I remember the Sunday that I became an atheist. I was in church trying to sort everything out. The temple of faith was feeling creakier than usual, and the usual amount of plaster wasn’t covering the cracks. Truth be told, I actually resented having to resort to ad hoc justifications in the face of inconvenient facts. So I didn’t go to the adult classes. I went to the Primary classes for kids. I thought if I could just start from the beginning, maybe I could build again without too many contradictions.
What were my options? Maybe I could be a deist. That seemed plausible for about five seconds. You can’t be a Mormon deist.
What got me here? Partly a realisation that the claims of religion were either not possible to evaluate or just plain counterfactual, but that was only one part of the story. A religion isn’t just a set of beliefs; it’s a philosophical worldview with a built-in social network. Deciding to leave takes a bit more than just changing your mind.
My deconversion story has three elements to it, three conditions that had to exist at the same time for deconversion to take place. I suspect that these three conditions are necessary not just for me, but for anyone who is going to get out of a belief system that they are deeply committed to.
It became important to me that my beliefs be grounded in fact.
Not desire, not faith, and not wishful thinking. In short, in order for my beliefs to be worthwhile, I decided that they had to be true in a factual sense.
For most of my life, I believed that it was more important to keep believing in the Church than it was to believe the facts. I didn’t think of it that way at the time because I didn’t think there was any difference. The Church taught eternal truths, science taught earthly truths, and any discrepancies would be ironed out in the fullness of time as scientists learned more and prophets revealed more. In the meantime, I accepted Church teachings as definitive. I am somewhat ashamed to say that if I ran across a fact that contradicted a cherished belief, I kept the belief and tossed the fact. After all, facts are always up for reanalysis, aren’t they? That I never did the reanalysis didn’t seem to bother me much, but at some point it began to.
This brings me to two:
It became clear to me that my beliefs were either not supported by fact, or contradicted the facts directly.
This required education into what constitutes good evidence and good arguments. I’d learned about fallacies long ago, but had given religion a pass. A renewed interest in the scientific method and an intense skepticism were instrumental.
Still, these two facets of deconversion were not enough to convince me to break free of religious doctrine. There was an emotional component.
I lost the fear of what might happen if the belief system were false.
Beliefs have consequences, as any believer will tell you. Just expressing a belief can get you into a community of faith — or out. All my life, I was taught that an eternity of blessings was waiting for me after my death, if only I could have faith in the meantime. But if that wasn’t so, I was wasting my short life. The stakes were huge. And so for a long time I avoided looking into the abyss. It was too painful and I had so much invested in my comforting faith.
The consequences would extend to my human relationships, as well. Would people at Church say, “Well, looks like old Brother Midgley couldn’t hack the program”? Though I’m strong enough to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous calumny, it still bothered me that some would take my deconversion as a sign of weakness. And would I be able to give up the network of religious support in favour of… nothing?
But with my knowledge of defense mechanisms defeating their own usefulness, and the cognitive dissonance growing, something had to give. That day in the chapel I said to myself, “I’ll be an atheist, then.”
Something clicked. I felt a rush of fear, holding on to nothing, ground gone. Then, amazingly, the universe failed to fall apart, and I kept on living. And I have kept doing so up to now. I gave up on faith, and got a knowledge of things as they are. Or as close as I can get.
In this million-part series, I’ll be exploring aspects of my own deconversion story along the three conditions above. I’ll be looking forward to your stories as well.
13 November 2006 at 11:06 am
I’ve always been an atheist. Mum and Dad never took us to church, and as far as I know they are also atheists. It’s not something we ever really talked about. Not through suppression, I suppose we just never had the need. I do remember asking my Dad about church when I was a lot younger, and he said that he was so bored in church he used to count the people wearing hats. My parents just left the decision up to us kids. I remember reading ‘My First Bible’ type picture books when I was little, but I just understood them as fables. I still do.
Religion must have been important in the family at some point, because I know my paternal grandfather played the organ at church. And his grandfather was a pastor.
I went to church twice whilst I was in high school, because I was staying with friends for the weekend that went. It scared me a little bit at first, but mostly it just made me think.
I was bought up watching nature documentaries on the ABC, and I believe in science. I think that using science to understand our world doesn’t make it any less miraculous. I think life is just a wonderful evolutionary accident. I don’t feel at all lost or without direction or meaning. I believe I just exist.
However, not having religion left me with a lot of questions about things, and not much of an idea of how to go about answering them. Eventually I went to university for answers to these questions, and answers I did receive, however I also gained many more, and better, questions.
