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.
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