Coming Out

{Before I begin this post I want to say that I am not at all equating what I am learning about "coming out" as an atheist to the experience of coming out as gay to one's family or friend group. I just don't know how else to try and describe it. Forgive me if I fuck it up.}

I didn't want this.

I didn't choose it.

I didn't sit down one day, a few years back, and think to myself, "You know what, self? I'd like to find a way to blow up everything I have ever believed because that way I can strain or break all sorts of important relationships and piss off all the people around me," before setting off down some perceived path toward atheism. This hasn't been an easy process. It has been many things but easy isn't one of them.

It has been scary and really fucking lonely.

But all of that doesn't change what I believe to be true. I'd like to say that if I could, I'd go back and somehow avoid "catching" atheistic beliefs, but I wouldn't. Or that I would take back my previous post and just keep it to myself instead of sharing it. I wouldn't. I shouldn't have to.

It has involved unpacking all sorts of uncomfortable feelings about religion and Jesus and the mounting evidence I kept uncovering against those ideas. It involved separating what I wanted to believe and what I truly, to my core believed. And recently, it involved a lot of personal introspection. My post may have come out of no-where for those reading it, but it has been months in the writing.

Atheism isn't contagious. I sure as fuck don't want to convert you. Your kids won't end up atheist if they play with my kids. I'm still me.

Losing My Religion

Are you okay? Are you questioning your faith? I saw your post and I’m worried about you.

Those are a few of the messages I’ve gotten recently from friends and family alarmed by my recent IG story post about evolution and atheism. I know these questions come from a place of genuine concern and there was no way to adequately answer those questions via a text or IG post. I realize the gravity of what I am saying and trying to respond to those texts made me decide to sit down and write it out. I am doing this for myself as much as for the people who are trying to understand me. This could be a long one…

To really understand how I have moved across the religious spectrum from my parent’s religious beliefs in the Lutheran Church to Presbyterian to Anabaptist to Omnist to Agnostic to Atheist. It is quite a change and the only way the end result makes sense is to go back and start from the very beginning.

A large percent of my childhood memories involve church. I remember Sunday mornings – often involving the smell of McDonald’s Egg McMuffins – in my nicest clothes. I remember sitting in the sanctuary and looking at the details of every stained-glass window, every arched beam, the altar, the pulpit, the fans whirling lazily in circles. I remember learning how to follow along in the complicated hymnals – usually singing songs that I didn’t understand. I remember listening to the pastor drone on and on about passages that didn’t make sense to me. I remember praying prayers and wondering why I always felt like a prayer fraud. If I were to trace my evolution to atheism, this forced, dictated prayer was where my first questions and doubts came from. I can clearly remember the inner dialogue that went on in my head during prayer time. I remember chastising myself for my thoughts wandering or for just going through my wish list (I genuinely believed that that was how God worked because there was always a portion of prayer time where the pastor named all those who were suffering in the congregation. We prayed for health, for employment, for discernment, for the doctors and surgeons. We prayed with the expectation that our God could, and perhaps would see fit to answer those prayers). I remember wondering why I never felt like anyone was really listening to me. I felt like everyone else must be feeling this supernatural connection when they prayed but that if I admitted my doubts or failings that my family would be horrified.

I think that there is an interesting tie-in here with my understanding of my adoption and how that aspect of my life reinforced the desire to “be part of” the only family that I knew. What if they all had a divine connection but because I was adopted, I was not included that divine relationship. I never consciously thought that at the time but looking back at some of my behaviors and beliefs with the eyes of an adult, I see where being adopted, led me to desperately want to please and be included during my youth.

But, back to the topic at hand. After Sunday School ended, my classes for confirmation began somewhere around 6^th grade. Once a week I would head upstairs in the church office building into the stuffy room where our pastor taught our confirmation classes. I need to mention here that I was not a fan of our pastor at that time. He was old, grumpy, and reeked of alcohol during classes. I have one very clear memory from those classes. It’s not the bible verses I was required to regurgitate or the beliefs I was told were in my best interest. Because why else would you send a child to such a class? I know that my parents absolutely had my best interests at heart. My memory? What stuck with me all these years? I asked him why the bible didn’t mention dinosaurs. Why, if the bible chronicled everything from the beginning of time, did it never mention these ferocious beasts that would have been terrifying to coexist with. There are all sorts of fantastical tales in the old testament that made the cut, but never once is a giant, man-eating lizard mentioned in these stories. I was taking 6th-grade science at the time and we were studying fossils. I was being presented with physical, scientifically soundproof that dinosaurs existed yet never once in the Bible were they ever really mentioned. Yes, someone will inevitably say that Isaiah 27:1 mentions Leviathan – a gliding serpent, a monster of the sea. That’s it. One tiny sentence mentioning a creature that could easily exist today – a giant crocodile or an anaconda. No mention of giant beasts, or predators, of the land and air.

