In our day and age we hear (or at least used to hear) much about post modernism and how through it we have come to see the idea that truth as being a relative thing. The sort of catch all summary that gets toted about is “what is true for you is not true for me.” I am oversimplifying to some extent but here is the quick origin story of postmodernism and how it got summarized in such a phrase. If modernism posited a human mind that could neutrally observe the world around it with no bias or interpretation, post-modernism overcorrected and decided not only was the mind not neutral but that reality was malleable as well. In other words, not only do we perceive things differently but also these perceptions themselves are reality, meaning we can have different realities. This concept has naturally come under fire by many, especially by those in what you might call the conservative religious world, because if God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow there is not a lot of room for different truths about God’s nature. In other words my God and your God are the same at a very fundamental level. Or if you would like it in more Wile E. Coyote terms smashing into a cliff because you have tied yourself to a rocket is not fun no matter who you are (which is not a terrible argument by the way). And while I am very sympathetic to many of the arguments against postmodernism there is something to the idea that we all see the world a little differently. I have trouble fathoming that there are people who actually enjoyed the movie Legends of the Fall (which seemed to be an overly long and overly serious study of men’s hair and its proper grooming). And it is not just matters of taste where people will see the world differently; two people can interpret an individual’s tone of voice or body language differently or draw much different conclusions from certain actions or events. So with that overly long introduction and pseudo intellectual overview of postmodernism let me try to bring this back to what I originally set out to do, which is describe my decent into atheism. And please remember the word my. In other words the reasons I will go through are what made me not believe for a season (as you are supposed to say these days). I am not saying that any of these things are right, true or even logical, but simply what went on inside the head of a teenager in northwest Fresno in the 1980’s. And so here it goes….
Growing up I often felt that there was something wrong with my faith because I tended not to experience God in the way that children, at least children in the 1970’s and 80’s were supposed to experience it. There seemed to be something of a basket of activities that you were supposed to have and feelings towards the things in that basket that I simply did not experience. I did not like summer camp. I didn’t like any Christian song involving a guitar and I don’t think that I was ever “on fire” for the Lord (which always sounded to me more like something you might pick up in an Iranian brothel). In high school I did not enjoy the hip youth minister that my church hired (he even sang in a band that played in bars) and I was thoroughly confused by what exactly was meant by or what I should feel if I accepted Jesus into my heart. Most of my experience of events that were geared towards youth was like going to one of those silent raves, that may or may not still be trendy, except I felt like I was going without the headphones. Everyone around me seemed to hear music that I simply did not hear.
For most of my childhood I just sort of took people’s word for it and pretended that I was grooving along to the techno pop or whatever it was the young kids were enjoying in those days. Before my mid teenage years I would have thought of myself as a Christian and had an adequate faith for someone my age. And to be quite honest even though I did not feel much in the way that I was supposed to feel it was not something that I dwelled on. I just kind of went along with things. The only event from this time that I remember having a deep impression on me was when our Sunday School teacher decided it would be a good idea to take a bunch of fifth graders through the minor prophet Amos. The book was really weird and scared me but I am glad that she did it. It was a glimpse into the parts of the Bible that they usually shielded from kids. No one was building an arky arky rather a splenetic vinedresser was fed up with people’s lack of obedience to God. All of which brings up a point that requires much more thought and examination than I am going to give it here, which has to do with how Christianity is presented to kids. Sometimes the way we bring children into the faith feels like what they do in cults, that is they only tell you the weird stuff after you have left your family and are living in a school bus in Driggs, Idaho making macramé light ropes. When we wait to share these strange things I think it can lead to problems in faith. Kids are not stupid and if you hide stuff from them it can make them think that there are nefarious reasons for you keeping things from them. But as I said this is a topic for a different day.
When people have asked me how I left the faith it is not a simple answer. There was not one event but a series of small things. In many ways the best way I have been able to think about it is that it was like the tide going out. You don’t really notice it happening until a moment where you simply realize your faith is no longer there. The only explicit thing that I do remember was the night I decided to stop praying. It was in Monterey, California of all places my senior year of high school and I decided that I was being hypocritical by continuing to pray. I sort of hedged my bets by telling God that I didn’t think I believed in him anymore and so I was signing off or whatever you call it when you stop praying because you no longer believe. I would imagine that there is a Finnish word for it. The idea of signing off is sort of funny because I am not sure whom I thought I was talking to. And so while my most vivid memory is the end there were some moments that I do remember as markers in this decline of faith.
