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Not long ago, when I was 49 years old, I had been doing some writing on Biblical themes and was fascinated by some of the insights that I was getting. But in actuality, the whole experience came close to killing me. Fortunately, one night during this time period my wife Nancy realized something was seriously wrong and convinced me to go to the emergency room. Shortly after I arrived there I went into a full blown manic attack during which it became necessary to shackle me to a hospital bed. I can't even begin to imagine how things would have turned out if I had not been in a hospital when I had my attack.
I spent about a week in the psych ward of the hospital trying to sort out what had happened to me. For a while I was convinced that the universe had chosen me to receive and transmit a special message for humankind. It took a number of weeks for me to realize that this idea was delusional, and largely the result of the antipsychotic drugs they had pumped me full of.
During these weeks I continued to write, but gradually my focus changed. Rather than writing a book that would change the world, I realized that my writing was more a therapy for me: an insight as to why I had suddenly become manic at 49 years of age. I started writing an account of my religious history. Now, several months after the incident that put me in the psych ward, I'd like to share this account and reflect on my current state in this testimony of my conversion to, and deconversion from, Christianity.
My father was raised as an orthodox Jew but shortly after he left his parent's home he quit practicing any religion. He had developed a distaste for all forms of organized religion that he kept throughout his life. My mother was raised Episcopalian, so that was how we kids were raised also. Dad didn't often come to church with us. His distaste for organized religion had developed into a distaste for religion in general, and he almost never talked about religious stuff. I think the only thing that he tolerated in church was the music. Dad always loved music of any kind.
In the Episcopal church I remember really liking Sunday school up until around the sixth grade. I enjoyed singing in the church's junior choir, and I thought one of the priests in particular was a really swell guy. Our choir occasionally went on trips to sing at other churches, and I really enjoyed this also. I didn't know if I preferred the Episcopal church to other churches, because it was the only church I knew. Our Sunday school class once took a trip to the Jewish synagogue and I was really intrigued, especially by the Torah scrolls, but it all seemed a bit intimidating too. I thought that it might be fun to become a Jew because my dad had been raised that way, but my thoughts never went beyond this.
Junior high school was hard for me, like it is for lots of young people. Religion stopped being fun and I viewed going to church as an unfortunate chore that I should try and get out of as much as possible. But when I reached high school there was a particular Sunday school teacher in my church that seemed to really enjoy his religion. I was intrigued and started enjoying Sunday school again. This man was beginning to get involved in a movement in the Episcopal church called the Charismatic Movement. He passed out New Testaments to all of us. They were an edition of the New Testament called Good News for Modern Man. I viewed this skeptically at first because all of my experience with the Bible up to this point had convinced me it was a boring book designed to be used in religious rituals. Much to my amazement I really enjoyed reading this book. It had interesting stick figure illustrations that seemed strangely compelling.
I was fascinated by this man Jesus. I guess I had never really thought of him as human before. I knew that he was a man, but my church experience had taught me that since he was also God, he was really rather remote: "up there somewhere." But the man that was presented on the pages of the Gospels was much more exciting! I especially liked his fearlessness; that he could stand up to the evil religious leaders and point out all of their flaws. He wasn't even afraid of crucifixion, because he knew God would save him from death. I wanted to be fearless like Jesus. I felt sorry for the Romans because they, unwittingly, had been used by the evil religious leaders to commit a horrible sin. And I felt sorry for the Jewish masses because their leaders had tricked them into complicity in commiting a great sin. The Gospel was obviously about viewing religious leaders with great suspicion.
It was around this time that my father lost his job and our lives became more chaotic. Dad found temporary work in Pensylvania and I went to live with him there while the rest of my family stayed behind in Tennessee. This was a really fun time for me, but really hard on my dad. In addition to his other pressures he was distressed by my new found interest in religion. He took me to an ecumenical service, hoping that I would find that more interesting than Christianity. But I just found it strange and mixed up. He suggested that maybe I could read the Book of Mormon. Dad had found a Mormon friend in Pennsylvania who had seemed to find a lot of peace in that religion. But I found that since I was away from the church I had grown up in, I was losing my interest in religion. I found other pastimes to occupy my mind, especially playing chess.
