Introduction: In which I apologize for what a mess this post is going to be, and then attempt to outline the reasons why I felt it necessary to write it anyway.
To Paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, I would hate to tell you how much trouble writing this post has caused me.
I’ve been trying to write some version of this post more or less ever since I started this blog back in 2003. I usually get a few thousand words into it, and then realize how muddled it’s becoming and give up. Or I realize how pompous and arrogant I’m getting, and then I give up. Or I realize how vast the subject matter is, and how I’m never going to be able to say everything I want to say in a coherent manner, and then I give up.
On one level perhaps, the argument for agnosticism needn’t be very complex. At its simplest, it probably goes something like this:
A). There are many different competing religions or (if we throw in atheism) various world views out there.
B). None of these religions or world views offer conclusive proof why they are right and the others are wrong.
C). Therefore, the only possible position a rational person could hold is agnosticism.
And there are days when this argument seems so blindingly self-evident and obvious to me I wonder how anyone could possibly hold any other view on the subject.
I know that if you travel in religious circles, you can find lots of people who claim to be able to logically prove that their religion is correct. Without getting encyclopedic in length, it is impossible here to exhaustively go through every one of these claims of proof and refute it on a case by case basis. (And besides, given all the books in print arguing and counter-arguing for religion in the past 500 years, it’s safe to say it’s all been done before.) All I will say here is that despite hearing these arguments, I have yet to hear anything that I would regard as conclusive proof. (And having grown up in both the church and private Christian schools, I like to think I’ve heard just about all of the usual standard arguments.) There are a number of arguments for God (or a specific religion) that are halfway convincing—arguments that make you go, “hey, yeah, maybe, just maybe, you’re onto something.” (This is why I’m an agnostic, and not an atheist. I’m open minded to the possibility that religious people might be on to something, but I haven’t seen the proof yet.) Given the extraordinary claims religion makes, in my opinion there’s no argument that completely proves anything. I guess the question of whether you find these various proofs completely convincing or not is something every person will have to decide for themselves.
The other standard justification of course is faith (or some other similar appeal to the inner workings of the spirit). This is something that’s impossible to argue either for or against. You either have this inner feeling of faith or you don’t. I did at one point, I don’t anymore. What else can one say on the subject?
….other than to point out that if you grant this to one religion, you have to grant it to all religions. My own protestant Christian background was opposed to Mormonism, but in my conversations with Mormon missionaries I’ve noticed that they use the exact same language when talking about faith. Just like my old Sunday School teachers, the Mormons asked me to pray for God’s guidance, and to feel God working in my heart, and to let God give me faith in what I couldn’t see or couldn’t rationally prove. I have no doubt that their faith was every bit as sincere as the faith of my Sunday School teachers.
For that matter my Muslim friends will often talk about their personal faith using the same language as my Sunday School teachers.
If religion is based on some sort of inner feeling of conviction, it seems to me to be based on very tenuous grounds indeed. Given all the things my heart was been wrong about over the years, why should I implicitly trust it more than my brain when it comes to religious matters? Human history and modern psychology have shown us that the human mind is capable of believing in all sorts of crazy things (especially when other people around you believe the same thing, and especially when it fulfills a psychological need).
And while I’m talking about psychology, the very language we used to talk about faith almost seems designed to psychological reinforce it. We talk about having faith as some sort of virtue, and the lack of it as some sort of personal default. Not having enough faith is the principle sin that a religious person can commit. A religious person who feels their faith slipping will immediately feel guilty about it, and pray to God to give them more faith. Even if there were no God “working in their heart”, we should not be surprised that they usual recover their faith. They have given themselves a goal of what they want to believe in, and then they set about psychologically reinforcing it to themselves everyday by praying for more faith.
Nor do I find it surprising that religions usually set great store in having “a community of believers” in order to strengthen each other’s faith, and, also not surprisingly, regular worship services and church attendance is viewed as essential to maintaining this faith.
I guess that’s my case in a nutshell.
Is there a need to say anything else? I’m not sure.
Growing up in a religious community, I always felt that my agnosticism was the minority position, and that I always needed to defend and rationalize my agnosticism.
Having spent some years in the wider world, I wonder if theism might not be the minority position, and if it is the theists who need to defend their beliefs.
The world is a big place, and I can’t speak for all of it. Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I felt like the whole world was religious. Japan, however, is more or less a nation of agnostics. (And, I might add, as a nation they seem to be making due just fine without religion. You could quibble about this or that aspect of Japanese culture, but they have yet to descend into the chaos and violence that religious people sometimes warn us will happen to Godless societies.)
My interaction with Europeans, Britain, and Australians also leads me to believe these societies are largely agnostic. And for that matter, even fellow Americans I’ve met from more liberal areas of the country seem to have a largely agnostic background that was completely different from my own.
A friend of mine from Trinidad, when talking about her religious history, once told me that the very religious diversity of Trinidad forces people into a kind of agnosticism. “You have to be an agnostic or you’ll just go nuts,” she said. “If you’re mother is Christian and you’re dad is Hindu, as a child you can’t grow up believing daddy’s going to hell and still try and make sense of the world.”
However if I compare myself to my old high school and college classmates, things get a little bit more muddled.
Facebook, blogging, and other ways to reconnect with old classmates via the internet has given me somewhat of an idea of where things stand with people from my old Christian school. We all had more or less the same background, but religiously we seem to be all over the board now. Many of them are also agnostic like I am. Some have moved to more of a vague Deist position. One describes herself as “Existential Christian” and another as a “reluctant atheist.”
And quite a few of them appear to be deeply religious Christians. Many of them appear to even be even more religious now than when we went to school together.
Undoubtedly, geographic location and personal background plays a huge role in this. I don’t think anyone would disagree that people who grow up in predominately Muslim areas tend to be Muslims, people who grow up in predominately Christian areas tend to become Christians, and people who grow up in non-religious areas tend to become agnostic.
That in itself, the fact that on a statistical level faith seems to be more about geographical location than personal conviction ought to give us serious pause. And I think it does. There’s not one religious person I know who isn’t keenly aware that their faith is a result of the geographic area into which they were born. And yet at the same time people do rationalize it to themselves and make it work.
