people neatly into a category. But my feelings about God weren’t all that tidy. The truth was, I didn’t know whether any label fit me. In a couple of interviews, I called myself a reluctant atheist, but that didn’t really capture where I was. I disliked the term “agnostic”—it seemed too wimpy, implying I didn’t quite have the guts to commit to atheism. I knew that I didn’t believe in a God who intervened in earthly matters, but I didn’t have a clue whether life here was put into motion by a creator or by cosmic accident. I leaned toward the creator explanation, because it seemed to me life couldn’t come from nothing. But if so, who created the creator? This was a question I have yet to figure out. The closest I could get to a label was something along the lines of “skeptical deist,” “wavering deist” or “reluctant atheist.” My new God is probably close to the God that Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein believed in—a deity that can be seen in the miracles of nature, the complexity of DNA or the wonder of physics. But this God—and I’m not sure even He exists—is incompatible with the God of the Bible.
The answer as to what I told my children comes in two parts because of my children’s ages. When the story was published, my two oldest boys were 18 and 15 and my two youngest were nine and six. My older sons had gone with us to Sunday school and youth nights at church but stopped attending when we did. We tapered off slowly enough that they didn’t question why we no longer went to church, and I didn’t offer an explanation. I didn’t mind accepting responsibility for my eternal soul—if it turned out I had one—but I didn’t want to be on the hook for sending my sons to hell, no matter how remote the possibility. I figured I’d let them decide what to believe. The morning the story came out, I sat down with my two older boys and asked them to read it. I told them I’d answer any questions they had. I was anxious about how they would react and felt guilty that I had avoided the subject until now. But I soon realized that I had once again underestimated how intuitive children are. Even with no words spoken, they had pretty much figured out where I sat with God. They said my story wasn’t a surprise, and they had reached the same conclusion independently. It may sound odd, but I was proud of them for taking a critical look at religion. I’m also guessing that as teenagers, their spiritual journey was just beginning. If they do become Christians at a later time, that will be their decision, and I will respect it—though we’ll have some lively debates during Thanksgiving dinner.
My two younger boys were a different story. Matthew, the nine-year-old, had only vague memories of church from long ago. Oliver was too young to remember anything. I’d been careful not to reveal my disbelief to them—it just didn’t seem right. With the two little guys, we treat God a little like Santa Claus. They think he’s real, and often ask questions about him that all kids ask; for instance, how does God see everyone at once? We answer as best we can. Yes, it’s inconsistent with my new beliefs, but there will be time when they are older to fill them in about my thoughts on God and religion. I’m not ready to tell a six-year-old that there’s no God and no heaven—or no Santa Claus.
I think many people responded to the story in part because I was not part of the new atheist movement that uses evangelical zeal to warn people about the stupidity and evils of religion. The best-selling trio of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are engaging polemists and, especially in Hitchens’s case, dazzling writers. But I am not as confident in my disbelief as they are. Their disbelief has a religious quality to it that I’m not ready to take on. I look at my Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends—many of them intellectuals—and it stops me from insisting that only I know the truth. I know only what is true for me. There are times when I feel confident in my new position of disbelief and catch myself looking down my nose at the faithful who worship a God whom I believe doesn’t exist. Is there much difference between the absurdity of Scientologists and their sacred E-Meters that allegedly trace the emotions of adherents, the Mormons and their belief that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, and the Jews and Christians and their belief that the sound of trumpets caused the fortified walls of Jericho to come tumbling down?
Religious ceremonies I once thought were exquisitely beautiful—the ordination of a priest, for instance—now seem almost comical to me, what with the incense, the holy water, the costumes and the freshly minted priest prostrate on the floor. But then I remember where I was a short time ago, viewing nonbelievers with sadness because they didn’t know the Lord. With all that has happened to me, I don’t feel qualified to judge anyone else.