Dad eventually found a job in Columbus, Ohio and things got back to normal. We were all together again and Mom started visiting Episcopal churches in the area. The first church we attended was a campus church that was much more liberal than the church we had attended in Tennessee. I didn't mind going to church, but I was much more interested in playing chess. My poor parents had to drag me around to chess tournaments all over the state of Ohio. I was completely consumed by my new passion. This made my last couple of years in high school rather tense. My parents, especially my father, were concerned that I was out of balance. I didn't seem to have any interest in continuing my education after graduation, nor in finding a job and moving out. And in fact both of those options just seemed scary and confusing to me. I had this strange idea that I would make a living playing chess, but I wasn't good enough to win the high paying tournaments and it wasn't likely that I would be that good before graduating high school. So I decided I would go to school and study Russian. The Russians were the best chess players in the world and it would help my own progress in chess if I could read the Russian chess magazines. I decided I would go to the Ohio State University. I was already somewhat familiar with the campus because I attended the O. S. U. chess club with great regularity.
In the meantime I had made something of a religious shift. We were still attending the liberal church, but I had made a few friends in high school that were much more conservative in their religious outlook. It was also around this time one of my brothers and my sister both became conservative Christians. This caused my father quite a bit of distress, especially because both my siblings rejected biological evolution and embraced a creationist view of the origin of life. Dad, who was trained as a scientist, was sure that two of his offspring had lost their minds. I was not so sure.
Going to college was a pretty big paradigm shift for me. I found it exciting at first and did my best to do well. But I was still more interested in playing chess than studying. Things didn't go too badly at first. One class that I signed up for was an introductory Geology class. I was looking for evidence of the world wide flood that was described in Genesis. I had read a few books that convinced me that perhaps this was the best way to explain the geology of the earth and I wanted to hear the other side. But Geology was very confusing to me. I realized that the concepts of dating strata by fossils was a lot more complicated than I had thought, and much more subtle than I had been led to believe than my creationist friends. And the biggest surprise was that I didn't get preached to in college Geology. None of the teachers tried to convince me that evolution was true, or that creationists were wrong. This was a huge eye opener for me. I had been convinced that Evolution was a religion that competed with Christianity. Taking this geology class showed me that, at least for my teachers, evolution wasn't a religion at all.
But despite occasional points of time when I was engaged by my studies, my first year in school was an exercise in futility. I had no real interest in scholastics and eventually stopped going to class altogether. When I flunked all my classes, everything hit the fan. Dad kicked me out of the house. This mind numbing change of events absolutely paralyzed me. I really had no idea what to do or where to go. Fortuately my mother's parents heard about the problems my parents were having with me and offered to take me in. I grabbed that option like a drowning man grabs on to a lifeline.
Suddenly life was becoming interesting again. I had new surroundings and a new routine. My grandparents suggested that I start anew at a junior college out in California. I thought, "Why not?" I would try to do better this time. I made new friends and I enjoyed the long bus rides to the college, which was miles away from where I lived. I even got a job and found to my great surprise that work had its fair share of pleasures. I continued to visit the local chess club but I found to my surprise that I was losing my interest in chess.
One thing I enjoyed immensely was being involved in a church again. My grandparent's church was the smallest I had ever been to, and I found that I liked it a lot. It was a middle of the road church, neither terribly liberal nor very conservative. I found that I liked that too. I was really enjoying my routine of church, work, and school. I would often spend my free time in the library listening to music or reading. The internet hadn't been invented yet.
On one of my bike rides to the library I happened to see a small music store and I popped in. There was a hippieish looking man behind the counter. That was unusual in my circles so I struck up a conversation to see what he was like. As it turned out, he was a Christian. He offered to lead me in the sinner's prayer. So it was there in California at age nineteen that I asked Jesus to come into my heart. I didn't feel much except for a kind of peace for having gotten over that important hurdle. The man told me about the church that he went to and suggested that I start attending. I thanked him for the invitation but explained that I already went to the Episcopal church with my Grandparents and that was just fine for now. I got the feeling that the man wasn't very happy with this.
Things were really idyllic living with my Grandparents. They sent me on a trip to Europe for a month during the summer break, after which I would spend the rest of the summer with my parents. It was a wonderful trip but I couldn't enjoy it the way that I should have. I knew that inexplicably I had neglected to sign up for the next year of classes. The same mind numbing paralysis that still occasionally grips me had kept me from doing what was obviously necessary. I wondered what would happen when everything hit the fan again.