And occasionally people do buck the trend as well. Some people in Japan do become Christians, and some people like myself leave the church and become agnostics. Why is that?
The temptation I suppose is just to claim that I’m agnostic because I’m smarter than religious people. But the truth is, I’m probably one of the stupidest people I know. (And this is no false-modesty here folks. People who know me personally will back this statement up. In most aspects of life I am completely lacking in the virtues of common sense.)
Also, some of the most intelligent people I know are Christian.
It’s also perhaps tempting to ascribe my agnosticism to my liberal views. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment. As I got older, I became more liberal. I pushed back against the traditional conservative Christianity I had been raised with, and I ended up an agnostic.
But this also is not a completely satisfying answer. Many of my fellow liberals are still in the church. (I won’t embarrass them by naming them here, but some of them read this blog.) Some of them are even employed in the ministry, and have given over their whole lives to the church. All of them are much smarter than I am.
I suppose it’s also a temptation to say I became an agnostic because I left Grand Rapids, and removed myself from the reinforcing nature of the religious community there. But again I know many people who are have left moved to predominately unchristian areas, and maintained their Christian faith.
So what’s left? I can’t give a satisfactory answer to why different people go different ways. And ultimately these people will have to speak for themselves.
This is going to be a bit of a mess, and I apologize in advance for it. I feel like this is something I have to do though.
Why do I have to do it? A number of reasons really.
Catharsis for one, and the need to just get everything out in the open.
The attempt to explain to everyone what I feel like up until now I’ve done such a poor job at explaining.
The desire to once and for all tackle religious issues head on instead of just nibbling at it from the sidelines (like I’ve been doing up until now on this blog).
Because this is ultimately the only question in life that’s important.
Because if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, and the state of my eternal soul is in doubt, I don’t want people to think I made my decisions about faith flippantly, or without thinking through all the issues.
And, given how many years I’ve been struggling to write this post, the need to just do it so I can finally forget about it.
After several failed attempts to write this blog post, I’ve decided the only possibly way I can write this is to divide it into two parts. The first part is simply a narrative of my religious experience, because ultimately I think these things are just as much grounded in our personal experience as they are in rationality. The second part will be an attempt to put my feelings on religion into some sort of theoretical framework.
Because the subject material is inherently too vast and complex for me, this post is destined to be a failure. I’ve resigned myself to that.
I’ve decided instead to use this blog post as sort of like a rough draft. I just want to get everything down at the moment. Then, if I think it’s worth the effort, I plan on coming back to this some day and cleaning it all up into something that’s intelligible.
In the meantime, this blog post is going to function as just a dumping ground for everything I have want to say. Any intelligent observations I have will most likely be buried under a sea of trivialities.
My own religious narrative is also going to include lots of trivialities. At this stage, I’m not going to try and separate what’s important from what’s not important. I’m just going to write down everything I remember. Again, think of this as a rough draft for another, possibly leaner post.
My Religious Experience
My own religious experience is pretty boring and typical. Perhaps that makes it all the more useful to dissect it (because it represents a common human experience.) Perhaps it doesn’t. Either way.
I was born into a Christian family, attended Church regularly, and went to Christian schools. As a young child, I accepted uncritically everything I was told.
I was far from a perfect child, but I was eager to please. Like all kids I did a lot of bad stuff when I thought I could get away with it, but I also bought into Christianity 110%, and spent a fair amount of my young life trying to be more spiritual, or feeling guilty that I wasn’t spiritual enough.
From an adult perspective, I would say now that religion should be less about euphoric spiritual highs, and more about just trying to do what you think is right on a day to day basis whether you feel like it or not. But this was not made clear to me as a child. In fact there seemed to be a huge emphasis on holiness, spirituality, feeling Jesus in your heart, feeling God’s love, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I spent a fair amount of emotional energy as a child trying to feel the right way.
(I remember riding home on the schoolbus one day, and suddenly feeling (in some indescribable way) that maybe I had achieved some sort of spirituality at last. And then losing it an hour later.)
At least in my own experience, this is probably more of an issue with religion as it is presented to children. As we grew older Sunday school seemed to mature as well, and the discussions grew more philosophical/theological. But I think the adults who did Sunday School for the younger kids didn’t really know what to do with us except talk about feelings, or singing songs about letting God into your heart. In practical terms, I was never really sure what it meant to let Jesus into your heart, or how I would know when I had done it right and he was actually there. I always had a feeling I wasn’t doing it quite right because I usually didn't feel any different.
It was also emphasized to me from a very young age that if you believe in Jesus Christ you get to go to heaven when you died, and if you didn’t, then you went to hell. And from a very young age (around Kindergarten actually) it was impressed on us that we had to convert our friends if we didn’t want them to go to hell.
As far as I remember, this theme popped up repeatedly and it popped up often. And I have memories of hearing it from both school and Sunday school starting from a young age.
In fact, one of the plays my church put on was very explicit on this point. Two girls were riding the bus to school. One of them asked the other why she was always praying. The second girl was too shy to answer, and said she would tell her later. Then the next day the bus got in an accident, and both girls were killed and went to the gates of heaven. One girl’s name was in the book of life, and was allowed to enter heaven. The other girl ran off stage crying after being told her name wasn’t in the book of life.
I was slightly horrified by this, which perhaps is why it sticks in mind so well. And just to make sure we didn’t miss the point, the next week our Sunday School teacher went over it with us again to make sure we understood why it was important to witness to our friends.
Since almost all of my friends were from church or school, I knew very few people who weren’t Christian. There were a couple kids in my neighborhood however who I found out on day weren’t Christian: a Chinese Buddhist boy, and a Jewish boy.
(I was almost in shock when I found out. I knew that these non-Christian creatures existed somewhere, but I had never expected they might be among people I knew.) I of course realized at once I had to try and convert them.
At that young age, most children don’t have the social skills to be very delicate about these matters. There were several bumbling attempts, the most cringe worthy memory is me at one point yelling at the Chinese and Jewish kids from my yard that they should love Jesus.
To my mother’s credit, she immediately called me inside and had a little chat with me, and the incident was mercifully cut short.
For years afterwards, once I had acquired a certain degree of maturity, I started to look back at these memories with mortification.