My piece did receive criticism, the most consistent being that I had witnessed the sinfulness of man and mistakenly mixed that up with a perfect God. I understand the argument but I don’t buy it. If the Lord is real, it would make sense for the people of God, on average, to be superior morally and ethically to the rest of society. Statistically, they aren’t. I also believe that God’s institutions, on average, should function on a higher moral plain than governments or corporations. I don’t see any evidence of this. It’s hard to believe in God when it’s impossible to tell the difference between His people and atheists.
In some conservative corners, the front-page play of the story was viewed with suspicion. The critics wondered whether the essay would have gotten the same exposure if I had had the reverse experience—moving from atheist to enthusiastic evangelical. Because it would have been equally interesting, I think the editors would have played it the same. There’s plenty of bias in the newsroom, but usually a good story trumps it.
The harshest criticism came nearer to home. One close friend, an evangelical, said the story was irresponsible, damaging the Body of Christ and possibly causing people to turn away from God, forcing them to spend eternity separated from Him. This angers me because it reflects a double standard. People of faith naturally demand the right to express themselves and to be granted tolerance by those who disagree. Someone without faith should receive the same treatment. A Catholic neighbor bitterly accused me of going through a midlife crisis and wondered why I couldn’t keep my doubts to myself. I argued that if I was experiencing a midlife crisis, I was cheating myself. I didn’t have a Porsche or a mistress; I had just stopped believing in God. My first wife—whom I hadn’t spoken with in years—called me at work and asked me what it felt like to have wasted most of my adult life believing in something that didn’t exist.
My mother-in-law, a regular at Sunday Mass, simply chose to avoid the subject. Another relative on Greer’s side of the family, however, decided to attack my disbelief head-on. He left a long message for me on my work voice mail, informing me that the reason I wasn’t rich (like him) and the reason our boy Tristan had gotten Type 1 diabetes the year before was because I had turned my back on God and allowed Satan into my family. (He added that the devil also was to be credited with bringing on another of my boy’s chronic ear infections.) If I were still talking to him, I’d love to ask why his loving God would allow an innocent child to be inflicted with a life-threatening illness—or even earaches—because of the sins of his father. Why wouldn’t God protect the children and allow the devil to strike me? What kind of sadistic God did he worship? One e-mail I received from a church-going mother put it better than I could have. She had watched helplessly as two of her young children succumbed to a terrible disease.
Your column…resonated with me because I find myself at the same spiritual crossroad. Having been raised to believe in a just God, my faith was shaken when my husband and I lost our ten-year-old child to Cystic Fibrosis, a congenital disease for which there is no cure.
We felt betrayed that a loving God could bring such pain to parents who lived by the Golden Rule and followed the Ten Commandments. As we coped with our grief, we couldn’t help but wonder why our love for our child wasn’t enough to keep her alive and why our faith wasn’t bringing us any comfort.
After losing another child to the same illness, we came to the conclusion that we were naïve to believe in the Sunday School version of a deity that sits in a place called heaven and doles out rewards for good behavior and punishment for bad. We have only to look at world events and know this isn’t true.
So, who to pray to? An impersonal deity who lets bad things happen to good people? We still haven’t figured that out. But it is difficult to abandon a life-long belief. As spiritual beings our souls cry out for something to fill the vacuum. I’ve even considered going back to church in the hope of recapturing that leap of faith, but, as you so eloquently stated, “there’s no faking your faith if you’re honest about the state of your soul.”
Though I’m usually hypersensitive to criticism, this time none of it bothered me. I had detailed, as honestly as I could, my spiritual journey. The story was true. I knew this because it happened to me. No criticism would change that. I also felt deeply that I gave Christianity my best shot. Some people argued that I had never been saved (probably true) or that my faith was too shallow to withstand the rigors of the religion beat (probably not true; I’d argue my faith had been deeper than many). Several evangelicals said I lost my way when I headed down the path to the Vatican. Many Catholics believe I quit too soon. But I walked away from Christianity with no regrets, knowing I tried my best to get my faith back.