When I was at my parents I became more and more afraid. I had no idea what would happen. Finally I realized that I had to tell my father that I had blown it again. Sobbing I told him everything. And, much to my surprise, he accepted me back into his household. That didn't mean that everybody wasn't furious with me. My grandparents were hurt and disappointed. They must have wondered what they had done wrong. My father was furious that I showed so little regard for my grandparent's generosity. There were to be conditions to my living at home. I had to get a job. Fortunately this prospect didn't scare me so much now. I had held a job in a restaurant in California and I was confident I could do it again. I found a job as a dishwasher in a retirement home. Then I found an even better job as a pizza chef. I could do this! Eventually I even moved out of the house.
Mom had stopped attending the liberal church and was attending a very small Episcopal church in a poor part of town. My sister had become very conservative in her religious ideas and had settled in this church, so Mom attended there, too. They suggested that I start attending as well. I thought, "What could it hurt?" I found that I liked this church a lot. The priest was tall confident man who was very excited about his religion. He was involved in the same Charismatic Movement within the Episcopal Church that my earlier religious teacher had been so excited about. This priest was also very excited about it and most of the people in the church were excited about it, too. And I felt drawn to the music. The organ music in the more traditional churches was OK, but this church used guitars and I found that more interesting and compelling. Since I had stopped playing chess it seemed logical to get involved in church music again since I needed something to occupy my mind in my spare time. I joined the "praise team" and began playing on a regular basis. I really wanted to be involved in the church more because I enjoyed it and perhaps I would get more opportunities to play music.
One of the main teachings of the Charismatic Movement was that although praying the sinner's prayer was an important first step for a Christian, there was a second blessing that was nearly as important. Asking Jesus into your heart ensured that you would go to Heaven when you died, but if you wanted to experience everything God had for you, you had to ask Him to baptize you in His Holy Spirit. I was really scared to do this. Whereas there were no particular outward signs to show that you had Jesus in your heart, the outward sign of Baptism in the Holy Spirit was that you spoke in tongues.
I was really afraid that I wouldn't be able to speak in tongues, and everybody would know that I wasn't fully a Christian. Maybe people would even think I didn't have Jesus in my heart. But I wanted to be involved in this church so badly that I finally agreed to have a small group of people pray that I be baptized in the Holy Spirit. They led me in the prayer and then many of them started to speak in tongues to encourage me to do it, too. I croaked out one or two strange sounds that didn't really sound like words to me. I had the feeling that I was just making them up, but maybe it was God's Holy Spirit that was giving them to me. People seemed disappointed but they encouraged me, too. "Not everybody speaks in tongues all at once. Practice your prayer language often." But everybody seemed happy. I was happy, too. I had overcome my fear and taken this important step. Somebody told me, "I can tell that you are baptized in the Holy Spirit now. I can see the joy on your face."
Now that I was baptized in the Holy Spirit I found I had a hunger for "God's Word" as it was found in the Bible. This really excited me because that was exactly what people told me would happen. I especially tackled the epistles of Paul in the New Testament. In this conservative church the epistles of Paul seemed to be the central focus. The priest would show how everything that Paul wrote dovetailed systematically and how it fit in with the gospels. I didn't realize it yet, but I was learning theology. Then I met a woman at the church and we fell in love and married. Her name was Nancy.
I expected that my life would be near perfect now. I had experienced the new birth and the baptism of the Holy Spirit and had a family, too. Much to my surprise there were difficulties right off the bat. Nancy had been married before and there was a child from her previous marriage: a stepchild to me. This presented a lot of challenges that were unexpectedly hard. I had been told that marriage was much easier for Christians than for unbelievers. I was at least grateful that Nancy and I were not unbelievers.
Some of the friction involved the church we were going to. So we prayed about it and decided we needed to change churches. The most important thing for me was that our new church have the same theology as the old church. I also liked small churches, so we looked for one like that. It wasn't long before we were led us to a new church that was just what we were looking for. Surely this meant God was moving in our lives.