Then I remember once in high school being at a Bible study for the cross country team. Somehow we got onto the subject, and it turned out everyone on the team had some sort of similar cringe worthy memory of trying tactlessly to convert a neighborhood kid at a young age. “I locked my neighbor in the car until she would say she loved Jesus,” one girl sheepishly admitted.
“I refused to give my neighbor any of my cookies until he became a Christian,” another said.
Once we had all shared our embarrassing stories, I think we felt a little bit better about it.
Looking back now, I can only wonder why we as little children were pushed so to try and convert our friends when the adult Sunday School teachers must have known we didn’t have the social skills or the tact for it yet.
This is one memory for which it’s safe to say I still have a little bit of resentment stored up, and there will be a lot of these coming up on this post. (This is my “get everything out post.”)
Of course even children have small doubts about religion, and I was no exception. I remember once, I must have been 6 or 7, asking my mother how out of all the religions in the world we could be sure that we had picked the right one. At the time I wasn’t trying to challenge her. I just assumed that she had a good answer, and wanted to know what it was. She remarked on what a good question it was, and what a thoughtful child I was, but I never did get an answer to that question.
This didn’t overly disturb me. I sensed there was some reason she was sure about her faith even if she couldn’t articulate it to me. And this was true of all the other adults around me. (I didn’t even know anyone who wasn’t a Christian). I couldn’t for myself make sense of how they somehow knew Christianity was the only true religion, but I never doubted for a moment that they were putting me on the right path.
In fact from childhood there were any number of things where things didn’t make complete sense to me.
* I never really understood how the Trinity worked, and how God was three different beings and yet at the same time one.
* I was always a little bit puzzled by the abrupt tone shift between the New Testament and the Old Testament. There were many stories in the Old Testament, such as the genocidal passages during the conquest of Canaan, that I had trouble reconciling to the loving God in the New Testament. Despite attempts by my teachers to rationalize the slaughter of the Canaanites, I could never understand why God couldn’t have come up with another way.
* Again, despite teachers attempting to explain it, I never understood why God had to have a chosen people in order to reveal Christianity to the world hundreds of years later. Couldn’t God have just started out with the Christian message if that’s where he was going anyway?
* Despite years of Sunday School and religion class addressing the topic, I was never completely able to rationalize why an all powerful all loving God let bad things happen to good people.
*I didn’t understand completely why God didn’t just show himself to prove his existence, and I didn’t understand why we had to take everything on faith.
* I didn’t understand why good people who just happened to pick the wrong religion had to go to hell for all eternity.
* I didn’t understand why if the Bible was the infallible word of God, why it contradicted itself in places. Or why it appeared at times to contradict established history.
* I didn’t understand why miracles and God speaking to people happened all the time in the Bible, but never happened these days.
* Despite growing up in a religious community that (on the whole) took a fairly non-literal interpretation of Genesis, I didn’t understand why God didn’t anticipate the problems modern archaeology would bring when he was inspiring the book of Genesis.
And many others besides.
And I hope I don’t give the impression by listing all of this that I think was a more precocious child than you were. Because we all had these questions as children. I know because my classmates had all the same questions I did. In fact many of them were even more vocal about asking them than I was.
(Christopher Hitchens once said something like, “the logical fallacies of religion are so obvious that even a child can see through them. In fact children do see through them, and you can tell this based on the types of questions children ask.” And that is so true.)
None of us ever asked these questions in a challenging way or a rebellious way. We just wanted our teachers to explain it to us. And our teachers did the best they could. Over the course of my childhood, I have heard all the traditional answers to these questions many times over. And they made some sense to a degree, but they never completely answered these questions.
When they were pressed hard on a certain point, or if one of us refused to accept the standard answer, the ever present fallback was that we as human beings couldn’t hope to fully understand the mind of God.
This is an answer that is as frustrating as it is unsatisfying. Because on one level, they’re absolutely right. We can’t hope to understand the mind of God. If God felt it was necessary to kill all the Canaanites, who am I, a mere mortal, to hope to second guess him? It is completely logical to believe that if there is a God, we humans can’t possibly hope to understand everything.
On the other hand though, it was so blatantly a philosophical cheat that I think even as children it left us unsatisfied. Besides which, it can so obviously be used as a cover all for any philosophy that doesn’t make sense.
As an agnostic, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that God might be beyond the realm of human understanding. But then why not be consistent about it? Why try and claim any sort of divine revelation or insight into God’s mind? Why claim that you know that one religion is valid, and another is not? Why claim that you know God’s mind in some places, but can’t explain it in others?
It is perfectly acceptable to say you can not understand God’s mind, and then stick to this. It is less acceptable to just use this as a way to weasel out of all the contradictions in your philosophy about God.
But I’m getting ahead of narrative. As kids we swallowed our reservations, and went along with it. We all trusted that our teachers were telling us the truth even if our kid minds couldn’t make sense of it entirely.
I therefore assumed (as all of us did) that any doubts I might have must be some sort of defect in me, and that once I was old enough and mature enough like all my teachers and parents and Sunday school leaders, I would somehow know everything that they did, and understand all the reasons for Christianity that they were so sure about, but never could really articulate.
A bit later, in second grade, I decided to set up various tests for God, as kids do. "God if you're really out there, make this sandwich turn into chocolate." Or something like that. Of course none of them really worked.
It sounds stupid and I guess it was. But if you're brought up on Bible stories of God doing miraculous things all the time to prove his existence to the Israelites, as a kid it makes a certain degree of sense to try and test it out yourself, and I would wager that just about everyone who came from a religious background has similar stories in their childhood.
After the first few failures I decided (as most kids do) that I was asking too much, and that it wasn't reasonable to expect God to perform huge miracles on my behalf just to prove his existence to a 2nd grade kid. So I lowered the bar and tried to ask God to do things that wouldn't put him out too much. I started to ask him to do stuff that had about a 50/50 chance of succeeding anyway, like "When I go downstairs, have the first sentence that my parents say to me be a question." And sure enough, God did a lot better on these types of tests, and eventually I convinced myself that he must exist after all.
