Losing My Religion

by Lobdell, William

  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.

  Epilogue

  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 m
e. 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…

&
nbsp; I’m seeing my spiritual life atrophy into skin and bones. God help me.

  Reading this now, I’m amazed that it took another three years to admit to myself that I had lost my faith, and 12 more months to tell my friends and family—a testament to the power of faith and my lack of courage. The essay reminded me of exactly how I was feeling. It was as though I were sitting at a no-limit poker game, knowing that I should push my stacks of chips to the middle of the table and say with confidence, “All in.” But I couldn’t. I was frozen, too scared to move.

  It took me a while, but now I’ve gone all in.

  I guess time will tell whether my decision was foolish or smart. But I have no regrets. For me, it was the move I had to make.

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