Let it shine
A couple of pastors have realized that they don’t believe the stuff they preach any more, and they’re stuck.
The two, who asked that their real identities be protected, are pastors who have lost their faith. And these two men, who have built their careers and lives around faith, say they now feel trapped, living a lie.
That must be a horrible situation. (It’s interesting that they don’t go on to say – that we’re told, at least – that nevertheless they still feel they are providing something their parishioners need. They feel trapped and crappy and dishonest; they don’t feel helpful or benevolent.)
Jack said that 10 years ago, he started to feel his faith slipping away. He grew bothered by inconsistencies regarding the last days of Jesus’ life, what he described as the improbability of stories like “Noah’s Ark” and by attitudes expressed in the Bible regarding women and their place in the world.
“Reading the Bible is what led me not to believe in God,” he said.
He said it was difficult to continue to work in ministry. “I just look at it as a job and do what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I’ve done it for years.”
See? That’s not a guy who thinks religion is a wonderful thing. It’s a guy who thinks it’s a job, and one that he doesn’t like any more.
Adam said his initial doubts about God came as he read the work of the so-called New Atheists — popular authors like the prominent scientist Richard Dawkins. He said the research was intended to help him defend his faith.
“My thinking was that God is big enough to handle any questions that I can come up with,” he said but that did not happen.
“I realized that everything I’d been taught to believe was sort of sheltered,” Adam said, “and never really looked at secular teaching or other philosophies. … I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. Am I believing the wrong things? Have I spent my entire life and my career promoting something that is not true?'”
Really? Oh my goodness – here was I thinking that gnu atheists can’t possibly convince anyone except near-atheists, because we’re always being told that, and yet here is an actual pastor being convinced by gnu atheists. Fancy that, eh? But then that’s what I keep saying (despite what I just said about what I thought, which was not entirely sincere): that nobody knows who will or won’t be convinced, and some people even among firm believers may be turned around by reading a book. So here’s one. And there are others; they write to gnus and tell us so.
Cross-posted from Friendly Atheist:
That might be the most common stupid canard in attacks on Gnus: “You’re not going to convince anyone with this stuff.”
Demonstrably, we are.
I’m confident that, in <i>proportional</i> terms, the Gnus’ work doesn’t lead to the deconversion of <i>very many</i> of the religious people who read it. But (a small fraction) multiplied by (a large number) still equals more than zero. Quite a bit more, in fact.
So much of haughty liberal defense of religion involves tremendous ignorance of the actual religious ideas and understanding of millions of believers. The second minister mentioned in the passage you quote had never considered the material in <i>The God Delusion</i> or whatever Gnu materials he read—and when he did, he found it earth-shattering. Clearly, then, the Karen Armstrongs of the world simply have no idea what people like that minister (and surely there are millions more like him) do and do not actually believe and understand.
I hate this comment software.
Ah, this rings true. It cannot be that some of our most thoughtful people would be uninfluenced by thought. It’s true, clergy are very often trained in a sheltered world. It can be sheltered for all sorts of reasons. Childhood influence can be enough to overcome the most serious doubts of thoughtful people. And faith ring-fences itself against argument. That’s where a lot of the critics of the gnu atheism go wrong. It’s a strange thing, but I’ve watched people go into theology school, watched them study all kinds of things about biblical criticism — after which it is really impossible to say that the Bible is the word of a god in any sense at all — explored liberal theologians who have dismantled orthodox Christian theology, and have come out as Sunday School teachers. And they do it for a very simple reason, because it takes an enormous amount of knowledge to counter the objections of people with a simple faith. Without that, they’re completely defenceless, and all they can do is to repeat the stories they heard as children, and talk about the gospels as though they were simple history, and the words of Jesus as if they were tape recorded.
