The Persistence of Disbelief

Psychology Today has a great piece about ministers who have lost their faith and continue in the job. The article points out that everyone interviewed for the story said that they reached a point where they simply stopped believing, a point where it just didn't make sense anymore. Since leaving the faith and pulpit myself, people who don't know me ask why I'm not doing it anymore. They also assume something must have happened. It's usually phrased like this: So, were you treated badly by Christians? Uh, yeah. I was in ministry of one sort or another for 12 of the past 15 years. Of course I was treated badly. And I acted badly. And while doing things I wasn't supposed to do, I still believed. If people's treatment of me was the decisive factor in my growing disillusionment, I'd have stopped believing in 1996.

I just stopped believing. It stopped adding up. I couldn't do the mental calculations anymore. I don't want to do the whole 'Til We Have Faces thing, thanks. This antipathy to Christianity has lately been directed outward from Christianity to encompass other forms of belief. The hot, erstwhile mystic, hairdresser wife is reading a book called Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's all the rage amongst "spiritualists" lately—that group of eccentric middle-aged women who need Paxil worse than they need a book about how to be spiritual. Last night I walked into the bedroom while she was reading a portion about kundalini and chakras. I lit up. I spared her most of my diatribe, but I did mention that belief in kundalini serpent energy and energy absorbing portals in the human body verged on idiotic. She doesn't believe the stuff, by the way, but she's irritated that I'm not more accepting. My response: some things are just stupid and it doesn't hurt to point that out.

One of her spiritualist friends tried to give me a Neale Donald Walsh book to read—he wrote Conversations with God. (The title alone put me off that one.) As kindly as possible, I informed her that I don't read religious books anymore. She responded with the classic "why I should be on Paxil" line: "It's not a religious book; it's about spirituality. I don't like religion either. I think it's poisonous." I only had the energy to say, "It's all religion to me." Why get into a discussion about why her current favorite Elmer Gantry stand-in is full of shit? I find myself in the odd position of evaluating all claims to spiritual knowledge as standing or falling on the same principles. Crazy, I know. That means all expressions of faith have equal validity in my mind, but they are also equally vacuous in my mind. I've never been here before. The air is good. I can see farther. Breathe easier. Sleep better. And I'm at least fifty percent less pissed off than I ever was when I was a Christian.

Comments

[Zossima]

And I'm at least fifty percent less pissed off than I ever was when I was a Christian.

Yeah, I think that about sums it up for me. I'm far happier outside the church than I ever was in it. I don't even want to put the energy into deciding if I believe it or don't anymore. I just quit caring. And it feels good.

[Leighton]

The heart of it for me was realizing after a couple of months with Thomas Merton that what I had been calling "real" or "authentic" spiritual experiences (don't ask me to define real, authentic or spiritual) cannot be communicated to anyone. I don't have the vocabulary or conceptual framework to articulate them to anyone else, and if I spent the time to build a way to talk about them, I would destroy whatever meaning they had for me in the process.

I don't think it's helpful for me to go out of my way to be critical of how other people organize their inner lives. On the other hand, when people impose on my time and energy by insisting that yes, I would benefit from reading what looks like little more than a collection of free-association stream of consciousness stuff by some halfway articulate author who can turn a phrase without really caring what the phrase means, I don't hesitate to nuke first and ask questions later. They're doing exactly the same thing stereotypical Bible-thumpers do, just more passive-aggressively. "You're not really spiritual" is what the subtext usually is. There are exceptions, but those are typically the people who grow out of a book I dislike before I get a chance to say anything bad about it.

Maybe I'm just an asshole or something, but I don't have the patience for things that don't have either a tangible effect on the world, or provide some benefit when I'm in the ER with heart troubles and it's just me, myself and my naked will to live. I figure if a philosophy can't survive encounters with injustice, death and despair, it's not worth bothering with.

[cheek]

I'm struggling to understand what exactly it is people are saying when they talk about 'spirituality' and 'being spiritual.' The best I've come up with so far is that it all has something to do with what we feel when we combine fear of death with our inherited tendency to ascribe meaning to experience. Most religions or disciplines or whatever the hell else people call them are just the attempts of individuals or groups to deal with those feelings.

[Leighton]

Descriptively, my experience is that many people who talk about being spiritual are talking about finding and experiencing a personal meaning in life, as distinguished from cheerleading what everyone else says ought to be meaningful. This is (in theory) what everyone does in the course of living, so at first glance it's puzzling why it should be given a special name. But it often seems to be informed by a reaction (justified, I think) against one of two social backgrounds.