If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.
—
MARK TWAIN
,
FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR
I
RECENTLY SPOKE
about my de-conversion to a group of students at Biola University, a Christian college in Southern California. At the end of my talk, one student asked what had taken the place of God in my life. The question caught me off-guard because I’d felt no vacuum created by God’s exit. I didn’t have a good answer for her at the time, but it’s a good question and it deserves a serious answer.
It is easier to begin by explaining what else departed along with my belief, rather than what replaced it. Frustrating, endless confusion about the way the world worked disappeared. My life makes better sense now, without a personal God in the equation. My mind isn’t troubled by the unsolvable mysteries that plagued me as a believer. C. S. Lewis wrote that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” It is one of the many inspiring things said by apologists that makes absolutely no sense to me anymore. Why would God whisper to us in our pleasures but use pain as His megaphone? That sounds sick.
It can be lonely having no one in the universe as your protector. I now experience this most in the smallest of ways. For instance, I recently caught a particularly nasty strain of the stomach flu. It caused me to spend hours in the bathroom, even forcing me to lie down on the tile floor because I was too weak to return to my bed between bouts of vomiting. Shaking, sweating and in tremendous stomach pain, I became scared that I was profoundly—maybe terminally—ill. I found myself praying, just in case I had been wrong about this whole God thing.
“God, if you are real, please make me better,” I pleaded. “I know I’ve turned away from you, but I could use a little help here. Please, God, I’m sorry.” I didn’t receive an instant healing, but I did get some insight into the saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I wonder what would happen to my spirituality if I became terminally ill.
The laws of nature, circumstance and coincidence make more sense than the divine. A friend of mine reached the same conclusion as I did, but said the knowledge was a “major psychological catastrophe.” It nearly drove him insane that no loving God was protecting his children. I had the advantage of seeing too much on the religion beat. I knew of many times when faithful Christian parents lost their children. I hadn’t seen any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that children were safer with God watching over them. It reminds me of a bumper sticker peddled by atheists that makes the point rather bluntly: “20,000 children died of hunger today. Why should God answer YOUR prayers?”
At least now when I see injustice and suffering—my guitar teacher’s beautiful boy, all of three years old, died of a brain tumor the day I’m writing this—the randomness is just that. A God in heaven didn’t sit by while the little boy died. To simply know that tragic stuff just happens is a much more satisfying and realistic answer.
What the Bible promises—peace and serenity—I’ve found in larger measures as a nonbeliever. My morals and values haven’t changed. I used to see my innate beliefs about right and wrong as something God-given. I now see them as a product of tens of thousands of years of evolution, encoded in my DNA to best insure the survival of my family and myself. A sociopath, not an atheist, has no conscience and no ability to tell right from wrong.
As a believer, I tried to live up to the standards for living outlined in the Bible. (That is, the generous and loving parts of the Scripture.) Nothing has changed since my loss of faith. I still try to follow the same general ideals—morals and values that I’d argue are inherent to each human being. I still find myself stumbling, but now I don’t blame Satan. Usually when I do wrong, it’s due to selfishness and poor judgment overcoming common sense, self-restraint and experience. Truth be told, my actions aren’t much different from when I was a Christian. Many of my basic life struggles are the same. I still worry too much. Hold grudges for too long. Lie, usually in small ways, too easily. Drink more than I should. Am too impatient with the kids. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
What’s gone is the placebo of faith that was supposed to transform me into a better person, to protect me, to guide me and eventually to usher me into heaven. The placebo had stopped working long ago. And when I admitted that I had been taking the sugar pill of faith, relief swept over me. My increasing doubts about Christianity hadn’t been a sign of weakness or lack of faith or a skirmish with the devil. I had only been slowly, even unconsciously, heading for the truth.
So what
has
taken the place of God in my life? A tremendous sense of gratitude. I sense how fortunate I am to be alive in this thin sliver of time in the history of the universe. This gives me a renewed sense of urgency to live this short life well. I don’t have eternity to fall back on, so my focus on the present has sharpened.