And the sad part is that it is very difficult to break away from that world. Leaving is not only sinful, its betrayal. Leave and you will be treated, very often, as a pariah, and worse. And all your training is devoted to helping people, encouraging them, and giving them a sense of their value. So the betrayal is personally destructive, as well as seeming to do great harm to others who you have promised to guide and direct. And a lot of people don’t come to this point until late, until, in many cases, it’s really too late to think of another career, and so, like Rumpole’s dad, you keep going through the motions until it’s time to retire.
Of course, there are others, who have learned to play the liberal game, and find it easy to answer the questions that people have, and if you’re sincere and apparently knowledgeable, then they’ll put up with you, because they know you won’t be there forever. Some of them may even begin to drift away from strict understandings of faith, even to see that religious belief is really about genuinely humane causes, like liberating women from traditional roles, and recognising other injustices, and perhaps even contributing something towards the restitution of the dignity that has been denied to people like gays, the poor, and the marginalised. It’s funny, though, that when people talk about the good that religion does, it’s always those things that have been initiated by people who believe with only half of their brain, trying to make religion something that is modern and relevant. It’s still possible to feel a sense of fulfilment through religion understood in that way, but it’s a strictly minority pursuit, and eventually there will be something they will come up against that simply can’t be squared with humane morality and the goodness that you hoped had been at the heart of the religious enterprise. And then, ‘god help you,’ you’ll be thrown to the wolves. Unprepared for life in the fast lane, trained in all the wrong ways, you enter the pool of the unemployed with very few prospects, like Clarence Wilmot, in Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies.
I have always thought that the church has a responsiblity for those who have been ordained, and then find their faith has died, but it doesn’t acknowledge one. There should be some kind of insurance for those who sign on, and then find themselves without the life jacket the thought they had stored under their seat. But churches can’t acknowledge their failures, and they don’t need to, because they have a simple explanation. It’s simply about sin, and the arrogant pride that pretends that human beings can live on their own without supernatural overseers.
Just a short reponse to Rieux. It’s not necessarily true that the minister had not read anything like Dawkin’s The God Delusion. The truth is that you have to read it at the right time. At theological school you can eat people like Dawkins for breakfast and then lunch on Hitchens. But that’s not life, and the church does it’s very best to make sure that you don’t wake up from that dream. But, hey, as they say, shit happens, and so does life, and then Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and all the rest resonate in a way they could never do in the sheltering valleys of faith. For me, it started with Darwin, not because I was a creationist, but because reading Darwin meant that we are here because of an impersonal process, and that we die in the same way. The only warmth is human, so, let us at least be true to that.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Let it shine http://dlvr.it/8Lb12 […]
I don’t think these folks have been convinced, by new atheists, to abandon beliefs sincerely held. As another (perhaps one of these two?) participant in Dennett and LaScola’s project reported, you really can’t go through seminary, pay attention, and come out a believer. What new atheists teach, and what these guys have forced themselves to realize, is that it is dishonest to pretend. Previously, they’d thought that pretending served some greater good.
And what a vicious realization, that your conscience rebels against asserting what you have agreed to assert, what your livelihood depends upon asserting.
Fuck. Can we possibly imagine? I look to a world in which belief continues to decline, yet I hope to remain appreciative of the anguish that vision will inevitably entail.