Later that year, in Bible class, I remember my 2nd grade teacher telling us the story of doubting Thomas. And Jesus said to Thomas, "Thomas, you have believe because you have seen. Blessed are those who haven't seen, and still believe." And then she said to the class, "That means us. We are blessed because we believe in Jesus even though we haven't seen him." And I felt incredibly guilty at this point, because I had only believed in God after I had tested him first, and thus excluded myself from this blessed group. From that point on, I thought that believing in Jesus in the face of contrary evidence was somehow a sort of virtue to be aspired to. And if you allowed logic to somehow make you doubt faith, then that was a fault in your character.
And this was a belief that was really drilled into me. I sat through more sermons than I can count talking about the arrogance of secular scholars who trusted in their own intellect and reason more than in God. The effect of this, of course, is that whenever you start to feel like logically Christianity doesn’t make sense to you, you suddenly realize you’re in danger of becoming like those arrogant scholars everyone warned you about.
I remember my 8th grade bible teacher, who was a bit of an amateur scholar, used to talk in disapproving tones about some of his Bible scholar friends. “The more scholarly he became,” he said of one friend, “the more he said you can’t trust the bible. Eventually he left the church and converted to Judaism.” This was said in tones of disapproval, and for years afterwards I was worried I was becoming like this apostate Bible scholar everyone disapproved of.
As for agnosticism, the first time I ever heard the word “agnostic” was in 5th grade. It was on a list of words we had to memorize for the spelling bee, and the teacher was obliged to explain what the words meant as she went through them. “An agnostic is someone who’s not sure if there’s a God or not,” the teacher explained. And then after a pause added, “and someone who doesn’t care either.”
I remember being shocked by this. How could you not care about whether there was a God or not? The whole meaning of existence lay in that question. Not to mention the question of whether your soul spent an eternity in heaven or in hell. How could anyone be so stupid as not to care about it?
(Obviously from my perspective now, I don’t think she gave a very fair or unbiased definition to the word. I think it is possible to be very concerned about whether there is a God or not and still feel like you lack the evidence to decide conclusively. But we’ll get there later. Right now I’m still working my way through the chronology.)
As a child, Bible class was actually my favorite school subject. I really got into all the Old Testament stories. Like a lot of kids do, especially us nerds I suppose. I was also fascinated with mythology (I was a big Greek mythology buff in Middle School) and I loved ancient history, so I suppose it is no surprise that I loved the history books of the Old Testament.
Around 7th grade, perhaps inspired by the amateur scholar we had as a Bible teacher, I decided that I wanted to be a Bible scholar when I grew up, and in my spare time tried to read books about the Biblical history. (I was always a bit of a nerd. If I hadn’t have been reading this, it would have been something else nerdy).
Like a lot of nerds, I became obsessed with trying to point out to other people how smart I was. When the opportunity would present itself, I would always try and correct our Sunday School teachers.
For example, once in 7th grade our Sunday School teacher was talking about how it was so wonderful that all 4 Gospels told the story of Jesus’ birth. I immediately raised my hand and said, “All 4 Gospels don’t include Jesus’ birth. Only Matthew and Luke do.”
The teacher was initially resistant to this correction. “Are you sure?” she asked.
Then one of the other kids in the class (one of the few kids in that Covenant church which also attended the same Christian Reformed school that I did) backed me up on this.
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” she said, and the point was dropped. (To be fair, the youth pastors at our church were much more knowledgeable about the bible, but some of the adult volunteers who occasionally taught the class hadn’t had the benefit of the same Christian schooling I did.)
Also, as I wrote before in this blog I made a big deal of correcting our Confirmation teacher when he tried to say that the tribe of Benjamin had been part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. He initially stuck to his guns, but while he was talking to the rest of the class about another topic I was frantically leafing through my Bible until I found the exact passage that proved him wrong. And then he corrected himself.
In retrospect, you would think maybe these experiences would have shown me perhaps that these people were fallible. But on anything else besides Bible trivia, I trusted them entirely, even if it seemed to go against my common sense.
For example, I remember our 6th grade teacher telling us that if you played the board game “Dungeons and Dragons” you would eventually become a Satan Worshipper.
At the time, I and the rest of the class had never played Dungeons and Dragons before, so we really had no idea what it was, but we couldn’t believe a simple board game could do that to you. And we pressed him on this repeatedly. “But how? How could just playing a board game make you a Satan worshipper?”
He talked about people he knew who had become obsessed with the game, and then somehow ended up as Satan Worshippers. He said that the game has a history, and if you really get into the history of all the board game pieces eventually you get seduced into Satanism. (I’m not even sure Dungeons and Dragons had board game pieces. I suspect he didn’t really know what he was talking about. But neither did we, so we took his word for it on everything.) Eventually he just said something like, “look, kids, I can’t explain it logically, but there’s some sort of dark power that game has, and if really get into it, it can turn you into a devil worshipper.”
“Dungeons and Dragons” was also something that my Sunday School teachers mentioned as evil. And so, like everything else they told me, I suspended my common sense and just trusted them on it. When my dad actually gave me a copy of “Dungeons and Dragons” for Christmas, I left it unopened in my closet.
Music was another thing I just trusted them on. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, our music teacher did a whole unit on popular music. The unit wasn’t actually a serious study of popular music or the history of it, but the focus was on what popular music Christians should and shouldn’t listen to.
We would talk about why Christians shouldn’t listen to this song or that song. Usually it was for the standard reasons: the songs talked about sex or drugs. But we also spent like a week talking about satanic messages hidden in songs if you play them backwards. She even showed us not one, but two documentaries on the phenomenon (one of them was produced by a Christian advocacy group, the other was an episode of Geraldo on the topic.)
Knowing what I know now I think the whole thing is a bit ridiculous. Studies have shown that very few people can actually hear these backwards satanic messages unless it’s first suggested to them or written out. (The documentaries we watched had the messages written out on the screen while they played the records backwards, so you could follow along and I personally would never have been able to assign any sort of words to the garbled sounds without them. But at the time I thought this was just me.)
Plus, the Christian groups who first found these satanic messages in rock music back in the 70s also claimed to have found satanic messages in the “Mr. Ed” theme song. (We were never told this part.)
But man, we all believed it at the time. You had to be really careful what music you listened to, because Satan had all these subliminal ways he was trying to influence you.
