by Dan Riley
When I was at BYU, my parents weren’t expecting to have to pay much for my college education. Because I had earned a full-tuition scholarship there and lived in tithe-subsidized housing on campus, my costs were about as low as possible for a college education in the United States. Unfortunately, I had no such scholarship at UW. My parents informed me that they were willing to pay as much as they had been paying for BYU, but no more. I maxed out the amount of public student loans available to me — an amount determined by my parents’ income — but it still wasn’t quite enough. I started putting tuition on credit cards, worked as much as I could, and ate all the Top Ramen I could stomach. Despite my efforts, nearing my degree, my credit limit was maxed out, and I was broke. My only option was to get a private student loan. Most private school loans require a cosigner, and mine was no exception. I asked my parents, but they told me that they were opposed to cosigning for loans as a rule. With my tuition deadline coming up fast, I began to panic.
After I did some initial planning for an interfaith project with a student Christian group, their pastor, a man named Greg, asked me how I was doing. Since I could barely think about much else, I told him about my financial situation and how I wasn’t sure what to do. He nodded, paused, and said, “Let me talk to my wife. We might be able to help you with that.” I was taken aback — I had barely met this man, and he seemed to be willing to consider helping me in such a meaningful way.
I fully expected him to reconsider his offer later, so I continued to search for a solution. Valerie Tarico, a local psychologist and secular activist I met through the Secular Student Union — she has written a wonderful book called Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light — was generous enough to cosign my loan. Not long after, I was studying when I received a Facebook chat message from Greg. “Hello there! I know that the tuition deadline is coming up soon,” he wrote. “And I wanted to let you know that I talked to my wife, and we would be able to cosign that loan for you.” I sat back in my chair, tears welling up in my eyes. Having been treated like a pariah and with utter distrust by Mormons I had known my whole life, it was utterly overwhelming to me that this man who barely knew me was willing to trust me so sincerely. Before I could respond, he said, “We’ll talk later. I have to go. I’m at the hospital right now — my daughter was just born.” Greg took the time to step away from his newborn baby girl to help a near stranger in a time of need, to help me. When I think about the best parts of Christianity, I think of Greg.
Over time, my interactions with wonderful people of all faiths began to quell my anger and frustration. I began to realize that I care a great deal more about who a person is than what a person believes in, that I care more about being a good person than being right.
That’s not to say I never get upset with religion in general or Mormonism in particular. Due to the involvement of the Church in fighting against same-sex marriage, for example, I’ve seen people I love actively seek to take away the rights of other people I love. I also get upset at the deceit of the Church — when they teach whitewashed versions of history, deceptively represent homosexuals, atheists, and other groups, and subjugate and oppress women, among other things. Being upset, however, does not lead me to confront individual Mormons on their beliefs and try to change their minds.
My relationship with my family will never be the same, but I believe it is as good as it can be given the circumstances. Mormon women are taught from a very young age that their primary responsibility and greatest calling is to help ensure that their families end up together in the next life. Since I am no longer Mormon, my family believes that I will be separated from them after death, and that thought is something that my mother will never be able to overlook. From a Mormon perspective, it would have actually been better if I had died prior to leaving the Church. There may always be an unspoken wall between myself and my family, and while that makes me sad, I am pleased that we’ve come as far as we have.
Looking back, there are very few things that I would change about what I’ve been through. In the moments of darkness that accompanied my transition, I wasn’t sure that I would ever enjoy life. The only advice I would give to my past self would be to know that I will find a way to survive and that some day I will be happy.
Leaving Mormonism stripped me of my pride, put all of my secrets on display, and left me with nothing but my own will. I’ve gotten the chance to choose what kind of man I want to be and how I want to live my life. I’ve been able to do so in my youth, before I had, relatively speaking, all that much to lose. Not long ago, I was staying at a hostel in Washington, DC. It had a communal bathroom. I saw a man brushing his teeth at the sink, wearing the Mormon garment top. I asked, “Are you LDS?” “Yes,” he replied. “Are you?” “I used to be, actually,” I responded. He sighed and looked at the floor. Then, he spoke. “I envy you. I have been in Mormonism my whole life, but recently I’ve stopped believing. You have the fortune of being young — I have a wife, children, and grandchildren, and I work for the Church. I can’t leave because I would lose everything.” Meeting him reminded me of how fortunate I should feel for leaving Mormonism when I did.
I used to see the world in binary. If something wasn’t of God, it was of Satan. If someone wasn’t Mormon, it was because they were, at best, ignorant. I believed that I had access to absolute truth and knowledge, while the rest of the world had only pieces. I thought that I knew the right way to live and freely judged anyone who lived otherwise. I perceived anything that challenged my faith or choices as a threat to be ignored, avoided, or destroyed. If you weren’t us, then you were them, and they aren’t as good, righteous, intelligent, or blessed as we are.
