A (Very Long) Conversion from Christianity

I wrote this a long time ago to an old friend from my Christian high school who emailed me concerned about my atheism. I never sent it to her. But I have to get it out. Finally. It's really long, so feel free to tune out at any point. But thanks to all of you Progressive U people for being my sounding board as I work out the kinks from my screwed-up childhood.

Part of the reason that I haven't posted a more extensive note on my profile explaining my "conversion" to my friends from the past is that generally they aren't really interested in WHY I had to change my beliefs, but only want to catch me in some sort of fallacy and tut-tut over what a shame my life has turned out to be, abandoning the faith to go my "own way" because it was too hard to be a Christian. I know that's how most Christians like to think of me. In reality it was absolutely the most difficult intellectual, emotional, and social decision I've ever made. I lost not only my belief and moral structure and had to start all over, but my family also disowned me for a while. There are some Christians that I know, though, who are going through an intellectual and moral crisis like I was and all they need right now is someone to understand and support them when no one else will, whatever their final religious decision is. If you happen to be going through a hard time like that, then I will tell you about my experience and maybe it will let you know that you aren’t the only one. Many other Christians will tell you that evaluating your faith--deeply, with your whole heart, soul, and especially your mind, which is the only tool that God (if there is a God) gave us to discover truth--they will say that doing this shows your faith is weak. In reality it shows a very rare type of intellectual, moral, and social courage.
Wow, okay, where to start? I grew up in a fundamentalist, Biblical literalist Baptist home, as you know, which made Bob Jones University look prurient. From the time that I first started understanding Christianity I was obsessed with it--with making myself a Christian and making all the unsaved people I knew Christians. When I started understanding the concept of repentance and the conversion experience, when I was about ten, I went into what I think now was a serious depression because I simply could not figure out how to “get saved.” I knew that it was supposed to be simple and all you had to do was pray and dedicate your future to Christ, but preachers always said that after that I should feel different and that the Holy Spirit would be in me. I never felt anything but terrified that I simply couldn’t get saved for one reason or another. I was also terrified that I would be left behind if Jesus came back. I went to counseling for years, I would cry hysterically at times, I would read the Bible for hours and pray for at least an hour every day, and I would make my brother sleep in my room so that I would know if Jesus came back because my little brother would be gone. I would see people cry and shout at church and I was sure that I couldn’t really be a Christian because I’d never felt anything transcendent like that. It was probably the most horrible time in my life, and it lasted about four years.
I went to PVBS until I was almost through my junior year, and there, although the religious and historical curriculum was designed to create good young Christians, I was exposed to some ideas that sparked some doubts in me. One of them was the idea that the Bible has not always existed--the books were written, yes, by men who were inspired by God, but there were lots of other books which were not included in the Bible, and somebody had to choose which to exclude in the Bible we have today. I was always worried that the Council that decided on the canon had accidentally left out a book which actually should have been there. I was also really disturbed, from quite a young age, about the subjugation of women which is seen in many parts of the Bible and is part of Christian doctrine.
My first year of college was a bit difficult. I was really an oddball on campus because of my arch-conservative beliefs and politics, yet I still felt like I wasn’t a good Christian, no matter how baggy I wore my skirts or how vocal I was about my beliefs. I took a course in philosophy which, obviously, presented me with some varied viewpoints, many of them credible, which challenged my beliefs. It was in that class that I started realizing that when you say you believe something, it means you are convinced of it because you think you have good reason for it. You don’t really believe something if you just blindly accept it because that’s what your parents told you is right. Believing was getting a new meaning for me, but I was still far from being ready to answer the really difficult questions I was confronted with in my philosophy debates. I realized that if I started questioning my own beliefs too closely, I might find that they were incorrect or illogical, and if that happened I couldn’t imagine simply dropping them. So I told myself that I wasn’t answering the hard questions because I was acting with faith, that sometimes things don’t make sense to us because God is so much smarter than we are.
In the summer before my sophomore year I took a job in Las Vegas, where I lived with my aunt Emily, a devout Mormon. I wanted to be a witness to Em, whom I love dearly, so I started asking her about her religion and telling her about mine. It ended up that we both just recited the truisms that our respective holy books declared. Em couldn’t be reasoned with, because she kept saying that she just had to accept her religion on faith. I just wanted her to accept Jesus‘s message, which I was convinced was absolute truth because it said it was. She just wanted me to accept the message of the Book of Mormon, which also claimed to be absolute.
