I spent six months going to an evangelical church …
… and I totally did it for the wrong reasons. But it was a necessary step for me to figure out that I was actually an atheist. Here’s why.
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The phone was ringing before I even walked into the house.
It was an unexpected visit home. Eight hours earlier, my mother passed unexpectedly. I was still in shock as I asked a friend from college to give me a ride home.
But by the time I walked in the door, my head full of tough-to-ponder thoughts and concerns about what faced my family and the people I cared about, I had a phone call already waiting for me.
It was a guy that led a bible study I was involved with back at school. We recently had a conversation about the “leap of faith” needed to accept Jesus into my life and my heart. I was an analytical person and I had been analyzing that statement in my own head for nearly a week before I got another call—the one that led me to come home unexpectedly that evening.
I never gave him my home phone number. He had to sleuth for it.
That was the moment I started asking why.
Lapsing into a coma
I grew up Catholic, and like a lot of cynical Catholics, I lapsed. There were too many questions—about communion, about the sort of consistency of it, the way it just seemed like the answers were laid out without the questions being asked.
So when my dad passed tragically and dramatically in 2000, I was already in a position to throw the answers without questions over to the side. Because hey, I didn’t need any of this. This wasn’t actually sticking with me. I couldn’t see a reason to stick with something I didn’t understand.
The problem with the Catholic Church in the U.S. is that there’s a lot of “what” and a bunch of “how,” but little “why.”
But my dad’s faith did get me questioning my religious outlook. Every six months or so, I’d pop into a Catholic church somewhere just to remind myself what was out there. I started doing a lot of personal research into religion, convinced that there was something out there I needed to better understand.
Eventually, a friend of mine who commented on my then-penchant for hawaiian shirts (don’t ask) convinced me to check out her church. I was in a curious mode, so I thought, why not?
That was how I became a Baptist for six months.
What I learned about myself
Switching from Catholic to Baptist, I immediately “got it.” Or so I thought.
There was a passion missing from the mechanical masses I grew up with. That passion, that charisma, was easy to find in everyone who went to the church. There was clear, instant engagement. Engagement is good, right? Didn’t seem like there was a ton of that in my Catholic Church days. We just seemed to walk out and not see the people in our community for another week.
Something I liked about what I was doing is that we actually spent time researching and discussing and thinking analytically about what we talked about. Too little of what happens in this world gets analyzed and pondered… especially, it seems like, in the Catholic Church.
It was a good experiment. I’m glad I put the time in and got to hear the perspectives and try to invest in all of the things I was learning. I was even convinced to check out secondary analytical perspectives, such as C.S. Lewis, to better research my options. But in the end, it didn’t last.
It wasn’t them. It was me.
Why I quit
To be clear, I didn’t quit because my mom died. Rather, I questioned my motivations.
Was I there because I wanted to believe that something else was out there after this whole mess? That I needed this relationship in my life to be a complete human being? In the end, I found strong evidence within myself that the reason I actually joined the church because I was lonely and needed a support system after a difficult time in my life.
Loneliness is a terrible reason to do anything, especially to jump head-first into evangelical Christianity. My motivations were real. I had big gaps in my life—first my dad, and later my mom. I couldn’t handle that on my own. I needed a support system. I realized, in the end, that this was a support system with strings attached.
If these people who I thought were amazing and clever and friendly had found a place in this system of belief, clearly I could, too, right? It’d click in and eventually I’d figure it all out.
I didn’t. Six months in, I was really enjoying hanging out with my new friends, but after a lot of soul-searching, I realized to myself that I couldn’t just borrow someone else’s support system without embracing the real reason it was there. I couldn’t justify it.
One night, after a church function maybe a month after the death of my mom, I had a long conversation with my two closest friends—the two people who were the strongest catalysts for devoting six months of my life to a grand experiment. I expressed fear, my need to step away from this life I had jumped into with both feet. I was scared that was it, things were over between us as friends.
They still accepted me. They understood where I was coming from. And while I can’t say that things were necessarily the same after that, I still regularly saw them and we were still close until college ended.
After you graduate, things change. I changed. I moved away, got a real job and started listening to Elliott Smith’s second album on repeat for a solid year or two. I didn’t see those friends for a while (but I did make an effort to call them a few years later, checking in and letting them know I was still alive). But eventually, I came out on the other side, realization in hand.
I learned way more from that Elliott Smith album than I ever learned from C.S. Lewis.
There’s nothing out there
It took me a while to admit it to myself that I was an atheist. For about five years, I hedged with the “agnostic” thing, just in case I decided I wanted to get in touch with my old friends at the church I went to at school or perhaps my old pastor at the Catholic church I grew up in.
But eventually, I realized that the things that excited me about the world—the way people live, the ideas that were out there—were all on this planet. Eventually, they faded away. I would too. That’s OK. No idea is so good as to last forever. But we can find ways to reach the people that fascinate us while we’re here, right?
Based on the research I’ve done, I’d best describe myself as a secular humanist. It’s an imperfect fit, but probably the closest one. I’m not one of those militant dudes that hangs on Reddit and wears a fedora and talks about how stupid believers are. I think it’s important to allow people the right to approach their own lives in their own way. Faith is in the eye of the beholder. If you behold something, you should. They’re your eyes. You should be able to see whatever’s in front of you. It’s your mission to figure it out, not anyone else’s.
For me, the question of where we came from is answered by science. The question of why we should care about others has an obvious answer of its own.
And the question of why I don’t go to church anymore didn’t come from being a jerk or talking down the beliefs of others. It came from a place of deep thought and ultimate disagreement.
We spend too much time speaking of what we know about each other already that we don’t reflect on how the answers might just be simpler than that. We’re here because we got lucky, and unlike the video game “Lemmings,” we actually have the ability to decide our next steps.
Walk there, sure. But don’t be afraid to ask a few questions along the way.
