My Deconversion Story

When I posted my recent churchy blogs that I shall link at the end, people seemed very interested in hearing about my faith story or actually loss of faith. 

You know my churchy background by now, but you may not know that I continued to be a very committed Christian until my mid-30s. In point of fact, there was a time when I thought of leaving teaching to retrain as a minister. 

In those years after our marriage in 1969, Sue and I attended various evangelical churches — Pentecostal, Free Methodist, Associated Gospel, and even the occasional Baptist service. This lasted into the 1980s. I loved being an evangelical Christian, and church music is still what plays in my head more than any other. The music still gives me feelings or at least memories of feelings.

Near the end of my faith period, I led a little couples bible study of just 3 couples. It was great. We all enjoyed our times together. When the sessions concluded because one couple was moving away, one of the guys loaned me a set of creationist tapes. At the end of the tapes, the presenter went on about the continents zooming around after the flood, just 4000 years ago.

I knew enough about the study of plate tectonics to realize that was balderdash. However, it shouldn't have affected me because I hadn't been a young earth creationist to begin with. I knew the earth was old, but believed in guided evolution or Intelligent Design as they call it now. I knew that it had been 200 million years since the planets were together in the form of Pangea and that they have been moving to their present position for all of that time and that they are still on the move. While I won't go into it, the science is irrefutable. 

All along, I had known about geologic time yet still also believed the gospel. Science and belief were not incompatible in my mind. However, it was realizing the absurdity of the claim that the continents had shifted dramatically just a few thousand years ago that made me think of time differently. It suddenly hit me that, geologically speaking, the earth hadn't required divine intervention for 200 million years. Geology just grinded on and on. I had never thought of it this way. 

I realized that the planet hadn't needed a guiding god for 200 million years. That's a rather long time.

As people and Christians, we have this notion that we are special and that god created us with a special purpose. If that were the case, he really took his time getting around to creating humans. And it wasn't just 200 million years but actually 4.5 billion years that our planet had existed. And then . . . when you figure that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the notion of the earth and humans being specially created at the whim of a god suddenly made no sense to me.

That was it. I stopped believing in that instant. It wasn't deliberate; I couldn't help myself. For many EXvangelicals, deconstruction is a long and panful journey. They struggle mightily to find reasons to hang onto their faith, but in the end they cannot. That wasn't my experience. I believed in one moment and not in the next. I had no control over this. You can't force yourself to believe what you don't believe.

Although I had loved being a Christian, I no longer believed after that sudden and unanticipated momentary flash of insight. There was nothing more to my deconversion. Christians tend to assume that ex-believers were unhappy about their, perhaps, restricted lifestyles, but that wasn't true for me or for others whom I have encountered. 

For many, deconstruction is a most painful journey. For me, the shift was instantaneous and natural. I still attended church with the family for some time afterward and not unhappily.

I am not sad about having once believed or having been raised the way that I was. I am not mad at a god whom I don't believe exists. I simply don't believe although, oddly enough, I still love to sing the songs of Zion, as some might call them. Gospel music is the main music in my head, which I know is weird for an atheist.

What I I don't remember from those days is evangelicalism being as mean-spirited or so anti-intellectual. We graduated scholars from my youth group: scientists, doctors, professors and mere teachers like me. My late brother-in-law, for example, was a highly intelligent and educated professor who believed deeply. Non-belief isn't a matter of intelligence, but I suspect it is often a matter of being honest about confronting truth and reality.

I think that we come to the end of this sequence of posts at last. I hope that I have answered your questions.

=================

For the record, these are the posts that led to this one.

Remembering the Foo

Evangel Temple

It Bagan on Drummond Street

Onto the Queensway