I find myself being more grateful for each day and more quickly making corrections in my life to avoid wasted time. I’ve tightened my circle of friends, wanting to maximize time with the people I love and enjoy the most. I’ve become more true to myself because I’m not as worried about what others think of me. This may be due in part to maturity, but it also has to do with knowing what’s of real importance in my one and only life. The sound of a ticking clock, counting down the minutes of my life, is now nearly impossible to get out of my head. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s the background beat to a well-lived life.
My teenage son Tristan and I watched
Fight Club
on television the other night. One of its themes is that when people have a brush with death, their lives become richer because they appreciate them more. In one scene, after nearly killing a mini-mart attendant for no reason, the film’s antagonist, Tyler Durden, is asked, “What the fuck was the point of that?”
He answers, “Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.”
That’s what losing God has done for me. Permanent death—I don’t think I have the escape hatch to heaven anymore—now sits squarely in front of me, unmoving as I rapidly approach. And you know what? My breakfast
does
taste better. I feel the love of my family and friends more deeply. And my dreams for my life have an urgency to them that won’t allow me to put them off any longer. I can no longer slog through each day, knowing that if my time on Earth isn’t used to its fullest potential, it’s no big thing, that I have eternity with God ahead of me.
I do miss my faith, as I’d miss any longtime love, and have a deep appreciation for how it helped me mature over 25 years. Even though I’ve come to believe my religion is based on a myth, its benefits are tangible and haven’t evaporated along with my faith. But when believers try to bring me back to the fold, I want to tell them they are wasting their time. It’s hard to describe my utter lack of belief; there’s just nothing there—there’s no smoldering ember that can be coaxed back into a flame.
To borrow Buddha’s analogy, I’ve just spent eight years crossing a river in a raft of my own construction, and I’m now standing on a new shore. My raft was not made of dharma, like Buddhism’s, but of things I gathered along the way: knowledge, maturity, humility, critical thinking and the willingness to face my world as it is, and not how I wish it to be. I don’t know what the future holds in this new land. I don’t see myself crossing the river back to Christianity, as many of my former brothers and sisters in Christ predict and pray for. I don’t see myself adopting a new religion. My disbelief in a personal God now seems cemented to my soul. Other kinds of spirituality seem equally improbable.
Besides, I like my life on this unexplored shore. It’s new, exciting and full of possibilities. I wouldn’t have predicted it as a Christian, but I now feel wonderfully free—not to go on a binge of debauchery like the Prodigal Son, but to stop wrestling with the mysteries of Christianity. I can stop dreaming up excuses for the shortcomings of my faith. I felt relief when I put down what had become the heavy mantle of Christianity. In my case Jesus was wrong when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30)
I do know one thing for sure: I will never cling to my disbelief as I did to my Christianity. I long ignored the heaviness of Jesus’ yoke and the burden of faith because those facts would have put my beliefs in jeopardy.
My last major story on the religion beat detailed how DNA tests—which revealed descendants of American Indians came from Asia, not the Middle East—had undercut the traditional reading of the Book of Mormon and the words of their prophets. Soon after my story appeared, a Mormon organization called the Sunstone Education Foundation invited me to be part of a panel discussion on “The Book of Mormon in Light of DNA Studies: Where Are We Now?” When I arrived at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Religion for the symposium, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The lecture hall was filled with devout Mormons, and I was the only non-Latter-day Saint on the panel. I felt as though I had entered the lions’ den—though the lions were remarkably tame.
Despite the odds against me, the evening was going along pleasantly enough, with some interesting discussion from scholars and church historians. When it was my turn, the audience politely listened. I thought I would escape the harsh criticism I had anticipated would come my way. But then the last panelist, Clifton Jolley, spoke.
