Neal's Workshop

On March 12, 1991, R.E.M. released Out of Time. Possibly R.E.M.'s greatest hit was off this album, Losing my Religion, which actually isn't about abandoning your religion at all, but rather a creepy stalker-like love song a la Sting's Every Breath You Take. The phrase "Losing your religion" is actually a southern phrase for losing your temper. Go figure.

I am going to talk about losing my religion, which is to say, my faith. As I mention in my About Neal post, I am an atheist. In Part I of Losing my Religion, I will lay out where I'm coming from.

Background:

My father has a Ph.D. in New Testament Theology and was a pastor. Around the age of five, I chose to be baptized; I attended a large moderate Baptist church until I was eighteen. I grew up a Christian professing Christian beliefs until I was around 20. By "professing Christian beliefs," I mean attending church functions up to around four times a week, leading youth worship services through playing guitar and singing, taking two mission trips to Brazil, visiting the Holy Land, taking multiple choir tours, preaching a sermon to around 500 people at age eighteen and carrying a pocket Bible around in my back pocket for about a year, among other things. I was well-known and well-received as a model young Christian.

As a Christian, a life worshipping God and His Son was deeply important to me. I understood Christianity as a belief in Jesus as the Son of God where God was love, mercy, grace and forgiveness. In keeping with my father's teachings, I approached the Bible as a window into understanding God. However, God/Jesus was bigger than the Bible, thus Biblical teachings that were inconsistent with my understanding of God/Jesus required intense study and interpretation. I frequently took issue with conservative Christian beliefs such as submission by women to their husbands and a strict seven-day creation. By not taking the Bible literally, I was already a fairly moderate Christian. As accepting the Bible as fallacious document, I moved to the bleeding edge of Christianity. Such was this moderate Christian's existence: my moderate views were perceived as extreme in comparison to Christian fundamentalism.

I love my parents. I believe they did a wonderful job in rearing me to be an educated, responsible and indepedent human being. One of the greatest gifts my father gave me was teaching me that I had a direct line to understanding anything I wanted to understand. This gift came in two pieces. For the first, I could see behind the Wizard's curtain. Because my pastor was also my father, I had no misgivings about my father's humanity or his connection to God or Jesus. I could understand everything that he could. Second, my dad taught me that understanding was critical to having meaningful faith. He exposed me to alternative interpretations of Biblical passages: he was not afraid to point out incongruencies in the Bible or challenge the mainstream paradigm. And so it is through these things that I stood on my father's shoulders.

The irony is that his endowment of a critical, challenging and searching mind led me to a place he would not go: I eventually determined that Christianity and a belief in God/Jesus was not necessary for life - the best life. The tragedy is that he often believes that he failed as a Christian and a father because of my conclusions. Naturally, I disagree: I think who I am is proof of his success. I hope he will one day see it as I do.

In Part II of Losing my Religion I will discuss certain key factors that led to my abandonment of the Christian faith and rejection of belief in any meaningful definition of God.