On the one hand, there are people whose upbringing was authoritarian or dysfunctionally religious (hence the distinction "spiritual but not religious"), wherein their lives' meaning was assigned to them by force--physical, social or both--entirely apart from their consent. On the other hand, there also seems to be a multitude of users of "spiritual" whose family of origin and early communities never said much of anything about finding meaning or happiness in life. If they were churchgoers, it was purely to socialize. Members of both these groups of people are often looking for a framework to express their inner lives, but the latter's primary emphasis is exploring it, while the former tends to focus on refining (or replacing) an existing vocabulary while keeping other, undesirable forces out.

It seems to me that this is why "spiritual" is such a woolly word in contemporary use. Close to half the users can't yet articulate what they mean, and another near-half is trying to avoid having its meaning pinned down to something less than what they mean. And of course there's no reason someone couldn't fit into both these categories. This is a good situation for personal development, but it can sometimes irritate people who like to communicate precisely. (There are contexts where "spiritual" is very precise, but that's another tangent.)

I don't think I object to the content of most New Age materials (except for obvious frauds and charlatans like Deepak Chopra and Sylvia Browne, who are a couple of the New Age movement's televangelist equivalents). Even in cases where I'm pretty sure an idea is as useless for someone else as it is for me, I don't think it's my place to make recommendations about what they do with their minds. What I object to, rather, is the inherent selfishness in trying to communicate something that can't be communicated. That's a concrete social phenomenon that can be observed and measured. They get all the warm fuzzies of sharing their beliefs (or whatever) with me, and I get nothing out of the exchange, because I have no possible way of knowing what they mean. I don't know whether that bothers people with other personality types in the same way, though.

Sorry this was so long. I should really get a blog of my own again so I can avoid cluttering up other people's.

[aaron c]

Great post Greg.

[Tim Sean]

Reminds me of Updike's novel, "In the Lilies of the Fields."

Scholarships to help closeted clergy atheists move out of the "industry." Hmm. Interesting.

I think for many, myself included, its less about being sure there isn't anything as it is the lack of freedom to be unsure one way or the other. For me, the idea of faith requires and element of not fully knowing, whistling in the dark, to use Beuchner's term.

I do think the practice of religion is more poetry than it is prose. It's when the language of faith is categorically dragged into the majority of the nitty-gritty politic that it becomes wearisome to me.

I do like Yann Martel's question at the end of "Life of Pi." Which story do you like better. It variesw for me, but i do like the idea of God, though some days it wears me out.

[awall]

Greg,

Hello. I've been a reader for a little over a year now after some friends of mine linked me to your typepad site. I've been part of the CoN for my whole life and I feel many of the same frustrations you do with the denomination in particular and Christian fundamentalism in general. This post was particularly striking to me because you reference a time in your past when you "just stopped believing. [I'm assuming 'because. . .'] It stopped adding up." I'm curious, if if a new commentator as myself may ask, what it is that you stopped believing. And as far the the second part of the quoted text, did you stop believing "because" it stopped adding up, or did those two events coincide in an intellectually satisfying way? Also, do you think you retained any of what you formerly believed, or came to believe during your Christian days?

[Jared Rader]

sweet. i don't think i have any more useless e-mails to send you. i noticed i was asking questions you have already thoroughly answered before, and again now. keep up the great writing, i love it.

[Cataract Moon]

Nothing to do with your post, but you need to see "gone baby gone" directed by Ben Afleck. Damn good film. I was surprised. Would work well in your ethics course, too. --moon

[greg]

Moon,

Is it on dvd?

Jared,

Not a problem. Thanks for the emails.

Awall,

I think Zossima summed up my perspective best: "I don't even want to put the energy into deciding if I believe it or don't anymore. I just quit caring. And it feels good." So it's possible that I still believe, whatever that means, in some things--resurrection even--but since no one lives with the implications of that event in mind, and since I seem incapable of doing it either, it seems pointless to make an issue of it. I did stop believing in the authority of Scripture. Basically, it's a book that has authority if a community decides it does (the Catholics have always been more right than Protestants on this point), but it has no authority by virtue of being "god's word"--there isn't a phrase in Christendom more in need of parsing than that destructive notion. I stopped believing that prayer works because I got tired of trying to cram the old square peg into the round hole. 99.98% of prayers go unanswered by any honest definition of answer, so why keep believing in something that works less often than chance? I don't believe in the goodness of God, and this was a huge turning point for me. Since no one, and I mean no one, can make an adequate theodic argument for natural evil (Aceh, for example), then I have to assume one of five things: God is evil, God is morally ambiguous, God is indifferent, God is good but incapable of creating a world where these things don't happen, or God isn't real. If there's another option, I'd like to know what it is.