I had briefly mentioned summer camp and it is probably worth expanding on a bit. There was a camp run by the local Presbytery that was integral part of the church my family attended, and to most of the Presbyterian churches in the area. The camp was located roughly halfway between Fresno and Yosemite Valley at an elevation of around 5,000 feet. Most every kid of the camp going age who went to my church participated in the summer camp, in some capacity, but not all at the same time. There were a number of camps offered and so there was a fairly good chance that you would get there and not know anyone, which happened to me a few times. Prior to going I was very excited. My brother who is four years older than me started (four years before me, imagine that) and from what I heard it sounded like a yabba dabba doo time. And so in the summer before fourth grade, I was old enough to go and set off. The camp for my age cohort was for some reason Robin Hood themed. I am still not sure if Robin Hood is an appropriate person for Christian’s to emulate, I mean who put him in charge of deciding income distribution for Nottingham? Certainly caring for the poor is Christian but the means by which he acquired the goods which he gave to the poor seems to be at best a little morally grey. Whatever the case I went off and generally enjoyed it, but the enjoyment was not in what you might call a spiritual way. I enjoyed probably the way someone might enjoy a secular camp – I liked the games and we got to build a small boat for a race. I did eat too much beef jerky one night and threw up, but I threw up a lot as a kid so this was not very unique.
I spent two more years at this Robin Hood themed camp and continued to enjoy it. Again my experience was not spiritual but pleasant enough. This pleasantness all changed the next year when I graduated to the Junior High camp. The lack of spiritual enlightenment continued but the secular fun ceased as well and I found myself surrounded by frightening kids who seemed to have overactive pituitary glands and a propensity to violence. One of these frightening kids was obsessed with Ozzy Osbourne which I found very disconcerting mainly because his interest in Ozzy seemed to be fueled by his belief that there was something of the occult in Ozzy’s antics. That is Ozzy was kind of a poor man’s Beelzebub in his telling. It was interesting that while I did not get a sense of the presence of God I did get a sense of the presence of something not of God. Ozzy was not the tottering bumbling grandfather that we know today and to my young mind seemed like someone who, in the words of St. John loved the darkness more than the light. So I spent the week slightly on edge wondering if I would wake up and find this kid trying to remove my pancreas to sacrifice to Odin or carving a pentagram into my head to ensure that there would be a bountiful harvest of einkorn. In addition the week I was there it rained limiting the outdoor fun. I am not sure if there is a straight line from any of this but for the first time that I can recall in my life I had real feelings of depression. I didn’t want to be there and looked forward to going home.
This feeling would become much worse my next year at camp, where the depression was some of the most severe I have ever experienced, before or since. I felt totally alone and at that time and place at camp the world felt devoid of any meaning. There was no joy and I had to force myself to think about future events to try and shake myself out of this feeling of nothingness. Today I would probably have dubbed this an existential crisis and maybe that is as good of explanation as any. I could not locate the source of it. There were certainly other people around and they were not terrible people but I could not muster any worthwhile interactions with them. It might have been easier had they simply not been there. If my loneliness was the result of an actual lack of people but instead I was surrounded by people and yet felt no contact and no meaning. I remember on numerous occasions during our “free time” I broke the rules and wondered away from the campsite hoping to find or see something that would cure the hopelessness that I was experiencing. Now and then even to this day I will have a nightmare where I feel like I did that week. It may have been a dark night of the soul, but if it was I failed because I did not emerge with any great new spiritual depth.
