Losing My Religion (21 page)

I started to see that the miracles of my Christian life had rational explanations. My born-again experience at the mountain retreat had been about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability, not about being touched by Jesus. My old boss gave me the $45,000 because he felt it was the right thing to do, not because I had asked God for it. I began to attribute my personal and professional turnaround to maturity, not to guidance from God. Landing the religion writing job at
The Times
was a product of years of hard work and persistence, not divine intervention.

I had changed in another way. I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded in logic and reason, requires a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. I used to think that you simply made a decision: to believe in Jesus or not. Collect the facts and then decide for yourself. But it’s not that simple. Faith is something that is triggered deep within your soul—influenced by upbringing, family, friends, experiences and desires. It’s not like registering to vote, checking a box to signal that you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. Christians often talk to those who have fallen away from the faith as if they had made a choice to turn away from God. But as deeply as I missed my faith, as hard as I tried to keep it, my head could not command my gut. I know now that it was wishful thinking, not truth. I just didn’t believe in God anymore, despite my best attempts to hold on to my beliefs. Faith can’t be willed into existence. There’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

This new honesty made me feel quite alone—and scared. I revealed the extent of my disbelief only to Hugh and to my wife, Greer. Hugh believed that I was misinterpreting what was happening to me. He was confident that I was still a Christian, but just experiencing a dark night of the soul. He was sure that I’d be back in church sooner or later. I had been saved, and that was forever.

“God won’t let you get away, Billy,” he said.

Greer, who had admitted to her loss of faith earlier, was a different story. She is one of the most disciplined people on Earth. She rises early each morning to work out, cares for our four boys, runs a thriving web-based business called GreersOC.com that reports on the latest in Orange County fashion, dining and trends, and volunteers for the Orange County Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a cause she joined when our second son, Tristan, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 14. In her spare time, she’s run a dozen marathons.

She brings that same kind of tenacity to other pursuits, whether it’s reading some of the most challenging classic literature at night or searching for the truth about God. I don’t know whether I should take credit or blame, but her loss of religion was sparked by our talks after I got home from work. I would tell her about my day, and she would listen, as flabbergasted by what I had seen as I was. The never-ending supply of stories ignited long-dormant doubts about her faith and caused her to see her Catholic experiences in a new light. For years, she said she had been “judged up the gazinga” by priests during confession and counseling sessions, making her feel guilty and worthless. Now she was finding out that these same priests had been covering up for their molesting brethren, or that they themselves had unconfessed sins far greater than hers. She came to see Catholic priests as regular people who belonged to an all-male club that absurdly believed its members held special powers—like turning bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ—that set them apart of the rest of humanity. From there, her faith fell rapidly, and Greer quick-marched to the anger phase of the grieving process. She couldn’t believe how the faithful showed automatic, deep reverence to priests simply because they had been ordained by the church. She was angry that she had been barred from Communion—she was an adulterer in the priests’ eyes—because she had not married in the Catholic Church. She found it sad and amusing that parishioners took seriously the garments worn by priests or the skullcaps and miters worn by bishops, cardinals and the pope, when they were just costumes from the Roman era. It bothered her that Catholics refer to a cardinal as “Your Eminence” or the pope as “Your Holiness,” as if they deserved titles that bordered on idolatry.

“I’m sorry it took me until I was 42 to figure it out,” Greer said. “But I feel free now. I don’t have one doubt.”

If I had still been a believer, I would have argued that her criticism was focused on human and institutional flaws. They didn’t reflect the underlying truth about God. But I had passed through that phase myself, and kept right on falling through the deeper logical underpinnings of belief. Yet I was still in the mourning stage over my loss of faith. I felt envious of people who had it. To me, their life was simpler—not tortured by doubt, and with a road map that put them on the path to eternal bliss.

Without God, I had a whole new set of problems. There was no almighty supernatural power that had my back. I didn’t have the comfort of a church home, where the music, the sermons and the fellowship could inspire me. Most significantly, I had to accept the fact that there was no perfect father out there, ready to sweep me up into his arms and love me no matter what I did. In many ways, I had to accept the fact that I was alone in this world. I didn’t want to join up with the atheists, who could be as arrogant and cocksure of their beliefs as fundamentalist Christians. And attending the inclusive Unitarian Church—which had Christians, Jews, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists and others inside its big tent—was to me like drinking non-alcoholic beer. What was the point?

My new disbelief affected smaller parts of my life as well. I suddenly felt awkward when I heard about someone who had been laid off, had fallen ill or experienced a death in the family. It didn’t feel right to use the comforting “You’re in my thoughts and prayers,” as I had done for years. Even the simpler “You’re in my thoughts” sounded a little empty. I felt helpless and even negligent that I couldn’t pray for divine intervention—despite knowing that prayer didn’t work. I settled on sending “positive thoughts” their way. Now I know that the best thing to do is offer to help, and the next best is simply to make contact. Human intervention isn’t miraculous, but I think it beats silent prayer.

My biggest challenge was death. Never the most comfortable subject, it now terrified me. I no longer believed in an eternal life in heaven. Jesus said that He would prepare a room especially for me in His Father’s House, and I always imagined that room as a little kid might—filled with my favorite things, including my best friends, favorite foods, wide-screen TV with an endless supply of great sports events and movies, a swimming pool, work-out equipment and easy access to the beach and waves. At some level, I assumed the truth about heaven was more sublime—time spent with the Lord—but the heavenly fun house was the symbolic shorthand that I had often used. Now, without the Bible as a guide, my afterlife was an abyss. Assuming, that is, I didn’t end up in hell because I rejected God.

