Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  But problems began to arise. After just a couple of months as a Christian, I finally admitted something to myself that I’ve always known: I’m queer. That presented an enormous internal conflict.

  I knew that being gay was not something that was acceptable in the eyes of my church. Homosexuality was often discussed in the small groups and in the sermons. The Teen Study Bible that I had said that if you are gay or if you practice the “gay lifestyle,” you will be punished by God, get AIDS, and burn in hell forever.

  I tried to turn myself into a heterosexual. I knew that being gay was not something that I had chosen, but I remember beginning to believe that my homosexuality was a spiritual test, some kind of punishment that I had received for not being a good enough Christian. I was determined to rise to the occasion and beat my ailment. I doubled down and began spending my lunch period at school in the evangelical math teacher’s classroom fasting and doing Bible study. On the surface I appeared to be a model Christian, but on the inside, I was slowly coming apart.

  I kept my secret to myself. I was convinced that if I revealed the truth about my sexuality, I would be cast out. As a child, I was full of life, interested in everything and very inquisitive. But once this struggle started, I became pretty reclusive, spending my nights in devotion in my room. Even though she was preoccupied with trying to keep us together as a family, my mother started to wonder if something was wrong.

  Things got worse, and I got to a really dark place. I couldn’t understand why I was being punished; I felt like I was being the perfect Christian. I started contemplating suicide. One night at my father’s place, when he wasn’t home and my siblings were asleep, I went to the kitchen and took out a knife. I went into the bathroom, turned on the fan, and locked the door. I sat down in the bathtub. I had all these romantic notions of suicide, but it didn’t feel romantic to me. I was sobbing, snot dripping down my face. I held the knife above my wrist and mimed cutting my wrist just to try it out to see what it would be like.

  I couldn’t do it. I was so unhappy, but somewhere deep down inside of me I wasn’t quite ready to quit. I don’t know whether I decided to go on because I felt like there was still hope for me to change or whether I believed that I didn’t need to change, but I knew that I had to find a way to become okay with who I am.

  I began what would become an uphill climb. I started keeping a notebook that I filled with different Bible verses that I felt gave me hope that change within Christianity was possible. I hid it in the back of my closet. One day, my mom went into my room to clean up, and she found it. She read it and discovered the truth. She picked me up from lifeguard training, told me that she had found my notebook, and that she knew what I was struggling with. Being in the closet, I was constantly terrified, convinced that if anyone knew, everyone would be horrified by me. When my mom told me she had discovered the truth, I thought, “This is it, say goodbye to your life.” I was worried that I might be disowned. But my mom was compassionate, and the next day, she took me to see an LGBT-friendly minister. For the first time, I was exposed to an alternate Scriptural position on homosexuality. My mom had called up Lutheran churches in the area, looking for someone who could talk to me. The minister she eventually connected with had a gay roommate in college and felt very strongly about LGBT equality. The conversations that I had with him changed my life.

  I spent the rest of high school being a progressive Christian. I reconciled my homosexuality and my Christianity and became involved in the movement for LGBT equality in Christian churches. I found an Evangelical Lutheran Church of America congregation with an openly gay minister. They had a group that met on Sunday afternoons for LGBT high school students who wanted to discuss these issues in a safe space. Eventually, they hosted the first pro-LGBT summer camp for Christian teens. I felt really welcomed by that community.

  Despite my religious progress, I recognized that I still had some long-held doubts about my Christian faith. I had always been taught that doubt was a test, not something to be upheld as a virtue. I remember being in an evangelical church when I was in middle school and watching everyone speaking in tongues. I could never join in. At the time, I thought the reason why I couldn’t was because I was spiritually unclean. Although these experiences contributed to my doubts, I had a community that was welcoming, and at the time, that was the most important thing to me.

  It wasn’t until I was in college that I really started to have serious, open skepticism. I went to a Lutheran school in Minnesota, Augsburg College, and studied to receive a degree in religion. I enrolled believing that I wanted to go into the ministry. I felt like my experiences had prepared me to help struggling people. I thought that perhaps God had put me through my experiences so that I could have empathy for others.