But I am not antireligious. I think I understand why people need and have religion, and how it has both helped and hindered us throughout history. I just wish we could keep it well separate from politics. Hey George?
And that’s my story 🙂
13 November 2006 at 11:36 am
Obviously I don’t have a deconversion story. But that third point hits hard. If my own little raft fell apart, you’d find me there clinging to the pieces, praying for nails.
But hey, if I’m wrong, it’s not like I’ll ever find out. I know that’s not good enough for you, but it’s good enough for me, and in the meantime, my raft is seaworthy.
I am so looking forward to the rest of this.
13 November 2006 at 4:13 pm
Some Christians are intelligent, loving people, like my parents. But in my experience most are ignorant and narrow minded and enjoy being that way.
Faerie’s ‘deconversion’ = a whole lot of stupid people from my (christian) school and church, and of shitty things happening. Me and my family have been treated terribly at times by life and by other Christians.
In Year 12 I got a phonecall at about 11pm on a Thursday night, “Luke committed suicide”. That did it for me.
I realised that i was (semi) holding onto a faith due to the fear of what might happen if I didn’t… ie I would burn in hell.
But you know what, if there were a God who would let me burn in hell for not taking notice of it’s all-powerful hidden clues… what a dickhead! I don’t want to go to it’s heaven anyway.
13 November 2006 at 11:07 pm
Dan,
I am very glad to see this post and I am eagerly awaiting the posts to come. I will say that we both came to the same conclusions from very different paths. I didn’t walk down your path until I was about 23. I am also very interested to hear more about point 3. I think rather than answering in full here I will do so in my own post at Soma Vacation How long has it been for you at this point, almost a year? How many people in your personal life know about your feelings?
13 November 2006 at 11:14 pm
I was never a Christian but I did want to believe in some sort of God or higher power for a long time. I think your 3 conditions are very much the ones that ended up with me giving up on the need for supernatural explanations and life rafts. I found the third condition particularly hard because the conditioning attached to the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing entity and the consequent need to placate it is so intricately linked to the way we relate to parents/adults as children.
I’m still scared of the dark even though I know that I am scared of my own imagination.
What is pissing me off nowadays is even having to define myself as an atheist. I’m considering answering ‘irrelevant’ if anyone asks me my religion in future.
13 November 2006 at 11:20 pm
Just quickly I wanted to also make a comment to amy. I also worry that some of us lefties, in our zeal to discount the crazy christian right, will be to quick to lump the majority of moderate christians and other good people of faith into a single “Crazy People” column. Most people in America and of course the world are religious and while we can argue the ideas we shouldn’t alienate or villify the millions if not billions of good , caring people of faith. Amy, have you seen the new show Studio 60 on sunset strip It’s main theme is how athiests and moderate christians can work together for possitive change.
14 November 2006 at 5:02 am
Faerie, I’m really sorry. And Jeff, thanks muchly!
18 November 2006 at 8:41 am
I disagree, Jeff. I think the main theme of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is “witty banter doesn’t write itself”. Maybe you could stretch it to “liberal do-gooders always gotta stay in touch with the values of the heartland”, but the possibilities for positive change available to the producers of a sketch comedy show are more limited than those of the president (for example).
But on to deconversion, I really identified with Daniel’s description of the moment he thought he’d be an atheist. I tried for years to make Christianity work for me somehow, shifting back and forth, but it all came down to a moment when I said to myself “That’s it, I’m done.” It is like converson. The world is different between those moments. Julia Sweeney describes something like that in her monologue. She said something like “I’ll just try living in a world without God’s presence, without angels, for a minute and see how it works.” And it worked OK.
But unlike conversion, it’s a conscious decision. No sweep of spirit is going to take you away from religion. It’s more like getting out of bed on a cold day, and putting your feet on the floor. You have to initiate the movement.
So to Daniel’s 3 conditions, I’d add a fourth: you have to give a damn, and have the time and motivation to investigate. It’s easier to slide along, keeping things as they are, than to change your life. Maybe that’s why religious folk are encouraged to have many kids. Running after and supporting a brood of 6 or 7 kids wouldn’t leave much time for introspection. Perhaps I’m projecting a bit here, since I’m disappointed by the amount of time my brood of 1 (with another one expected in April) leaves me.
PS. Am settled in Portland now. I don’t want to ever move again…
18 November 2006 at 9:40 am
Hello Dobbins. Nice to see you here again. Moves are the worst. Glad you are feeling settled. I hope you are enjoying Portland. It’s one of my favorite towns.
30 November 2009 at 1:12 pm
Now I think I get you – your deconversion sounds faintly Joycean – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.