I like to think that I now see the world as it truly is — messy, human, nuanced, and beautiful. No person, philosophy, or idea is without flaws, and I think that’s wonderful. I have yet to hear a moral or philosophical absolute that is completely logically sound. I have found that I favor virtue-based ethics, such as the four Aristotelian ethics of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom — so long as each of the virtues is rooted in empathy and not considered an absolute. I find that, by distancing myself from moral absolutism, I’ve been able to find a deep peace.
Moving away from those absolutes has also caused me to move away from atheist activism. While I do consider myself an atheist, I’ve come to find that many of the loudest voices in the movement are also tone-deaf regarding how their messages will be received by the faithful. Having been raised religious, I know firsthand that people who are perceived to be hostile or aggressive toward faith are immediately shut out, marginalized, and ignored. Not only is it ineffective, but it can further entrench someone in their beliefs and reinforce the “us vs. them” mentality.
Despite shrill voices on either side of the theistic line, I believe that the world is slowly changing for the better. Civil rights for racial and sexual minorities are better now than they ever have been. Violent crimes are at an all-time low. As far as I can tell, each generation in the last 200 years has generally been more progressive, more accepting, and more tolerant than the last. In addition, morally absolutist religions have seen their numbers steadily declining, the Mormon Church included. I have hope for the future and hope for humanity. The more interconnected we are, the more we will develop our empathy and the less we will see the world as a matter of us vs. them.
IV.
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Jason Ball: You’re Not in Australia Anymore
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life, so that we are all connected: to each other, biologically, to the Earth, chemically, and to the rest of the universe, atomically.
That’s kinda cool. That makes me smile. And I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are
better than the universe. We are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
There are surely fewer greater cultural contrasts in the English-speaking world than that between Melbourne, Australia and rural Kansas. Jason Ball ventured from his relaxed hometown to the American heartland at age 17. What he experienced there would change the direction of his life.
Kansas was full of surprises. The Midwestern hospitality was very real and incredibly endearing. The religious lessons were also noteworthy and seemingly omnipresent. At the local youth group, he was taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a myth, and that gay marriage should be opposed with strident intensity. He observed a society dominated by religion for the first time.
Jason then began an intellectual journey unmatched in his life after returning home from Kansas. Influenced by scientific books, Jason found his passion and his community, subsequently deciding to become an advocate for secularism.
I grew up in Australia, a relatively secular country. I don’t think religion was ever forced onto me. I was never even asked to consider it as a young child. The only time I thought about it was when I watched characters going to church on The Simpsons. I asked my mom, “How come we don’t go to church?” She said, “Well, you play football on Sundays and church is on Sundays, so what would you rather do?” I said, “That’s a pretty easy question.”
As I got older, I began to think that there was a God and that there was a heaven and hell. We had Christian religious instruction in my primary school, although no one took it all that seriously. I didn’t think I really needed to investigate whether or not it was true. To me, God was regarded much like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
I felt indifference toward religion up until I was 17 when I went on student exchange to the United States. I was placed in Kansas, which is the buckle of the Bible Belt. I thought I knew what America was like because of TV and movies, one monolithic culture. What I learned was that that wasn’t the case. I lived with a Catholic family in a very small town. They didn’t interact with a lot of people from outside their community and, thus, they hadn’t had a lot of experience with other worldviews. They lived in a bubble where they thought that people only thought like they did; if others didn’t, they had a really negative view of them.
There was quite a lot of racism and homophobia, even though the people were incredibly nice. Interestingly, it was one of the most welcoming environments I’ve ever experienced, and I absolutely loved it there. I could see that their entrenched views were something that was ingrained in the culture. I could forgive them for that a bit. If these people were born in the Middle East, then they would probably be Islamic. If they were born in India, they would likely be Hindu.
Everyone my age went to youth group and church. I was more than happy to go along. I had an open mind, and I was really interested in what they said and did. I used the excuse of ignorance and curiosity to question my peers. I would get rides to youth group from a friend. I remember that she asked, “Are you religious?” I said, “I went to an Anglican school, so I’m an Anglican.“ Then she asked, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” Eyebrows raised, I said, “I don’t think so.”
I enjoyed going to religious gatherings because it was so fascinating. At the first youth group that I went to, the pastor got up and said, “The world is about 6,000 years old, and we know that as Christians.” I was pretty sure it was much older. Even my geography teacher suggested that fossils were planted to test humanity’s faith in God. That drove me to read a lot and get into debates about science and religion and whether God is real, whether the Bible is true. When I was in Kansas, in 2005, the state both introduced intelligent design into the biology curriculum and voted overwhelmingly to ban gay marriage. My experience there gave me a first-hand account of what can happen to a society when it truly takes religion seriously.