At our new church the first thing I did was make it known that I was a musician and would like to play with the "worship team." As it turned out, I could play electric bass and they needed a bassist. Surely God's hand was in this. I was also developing quickly theologically. I felt I had pretty much mastered Paul's epistles by now and felt much more confident in my theology, even though there were a lot things in the Bible which confused me. But I was sure if I just continued down this path it wouldn't be too long before I understood everything in the entire Bible.
Around this time I turned my attention to the book of Revelation. In conservative churches, Revelation combined with the book of Daniel is believed to clearly show that in the near future there will be a seven year tribulation period followed by Jesus' return. Most believe that the beginning of the tribulation will be made clear by a tumultuous event called the Rapture, when all Christians will simply disappear for the earth, much to the amazement of all the unbelievers. I was eager to see how Revelation and Daniel taught all this and I bought a few books that I hoped would explain it to me. But the more I read the more confused I got. Although most theologians thought the rapture would occur at the beginning of the tribulation, some thought that the rapture would occur at the end of the tribulation and others thought that it would occur in the middle. Each position seemed to have convincing evidence to support its views and obviously I was not yet skilled enough in Biblical interpretation to untangle which was the correct position. I decided that I would just have to set Revelation and Daniel aside for now and try to figure out some other part of the Bible.
As small as our new church was, there was a split early on. There was one man in our church who thought that God was calling him to be a pastor, but our church was not large enough to support two pastors. Really, we were having trouble supporting just one. So many people were angry at this man for presuming that God was calling him. He finally decided to start his own church and some people went with him to support him in his new venture. Nancy and I were two of them.
My new pastor told me that he wanted me to head up the music program. I was delighted that now I was a full fledged worship leader. The church was doing well too, growing so fast that it was soon bigger than our old church. Surely this showed that God was more pleased with my new church than my old one. Before I knew it, I was responsible for a full fledged worship team. I was learning more theology too, under the teaching of this new pastor. He emphasized different things than the other teachers that I had in the other churches, and this was very refreshing. He taught me that principles concerning human relationships could be found in the Bible. In particular God was very interested in marriage and desired all marriages to succeed. Before he was a Christian this pastor had left his first wife and remarried, but after this man became a Christian God miraculously led him back to his first wife. I found this really impressive. Even though my own marriage was going better, there were still times Nancy and I could use a little divine intervention.
Just when it seemed that everything was going well, this pastor had a heart attack and died. This rocked the fledgeling church. We talked about whether we should disband or continue on. Finally it was decided that we could continue on and look for a pastor. I and another man would take over preaching duties until a new pastor could be found.
I was a little intimidated by this, but soon relished my new duty. It seemed as though people preferred my preaching to the other man's. This made me very glad and proud, because I was a relatively new Christian compared to the other man, who was older and had preached before in another church. Time went on and it soon became obvious that no one from the outside would be interested in pastoring our church. Attendance had dropped to less than half of what it had been at it's peak, and no one wanted the daunting task of bringing such a church back to life. People started saying that maybe I should take over as pastor.
And then I felt it again. That old mind numbing paralysis. If older men who had already pastored were intimidated by the task, why did I think I could do any better? I declined, and the tiny church disbanded.
Eventually Nancy and I decided that small churches were the source of too much pain and we resolved to go to larger churches. During this time I finally grew up. I was more willing to sit and listen than to try to rise in leadership. I also grew theologically. One thing that I noticed were that certain controversies about the Bible seemed to be unresolvable. Theologians would take opposing positions and each position seemed defensable. As I wondered about why this was I developed a theory I now call "lock and key." Conservative theologians sometimes talk about key scriptures. I came to realize that key scriptures are clear Bible verses that are to be taken literally. These can be used to unlock more obscure scriptures that are metaphorical. Here is one example:
lock: Blessed are the poor...
key: Blessed are the poor in spirit...
In this example the "lock" is a mysterious metaphorical scripture. In our society as in most others, blessing is synonymous with having an abundance of something, be it wisdom, faith, money, position, or abundant health. Faith is a particular problem in this list. Surely Jesus wants us to be rich in faith. So in what sense can it be blessed to be poor? We find a "key" in a parallel scripture when Jesus says it is those who are poor in "spirit" who are the blessed ones. Thus it is fine to be rich in faith, money, and position, as long as you are poor in spirit.