His response, in front of all my peers: “How dare you to question the Word of God?” He was angry that I had the audacity to try to understand the text I was about to publicly proclaim as Truth. He didn’t even give me the verse from Isaiah. It took until adulthood for me to discover that one. He shut me down. Embarrassed me. Reinforced the already strong notion that asking questions meant I was a doubter (insert audible gasp). I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t get “in”… who didn’t graduate. So, I stuffed my questions and learned my lesson. It wasn’t about understanding it was only about believing blindly. This was around the time I was pulling back from church. Trying week after week to get out of going and, finally, when I was 14 or 15, I left for good. Shortly after, I went into quite a tailspin of shitty behavior. My whole belief system had taken a hit and I acted out. I won’t go into that, but I went dark for a while. From then until college, I pretty much stayed out of the pews. Every once in awhile, we went to a Christmas Eve service genuinely because I believed not going was some sort of smite toward God. Easter was pretty much the same. I attended one church in college, but it was super cult-like and after a few awkward encounters I quit going.

I didn’t return to church regularly until I was pregnant with Addison. We went through hell trying to get pregnant and then, to top it off, my pregnancy was miserable. I felt strongly that our kids needed a church upbringing like I had. How ironic is that? I felt like my kids needed the same uncomfortable, confusing experience that I dreaded every week as a kid. Hindsight… Anyway. I spent half my pregnancy in bed, so church wasn’t really happening. Then, with a newborn, church just wasn’t feasible. I know I attended the Presbyterian church in town sporadically for a while, but I can’t remember exactly when I really returned and started interacting more with the people there. I volunteered in the middle school youth group. I went through the classes and the process of becoming a church member. My babies were baptized there. I fell into a small group that led to a friendship that was instrumental in me really starting to look at my faith and do the work to understand it. She met with me regularly and guided me through some really difficult life situations. She was the first person who every actively encouraged me to ask the tough questions and then to dig into scripture to find the answers. We talked about dinosaurs and gaps in scripture and how we had to understand the context of the stories in the bible to understand the meaning of verses. I attended a small group for the first time in my life. I had never heard people discuss Jesus as I did in that group. It made me want to understand. I was curious. I started reading scripture. Then, when my dad died – I dove in even further. I was desperate to answer questions I had about mortality and the idea of heaven. I wanted to know that my dad was okay. I wanted to know that I would see him again. I needed that. I made friends in the church. These friends were people that I looked up to. People who I felt were “further along the path” than I was. We had deep conversations about what it meant to follow Jesus. Then, there was a big shake-up in the church administration and things slowly dissolved. One of the interim pastors left and his replacement was a joke. Friends that worked in the church started to leave and I left with them. That church went in a direction that we didn’t agree with.

The time between when I last went to a service at the Presbyterian church and when some friends and I started meeting semi-regularly is kind of nebulous. I know it started around the time of the 2016 election.

Just to be controversial, I would honestly attribute this radical shift in my belief system to the election of Donald Trump.

Yah. I know. I am going to do my best to leave politics out of this post because that is a WHOLE other topic with its own set of bunny trails. I’m going to try to avoid those trails as best I can.

So how did Donald Trump make me an atheist?

Right around the time of the election, some friends that I had made in the church and I started our own “tiny church”. We fell into an online sermon from a church in Canada that we really resonated with. The Meeting House was our primary source of sermons and questions that we discussed in our group. We started grappling with societal issues – privilege, racism, feminism among them. The Meeting House is an Anabaptist Church. Anabaptists are on the same branch of Christianity as Quakers and Mennonites. In a nutshell, Anabaptists focus on the written words of Jesus and the message that he was trying to send. It spends far less time rooting around in Old Testament texts. The lead pastor, Bruxy, is an excellent speaker. His teachings were so accessible and so relatable that I really looked forward to church in a way that I never had in organized (what we called capital “C” Church) church. The members of our small group were intelligent, intellectual, educated humans. It was the perfect version of church for me for a season. As we moved through the sermons, we also followed politics with a wary eye. We talked about trends we were seeing in society and in the people, we thought we knew so well. I started reading about white privilege. I started listening to podcasts about racism. I started paying attention to what people were saying. This same time period is also when I taught 7^th grade Ancient Civilizations. I’m a nerd by trade. I wanted to know everything about everything. Buddhism fascinated me. The overlap between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity ran deeper than I had ever learned in church. We spent a month each spring diving into each of the eight major world religions. Each year that I taught the class we dove a little deeper. I found new materials, videos, and sources. It was amazing. One of the biggest takeaways from teaching that class was my understanding that all of the world religions were trying to do the exact same questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens next? Each religion shares the same basic beliefs. God is love.