[Adam Smithee]

Greg,

Run Baby Run comes out on Tuesday and I agree with Moon it is an excellent movie for your ethics class.

Hope you're feeling better.

[awall]

Greg,

I must say, if I thought I had to give an account of God's goodness in light of some natural, or unnatural evils for that matter, I'd stop caring myself. I'm currently working on a MA in philosophy and was compelled, unfortunately, to take a philosophy of religions course where we were (again) forced to learn some really *great* possible-world semantics to account for how God can be justified in creating this place. I was underwhelmed with Alvin Plantinga's achievements, though the atheist crowd consider him quite the intellectual representative for "theists." So, I started thinking that perhaps I'm not a theist if being a theist means making some kind of philosophical apology for a Being who's attributes don't match up with some of the nasty shit that goes on in this world. I think it was the first time I considered myself a Christian atheist. But that has begged the question for me. What makes me a Christian? For now, the best I can do is say that I am compelled to treat my neighbor better, or at least as well as, I treat myself. I am compelled to call certain things "sinful" rather than "unfortunate" and am compelled also to address the problems I see in the world in terms of the world that's presented through the gospel; things like that. When, I remember where I learned that stuff I realize that I'm caught up in a "story" as the narrative folk like to say. I don't know I'd say I was "convinced" by the story, but I'm certainly trained by it to see the world in strange ways. I think it provides the tools necessary to understand and confront my own demons. That's certainly not convincing, though. I need a another glass of wine. (I'm on my fifth of Stella Rossa 1917.) Thanks for responding though. I enjoy your blogs. I'm compelled to offer you a beer on my next visit to OKC.

[Leighton]

It seems like we need a different word for "true." There are the things you abstractly affirm (like relativistic models of gravity and electromagnetism, penicillin killing non-immune bacteria, improperly built bridges collapsing, low blood sugar and electrolyte levels inducing depression, etc.), that are correct independently of our wishes, and work (or fail to work) whether we mean for them to or not. And then there are the things we make true by force of will, that derive their truth from being lived. I don't think this is a distinction that is likely to become extant in English vocabulary, though. The latter isn't positivist enough (or coercive enough) to really take off as a single-word concept.

[Leighton]

I was underwhelmed with Alvin Plantinga's achievements, though the atheist crowd consider him quite the intellectual representative for "theists."

Is that in a philosophy department? My formal training in philosophy stops at four courses in undergrad, but the atheists and Christians in my math department both thought Plantinga's defining himself to be right was as useful (and as funny) as the mathematician in the joke who takes a yard of fencing, walls himself in and says "I define myself to be on the outside of this fence." I never got the sense that he was well known, but I was never really looking, either.

[greg]

Leighton,

Plantinga is that rare evangelical (Calvinist really) philosopher who has managed to scrape together some professional respect in the larger field of philosophy. Last I heard he was at Notre Dame, but I think he spent some time at Calvin before that. He and Wolterstorff have tried very hard to make a comprehensive response to non-theistic models. Unfortunately, they both come from the Calvinist perspective, which is completely unhelpful for me, as I've decided the whole system is completely full of shit once you decide you don't accept even one of the premises. However, they are also the only two Reformed philosophers I've read who are sincerely trying to do post-Barthian Reformed philosophy. I guess that's the long answer for him being well-known: his students and people who read Reformed theology know who he is, as do professional theologians. That's saying something in a field as small as evangelical philosophy.

[emergentninja]

Earlier this week, Bart Ehrman was on NPR (it is still on the website) he sees himself as agnostic, and he articulated well, the idea of "leaving the faith." He even addressed the new athiest movement and how they may have gone too far. One particularly meaningful thing he said was how fellowship was an element that is missing in the new movement. I remember a post that you wrote a while back speaking on the importance of friendship, I think that is probably as close as we can get, and I think I am ok w/ that. Anyways, it is about 45min long and well worth the listen. If you get a chance, check it out and let me know what you think. I appreciate your constant honesty and willingness to share it.