One day, Greer read a nice review in
The Times
about a one-woman play called
Letting Go of God
. Intrigued, she bought two tickets, and we soon found ourselves sitting in a small theater in Hollywood, waiting for Julia Sweeney to take the stage.

Best known for her androgynous character “Pat” on
Saturday Night Live
, Sweeney had written and was starring in a play based on her own religious experiences. As she moved into her monologue, I could feel my pulse quicken. I scooted to the edge of my chair. As she told the story of her spiritual journey—from Catholic to happy atheist—I had goose bumps. Though the details varied, it was my story, too. Using humor, insight, sensitivity and reason, she seemed to be talking directly to me,
for
me. It felt so good to know I had company—not among wild-eyed atheists and cynical nonbelievers, but with someone who had taken her faith seriously and sought to shore up her beliefs when they started to crumble.

A cradle Catholic, Sweeney told the audience that the beginning of her doubt came when she signed up for a Bible study class at her parish and began to read the Good Book straight through, beginning at Genesis and ending at Revelation:

I knew the Bible had nutty stories but I guess I thought they’d be wedged in amongst an ocean of inspiration and history. But instead the stories just got darker and more convoluted, like when God asked Abraham to murder his son, Isaac. As a kid we were taught to admire it. I caught my breath reading it. We were taught to admire it? What kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that, to ask someone to kill his or her own child? And isn’t the proper answer, “No, I will not kill my child, or any child”?

 

I had the same problems. I had always believed that it was silly to take the Bible literally—I never could get past the story of Noah and the Ark. How could every species on Earth fit into a single boat? How did the animals get fed—and who cleaned up after them? How could Noah live to be 950 years old? God could make anything happen, I thought, but this story had the smell of a man-made fable, not His inerrant word. The Bible is filled with these kinds of tales. It also portrays God as merciful and merciless, vengeful and forgiving, angry and kind, patient and impatient, unpredictable and unchanging. You could get whiplash trying to keep track of his moods. Sweeney talked about other surprises she found:

Even if you leave aside the creepy sacrifice-your-own-off-spring stories, the laws of the Old Testament were really hard to take. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with archaic, just hard-to-imagine laws. Like if a man has sex with an animal, both the man and the animal should be killed. Which I could almost understand for the man, but the animal? Because the animal was a willing participant? Because now the animals had the taste of human sex and won’t be satisified without it?

 

The New Testament didn’t get any better for Sweeney, who found Jesus to be “much angrier than I had expected…and very impatient.” I suppressed the urge to shout, “Preach it, sister!”

I have to say, that for me, the most deeply upsetting thing about Jesus is his family values. Which is amazing when you think how there’s so many groups out there who say they base their family values on the Bible. I mean he seems to have no real close ties to his parents. He puts his mother off cruelly, over and over again. At the wedding feast, he says to her, “Woman, what have I to do with you?” And once, while he was speaking to a crowd, Mary waited patiently off to the side to talk to him, and Jesus said to the disciples, “Send her away, you are my family now.”…Jesus discourages any contact his converts have with their own families. As we know, he himself does not marry or have children and he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well, and if they do, they should just abandon them.

 

She detailed how she tried desperately to retain her faith, despite seeing its deep flaws. She eventually looked for God in Eastern religions, nature and love—the refuge of impersonal transcendentalists. She said she finally had to accept “what was true over what I wished were true.” This was, for me, the most profound moment in the play. I had been wishing Christianity were true, as if I wished hard enough, I could turn fantasy into reality.

Sweeney’s description of her atheist life was quite comforting to me. Right up front, she tackled the subject of death, saying that she believes our consciousness dies along with our other organs. This made sense to me: before I was born, I had no consciousness; after I die, I will have no consciousness. There will be nothing. The revelation had an instant and curious effect. The intense squeeze of time—the difference between eternity and one lifetime—made my life, and my time on Earth, much more precious. Sweeney put it like this:

I suddenly felt very deeply that I was alive: Alive with my own particular thoughts, with my own particular story, in this itty-bitty splash of time. And in that splash of time, I get to think about things and do stuff and wonder about the world and love people, and drink my coffee if I want to. And then that’s it.

 

Driving home from the play, adrenaline raced through my body. It felt as if I had made a discovery that made sense of my life and gave my mind some rest. For me, the play was the key I had been missing in my new worldview. I could now open the door to a new life—one without God. It didn’t feel too scary; it felt more like something new and exciting. Like exploring a new home.

In college I had earned money working as a lifeguard on the sands of Huntington Beach, California. It was the perfect summer job—guarding the waters of one of the world’s best and most dangerous beaches. I made about 1,500 rescues during my four summers there. Most of the swimmers I helped were caught in rip currents—rivers that form in the surf and pull people out to sea. Rips themselves are harmless. They don’t yank people under, they aren’t very wide and they dissipate outside the surf line. But inexperienced swimmers don’t know this. All they sense is that they are being pulled quickly out to sea. Panicking, they claw at the water, fighting in vain to get back to the beach. They tire, choke on water and go down. No swimmer can make headway against a strong rip current. But someone with ocean experience can get out of a rip easily, simply by swimming to its side. Or she can just relax and let it carry her beyond the surf, where it will quickly dissipate.

At first, experiencing doubts about my faith, I acted like one of those frightened beachgoers who swim madly against the current, trying to get back to what I thought was the safety of Christianity. But the current of truth had me and wasn’t going to let me go. When I decided to stop fighting it, I felt relief—even serenity. I decided to ride it out past the surf line and see where it would take me.