As I taught about the major world religions, I started re-evaluating my own beliefs. One of the first concepts that grabbed me was the overlap of creation stories that the Bible shares with world religions around the globe. Early people had questions too, but they lacked the science and knowledge to understand the answers. They couldn’t comprehend the cause of thunder and lightning, so they attributed the storms to the gods. As we look back at natural disasters and natural phenomena throughout history, almost every early polytheistic religion attributed a different god to each natural event. As humans learned more about the world and our place in it, some of these previously unexplained events suddenly had a logical, and more importantly, scientifically-backed, explanation. When we study the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans we see polytheistic religions with gods for everything from fertility to war to famine. We look back on these ancient civilizations and shake our heads that they could believe something so silly. Of course, there isn’t a god for famine, there is just GOD. Silly Egyptians. But stop for a second and try to think objectively about some of the Jesus stories in the bible. I fully believe that future humans will look back at modern religions the same way we look at the Romans and Greeks. Silly Christians believing that the world was made in 6 days or that Adam and Eve actually existed (fun fact: they didn’t. Genesis is a creation myth. Just like every other early religion, Christianity has a farfetched story about how the world and everything in it came to be. I’m not going to go into all the ways that science and history have disproved the reliability of the bible, I’d recommend listening to one of Richard Dawkins books for an intro to that. He’s far more articulate and educated than I and he will do a better job explaining it. But the historical inaccuracies are huge. King David is NEVER mentioned outside of the bible. The whole lineage of Jesus is based on Joseph’s link to King David (which make no sense, since Joseph allegedly wasn’t Jesus’s father). But if King David didn’t exist, then Jesus doesn’t fulfill the Old Testament prophecies. The plagues of Egypt aren’t mentioned anywhere in Egyptian history – especially the death of the firstborns. If there was an event where every firstborn son in Egypt died in one night, it would have been recorded SOMEWHERE. But it’s not. Add to that, the bible wasn’t written until hundreds of years after Jesus’s life. That means for hundreds of years, these stories were passed down orally. Anyone who played the game “telephone” at a slumber party knows what happens when stories are told and retold. The end product is very rarely an accurate representation of what the original story was. I’m going to stop there but honesty, Richard Dawkins is a great source if you want to learn more about the inconsistencies that Christians never question. I honestly used to believe that Adam and Eve were real people for a long time. They most definitely weren’t. If they didn’t exist, then original sin can’t exist because Eve wasn’t there to ruin it for everyone. Once you start looking at it objectively, Christianity just doesn’t make sense.

Back to Tiny Church and anabaptist beliefs… Doing the work through The Meeting House of looking at the words of Jesus led to a lot of discussions about pacifism and pacifist beliefs. At the start of this discussion, I was definitely on the “defend my turf” bandwagon. Someone hurts you, you hurt them bigger and badder (intentionally poor grammar). When you look at the words of Jesus, it’s pretty easy to see that he was a pacifist and how he demonstrated pacifist beliefs right up until going to die willingly on the cross. It was a hard sell for me but by the time we had gotten through Bruxy’s sermon series on pacifism, I realized that that was the most basic and simple thing that Jesus asked of us. Love one another. Be kind. Don’t hurt people intentionally. You can’t do those things with a gun in your hand. I’m still working out what pacifism means to me. It is an evolving belief that I’m still getting to know. Pacifism also means seeking peace in your relationships, not just practicing non-violence. I can feel a huge change from how I used to view interpersonal relationships and conflict before to how I view it now. I used to see every interaction as “me versus them”. Every interaction had a winner and a loser and I am highly competitive, so I wanted to be the winner all of the time. It led to arguments in my marriage because I tried to “win” against my husband. When I started looking at maintaining peace, I learned to choose my arguments, to evaluate what I do and don’t want to say, and to swallow my pride when I can. I learned to see my family and friends as on “my team” and not as opponents. It changed how I talked to myself in my own head. It’s one of the changes that I’m most grateful for because it has helped me navigate Addison’s blow-ups. I’m imperfect though – I still lose my temper and say things I don’t mean. But pacifism forces me to get real and apologize. It’s pretty humbling to have to apologize to your 10-year-old for losing your mind.