I didn’t know Jolley, but within Mormon circles, he had gained some fame as an entertaining speaker, poet and columnist. With his gray goatee, glasses and narrow face, he looked like a harmless artist of some sort. But then he launched into a bizarre, occasionally funny, often angry 45-minute tirade directed mostly at me.
Early on, he bellowed, “Shame on the
Los Angeles Times
for frightening us. Shame on the
Los Angeles Times
for pretending that it has discovered something that really matters. [That Native Americans] are not Hebrews.”
He took offense that the newspaper would even wade into Mormon matters.
“This isn’t your story, it’s our story, and we’ll tell it any damn way we please,” he said. “And if you think the story we have to tell isn’t a good story, then screw the
Los Angeles Times
!”
He went on to say that Native Americans shouldn’t worry about the DNA evidence because “being Chinese isn’t half bad….” He next lashed out against science: “If you’re a good scientist, a world-class physicist, you’re out to murder God…
“Screw you,
Los Angeles Times
!” he shouted. “They thought our stories could be proven true or false using the false tools of the apostate priesthood of science.”
He wrapped up by suggesting (I think) that the stories in the Book of Mormon didn’t have to be accurate for the faith to be real.
“After we have been defeated and all our stories proven untrue, we will perhaps come to know the more important reason and the only question that ever is—not whether the stories are true, but whether we are true to our stories,” Jolley said.
What did that
mean
—that it’s not whether the stories are true, but whether we are true to our stories?
Despite Jolley’s attack on me—which included, as I recall, an ample amount of finger pointing—I had an odd sense of serenity that night. I didn’t feel my natural urge to fight back. I sensed his out-of-proportion response was the result of someone trying desperately to defend a faith that had one too many fault lines running through it. Facts were stubborn things, so he resorted to a smokescreen of angry rhetoric, biting humor, sarcasm and clever phrases. I suspect Jolley, like most of his Mormon brothers and sisters, believed his religion had a good thing going—the church members loved each other, looked after those who had fallen on hard times, raised good families—and he didn’t need outsiders, or science, to cast doubts on the operation. Mormonism worked, so leave it alone. If too many people chipped away at it, if too much truth were revealed, the foundation that Jolley and other Mormons built their life upon might give way. At least that’s what happened to me with my religion.
Leaving the Claremont campus, I thought about how I had not been much different from Clifton Jolley most of my adult life. I had defended my faith rather blindly—if only in my own mind—and refused to acknowledge the reality before me. Because I
knew
Jesus was real—I had felt Him entering my heart, after all—attacks on Him and my faith had to be false. I believed any doubts I had were rooted in
my
shortcomings and not in the veracity of Christianity. Also, I found it nearly impossible to walk away from something that promised to provide comfort, guidance, community, protection, a sense of purpose and salvation. Americans spend billions of dollars on products that promise weight loss. Imagine how much more powerful the lure of religion is.
I recently unearthed an essay I wrote in 2003 during a week-long seminar for religion reporters at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training ground in St. Petersburg, Florida. Near the end of the week, we were asked to write something extremely personal about ourselves, an oddly easy task because the dozen reporters from across the country and Europe had gotten remarkably close in a short time and trusted each other with secrets we couldn’t tell our newsroom colleagues. I titled my piece “Spiritual Suicide.” It read in part:
I am on a narrow ledge, far above the ground. The toes of my bare feet are wrapped over the concrete edge. I’m not even leaning against the building anymore. I don’t care anymore. After two years of this, jumping would bring me rest.
A plunge wouldn’t drop me onto unforgiving pavement far below. It’s not that kind of act. Instead, my leap would be into the warm, inviting pool of unbelief.
I imagine the water would engulf me like a kind of reverse baptism. It would wash away all the doubts I’ve had about God. Once I step off this last ledge of faith, the answer [to tough questions such as why good people suffer] becomes easy: A loving God doesn’t let it happen because He doesn’t exist…
I’m seeing my spiritual life atrophy into skin and bones. God help me.