I don’t remember all of the groups that supposedly had Satanic messages in them. “Queen” was definitely one of them. “ACDC” I think. “Pink Floyd” maybe. (At least I remember “Pink Floyd” was a group my Sunday School teachers had told us were secretly satanic, but I don’t remember if they showed up in the backmasking documentary or not.) But “Led Zeppelin” was the worst group, because not only did they have satanic messages in their songs played backwards, but also because they apparently had pagan messages in their songs played forward.
Shortly afterwards, my youth pastor made a throw-away comment at Sunday school about how “Led Zeppelin” was pagan music, and these two things together were enough to cement it in my mind. (Not being a huge music fan I had no idea who Led Zeppelin was at the time, by the way. I wouldn’t really get into Led Zeppelin music until I was in college, partly because I spent years in high school changing the radio station whenever Led Zeppelin came on.)
As I grew older, the message of the church changed to target my age group. There was a certain point when I was around 16 when I began to realize the only thing the church really wanted to say to me was: “don’t have sex.”
At school, we had started talking about sexual purity from about 5th grade. By 6th grade, it was integrated into the science curriculum for a full on unit about combining the science of sex with the churches moral teachings.
We were all wide eyed and eager to pay attention for that class. And to the teacher’s credit, although he did present a puritanical view of sexual morality, he made good on his promise to answer any question we had on sex no matter what it was. And we had lots of questions.
Sexual morality came up as a major topic again in 7th grade (by now I was hearing about it both at church and at school). And it was another scholastic unit in 8th grade (at this point it was called “moral purity class” and the focus was only on the morality of sex, not the science.)
By this point already, the novelty was beginning to wear off slightly, and I was beginning to get slightly sick of the topic.
Then it was another major point in 9th grade religion class at school (and in Church Sunday School classes as well.) And then in 10th grade.
And there was a point around maybe 11th grade where it seemed to be just about all I was hearing. I was already getting slightly annoyed at this point, but what sent me over the top was “Spiritual Renewal Week.”
Although this makes me sound nerdy, I actually looked forward to “Spiritual Renewal Week.” It was a nice break from regular classes, for one thing. And secondly I had fully boughten into the idea that the more spiritual you are, the happier your life will become. So I kind of almost looked at these seminars as kind of free happiness classes. I was hoping they would help me learn how to be less selfish in my daily life, or more giving to others, or something like that.
For spiritual renewal week, we had a special assembly every morning before regular classes, and then one day out of the week (I think it was Wednesday) was given entirely over to spiritual renewal week.
The whole week was about not having sex. The morning assembly was all about not having sex all week. The Wednesday consisted of two different speakers in in the morning in which the whole school attended, and then we were broken up into various different classrooms for two smaller workshops in the afternoon. The whole day, all 4 speakers, were all about not having sex.
It’s hard to describe my level of frustration with this.
To begin with, I was an extremely awkward teenager. I couldn’t even talk to girls. All of this had zero relevance to my life. I mean, they just have well have spent the last 6 years (Sunday School, Wednesday night bible study, scholastic units and morning assemblies) telling me not to leak CIA documents. They may just have well have been spending all this time telling me not to green light invasions of Panama for all the relevance this had to me.
Besides which this level of repetition was just getting down right patronizing. I had gotten the message loud and clear in 6th grade when we did our first scholastic unit on sexual morality. An occasional reminder would have been okay, but I don’t think any of us needed this level of constant reinforcement. Either we had gotten the message by now or we hadn’t.
Going to a religious school, plus attending weekly Sunday School and Wednesday night Bible studies I got the message doubly over.
That year was the same year we attended Chic “Covenant High Congress” which was a weeklong religious seminar for high school students put on by the Covenant Church. There were, to be fair, a variety of themes hit on throughout the week. But sex was one of the ones that they hit hard and they hit repeatedly.
Eventually, after the 3rd day of this or so, after a particularly strong speech condemning sex from one of the speakers, one of the girls in my group of friends broke down sobbing. At first she was crying so hard she had trouble breathing. We went for a walk with her after the assembly, and eventually she composed herself enough to tell us that she was no longer a virgin, and that she had had sex with some guy at her school. She was overwhelmed with guilt about it.
This is one of those moments that I accepted at the time, and only get angry about it looking back. At the time I accepted that pre-marital sex was about the worst thing you could do, and so I accepted that the speakers were right to work up the crowd into such emotion about it, even though they must have known what they were going to do to girls like this who already had a guilt complex about it.
Looking back at it now though, I’m so angry I can feel the bile in my throat.
To be fair though, they weren’t just picking on this girl. There was a fairly wide net cast at these things. I remember one of the speakers, after roundly condemning pre-marital sex for about 30 minutes or so added “and some of you have sinned by masturbation, or impure thoughts, and you’ve sinned just as greatly.”
Masturbation, impure thoughts, or the lust in your heart was another theme they returned to again and again. And I remember lots of religion classes and Sunday school classes on the Biblical message that “he who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart with her.” (And to be fair to them, this is straight out of the Bible.)
Not masturbating was something I could control, and, having been taught it was wrong long before I even developed the urge, I dutifully avoided it all through my adolescence and teen-age years.
I was less successful however in controlling how much I thought about sex, and like most Christian adolescents I spent an incredibly amount of emotional energy trying to control impure thoughts..
Depending on who the teacher was, sometimes impure thoughts were presented in more absolute moral terms than others. Our 6th grade teacher, for instance, used to read to us every morning from a devotional book, the theme of which was often on impure thoughts. The book's author emphasized that we shouldn’t feel guilty for quick thoughts or images of sex that flash through our head. This apparently was one of the devil’s tricks to make Christians feel unnecessary guilt. According to this devotional, the devil would place those images in our head, and then turn around and accuse of us having thought them ourselves. So it wasn’t wrong to have these thoughts pop up in our head if it was beyond our control. It was wrong to linger on them however.
(And I had a Sunday School teacher at the same time who also confirmed this view. He was talking more broadly about unchristian thoughts in general, but he said it wasn’t wrong to have them pop up in your head, but it was wrong to linger on them.)
So consequently I forgave myself when unchaste imagery would pop up in my head, but I would feel guilty about it when I lingered on it.
Michael Moore, in one of his movies, has a little comedy bit about how the Catholic Nuns at his school told him that to hold an impure thought for under 5 seconds was a venial sin, but to hold it in mind for more than 5 seconds was a mortal sin. “So I spent my entire adolescence timing my impure thoughts,” Moore said.