  It was in my first religion class at Augsburg that I was exposed to information that destroyed my faith. I learned about the existence of whole sections of the Bible that I’d never been exposed to. I discovered that certain books had been left out of the Bible altogether and that the Bible had been pieced together by a group of people who decided which parts would go into it and which would not. I was introduced to competing interpretations of Scripture and to the beliefs of other world religions. I remember feeling inundated with this information, all of which was presented to me from a very unbiased perspective. This initiated a period of critical reflection on my initial conversion. I started thinking about the reasons why I had become a Christian in the first place. I began to realize that my conversion was less about a belief in God than it was about social justice values and the feeling of inclusion that came with being part of a community. Very quickly, in that first semester, I realized that I no longer believed.

  My transition out of Christianity was hard. I still wanted to have faith because my beliefs had been a source of comfort for me, a way to bring meaning to my life. I felt resentful when I realized that I truly did not believe in God because religion had made my struggle with my sexuality so difficult for so long.

  I began to search. At first, I checked out Buddhism and started going to meditation centers. Simultaneously, I was open about my atheism and became a very vocal critic of religion. I remained a religion major, but I began studying the subject from a strictly academic perspective. In class, I often felt like the sole voice of reason among my religious peers, and it became important to me to challenge religious beliefs whenever possible. I considered myself to be firmly anti-Christian, and, more generally, anti-religious.

  After college, I got a job working with adults with developmental disabilities in northern Minnesota. I got particularly close with one individual. One night, he brought me his book of prayers and asked if I would read one to him. He was unable to speak, so he asked by giving me the book and using signs. At first, I didn’t want to, but I gave it some thought and decided that I would. I expected that after I was done, I would feel one of two things: one, that I would feel how I often felt when I saw other people engaging in religious practices, which was revulsion and annoyance, or two, that I would feel a longing to return to Christianity. To my surprise, I didn’t feel either. Instead, I felt grateful that I had been introduced to that part of his life. I felt like we had become closer and that I better understood him as a human being.

  I began to realize that I had many opportunities to learn more about what other people believed — to understand where they were coming from — that I had rejected by refusing to constructively talk about religious topics. In college, there was a community center that I brought food to once a week. It was in an area that has the largest population of Somalians anywhere in the world outside of Somalia itself. The majority of them were Muslims. Anytime something about religion came up, I would disengage. I had so many missed opportunities to learn more about their perspective and to allow them to learn more about where I was coming from as well. I started realizing all of the positive conversations that can take place when people communicate with one another about their beliefs. Because of this, I decided to
go back to school to do graduate work in religion.

  I decided to go to school in Chicago, and I did so for two reasons. The city has an inter-seminary program that allows students who are enrolled in any one school to take classes at all of them. I wanted to study within religious institutions alongside people who were preparing for a lifetime of religious leadership so that I could better understand their motivations. The second reason I wanted to be in Chicago was because there’s an organization based there — I ended up working there while I was getting my master’s — called the Interfaith Youth Core that was founded by Eboo Patel. He authored a book that transformed the way that I thought about religion. He posited that inter-religious conflict could be addressed through engaging religious diversity, a concept that I found really intriguing.

  I found that most of the aspiring religious leaders were getting involved in ministry for the same reasons that I had wanted to. They genuinely hoped to effect social change and work with people on the challenges that they faced in their lives. They saw their religious communities as the ideal forum through which they could accomplish their goals. Getting to know them confirmed my suspicion that a lot of people who enter a life of religion do so because they truly want to help improve society.

  These conclusions influenced the trajectory of my career. I was able to work for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. I loved the work that I did there: engaging students, encouraging interfaith outreach, and organizing community service efforts. It was a dream position for me because I did exactly what I advocated for in my writing: encouraging nonreligious people to seek out opportunities to increase their understanding of people from different walks of life. I believe that secularists need to move into robust collaborative relationships with people from a variety of different perspectives, thereby allowing people to actually get stuff done in the world.

  One of the things that I’ve learned from my interfaith organizing is that there are still subjects that provoke profound disagreement. One such issue is the morality of homosexuality. These are conversations that are easy to avoid, and some people only want to have easy conversations. But what I’ve found is that establishing relationships with people who have diverse outlooks causes people on all sides to humanize the very people they had seen as being so different from themselves, with whom they couldn’t imagine having anything in common. Once you humanize, you’re forced to empathize with them and see your happiness, your success, your ability to live freely, as being bound up in their happiness, their success, and their ability to live freely in the world. This is the concept of inter-religious pluralism — the idea that while there isn’t going to be a consensus on controversial issues, there can be a consensus on the fact that in order for us to live in the world together as diverse people, we have to come to agree on whether or not we will allow people to live lives that we might personally disagree with.