Ken, I disagree. It is possible to go through theological training and come out a believer, a sincere, true believer. It’s no different from the communists who could take all Stalin’s crimes in stride and still believe that it was all necessary to bring about the worker’s paradise. True believers are simply like that, and the orgainsations that depend upon them have skilled techniques for maintaining belief in the presence of the most unassailable evidence. The evidence for that is all around you. Churches and other religious bodies have been at this for thousands of years. That is why they are so dangerous, because religious belief deliberately downplays the importance of evidence, even as they affirm it. ‘Jesus rose from the dead. We have the evidence to prove it. Just read the gospels.’ And at the same time are arguments which subvert rational thinking in favour of religious belief. Practically every theological textbook will provide examples. They will talk about fallen reason, for example, or the sin of human arrogance and pride (hubris). And if you want it badly enough (cf, James’s “Will to Believe”) these arguments will convince you. Hear people like Dawkins or Hitchens at the right time and the structure of faith will come tumbling down like a house of cards. We are, as Hitchens says, only primates, and we have all the faults and foibles of limited information, trust and insight. We are often driven by emotion and fear. And life can be a confusing, chaotic and fearful thing. Of course, you can take courses in biblical criticism and still believe. The courses are taught by people who, even if they don’t believe, can’t tell you that, if they want to keep their jobs. Like many another human enterprise, religions are composed of human beings, and most of us are, in so many respects, all alone, especially if what you believe happens to be something that could leave you bereft of everything that has been important to you — community, friendship, trust, hope and meaning. And always, at the back of your mind — if you have been brought up in the right conditions — is the thought that, perhaps, they are right after all, and you deserve to suffer infinitely and forever.
Of reminds me of the story from last month about the effect ‘The God Delusion’ had on one of Michael Behe’s family.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dngag/iama_son_of_michael_behe_the_catholic_biochemist/
reminds self- *must remember to hit preview*
@ Sigmund
We must remember that not only is religion not justified in terms of reality and truth, but that it is an evil coercive system of power and control. These people are not friendly loving people but disturbed abusers intellectually, emotionally and often physically.
Egbert, true, but alas many (most?) are likely also victims of the same …
Egbert & Philosopher: It is a well-documented phenomenon that the abused often grow up to become abusers.
One wonders, of course, that if a few foot-soldiers in ‘the church’ have come to this realization, surely the senior officer corps has too? But ‘the church’ LLC is a self-perpetuating business organization that will rumble along like some great panjandrum under its own weight regardless of whether or not the executives and members have forgotten the mission (as long as the way is downhill)
Its interesting to see Dan Dennet’s piece showing up again, perhaps it didn’t get much play before. I once dated a woman in college who wanted to be a Lutheran pastor, so I got to see a bit of the what the schooling would look like, and what the future obligations would be for her. The ELCA Lutheran seminaries we went to were very small campuses, one or two of which were free standing institutions, so it was not like those students were necessarily part of a larger, more diverse community. If she had proceeded with her education (she ended up converting to Catholicism), it would have taken years, and then she would have been given several options by the ELCA (her only possible employer), and would interview with those churches, which would vote on whether to offer her a job. You have no way of knowing where you’ll be able to be posted at, and its likely that a candidate will start of as an associate pastor for a while.
It was frankly a scary realization that she was going to school to have only a single employer, which could put her anywhere in the country without her having much choice. Though I didn’t believe in God, I wanted to support her decisions, it would have been really difficult for me to get a job, or further education not knowing where we might end up, since as a science person, there are only so many places I could even get a job. Its a very big commitment, and once you get in there, it seems like it would be hard to leave… its not like pastors can really change denomination easily, or even change their congregation, and they aren’t paid terribly much. The church really traps its ministers into these jobs, leaving them far from their original home, with spouses that don’t necessarily have a good job because of where they are. I’m sure they justify it as being part of the price of being called, but I can’t imagine say, a lawyer going through school to only have a single employer ever, and having to go back through law school again if he/she wanted a different employer.
While the ‘gnu atheists’ provide some well framed discussion, it’s not something radically new. This analysis has always been there. I was raised a JW, and deconverted, largely on my own by looking at all the internal bias displayed by the members of the group (the Stalin analogy above is fitting). In the Bible, God (and his followers), could be such complete pathological bastards comparable to Hannibal Lecter, but on a much bigger scale…. and that was OK because Goddidit. But slipping up by having sex with the wrong person… that was “evil”.
The pastor’s concern about his marriage is possibly a valid one. An event so personally shaking can alter a lot of things. Even though my (JW) wife at the time also went through deconversion, the whole process left us altered people with little in common, and in our case the best option was an amicable divorce.
