March 26, 2013 |
The percentage of Americans who
have abandoned religious faith has
been growing rapidly in recent years, with one in five Americans citing
“none” as their religious affiliation. Most of these people have little
to fear when it comes to admitting they have no religion, but for a
small subset of religious believers, quitting faith is one of the
hardest choices they’ll have to make in their lives. What happens to
people who lose their faith in God after they’ve taken on a position as a
religious leader? Here’s an examination of five prominent skeptics of
religion who used to consider themselves not just believers, but
leaders, and how they’ve learned to cope with life after religion.
1) Dan Barker. Religion
was a major part of Dan Barker’s life for more than two decades. He
became an evangelical Christian in his early teens and entered a career
as a preacher who specialized in spreading the Christian faith through
music. He wrote popular religious children’s musicals, worked heavily
with Christian singer Manuel Bonilla, and accompanied many other famous
Christian musicians.
Over the years, however, Barker’s reading
caused him to start to doubt the truth not just of Christianity, but
claims of God altogether. In 1984, he publicly came out as an atheist.
Since then,
Barker has become a prominent atheist leader and author,
writing two books about his journey and working with the Clergy Project
and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Despite his past--or because
of it--Barker shows
no reticence in criticizing his former faith.
“How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being
monitored by a judgmental ghost?” he asks, while affirming rationalism
as the surer path to a happy existence.
2) Jerry DeWitt. For
some, leaving religion exacts a high price. Jerry DeWitt lost his faith
after 25 years in the Pentecostal ministry in Bible Belt rural America.
DeWitt, who was converted at age 17 in Jimmy Swaggart’s church, hung
onto his religion as long as he could, but finally could no longer hide
his lack of belief.
While he found a welcoming community among
atheists, particularly through the Clergy Project (devoted to helping
ministers who have lost their faith) and the group Recovering From
Religion, DeWitt still faced many practical concerns as a result of his
deconversion. As
recounted in a profile for the New York Times,
DeWitt lost his job, his wife, and much of his connection to his
community in his hometown of DeRidder, LA. While he is getting back on
his feet with his work at
Recovering From Religion and a
grant from the Clergy Project, DeWitt’s story shows that for many atheists, the price for being true to your conscience remains high.
3) Teresa MacBain. Teresa MacBain described to NPR the
hell that is continuing to serve as a minister after losing your faith
in God: “I start having stomachaches, headaches, just knowing that I got
to stand up and say things that I no longer believe in and portray
myself in a way that's totally false.”
MacBain continued to serve
as a minister despite having concluded that she didn’t believe in no
small part because she feared the economic devastation that would follow
if she didn’t have her job as a minister any longer. Eventually, with
moral support from the Clergy Project, she moved on to become an
outspoken atheist and the executive director of Humanists of Florida.
MacBain describes a lifetime of squelching doubts,
going back to her adolescence, when she noticed the internal
contradictions in the Bible. Despite decades of trying to ignore her
doubts, her inherent nature as a questioner eventually came out. She
described her deconversion to
American Atheist Magazine: “I didn’t want to lose my faith. I didn’t want to change or stop believing, but I wanted truth more!”
4) Anthony Pinn. Anthony
Pinn is a professor of religious studies at Rice University and an
outspoken expert on African-American humanism. As he explained in
a recent speech at Skepticon,
he began preaching at the ripe old age of 12, and was ordained at age
of 18. His doubts started immediately after he started working as a
youth pastor in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. Now he has a Ph.D. in religious
studies from Harvard and a professorship in Houston, and he’s a blunt
and outspoken critic of religion, focusing specifically on religion’s
inability to address the concerns of the black community.
Depending
on your point of view, Pinn’s acerbic wit and no-holds-barred approach
to the discussion of belief versus non-belief is either delightful or
offensive. In a recent
interview with the Root,
Pinn summed up his critique of religion by saying, “I think African
Americans are worse off because of their allegiance to theism. The
belief in God and gods has not been particularly useful or productive
for them. It has lessened their appeal to their own creativity and
ingenuity, and in most cases has resulted in a kind of bizarre
understanding of suffering as a marker of closeness to God and a mark of
divine favor. Nothing good can come out of that.”
5) Andrew Johnson. In
the Mormon faith, young men must demonstrate their right to inherit the
priesthood by going on a missionary trip to spread their faith to the
non-believers. For Andrew Johnson, however,
going on a missionary trip made
him a non-believer. The time away from home made it easier to research
literature (including Richard Dawkins' instant classic,
The God Delusion) that spoke to his doubts about God.
Johnson
has since put that famous Mormon work ethic to the task of helping
other ex-Mormon atheists find community and support, creating a club
called Atheists of Utah Valley. “I thought I was the only one,” Johnson
said, but his work organizing atheists in the atheist-unfriendly Mormon
region of Utah has conclusively demonstrated that atheists are turning
up, and thriving, in every corner of this country.
These are just a
sampling of the stories happening every day in this country as people
who aren’t just believers but leaders in their various faith communities
are losing their faith and turning to secular humanism to find the
answers to life's big questions. The Clergy Project, an organization
devoted to helping members of the clergy who no longer believe, has over
200 members, despite its rather recent founding. Now that atheists are
organizing and making their presence known more than ever before, the
ranks of religious leaders who no longer believe and want to come out is
only likely to keep growing.
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