Actually I wasn’t too far off from that myself. I wasn’t given a specific time limit, like Moore was, but I did have a fair amount of interest in how long I could hold onto an impure thought before it became no longer Satan’s responsibility and became my own sin.
Christopher Hitchens I think speaks very eloquently about how one of the most terrible aspects of religions is that it endorses the Orwellian concept of thought-crime, and having experienced this myself I know exactly what he is talking about, and I couldn’t agree with him more. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. That’s the adult me speaking. At the time I really bought into it. In fact perhaps if anything it made all those sex lectures somewhat more relevant to my life.
I remember our 12th grade religion teacher once told us that he personally didn’t believe thoughts could be sins.
We as a class reacted against this, because it was counter to what we had been taught up until this point. (Not only with sex, but there’s also a Biblical passage that says if you hate someone in your heart than you’re guilty of the sin of murder). This was new and semi-heretical sounding views to us, but defended it. “If you don’t actually do it, I don’t think it counts,” he said.
The someone in the class asked him, “But what about impure thoughts?”
“Yeah, okay I’ll give you that one,” he said.
If he had just stood his ground on that and said, “no, impure thoughts are not a sin,” it would probably have saved me a couple more years of feeling guilty. But he couldn’t do it. Sex was the one subject they just couldn’t let go of.
And their obsession with sex spilled over into lots of other areas as well— Their obsession with homosexuality, for instance. I couldn’t begin to count the number of anti-homosexual religion classes and Sunday Schools I sat through. I barely even knew that the concept of homosexuality existed before they were telling me it was wrong. We were told it was explicitly wrong in our 6th grade unit on sex, and it came back again and again and again.
My 7th and 8th grade Bible teacher (the one I so admired at the time) would often make comments about how all the gay people in California was just hastening the day when God would drop California into the sea. (And he wasn’t joking.) He was also constantly complaining about the gay rights political agenda.
At CHIC (Covenant High Congress) event in Colorado, one of the featured speakers was a formerly gay person who had somehow become ungay through prayer. We all went to see him, and he talked about how he was living proof that the homosexual life style really was a choice, and that the gay advocates were misleading people when they tried to convince people otherwise.
Again, looking back I’m upset about it, but at the time I bought into it completely.
Our Youth Pastor at Church also made condemning homosexuality one of his favorite topics.
I was so indoctrinated at that point that it was inconceivable to me to believe that homosexuality was not a sin. But I was becoming aware as I grew older of the somewhat flimsy Biblical ground this bedrock principle of theirs rested on. You could find some isolated Biblical passages condemning homosexuality (usually only when Paul is listing all the sins he can think of and he gets a bit carried away) but you could find isolated Biblical passages condemning just about everyone and everybody. Wasn’t the submission of the black race and slavery Biblically justified? Hadn’t the Bible been used to prevent women from voting?
During one Sunday School session I raised my hand and timidly made this point. “I like, totally agree with you that homosexuality is wrong,” I said. “But isn’t it a little dangerous to take isolated Bible passages like that? Can’t they be misinterpreted just like Bible passages used to justify slavery?”
“I don’t know how anyone could possibly misinterpret these passages,” he said. “It says as clear as day that homosexuality is wrong, there’s no two ways to interpret this passage.” And then, just to be kind to me, he added, “But your point is well taken.”
And the church’s obsession with anti-pornography crusades of course ties in here as well.
By the way, while I’m on the subject, never ever let a religious person tell you they’re against pornography because they’re concerned about the exploitation of women. What they’re concerned about is that some people will start thinking about sex, they just know that they’ll get more public sympathy for their view if they pretend to be concerned about women’s exploitation. (Although to be fair, I think a number of them legitimately can’t tell the difference between those two issues. I’m serious.)
For one thing, the Christian church has never been associated with being at the forefront of women’s rights. The religious school I went to, where the teachers shamelessly used the line about pornography exploiting women, was affiliated with a Church which wouldn’t even allow women to have positions of authority in the church because the bible said women weren’t permitted to have authority over men.
Secondly, in order to believe that they were primarily concerned about women’s exploitation, you would have to believe that in every other sexual area they were against sex and impure thoughts just on its own sake, and then suddenly, in just this one particular area, they become concerned with women’s issues?
Furthermore (and I know I’ll get in trouble for this, but I’m going to say it anyway) based on my own personal experience, I believe that the pro-life movement gets a lot of its religious boosting from people who are just upset at the fact that women are having pre-marital sex. I know this because in the religious schools I attended I would hear them occasionally say so more or less explicitly. They would talk about how these girls had sinned by having pre-marital sex, and that they needed to accept the consequences of their actions by having the baby. And they viewed abortion becoming acceptable as a sign that they were losing the cultural war to demonize pre-marital sex. Again, I know this because they would occasionally say so. The legalization of abortion was sometimes mentioned in their sermons about how sex is becoming too permissive in our culture.
[That was a small unrelated side note. There will be more of these. This is the “get-it-all-out” draft.]
In the years since, when I have complained about the obsession the church had with sex, it was occasionally suggested to me that part of this was a necessary public health measure. Teenagers needed to be warned about the dangers of unprotected sex, and I just happened to get it through a religious lense because I was attending a religious school.
This perhaps excuses things up to a point. Leaving aside the statistic that the abstinence only education programs favored by the church often produces more unprotected sex than education about condemns, it doesn’t explain why they were so against impure thoughts and masturbation. Or why they had to demonize it and harp on it to the point my friend was gasping for breath through her sobs because of the guilt.
But it is true that they had a tendency to mix their public health announcements with religion. Anti-smoking, anti-drugs, and anti-drinking campaigns were also often coached in religious rhetoric. And yes, of course there is some overlap here. If you’re religious, you believe that doing unhealthy things to your body is also immoral, and I can see the reasoning.
However there was a side effect to mixing their messages like this. By the time I was 18, I had gotten the impression that the only thing established religion cared about was that I didn’t do drugs, didn’t have sex, didn’t smoke, and didn’t drink.
