The Redheaded Skeptic's Significant Other: Notes on the Journey from Ministry Student to Atheist
Monday, November 9th, 2009
by Steve
Laura’s Note: I met Steve the same day I met my ex-husband, Bob. The two were roommates and ministry majors. Steve changed his major to history, though, and is currently a third year law student. This post explains why. Steve is technically my husband–we eloped back in May, 2009 for some legal reasons, but our actual unWedding is scheduled for May 16, 2010. Also, if you have a story about the ministry (paid or volunteer) or how religion has hurt you personally that you would like featured on here, email me at redheadedskeptic@gmail.com. It doesn’t have to be a life story–an incident or two will work.
In the fall of 2003, I transferred from Arkansas State University to Williams Baptist College. I did so for two reasons: 1) Crippling suicidal depression had led to decreased academic performance and placed me on suspension from my free-ride scholarship at ASU, and 2) several of my friends and I wanted to further our theological education prior to entering seminary. This post marks the first time in my recollection that I’ve ever told anyone the first reason, though I’m sure it will come as a surprise to very few, given that only a few weeks later I voluntarily committed myself to a mental health hospital in order to avoid committing suicide.
I often wonder: What if I had sought and received treatment for my depression in high school? What if I had been a normal person in college? The future is, of course, unknowable – and alternate pasts are even more unknowable. Still, I think it likely that I wouldn’t have transferred to Williams, that I wouldn’t have met my wife, and that I wouldn’t have so soon converted (if such a term can be so applied) to atheism.
But Laura didn’t ask me to write this post so that I could ramble about an alternate-reality past/present, but rather so that I could talk about what actually happened to me, and how I became an atheist.
So how did I, a man licensed as a minister by a Southern Baptist Church, raised in a vaguely Christian home, educated in a nondenominational Christian school, who surrounded himself with conservative Christians at a secular university and then transferred to a conservative Christian college – how did I, of all people, become an atheist?
The answer is clear, but it is unfortunately not terribly simple. To understand this part of my faith journey, you must first understand an ancient theological debate, one that has raged among Christians since the earliest days of the church. I am speaking, of course, of the concept of justification, and its relationship (or lack thereof) to what is commonly called “works.” For the benefit of those of you who spent your time studying things far more useful than religion, I offer the following brief primer.
The Apostle Paul believed that a man could be a Christian, even if his life showed no evidence of this religious identity. The Apostle James believed that a man whose life lacked evidence of a Christian identity (referred to in the shorthand as “works”) necessarily lacked Christian faith. This disagreement would be of no historical importance whatsoever, except that Paul and James did the very silly thing of writing of their beliefs on this topic to people; and those people did the even sillier thing of preserving these letters, collecting them, and then with little forethought or examination called them all “The Word of God” and passed them on as such to later generations of people as “The Book of Galatians” and “The Book of James,” respectively. If anonymous people in the dusty corners of the Roman Empire had made a more common practice of reading a thing before claiming its divine inspiration, the world would have been spared a lot of wasted energy, and I might have lived a happily-undisturbed life as a transsexual prostitute in the temple of Diana.
It is fair to say that I became an atheist as a result of this ancient theological dispute. It is equally fair to say that I became an atheist because of my own personal preference for logic and reason. I’ve always been one of those people who wants the world to make sense, especially those parts of the world (like my theological beliefs) that are under my direct control. So if I want to believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, I want it to have certain properties, chief among them freedom from internal contradiction. I have a number of Christian friends and family for whom this is not a necessary prerequisite. ”The mind of God is far above the mind of man,” they commonly protest, “and so what appears to be a contradiction to your human mind is resolved in the higher logic of God’s mind.” (A more common protest: “Stop arguing with your grandmother and eat your damn peas.”)
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never believed that the ability to simultaneously believe “A” and “Not A” is the mark of a higher mind; it is, instead, the mark of a distinctly illogical (and frequently diseased) mind. Not wanting to be a minister for a schizophrenic God, in June 2004 I resolved to end the age-old debate – at least for myself – and resolve the tension between James and Galatians. (It was summer, and having few friends meant I had an abundance of free time.) Unfortunately for my ministerial ambitions, I made a crucial mistake right at the outset: I read the books. Pro Tip #1: If you’re a Christian looking to study the Bible (and remain Christian), never ever read it; just rely on what others say about it, and don’t bother with it yourself. It’s a terribly demented book, and reading it only leads to theological confusion.
Having begun in the worst possible way, I kept up the trend by continuing in the worst possible way: I thought about what I read. Pro Tip #2: If you’re a Christian ministry student, and one day while cleaning your room you trip and accidentally end up reading a passage of Scripture, don’t worry – all is not lost. Simply wash the affected area with cool water, keep an eye out for redness and swelling, and for the love of all that (you mistakenly think) is holy don’t think about what you read. Just watch some nice, healthy porn, masturbate, cry about having masturbated, pray for masturbatory forgiveness, and go about your day.
Needless to say, at this point my goose was cooked. I had not only read the Bible (a rookie mistake), I had also thought about it (a more veteran and more dangerous mistake). And what I thought was this: James says people are saved by faith and works, while Paul said people are only saved by faith. I looked up the verses in the original koine Greek to ensure I wasn’t being needlessly hampered by a translator’s error; sadly, the contradiction was there too.
Now, some of you may be thinking, “Justification is a fairly advanced theological concept. Should uncertainty over something so abstract necessarily lead to such an extreme abandonment of your faith?” The answer is no, it shouldn’t, unless you also believe two other things: 1) God wrote the Bible, and 2) God isn’t crazy. Unlike the comparatively lucky members of the Manson Family, I heartily believed both of those things. So the contradiction between James and Paul on this point wasn’t merely disturbing…it was earth-shattering, and the consequences of this inescapable realization have led me directly here.
Others of you may be thinking, “You’re surely not the first fool to read and think about James and Galatians in this context. Why hasn’t this debate wrecked Christianity, if it’s so important?” That’s a complex question involving a number of sociopolitical variables, but the most common reason is that a long time ago, a man named John Calvin (likely echoing a much more ancient line of thought) tried to resolve this contradiction in the following way: Paul is writing about what God cares about (which is only faith), but James is writing about what humans should care about (which is works). After arriving at this ingenious conclusion, John Calvin, being a Frenchman living in Switzerland, promptly surrendered to a box of chocolates; and ever since, Christians (especially Protestants of the Reformed variety, as I was) have been relying on Calvin’s answer.
There’s only one teeny-tiny little problem with Calvin’s answer, however; it’s ascriptural. James doesn’t indicate that he is talking only about human perceptions of justification, nor does Paul indicated that he is talking only about divine perceptions of justification. You have to insert that into the text of Scripture before you can arrive at that conclusion. Not being one for editing a book before I understand it, I couldn’t accept Calvin’s nifty workaround. And since his was the only workaround ever offered in two thousand years of Christian theology, I had no other choice but to accept that this was a fundamental and irreconcilable contradiction in the Bible.
Scriptural inerrancy, and the divine authorship of the Bible which rests upon it, is a house of cards. Remove one piece – perhaps by discovering a fundamental contradiction – and the whole structure comes tumbling down. If the Bible contained contradictions, God could not have written it – at least, not all of it.
It took a further two and a half years of adhering to progressively more liberal interpretations of Christianity, but it all started – and in some ways, ended – on that evening in June 2004. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was when I became an atheist.
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