  This philosophy extends to two of the most demonized sections of the population in the world right now: Muslims and homosexuals. I have written about why I think the Islamic community and the queer community would do well to engage in more dialogue with one another. I draw on my own personal experiences as a queer atheist working with some very heavily Muslim communities. I have become a strong and vocal critic of anti-Muslim rhetoric and anti-Muslim bias because of my work with them. The more that I began to know Muslims, the more personal relationships I developed, and the more members of the Muslim community started to ask me how they could advocate for me as a queer person and as an atheist.

  My favorite part of my job at Harvard was visiting college campuses, often with a religious group and an atheist group. I loved seeing the conversations that followed a speech or workshop, getting to talk to students about what the world looks like from their angle. I’ve been very impressed by the students I’ve met and humbled by the work that they’re doing in their communities.

  One particular campus visit highlights why I think interfaith work is so important. The campus ministry office from a college in rural Pennsylvania brought me to speak. They booked me for a full day of activities: speaking in classes, leading a workshop, giving an evening speech. At every event that I did, at least one student would come up to me afterward and quietly say, “I’m an atheist, and it’s not something that I’ve felt like I can talk about with other people. I’m really looking for a community, but I don’t know where to find one.” In many ways, these students are asking the same questions and struggling with the same issues that I had been dealing with earlier in my life. Later that day, I had a consulting meeting with the campus ministry office. I said, “Look, you have these atheist students. They’re looking for resources. You have an office of religious life and host a student group for the few Muslim students, for the few Buddhist students, for the few Jewish students. Why isn’t there some kind of atheist student group?” By the end of the day, they had financially and institutionally committed to supporting a group for students who don’t believe in God.

  Overall, I see the secular student movement moving in some very good directions. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of secular student groups that are engaging in collaborative events with other student groups, and I think that’s so important. To me, at the end of the day, the most important thing about a secular student group is that it provides a safe space and a community for like-minded people, especially in environments where their beliefs represent a minority and perhaps marginalized viewpoint. I think that when these secular groups work with other groups and are able to have positive and healthy relationships with them, it does a lot to dispel many of the myths that exist about atheists. It makes their campus climate a lot safer for nonreligious students. The trailblazing work that these students are doing is going to have a huge impact on the environment of these campuses in the future.

  Looking back at my life, it’s impossible for me to say what my life would now be like if I hadn’t gone through what I did. Growing up, I was a gregarious, self-confident kid. I don’t remember this, but my mom likes to tell a story about a childhood birthday party that I attended with a bunch of my cousins. One of them came up to me and asked, “Oh, isn’t this ice cream so good?” I deadpanned and responded, “It’s not ice cream, it’s sherbet!” At that age, what mattered to me most was being correct. I didn’t have a lot of empathy for other people’s experiences. My hardships since then have made me the individual I am today. I like to think that I’ve become a more open-minded, caring, and compassionate person. I don’t know that I would go back and change my difficult moments. Oddly, in many ways, I’m grateful for them.

  I do still think that my belief that there is no God is probably correct. I try to be humble about all of my convictions and am open to being proven wrong. I’m pretty confident in my atheism, though, and find that it actually gives me a lot of satisfaction at the end of the day. When I believed that there was an afterlife and that there was a God, I was scared of life and never really lived in the moment. I was always thinking about what was going to come later. Now that I don’t believe that there is an afterlife, it’s really important to me to try to remember to live right now, in the present moment, making the world around me the best that it can be for myself and for others.

  About the Author

  From 2008-2011, Dan Riley worked as a campus organizer in the outreach department at the non-profit think tank the Center for Inquiry. He got to know many secular student leaders during his time with CFI. Finding many of their personal journeys to atheism to be fascinating, compelling, and unique, he decided to create a book that tells their stories. The initial work that has resulted in Generation Atheist began at a student conference in 2009.

  Dan is a 2006 graduate of Duke University.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2012 by Dan Riley

  All Rights Reserved

  For more information about either the book or special discounts for bulk purchases, visit www.GenerationAtheistBook.com or e-mail GenerationAtheistBook@gmail.com.


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