(Oh yeah, and 4 letter swear words were another big concern of theirs. Again, this was partly a result of mixing their roles as teachers and religious educators. As teachers I think they were just trying to prevent kids from using filthy language in the hallway. But it was given to us in religious terminology, and for a long time I thought it was a sin to say “fuck.” I used to ask forgiveness to God if I even thought the word “fuck”.)
So anyway, I knew what they cared about.
Through their silence, I also thought I had a good idea of what they didn’t really care about. For example, the church didn’t really have a strong principled position against war.
The first Gulf War happened when I was in 7th grade. I was attending Christian schools every weekday, and Church twice a week (plus extra youth group activities.) No one ever said to me that Christians should be against the War.
A lot of them didn’t like the war. I remember our music teacher was really upset about it, and spent a whole class telling us that it was so unfair our generation had to deal with this crisis. (As it turned out, the first Gulf War was over fairly quickly and didn’t end up affecting my generation that much, unlike the Vietnam War did for our elders. But at the initial stages not everyone realized this.)
But there was no principled religious stand against the war. I did not grow up in the pacifist wing of the church, and although some people disliked certain wars, no teacher or church leader ever took a position of principled pacifism against all wars. In fact for anyone in any sort of position of leadership to do so would have been difficult, because you would have to avoid offending all the religious people who did support the war. (And there were a number of people in my community who thought the first Gulf War was actually a good idea. Just like a number of people support the current Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.)
Military recruiters would visit the school, and occasionally, even as young as middle school, whole class periods would be given over to them to talk about why we might want to consider a career in the military when we grew older, or about joining JROTC. Military service was portrayed to us as an honorable thing to do.
And fighting in wars was by no means seen as an unchristian activity. We were even, on one occasion I remember vividly, encouraged to applaud war at a school assembly.
One of the assemblies was given by a veteran who was proud of his service in Vietnam, and mocked people who had opposed the war.
“People always ask me why would you serve in such an unpopular war,” he said. “As if there was something as a popular war. Hey, I’m getting shot, I’m bleeding, but I don’t care, everyones having fun because this is a popular war. Well listen, popular or not, I love freedom more than I hate war. Now what do you think of that?”
We burst into long sustained applause of course. I as much as anyone else. I didn’t know any better back then.
(I’ve mentioned this incident before on a previous post. And both then and now I’m giving out the full name of the Grand Rapids Christian High School because I believe they deserve to be publically shamed on this one. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I’ve been angry about it for years afterwards.)
Perhaps somewhat predictably, in addition to praising the war he also preached against sex. He talked about his fellow soldiers who had pre-marital sex when they were in Vietnam, and how he had tried to make the see the error of their ways. (He was apparently under the impression that this was the worst thing our troops were doing over in Vietnam.)
As I grew older, I began to identify more with the pacifist position myself.
None of my teachers or Sunday School teachers were pacifists, (or if they were, they never told me). All of them believed in the Christian just-war theory. And yet my own stance on pacifism was an outgrowth of extending the various things they had taught me. It was a position that was religiously influenced in its initial stages, and yet ultimately it would help to drive me away from religion. I guess life can be a bit complex like that. Influences overlap at various stages of your life, and looking back not everything always fits into nice neat boxes.
For one thing, I had become a moral absolutist at a young age. I believed that if God says something is wrong, it’s wrong in all cases and all situations.
I think this was partly just a reaction to the moral absolutism around me. (Not on war, obviously, but on a lot of other issues).
For example, during the unit we did on music in middle school, we were asked to come up with some songs that were acceptable for Christians to listen to. One group came up with the song, “Everything I do,” by Brain Adams as a song that showed good Christian virtues.
Others in the class objected to the song on the grounds that it contained the words, “I would lie for you”, and lying was clearly something that was wrong.
The music teacher, to her credit, resisted the temptation to tell us the right answer, and let us debate it as a class.
Some people in the class argued that in some situations lying could be morally justifiable, like if you were in Nazi Germany and you were lying to protect Jews hiding in your attic.
Other people took the position that a sin was a sin, and it didn’t matter what the circumstances were.
I had never thought seriously about this issue before, so I was largely just a spectator in this debate.
I remember one girl read aloud to the class a passage from the Bible. I don’t remember where exactly it was from, it was one of Paul’s letters, but I couldn’t give you exact chapter and verse. But the jist of it was that Christians should not use immoral means to advance the kingdom of God. Even if it appears that good can come from committing sins, we still should no do them.
This had an effect on me, and eventually I began to agree with it. It was not acceptable to sin, even if beneficial results could be achieved by it. Rather from a moral standpoint, it was better to accept the harsh results of telling the truth, even if it causes a set back in the greater cause, because it was a contradiction to try and advance God’s kingdom by immoral means. (I suppose much of this view also rests on the assumption that God is ultimately in control of everything, and if you try and follow his moral commandments he will ensure that everything will eventually work out for the greater good.)
And once I had applied this principle to lying, I began to also apply it to violence as well.
As a child, it had been drilled into me that watching violent movies and TV was sinful. This was a constant argument I would have with my mother (like many young boys, I was attracted to violent programs but forbidden to watch them.) And condemning violence and sex in the media was a constant theme that my teachers and Sunday School teachers often returned to. And I bought into this message as well. (Not that I completely stopped watching action movies, but I felt guilty for enjoying them.)
However, as I grew older I was puzzled as to why they were so sure that media violence was a sin, but real life violence seemed more ambivalent. If one fully imbibes the message that violence is no good, shouldn’t this affect every aspect of life? Shouldn’t violence be just as bad for governments and armies as it is for individuals? Shouldn’t it be just as bad to fight in a war as it is to watch a war movie on TV?
On the subject of violent media, I remember a debate we as a class had with our 8th grade Bible teacher. One afternoon he was upset that some of the people in the class had seen the new ‘Terminator 2” movie and had been talking about it in the hallways, and so we spent a whole class period talking about why violent movies are bad.
I hadn’t actually been allowed to see “Terminator 2” by my parents. But I (and much of the rest of the class) were resisting his premise that watching violent movies inherently makes you a more violent person. “But people don’t get the urge to suck blood after watching vampire movies,” I said.
“No, see I don’t buy that,” he responded. “What you watch has an effect on you.”
I guess I must have felt strongly about the issue, because later in the class I raised my hand again. (I was normally a very shy student, and didn’t speak out much in class.) “But the stories you have us read for Bible class are full of violence,” I said. “Why is it okay to read violent stories in the Bible but not see them on TV?”