When I came back to Australia, I felt like the only person in my country who cared about secular values, defending science, and standing up against superstition. For one year in high school, I didn’t talk to any of my classmates about what was on my mind. I would go home in the evening and read on the internet; I was trying to figure out where I stood on certain issues. I openly read Christian books that my Christian friends were telling me to read.
Books that I read began to influence my own beliefs. The first book that began to shape my thinking about life on Earth was The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. At the time, all I cared about was whether evolution was true. Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea also helped to explain that subject. Nature, I learned, is cruel, and I concluded that evolution is not necessarily irreconcilable with God, but it does seem to be irreconcilable with a loving God who has a purpose for human beings.
After high school, when I went to university, I got in touch with a couple students who were starting a secular society. I was on the founding committee, and at the beginning, we had a small group of about 30 students. This group became quite influential in my life. In 2008, we learned that the Pope was coming to Australia, subsidized to the tune of $150 million dollars by the government. I realized that we needed to speak out, so my club and I organized a rally. We called it “Youth Against World Youth Day” and received some national media coverage. We highlighted the Pope’s backward views on a variety of issues from homosexuality to condom use to women’s rights, promoting the idea of secularism, emphasizing that our state shouldn’t be funding his visit.
Because of my activism, I later got elected president of the secular society, and we grew quite a lot. I managed to get some funding from the Secular Party of Australia, which is the lone voice of secularism in Australian politics. With that money, we invested in merchandise and a big poster of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — the deity of the fictitious religion The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and some membership cards with the Flying Spaghetti Monster on it. I began to embrace the idea of ridiculing religion, and the group became antagonistic toward the religious clubs on campus. Over time, though, I changed and so did the direction of the club. I didn’t feel as though we were being productive. We wanted to engage with the students from the Christian Union and have respectful dialogue while standing up for the rights of nonreligious students and promoting science and secularism on campus. We ended up organizing a couple of debates with the Christian Union in which we invited guest speakers to come in and represent our viewpoints. We began to have really good and healthy discussions. I think the Christian clubs were actually keen that there were other kids on campus who actually cared about life’s big questions. We continued to grow, and our society now has 300 to 400 members.
While our group found respectful dialogue to be effective on campus, problems regarding religion persist in Australia. Some fundamentalist churches have taken advantage of the tolerant nature of my country. Over the past 20 years, churches have been able to work their way into public schools to give Christian classes during which they try to indoctrinate young children. They give children comic books about how God made the world and how Jesus loves them. The religious groups have been able to achieve such leverage by working out exemptions to various education acts that stipulate that public education should be secular. Groups like the Australian Christian Lobby don’t have a lot of members, but they can cite the amount of citizens who select “Christian” in the census, thus swelling the number of Australians who they claim identify with them. They like to appear as a big voting bloc so that politicians will take them seriously. Consequently, we have had a real lack of reform on issues like euthanasia, abortion, and gay marriage, where the laws that do pass are actually quite conservative even though opinion polls show that the majority of Australians support gay marriage, legalized abortion, and euthanasia.
I do, however, think that secular arguments are winning in Australia. We’re making a lot of progress every year. Secular activists are gradually ra
ising people’s consciousnesses to issues and penetrating the mainstream press. We’ve been able to speak to people in the middle and get them on our side. The statistics indicate that there are a growing number of people who identify as not religious, atheist, or agnostic, which is very encouraging.
Secular organizations like the Center for Inquiry often say that the goal of their institution is to not exist. I think that’s right. I like that goal and hope to work to achieve it. One way to do so is to continue to grow the secular campus movement. Universities in society should be the hub of cutting-edge ideas and debate, the forefront of knowledge. I want students to be organizing on campuses and helping their peers to be aware of the secular movement so that they can come together to debate, learn, and contribute. I think that’s the future.
For me, coming to the realization that there’s probably no God was, at first, kind of scary. I felt isolation, loneliness, and meaninglessness. It was the writings of people like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan that saved me from depression. Their words inspired me to make the most of the life that I have, along with appreciating the wonder of science and the excitement of the pursuit of knowledge. They helped me get through that moment.
At first, I was really cautious about who I told that I was an atheist. Eventually, I told my parents. They’re now atheists as well. Over time, everyone I know learned that I’m an atheist. All of my friends have heard my perspective and know my beliefs. I’ve had only positive feedback from them.
I have great hope for the secular movement because of people’s current access to information. Today, even if they’re sheltered, individuals often accidentally come across information. I know quite a few people who stumbled across Richard Dawkins on Youtube and spent many weeks constantly watching atheist videos that changed their worldview. Free, instantaneous access to ideas — often new ideas — is changing the world.