Ironically though, her JW family broke off so completely with her over this, that for a while (before her remarriage) I was pretty much the only family she had left. To this day I don’t think she has seen any of them.
Right, it’s not something radically new, and I think all the gnu bestsellers agree that it’s not. It’s just that it’s newly conspicuous, newly available, even newly popular. That’s step one to making it newly normal and routine as opposed to weird and demonic and other.
I googled ‘pastors who don’t believe‘ and got tons of hits, but couldn’t find a poll or any stats.
Has anyone run across an informed guess as to the incidence of working pastors who have lost belief?
This isn’t really much difference from the situation many non-clergy face. After spending thirty-plus years in my chosen profession (computer sciece) I came to the realization that it wasn’t that interesting any more (largely because of the people doing it these days). Over the years I found many others who felt the same way. So should I have given up a lucrative position seven years from retirement and faced the prospect of unemployment or grocery-bagging because by that time I was not qualified to do anything else, or should I continue to do a job I was well-qualified for but in which I had little interest. The decision is quite easy when you realise that you won’t achieve happiness, self-actualization and all the other BS from working anyway. And most people don’t get that thirty-plus years, they’re stuck in boring, dead-ends most or all of their working life. So why are pastors so special? Just keep doing what they’re doing until they retire, end of problem.
I think Dan Barker stopped believing before he quit preaching.
On an April Saturday night in 1981 I lay in bed next to my wife and began to sob. We were close so it wasn’t a complete surprise when I told her that I couldn’t go on and that my faith had utterly collapsed. I got up the next morning and ‘acted’ my way through the morning and evening services of the pentecostal/charismatic church for which I was senior pastor. The next day I called my overseer and informed him that I was resigning and when he asked me to stay for 4 weeks I numbly complied. It was the worst month of my life. I still don’t know if I made the right choice to ‘go through the motions’. There were people in the congregation that were suicidal and identified strongly with my leadership. It was a horribly compromised time.
When I finally left, I also left behind all of my support network except for my wife and her family. I though I had no training for any other work. We were living in a parsonage so we didn’t even know where we would live. I experienced psychological states that I later found to be shared by individuals leaving cults– a sense of floating or lack of attachment, panic attacks, etc.
Within six months I was completely out of Christianity after applying for but ultimately rejecting two doctor of theology programs. During that period I also flirted with Christian liberalism. I am so very, very fortunate that I finally just-walked-away.
If you find yourself in a similar situation all I can say is get out and get out now. In the years since I have many times been dumbstruck by the wonder and beauty of an honest, reasonable, “faith” free life.
@Grumpy the Elder
Dan Dennett’s original case study was the first I’d really heard of this, and he mentions some of the challenges of conducting a poll in his work.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/Non-Believing-Clergy.pdf
All of the people in his study operated under pretty tight anonymity, and I could imagine that it would be hard to poll such a diverse group very easily.
sailor1031, I think you’re missing an important point. One can become a software engineer because one loves it, but one can also become a software engineer because it’s a high-salary job with clear criteria for competence, life being a CPA or an actuary. Being a pastor doesn’t fall into that same job space. (It’s actually even more complicated, because presumably you don’t feel like you’re lying to and cheating members of your family in the course of going through the motions. I imagine faith-lapsed pastors do. Would you keep at the software engineering if a) the paycheck was MUCH smaller and b) doing it made you feel like a fraud? I suspect you would reason differently in such a situation.)
I also disagree with you in principle. You’re talking about the old-fashioned industrial economy cog-in-the-machine model of employment. I think we can do better. I’m fairly certain my father doesn’t regret trying to buck it despite decades of financial trouble and a certain amount of friction in his marriage because of it. His career made it clear to me that winning small successes according to your own rules is much more satisfying than winning even big successes playing by someone else’s.
If you give up every opportunity for happiness just to keep yourself alive, what was the point?