Editor’s Note: Everyone who has ever gone from religious to non-religious has a story, but lately with so many new information sources available, the journey is no longer such an internal and lonely transition. As you read this essay by a newly non-believing pastor, think about the role that different types of media played along the way. And if you have been a non-believer for a while (let’s say 5+ years), think about how this differs from your experience.
FYI: This post was written as a response to this written request that I made of the author: “Your blog offers vivid descriptions about how becoming an atheist affects your life, but it doesn’t focus much on how you actually got to be an atheist. Please tell me about that.”
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By “John Jameson”
The “how” of becoming an atheist is difficult to decipher because there weren’t one or two things that pointed me away from faith. My faith died a death of a thousand cuts. It was a complete collapse of my entire belief system. What I can say is that my realization that I had become an atheist certainly had waypoints. It was January 2013 when NPR (I’m an avid NPR fan) did a weeklong series on “Losing our Religion.” That’s when I first heard of pastors in the pulpit coming out as atheists, which I found fascinating in a moth-to-a-flame kind of way. It filled me with the same kind of questions I’m sure many readers of this blog have.
Why would a pastor become an atheist?
How do they find employment?
What happens to their social life? Their kids? Their spouses?
I believe the NPR series was when I first heard of the Clergy Project.
But it wasn’t the pastors’ stories that I found most threatening. It was a rock band in the series that gave me goose bumps.
Out of Austin, Texas there is a band called “Quiet Company” which is fronted by an ex-Christian. They made “We Are All Where We Belong” as sort of a break-up album. The singer was breaking up with God. Most of the atheism-inspired rock I’ve listened to is angst directed against religious institutions. But this album expressed the raw emotions of a man who had come to realize that God did not exist. You hear his hurt, his rage, his fears and his epiphanies. All of this is accompanied by really solid rock ballads. Hell, I’d still listen to it if the lyric topic was romance. The music is just that good. The album is epic. And I was afraid to listen to it.
My heart raced just hearing about the album and listening to the singer being interviewed.
This was my story.
This was my disappointment.
And if I wasn’t careful, I’d accidently allow myself to feel everything this man is singing about.
But I still maintained some intellectual honesty. If I refused to listen to this album, then I was conceding defeat, and I couldn’t do that. So I listened to the album, one song at a time, with days in between listening sessions. I processed his feelings, convinced myself that I was different and then moved on with my day. But I couldn’t leave that album behind. I kept coming back to it. So I repressed the intellect that was telling my emotions that perhaps there is no God and I continued a forced belief in God.
A couple of years later I met my friend Mark, whom I’ve talked about on my blog. He’s an atheist ex-pastor. After he left his ministry he moved with his pregnant wife to take a job near where I live. His wife was looking for a church to attend, so I invited her to my wife’s bible study. Later, we had them over for dinner.
Mark turned out to be a guy of absolute dizzying intellect. He was a true scholar of biblical studies. This was not your average atheist troll; this was a man who knew the Bible better than I did, who had taught the Bible better than I had, who eventually realized that he couldn’t believe anymore. Mark’s life was tragically hard due to his deconversion. He and his wife split and now his baby lives clear across the country. I didn’t want that to happen to me. But it bugged me that all my reasoning and “answers” were absolute crap in this man’s hands. I had secretly known it but refused to believe it until I posed my arguments to someone who could easily defeat them.
I told him that debating with him was like bringing a knife to a nuclear war.
With minimal debate, I saw that a reasonable man who had once truly believed had walked away from belief and there was no way I could blame him or find fault in his reasoning. But because his lack of belief had cost him his wife and child, I further suppressed my doubts in an attempt to avoid the same fate.
Then last fall I had my own existential crisis. I could no longer deny that it felt like no one was listening to my prayers. Whether or not I prayed, things were going to turn out the way they were going to turn out. What’s worse, I had long prayed for God to help me with my depression. I was experiencing a strong depressive moment praying for God to help me when I got angry that God had never done anything about it. Was he even listening to me? Did he care about my family and me? Why couldn’t he help me? Then I admitted that maybe the reason why my prayers were unanswered was because there was no one there to listen to them.
At that moment I became a deist.
After sitting with my deism long enough, I decided to go back to “We Are All Where We Belong” and listen to it from the first note to the last. Then I had it on repeat. I listened to it for weeks straight, playing no other music when I was alone. And I processed what it meant to no longer have a god who cares about me.
So it was time for me to move forward and start considering other career options. That’s when I remembered the Clergy Project. However, deists have no place with TCP. According to its public website, members embrace an entirely natural explanation for the universe, and as a deist I couldn’t do that. But then I thought, “Why is deism different from atheism?” Well, deism says that there is a supernatural force that started the universe on its natural path. Was there any evidence of this supernatural force? Nope.
Bam — atheist.
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**Editor’s Questions** According to your count, how many and what types of media contributed to his move from faith to no faith? How does this differ from your experience? Any guesses about likely future influences?
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Bio: “John Jameson” is currently the pastor a conservative non-denominational Evangelical Church. He attended a moderately liberal seminary and is a member of The Clergy Project. He blogs about his experiences at https://pastornofaith.wordpress.com
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