I went back to college a bit frustrated with the fact that Emily would never get saved because she couldn’t ever be persuaded to question her beliefs. That semester I watched a documentary on PBS called Get the Fire, which was about Mormon missionaries in Germany. I remember it so vividly because one of the missionaries was a really intelligent person and really wanted to follow the truth. So when people started asking him really difficult questions, he tried to find answers. I wanted him to realize that Mormonism is basically the product of a crazy treasure hunting shyster’s imagination (meaning, of course, Joseph Smith), but the missionary copped out by saying the exact same thing that I had told myself in philosophy the year before: sometimes his faith doesn’t make sense, but he had to hold onto it anyway.
I was overwhelmed with guilt and extremely upset after that. I realized that my pressuring my aunt Em or any non-Christian in the world to examine their beliefs and find the real truth was something that I wasn’t even prepared to do myself. How could I even be sure that I believed the truth if I was too afraid to think critically about my religion? I decided that I would take the plunge, come what may.
So I started studying the history of the Bible. I took a class on the Old Testament which completely fascinated me. But ironically, the more I learned about the Bible, and the people and time period that produced it, the less I could view it as the source to refer to with all of life’s questions. I was troubled intellectually by hundred and hundreds of things, but I’ll just point out the most important ones. Firstly, there were some historical tidbits which just didn’t line up, like the idea that a million Hebrews came out of Egypt when the entire population of Palestine at the time couldn’t have been anywhere near that. But the historical inaccuracies didn’t really matter to me as much as the recurring moral problems. Why were there so many instances in the Old Testament when God acted in a way that was definitely immoral? For instance, by killing the innocent firstborn children of the Egyptians in Exodus. Or by telling the Israelites to basically commit ethnic cleansing on the Canaanites in Joshua. Or by killing 70,000 innocent Hebrew people when David numbered the people against God’s will. I tried talking to my mom about this, and she just said that because God is holy, whatever he does is therefore holy. But to me that wasn’t a real answer. Holiness, or goodness MUST have some absolute meaning. Goodness can’t just be a synonym for “God,” or else saying that “God is good” would just mean “God is what god is” which means nothing at all. We’re supposed to worship God because he’s good, and follow his rules because his rules are good. Therefore goodness must be something independent. And time and again I was seeing the Old Testament God act in a way that way certainly not ethical, and often against the rules that he himself told us to follow. I was mortified.
The major other objection that I had was the way women were treated. This was sort of a holdover from my childhood, when I always inwardly objected to the New Testament portrayal of the meek woman who covers her head and is not allowed to speak in church. As a woman, how could that not seem unjust to me? In the Old Testament the subservience of women is even more glaring--women are treated as property, and are valuable for their virgin vaginas. In the Old Testament a man that raped a woman had to give her father money for the dowry that the father would no longer be able to get by marrying off his daughter. If the rapist impregnated her, he wasn’t imprisoned or executed. No, he is required to marry her. A woman would have to marry the one man who she never wanted to see again--the man that raped her. I was really upset by this.
I could no longer look at the Bible as a complete, immutable, infallible entity which provided guidance for this life and the next. I could only see it as the product of a nomadic, chauvinistic society. I began to view the Bible in a way that I later learned was called constructivist: I saw it as a book written to explain, safeguard, and justify the traditions of a society that was three thousand years old. Furthermore, I couldn’t even imagine wanting to preserve a society whose traditions were so violent towards innocent people, where not even God was expected to behave morally, and women were like cattle.
I told my parents about all this, hoping (naively, of course) that they would be happy that I had found out the truth. They were completely outraged and distraught, begged me to quit college, and not to go to England (I had all the groundwork laid out for my study abroad and was only days away from flying). I felt so torn and it was horrible--I had thought I had done the right thing, and certainly the more difficult thing, in daring to question basically everything I’d ever known. And now my entire family hated me for it. And of course, there was no way I could just act like this had never happened. I could no longer say that I believed something that I flatly couldn’t believe just to make my family happy. So I left. In England I found a place where I finally felt at home--nobody in England cared about my religion, or looked down on me for not wearing the ridiculous long skirts that I used to have to wear, or wagged their heads in pity at me.
So that’s what happened. And that’s why I’m leaving the States. I can’t even talk to my family about the things most important to me anymore, and I can’t go a week without someone asking me self-righteously to come to their church.
I hope that I haven’t offended you because that definitely wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to let you know what really happened so that you know that I didn’t decide to “backslide” because Christianity was just too hard for me. It was a primarily moral and intellectual decision that cost me almost everything familiar to me in my life. But at the same time it was the best thing that has ever happened for me. I feel like I REALLY do believe the things I say I do now, and I don’t walk around constantly trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.
If you have any questions about any of this, please let me know. Talk to you soon! =Sam

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