“No, no, no, no,” he said. “That’s an Old Testament idea. That’s part of the old covenant. Nowhere in the New Testament do you see Jesus saying kill all the Romans.”
This somewhat missed my point. (I had been talking about the bible as violent reading material, not as theoretically justifying violence.) But missed point or not, it made an impression on me. Up until then I had seen the wars in the Old Testament as proof that violence was sometimes justified. Now this made me realize that you couldn’t use all the wars in the Old Testament to justify current wars. There was a new covenant, and you had to look at what Jesus said to get your bearings on when violence was acceptable. Or at least that’s what I took away from his comments. (I don’t know if that was his intended meaning or not. I don’t think he was actually a pacifist himself—I’m pretty sure he believed in the just war theory. I think he was more concerned about us watching violent movies)
Once the Old Testament had been put aside, my reading of the New Testament gave me the idea that Jesus was a pacifist. There seemed to be any number of quotes from him that reinforced this view. “Turn the other cheek,” “Do not resist an evil person,” “love your enemies,” “do onto others as you would have them do unto you,” et cetera.
The WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bracelets were beginning to become popular at this time as well, and in my own personal image of Jesus I had a hard time imagining him fighting in any wars.
So I became a Christian pacifist. But having adopted this position, I became frustrated that the Church didn’t seem to feel strongly about the same issues I felt strongly about. They had a very strong moral absolutist view of pre-marital sex and homosexuality, but they could not extend this same attitudes towards wars.
They were obsessed with fighting violence, yes, but they were concerned about violence in the media, not in real life. And more than anything, they seemed to spend all their time, energy and money preaching against sex, not wars.
Sometimes, when you’re just at the cusp of discovering a new opinion you didn’t know you had before, it can help if someone else says it first. And that’s what happened to me. I was in the dentist’s waiting room, and I was reading through some magazine article. It was one of those articles Time Magazine will occasionally do examining religious life in America, and taking quotes from people on both sides. I don’t remember the article anymore, but one of the critics of the church was quoted as saying something like, “Can you imagine what the world would be like today if the church had spent the same amount of energy fighting against wars as it does fighting against sex?”
And I read that, and all sorts of bells went off in my head, and I thought, “Yes, yes, yes, that’s it exactly!”
(For years afterwards I would quote that to people, sometimes trying to pass it off as my own observation. “Can you imagine,” I would say, “if the Church spent as much time fighting wars as it spends fighting sex.”
And they would always laugh and say something like, “well it’s precisely the church fighting wars that’s the problem.”
And I would say, “No, that’s not what I meant, it’s just a figure of speech….”)
I also didn’t remember my church being very concerned about social justice issues.
Nor was it very focused on helping people in need.
Actually I should be carefully on this last point, because the virtues of helping the poor and the needy was something they talked a lot about in theory. And there were occasional fund raisers both at school and church for this.
There weren’t however very many service opportunities. Or at least not many that I found accessible.
By about high school, I had begun to lobby for more service projects in our youth group, because I felt this was an important part of Christianity. I remember being on a couple of discussions with our youth pastor about things we thought the youth group should be doing. And I mentioned service projects a couple of times as things I would like to do more. We had one day organized with Habitat for Humanity, and that I think was about the end of it.
Later the youth group leaders, again in response requests for more service projects, started organizing to go down to Degage (the local soup kitchen) to volunteer one night a month.
Despite my desire to be involved in service projects, I was always luke warm about the Degage nights, because I figured the point of volunteering was not just for the experience but also to help people. In fact it was primarily to help people. (Lots be honest, it’s not for the experience at all. Given the choice, who wouldn’t rather just be sitting at home watching TV?) But Degage, the local soup kitchen, was so overstaffed with volunteers they could only give our church one night a month. And even then they had a limited amount of spots, so we had to sign up in advance, and I think there was even a rotation scheme worked out so everyone could get a chance to go.
Now the appeal of sacrificing your free time to try and do some good is somewhat diminished when you know you’re presence there is only pushing someone else out of a volunteer spot. I went to the Degage kitchen with the youth group one night (partly just because I felt like I had to go after being one of the people who had requested service projects) but didn’t feel the need to sign up again.
There were also some 2 week long vacation service projects during the summer. I think during my 4 years in the high school youth group, there were two of these. I didn’t go on either.
Partly because I was worried it would throw off my summer training for cross country.
And partly because I wanted some sort of service opportunity I could integrate into my weekly life in my own city, not something that was just for 2 weeks and then you forgot about it for the rest of the year.
So I didn’t feel like I was getting the service opportunities I wanted out of my church. In retrospect this was probably my fault just as much as theirs. I expected the perfect volunteer opportunity to come to me on a silver platter, and all I would have to do was just show up and join in. I didn’t have the get up and go to search out volunteer opportunities on my own, I just wanted the church to provide them with me. And if my youth group leaders didn’t seem to have any good ideas, then I was just as guilty as they were.
Nevertheless, certainly the subjective impression I got was that the Church wasn’t where any meaningful work helping the poor and needy people took place. (And when recounting one’s religious journey as a youngster, perhaps the impression you have at the time is what shapes you.) The church was where you went to hear about not having sex, and why homosexuality was bad, et cetera. It was completely useless on all other grounds.
Around the time I was 17 or so, I also began to shift politically from conservative to liberal.
Up until I was 17 I identified as a cultural, social and (to the extent I understood economics) economic conservative. By the time I was 18 I had considered myself a liberal.
Politics is a separate subject, so I don’t want to get bogged down here with a detailed examination of my political views. And yet it definitely had an effect on my religious views, so I can’t leave it out entirely either.
I’ll try and be brief then.
Like my pacifism, this started out because of religious reasons even though it would ultimately serve to alienate me from established religion.
For example, I remember debating the death penalty with a member of the swim team on the way to a meet. I was republican and pro-death penalty, he was democrat and anti-death penalty. I went on the usual conservative rant about how those murderous scum deserve to lose their own lives in payment for the lives they’ve taken. He responded, “I don’t believe anyone but God ever has the right to take a human life.”
I couldn’t disagree with this, and I’ve been anti-death penalty ever since.
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