But what if we turn these scriptures around and make the other scripture the lock:
lock: Blessed are the poor in spirit...
key: Blessed are the poor...
In this example we are trying to unlock the mysterious phrase "poor in spirit." What can this mean? We find a key in the parallel verse, in which Jesus explains that it one must be poor in the commonly understood sense, that is in money, to also be poor in spirit. We get a completely different meaning by exchanging the lock and the key.
As I applied my theory of Biblical interpretation to the conservative sermons that I heard, I found that there were scriptures that were commonly assumed to be keys that might in fact be locks. In particular, the teachings of Paul were often considered clear keys to understanding to the confusing things Jesus had said. This is because Paul's style is so much more straight forward and less figurative than the things Jesus said. At this point I did a dangerous thing. I decided that I was going to make the words of Jesus keys rather than the words of Paul. I threw out all my Pauline theology and tried to read the gospels again for the very first time. And I found it frightening! I remembered my first experience falling in love with the man Jesus who fearlessly stood up to the religious leaders and pointed out their errors. And I realized that I had become far more like those leaders than I was like Jesus. Then I did an even more dangerous thing. I started reading Paul through the eyes of Paul rather than my leaders who had been interpreting him to me. And I realized that the words of Paul were dependent upon the actions and words of Jesus. Paul would have been horrified to find that people were considering his words rather than Jesus' words key to understanding certain concepts, especially authority and church structure. I was starting to be horrified as well. I wondered if maybe Jesus literally meant that poor people have more moral worth than rich people, that slaves had more moral worth than presidents, and if Paul believed literally that fools had more moral worth than wise men. I had always viewed myself as a wise man. I also had no desire whatsoever to be poor or a slave.
These musings led me to do the most dangerous thing of all. I started interpreting the scriptures privately rather than depending on the authority of Orthodoxy. Eventually I realized that this was the same thing that got Martin Luther into so much hot water. Conservative American Christians consider themselves to be continuing in the tradition of Luther rather than the Orthodoxy he opposed, but they are wrong. Modern Conservative Orthodoxy only allows private interpretation of the Bible for private or trivial matters. In conservative churches all matters of essential doctrine are dictated by The Church, just like they were in the good old days before Martin Luther.
So my viewpoint changed. I started to consider what I did believe, rather than what I should believe. And I started to develop my own personal theology. I chose my own keys rather than let my leaders do it for me. Whereas I was still following in the tradition of Conservative American Orthodoxy, I also followed the leading of my own mind to think independently and try to figure out where exactly where I was headed. And I realized that theologies are more or less arbitrary, depending on which scriptures or ideas the theologian personally finds compelling (the keys) as opposed to the scriptures or ideas the theologian finds confusing (the locks).
There was a book in my church's library: The Humiliation of the Word by sociologist and amateur theologian Jaques Ellul. Even though Ellul was not a conservative theologian I found his ideas much more compelling than those that were being preached in my church. I discovered some other writings of Ellul on the internet and began to study them. One writing that I found particularly fascinating was an essay devoted to the tempations and sufferings of Jesus. Particularly interesting in the Biblical account of Jesus' tempations is this New Testament claim:
The devil took him (Jesus) to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor...
Although this could have been a literally credible account in the first century after Jesus' birth, it presents a problem for those of us in the twenty-first century who know that the earth is spherical. Not only do we know that such a mountain does not exist, it could not possibly exist on a spherical earth. If the New Testament account of Jesus' temptations is literally true, the earth must be flat. The only way to solve the problem is to assume that something in the New Testament claim must be metaphorical. The easiest way to resolve things is to say that the "mountain" is a metaphorical high place; it has no real existence. Modern conservative Christians instinctively and unconsciously assume a metaphorical mountain.
Ellul took this metaphorizing one step further and assumed that "the devil" in this account and throughout the New Testament is also metaphorical. Ellul believed that there was no literal devil: that Satan was a figure that the New Testament writers created as a metaphor for evil. I realized when I read this that most Christians would say that this was taking things too far. If the devil is simply a metaphor for evil, then why couldn't God (or Jesus) simply be a metaphor for good, having no real existence? This was really way too dangerous for Christianity. But I also realized that Ellul hadn't really broken any "rules" by metaphorizing the devil: if it was fair to say that the very high mountain was a metaphor, it was just as fair to say that the devil or even God Himself were metaphors as well.