Since the 2016 election, my interest and awareness of societal issues and inequalities have steadily increased. We did a lot of work in Tiny Church around recognizing the privilege that we all had as white, middle class, highly educated humans and how that privilege had led us to be complacent in systemic racism. It was hard work, but we wanted to understand how we could use the privilege we had to raise awareness or affect change in some way. We discussed MAGAs and how we couldn’t see any period in American history as “great” by any definition of the word. The “great” periods people talked about weren’t ever really great at all. Slavery? Segregation? War? Corruption? Prohibition? Great Depression? Westward Expansion? None of these periods were great. Some were downright awful. The more we discussed our nations ugly history and how our nation is ugly today, the less proud I was to be “American”.  I saw how I had been trained by society to be blindly allegiant to our flag. To pledge that allegiance before we even understood what that meant. To hang our flags on the front porch and wear red, white, and blue on the 4^th of July. To accept our history at the face value of our biased textbooks. To believe that “God blessed America” when America didn’t exist when God was doing the supposed blessing. No thank you. I cringe when I watch interviews with Trump Rally go-ers. I don’t want to be in any way associated with those people. I’m not proud of our nation at any point in history. I don’t recite the pledge of allegiance when I sub. I don’t sing the national anthem or put my hand on my heart. I stand respectively to set a good example. In public, I wouldn’t bother. It just doesn’t matter to me anymore. Being American isn’t relevant just like being Australian isn’t relevant. There is no genetic or biological difference between any race. The color of our skin is simply based on how much sun our ancestors got. More sun means more melanin. More melanin means darker skin. Go team evolution. That’s it. So, I’m a human. That’s it.

Just like the term American, “Christian” has an ugly connotation among non-believers or those of other non-Christian religions. Christians are judgmental. They’re hypocrites. More wars have been fought in the name of Christianity than of any other religion. That’s right, those who follow the Jesus of non-violence have murdered more people in the name of that God than ANY other world religion. That’s gross. But then I started reading articles about white evangelicals who fervently support Trump and turn a blind eye and his repeated, unapologetic transgressions (admitted adultery, 25 allegations of sexual assault, bragging about sexually assaulting women, literally thousands of proven lies to the media, the list goes on and on). To try and tell me that Jesus would be a Trump supporter is like telling me Gandhi was in the MMA. It goes against literally everything he taught. If Christianity is the religion of Trump, then I knew I definitely didn’t want to be a part of that club. I joke that Trump made me an atheist but, in some ways, he did help.

I wanted to understand government and to try to get a better understanding of what the history of our whole nation really was. We know what it was like for the white elites, their stories are the ones that made it into the history books. But what about the experience of immigrants? Orphans? Women? The poor? There is so much that we DON’T know about these groups. So, I started reading. I started listening to podcasts. I followed activists on social media. I watched videos. I did the same with evolution and astrophysics. This process of learning has taken place slowly, and privately for the most part, for the past two years. I have been moving by small degrees across the spectrum from anabaptist, where my beliefs were at at the start of this process, to omnist. From omnist to agnostic. And finally, I think, to tentative atheist. I’d like to believe in God but I think that the likelihood that of all of the thousands of gods who have been worshipped throughout the years, that the Christian God is the “winner”, is pretty low. What I believe now, I think, is just as beautiful as the idea of a benevolent god. I believe in matter. The atoms that make us up are only created when a star explodes. We are literally made of star-stuff (that is also my next tattoo theme). How fucking beautiful is that?? And what else, matter never goes away, it never dies. Parts of me have existed in a million different forms over billions of years. And, parts of me will live on, in different forms, for billions of years more. When I die, I want my ashes sent into space. I want to be in the heavens, not in Heaven. I know that could be upsetting to people who believe in the Christian God. I’m not trying to be offensive – I really do find it beautiful and kind of awe inspiring.  

So why share this? I could have kept quiet and just silently made the transition without those around me really noticing at all. I could just let people maintain the assumption of my Christian beliefs and avoid some potentially upsetting conversations. But then I realized that if I did that, it was only to make the people around me comfortable. The internet has been a blessing in this regard. I have had the chance to talk to so many different people around the world who are atheists and learned that there are so many out there. Remember back to the beginning of this dissertation, my earliest memory of the church involves being chastised for asking questions, for doubting. I was terrified to talk about this with almost all of the humans in my life, save one or two. Anyone who has made the move from religion to non-religion will be able to attest, it is hard to unpack all the dogma and superstition that you inherit as a part of organized religion. It’s hard to navigate holidays like Christmas and Easter. It’s hard to know how to talk to people about it or how to handle it when they get upset. But it’s hard because no one talks about it. So here I am, talking about it. Maybe me writing this will make it easier for someone else to bring to light concerns or questions they have or encourage someone else to read a book on a topic they hadn’t considered before. Maybe it won’t do anything. I don’t know. What I do know, is that for the first time in my life, I think I’m onto the truth.