Losing My Religion

by Lobdell, William

  The darkest part of my heart wanted to show, in a very public way, how people who identified themselves as Christians had driven me away from a faith I loved. If someone with my desire for God could come away disillusioned by faith, then Christianity in its present form was in trouble, and someone should point that out to believers. I felt a little like the kid who declared that the emperor had no clothes, though I had no illusion that my revelation would open the eyes of others. It would be enough just to speak up for myself.

  I printed out hundreds of stories I had written in my eight years on the religion beat and dove back into them. I flipped through old notes I took from some of the larger stories. I stared at the photographs that appeared with my articles. I sketched out a timeline containing key moments in my journey. I talked with old friends and associates to get their recollections. I was researching a eulogy, and it felt incredibly sad—and surreal. Part of me still couldn’t believe this had happened, especially as I relived the early joys of the religion beat, now knowing the sorrow of how the story ended. At times, I viewed my old self with disgust and disdain—at my naïveté, my blind faith, my seemingly endless attempts to hold onto my beliefs and the amount of time, measured in years, it took to admit my religion was lost. I didn’t like the portrait it painted of me, and I was tempted to touch it up so I would look better.

  Believe it or not, right then, I found a new savior: Howard Stern, the radio personality. Howard is often criticized for being crude and sophomoric, among other things, but his critics overlook why millions of people love him: Howard Stern is utterly honest about himself on the air. Few people are candid about their lives, even in private; Howard tells listeners his most embarrassing secrets and darkest thoughts each day. His show is often a stream of consciousness straight from his id. It takes only a little listening to Howard to learn that his father’s constant criticism of him as a child fuels his desire to succeed and still haunts him each day; that he hates the diminutive size of his penis, the largeness of his nose and the gangliness of his body; that going to a psychiatrist up to four days a week hasn’t cured his narcissism but has made him a better father; that he loves lesbian stories and the sounds of farting; and that his relationship with his model girlfriend is growing a little stale because he finds himself wanting to play chess on the computer at night instead of going to bed with her.

  If you listen to Howard for a few weeks, the chances are you are going to like him—sometimes in spite of yourself. When someone is so honest about his life, his failings, his fears and his prejudices, there is something very appealing about the openness. It’s what makes testimonies in church—or at AA meetings—inspirational, touching and emphatic. As people pour out their hearts during a bout of honesty—sometimes revealing horrendous behavior—they always become more human, sympathetic and lovable. Everyone has messed up and is screwed up; it’s the people being honest about it who gain our admiration. But it is a tough discipline to transfer outside the safety of a church sanctuary, an AA meeting hall or a psychiatrist’s office.

  As I started to write, Howard Stern was my role model. He was far more honest than the average Catholic bishop. I found myself going back and rewriting passages several times, trying to be more honest and penetrate my feelings more deeply with each pass, Howardizing them. I had to omit a few parts of my story because the people involved were unwilling to allow our private conversations into print. That aside, I tried not to flinch in the writing. By the time I was done, I had a 6,000-word essay. Roger Smith wielded his keyboard like a surgeon’s knife and rather painlessly cut it down to a more newspaper-manageable 3,800 words. The piece was ready to go.

  The worst part of a journalist’s job is waiting for a story to be published. There is a terrible gap between the time a story is edited and when it is published. It feels as if you are approaching an uncharted waterfall and have reached the point of no return. My obsessive-compulsive instincts always kick in during these gaps, and at home (or at a restaurant or in a movie theater lobby), with a printout of the story in hand, I continue to recheck facts and torture myself over each sentence, wanting the nuance and flow to be just right. If I catch something before 10:30 p.m., I call the copy desk and beg them to make a last-minute change. After that, the paper is put to bed, though even that fact doesn’t stop me from continuing to go over the story.

  On the eve of publishing this story, I felt as though I were heading toward Niagara Falls in a tiny kayak. My intestines cramped. Ask reporters on the religion beat and they’ll tell you the most vicious e-mails they ever receive as journalists are from people of faith who feel their beliefs have been slighted. The passion behind religion magnifies any perceived mistakes, slights or bias. My ears began to ring, anticipating how my inner thoughts and feelings and failings would be taken by readers who hold their faith sacred. With the echo effect of the Internet, there was no telling the repercussions. In our bedroom, I relayed this to Greer, just before she turned off the light at 11 p.m.

  “There’s no use worrying about it anymore,” she said cheerfully. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it now.”

  Thanks, dear. That was exactly my problem. It was too late, and I was sure that the whole thing was a stupid idea—and I had volunteered to write it! How stupid could I be?

  Whenever I got myself in big trouble, my mind flashed back to the eighth grade. My best friend, Jon Schleimer, was spending the night, and I proposed a daring game: see who could come closer to the fuse of an M-80 with a lighted match. I even volunteered to go first. I struck the match and held it perilously close to a fuse that was attached to the equivalent of a quarter stick of dynamite. Suddenly I heard “Hsssssssssssssssssss”—the sickening sound of the fuse alit. My stomach sank, and my world went into slow motion. I pinched my fingers together on the unburned portion of the fuse, hoping to extinguish it. The fuse burned right through my fingers. Now I had only seconds left. The M-80 was about at my eye level, sitting on a windowsill in my bedroom. It was ten o’clock at night, and my parents were asleep in the next bedroom. I grabbed the M-80 to throw it into the corner of the room, thinking very clearly: How dumb could I be?

  It exploded in my hand. In shock, with my ears ringing, I opened my hand and counted the fingers. Miraculously, they were all there, the explosion muffled by my closed fist. Smoke rose from my palm. Much of the skin on my hand had been blown away. As the pain arrived, I started to scream over and over and over again, “I’m so stupid! I’m so stupid! I’m so stupid!”

  This is roughly how I felt now, waiting for my story to be published. I attempted to go to bed, but I couldn’t get close to sleep. At midnight, I got up and decided to check The Times website. The page came up instantly at that late hour, and boom, there it was—the most prominent story on the page, along with a photo of me. The headline, which I saw for the first time, read “Religion beat became a test of faith: A reporter’s work covering church sex scandals, religious tycoons and healers tests his beliefs—and triggers a revelation.” Oddly, seeing it there on the web calmed me down. I had gone over the falls. No more anticipation. The story was out there, for better or worse. I read it from start to finish, though I had gone over it a hundred times before. Reading my stories on the web or in the paper always gave me some psychological distance. Sometimes, it made me sick to my stomach about the lameness of the writing or the holes in the reporting; other times, I was pleasantly surprised. With this piece, I was actually proud—a rare feeling for someone neurotically critical of his own work. I hated only the photo.

  With adrenaline pumping through me, I had some time to kill before I’d be able to sleep. I absent-mindedly checked my work e-mail. It was 12:15 a.m., about an hour after the story had been posted on the web. Most of my stories generated no more than a dozen e-mail responses, often split down the middle between those offering praise and criticism. On routine stories, I might get only a stray e-mail or two. On larger stories—such as the Alaska Native story—I might get several hundred.

&nbs
p; 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 fo
r 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.