As I continued to delve into Ellul's theology I became fascinated by Ellul's political view of Jesus; a view sometimes called Christian Anarchism. I reformulated this view somewhat and renamed it "Jesus' theory of the absent monarch." One way to formulate Jesus' view of the world is that he saw the human system as a monarchy which is missing its monarch. This is best seen in a series of parables in which Jesus compares God to variously a landowner, a king, or a bridegroom, who has simply left the scene (for an unstated reason) and who will return someday to set things right. While I was happy to find a theology that I felt fit the teachings of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament very well, there were a couple of things that bothered me. First of all, if the human system really is designed as a monarchy, why does democracy work so much better as a political system than monarchy? And why would Jesus espouse a view which dovetails so well with what atheists say: that there is no evidence of God's presence in the system; that He is off on a "long journey"?
I continued on as best I could within the context of Orthodox Christianity. Nancy and I were changing theologically and we decided not to keep attending the conservative church in which (paradoxically) I had discovered Ellul's theology. We changed churches yet again to a church which despite its conservative theology had much more liberal practices than the previous church. I found that people there were more receptive to listening to my not so orthodox points of views and even conceded that they had some merit. I continued to entertain more and more heterodox notions, such as the idea that hell itself was not literal, but was a metaphor for something else. It seemed to me, and still does, that a God who would consign people to hell is more a demon than He is a God.
Then my father died after a long and productive life. I was reconciled to the fact that he would die soon: he was 86 and in ill health. But I still grieved. And during the grieving process I wondered again about God and what the final fate of my father was. I would sometimes go to the place where they had buried my father's ashes, but felt nothing; certainly not the presence of my father. I knew very well that my father was not in hell, because that would be absurd. But I couldn't figure out a way that he was in heaven, either.
Then I had an idea and started writing my own version of Genesis which began not with God's creative act, but simply with a Primal Man who was the product of an evolutionary process. In my writing I defined "good and evil" as pain and pleasure and reformulated the fall of man in terms of knowledge of self. As I weaved these themes into my writing I became more and more excited about what I was discovering. I continued on, writing a "Gospel" while weaving in a bit of ancient Greek philosophy. Finally one night I was in such a manic state that my wife convinced me that I needed to go to the hospital. It was a good thing that she did, for right after I walked into the Emergency Room I experienced a full blown manic attack that lasted four hours. The first three hours of it are a complete blank in my memory, I only remember about the last hour of the experience. The medical personnel that attended me said that they had never seen a case of anyone as old as me having such an episode unless they were on narcotics or suffering from alcohol withdrawal. They even gave me a drug that would have made me violently ill if I had any narcotics in my system, despite my wife's insistence that I was not a drug user. Of course, it didn't phase me in the least. My body was not in the throes of an alcohol or narcotics withdrawal. No one but I could have known what was causing my violent behavior. I was losing my religion.
I came out on the other side of this experience convinced that something extremely profound had happened to me. Paradoxically, I felt as though I had been born again. This feeling was much deeper than anything I had felt when I prayed before, even the time I initially "accepted Jesus." Despite the fact that I realize now that much of what I was initially feeling and thinking was delusional, it was all a part of a process that began perhaps years earlier, and would culminate in my deconversion from Christianity.
In the month or so that followed, I had to acknowledge that I no longer believed in the existence of a personal God. This left me in an interesting position: for all of my adult life I had defined myself as a Christian and now I was somehow different. In a sense I really had been born again: born into a new life in which my primitive beliefs had to be put behind and my new reality faced bravely. But what was I now? For a while I examined internet sites like infidels.com wondering if I was an atheist. Although I am now much more sypathetic to those who define themselves this way, I don't like the tone of such sites which seem preachy to me. I find that I have no desire to convert Christians to my way of thinking. Although Christianity no longer works for me, I don't think it is helpful to try to wrench a sincere believer from a belief system that gives meaning to life. Currently I am defining myself as a secular humanist. I believe that there is a side of life that can be defined as "spiritual," although I think of spirituality more in terms of mythological truths rooted deep in our collective evolutionary past than as an actual realm that exists somewhere.