I gave camp one more try or an event sponsored by the camp. It was a bike trip in the Lake Tahoe area. The biking was nice and it was not terribly depressing. However our “spiritual” leader was a warmed over Bolshevik who conflated his politics with the Gospel. He may have been one of the most self-satisfied individuals that I have ever met, whether this was compensating for some terrible insecurities or whether he truly believed in his own awesomeness I am not qualified to say. Whatever the case, it was probably not what someone coming off two horrific camping experiences needed at least in terms of spiritual renewal. Besides he really liked Huey Lewis and the News. It’s hard to think of a worse combination. I mean if you are going to be a tiresome pinko at least play The Internationale that would at least get you in the mood to liquidate some Kulaks, but Huey Lewis, they seem like a band that Uncle Jessie would have belonged to on Full House. I am not sure which circle of hell has this as a soundtrack, but I am sure that there is one. So anyway my last major exposure to Christianity in a camp setting was this guy and the Christianity he presented was not terribly attractive unless you think politics is the highest order of the universe.
So it was not then that I lost my faith. What my faith was at this point in time it is sort of difficult to remember. I would suspect that it was like a lot of people who go to church sometimes – I had a vague awareness that this was something I should have, but really nothing deeper. This was not really helped by the fact that shortly hereafter my church decided it was time to bring in Craig, the cool, hip youth group director. He had a mullet, which was somehow awesome at this point in the 80’s and he even played in a band. I don’t think there was anything uniquely wrong with him, but he was more the byproduct of a system that emphasized youth as an end unto itself, meaning that someone thought it was a good idea to bring in young hip college students who also happened to be Christian. Most of his problems stemmed from the fact that he had no training and not much in the way of knowledge when it came to Christianity. The last I heard he was still living in Fresno and doing some sort of sales job and was not an active Christian. Which seems to be a fitting conclusion. He would do odd things like approach you and tell you that he had heard that you were at a party where beer was served. The funny thing is that when he did this I had not been at any such party. Later when I was actually going to parties where beer was served he went silent. For someone like me who was hopped up on self-satisfaction and believed that I was deeply intellectual there could not have been a much worse choice. Craig did not know a whole lot and so most objections I voiced he didn’t have an answer for. This is not to say that there were not answers, its just that he was hired for his hipness and date on his birth certificate, not his knowledge of the faith once delivered. And I should probably pause for a moment and point out that he may have had an impossible task with me, I was a self-satisfied teenager and he could have been Justin Martyr and I may have ended up just the same.
By the time Craig entered my life I was beginning to have doubts about the faith that were more overt than any I had previously had. I don’t think any were terribly profound or original, just the usual store bought atheism that products of the Oxbridge seem to espouse. Like those who come out of this milieu much of my objections were probably just pride which manifested itself in a belief that really smart people were not Christian. And I saw myself as really smart, why I am not quite so sure. I have sometimes speculated as to whether or not I would have lost my faith if my youth minister had been better educated, if he could have answered my questions. Frankly I don’t know. My youthful hubris may have overwhelmed even the most patient and informed individual. Whatever the case I can say he was not helpful and did nothing to slow my slide into atheism.
Like the Gnostics and their uneven relationship to the created order I was never really sure what to do about being atheist. Was I supposed to be free like some Rousseauean natural man, unimpeded by society and all its rules or was I some quasi Nietzschean superman who had seen through the superstitions of others and was now to rule over these silly earthlings. Whatever the case I didn’t really pull off either. I was a mediocre atheist, just like I had been a mediocre Christian. I felt a little less guilty about some of my behavior, but not a whole lot. My latent Calvinism still whispered in my ear, occasionally telling me of my total depravity. I have to say that I didn’t think about atheism too much as a thing in and of itself, but mainly thought of it in terms of not being a Christian. And I have to say that I am not alone in this. I have found that most atheists who put a whole lot of energy into their atheism often act on it in terms of opposing that which is Christian or some other religion.
If you want an example and since we have been talking about mullets the professional atheist Bill Maher made an entire movie about how dumb religion is. Which he is allowed to do, but it just seems that atheism does not have much substance to it, which is probably baked into the pie by its very nature. It would seem that once you have decided you believe in nothing beyond yourself the topics of conversation sort of end there – “hey you don’t believe in anything either -- awesome.” I will continue this discussion in a bit about my life in the world of atheism but want to simply point out that much of our intellectual energy these days follows atheism or at least the way I practiced atheism by finding its energy not in what it supports but what it opposes and naturally I think this is a very bad thing.