Last post I talked about the intellectual points that led me to question my belief in God. I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t have gotten me to where I am now, though, without the emotional changes that took place at the same time. There are so many workarounds for evidence that contradicts something you want to believe: if the evidence is really convincing, you can move into a more liberal, less literalistic interpretation of your faith (something Christendom as a whole has been doing for decades.) There are some compelling emotional reasons to hold on to a faith that you aren’t fully intellectually convinced by.

The first of these reasons is social bonding. When you grow up in a religious family, centered within a religious community, inevitably most of the people dear to you are going to be adherents of that religion. The language and philosophies of that religion are going to be built into your interactions with them. You will inevitably hear criticisms, however mild, directed at non-believers, or outsiders to your particular sect. All your social and tribal instincts will be directing you to stay within the religion, for fear of being outcast.

Or at least that’s how it was for me. In addition to growing up within the church, I was homeschooled, which for me meant that almost my entire social world centered around the church. My parents themselves were on the moderate side compared to many I knew, but my greater “tribe” was entirely Christian. Interestingly, my close friendships growing up were always with non-Christians or casual Christians; it wasn’t until my college days that I developed some strong faith-centric relationships. But those relationships were strong. In college I joined a group of wonderful, smart, fun people, and they became extended family to me. And the love and friendship between us was always tied up with the faith we shared. Is it any wonder I couldn’t bring myself to seriously question this faith? It never even occurred to me as a real possibility.

When I came home from college, I joined a more conservative church than the ones I’d grown up in, a church that matched the doctrines believed in my college-era church. I lived in that community for a full year: took part in a small group, made many friends, dated a man who was everything I was supposed to want in a godly partner. I call that phase of life the “reductio ad absurdum” of my religious ideas. I had gravitated toward the more conservative side partly because it was more intellectually rigorous, but what I found over time was that it was also intellectually narrow. There were questions people just didn’t ask (questions like, “what if my gay best friend is actually doing God’s will, not rejecting it?” — one which lay heavy on my mind at that time), books people didn’t read, areas of thought people didn’t explore. It was drought to my intellectually thirsty mind.

Enter Kurt. When I first had a conversation with Kurt, I felt as if my entire brain had been electrified. In a good way. It was as if huge areas of my mind which I’d been letting die of disuse were zapped into vitality again. I couldn’t get enough… so Kurt and I spent a lot of time together. And so it was that I developed my first friendship with someone who was openly, unapologetically atheist.

Now the conversations Kurt and I had were undoubtedly important in moving me away from belief, but the friendship was just as important. For the first time in my life, leaving my faith would mean moving closer to someone I cared about, not farther away from everyone.

It shouldn’t matter this much. The importance of personal, emotional ties in choosing what to believe is a dirty little secret we keep swept under the rug as much as possible. And my guess is that most of the vocal atheists, today and through history, are by nature less swayed by personal considerations than the mass of humanity is. But the fact is that the need for community and tribal identification is much older and deeper than the need for intellectual satisfaction and exploration. As long as people feel that abandoning their belief will mean losing their tribe, only a very few courageous and independent people will do so.

So there was the gravitational move toward Kurt and away from my church group (toward whom I began to feel some resentment for their role in the stifling of my intellect). Another big push came when my parents converted to Catholicism. Catholicism is different enough from Protestant fundamentalism that it felt as if my parents, too, were leaving the tribe. Suddenly I felt as though the field of acceptable belief was wide open. So I started exploring. For the first time, I measured Biblical accounts against recorded history with a truly impartial eye. That led me very quickly to lose any faith in the literal historicity of the gospels. I decided that, to the extent that the gospel accounts of Jesus were true, they were legend and metaphor, not historical fact. And that was the point that made me face head-on the fact that I was walking away from my tribe. I was accepting doctrines that I’d previously looked on with scorn; while I still at that time considered myself a believer, I knew some very conservative people would not. Finding myself in that place — and seeing with horror how strong a hold the social considerations had on me — was the final step needed to divorce myself from the social bonds that were helping to hold me within Christianity.

Next time: the third and final part… existential cushioning.

One of the most interesting questions in the dialogue between atheism and belief is, “What would it take to change your mind?” I like it because it’s a question that either side can ask of the other, and because it’s a question that short-circuits a lot of the defensiveness that so easily springs up around such conversations. If you’re going to make any attempt to answer it, you have to extend your imagination into possibilities that aren’t part of your worldview; whether you’re right or wrong, I think this is usually a healthy exercise.

My esteemed colleague and I are both atheists, fairly newly crossed over from the medium-conservative Christianity we were brought up in. She’s going to answer the “What would it take to change your mind?” question from her current perspective; I’m going to relate what it did take to change my mind from my former one.

First of all, if you’d asked me that question when I was a believer, I wouldn’t have been able to give a clear answer. There are two reasons for this: first, faith is highly praised within a faith system (duh!) and stories of people holding onto their belief in spite of reason and evidence are part of the narrative of virtue; second, I was terrified of the possibility that I might actually, someday, be given a reason not to believe. I remember thinking over the question “What would it take…?” and shying away from possible answers, taking refuge in that “virtue-of-faith” business, because I couldn’t bear the idea of losing my belief in God. Faith was, to me, a cushion against a particular kind of existential dread that I’ve spent my life running from. Letting go of it (it seemed to me at the time) would be like falling off the edge of an abyss.

And that’s an important point, as we continue this conversation. In my own experience, there were three pillars my faith rested on: intellectual persuasion, social bonds, and that existential cushioning I just mentioned. Of these three, only the first is at all susceptible to arguments, evidence, even simple conversation. If my experience was typical — and I suspect that it was — the question “What would it take…?” has answers that have nothing to do with evidence or arguments.

But let’s start with the evidence and arguments: the intellectual persuasion. I have always been a skeptic of a certain degree, which is to say that I trust the scientific method as the best way of obtaining facts about the world. In addition, I seem to have internalized certain principles of elegance and parsimony. So when settling into a position on creation versus evolution, for example, I found any and all “young earth” theories simply laughable. I spent some time in my early teen years reading ultra-conservative “science” that attempted to refute evolution, but as I got older, I contrasted it with the actual science out there, and found it absurd. I was convinced on evolution, and there went any hope of a strictly literalist interpretation of the Bible. I figured some parts of it were meant to be taken literally (the histories of Israel, of Jesus and the early church, and the prescriptions in the epistles) and some were meant to be read on a mythic/allegorical level.

Then came the moral strictures. I never tried to believe in the purely intangible “spirit” that was somehow alive or dead, healthy or sick, without showing any evidence in the life of the person. God’s moral laws, I believed, were there for the nurturing of the whole human: mind, body, and spirit. Someone living according to them would be healthier, more whole, more in harmony with themselves and the world. Growing up, I was surrounded almost entirely by Christians who were following the big social rules: no drinking in excess or sex outside of marriage, along with being a decent, law-abiding citizen. I didn’t have much opportunity to compare different systems of morality to see what results they brought in the lives of their adherents.

Then, in my early 20s, my best friend — who’d always been a far stricter and more rigid Christian moralist than I — broke one of the Big Ones. She came out as gay, and started an open relationship with a woman. She and I were roommates at the time, so I watched her go through the whole journey, and what I saw flatly contradicted what I was supposed to believe. Embracing her love for women, and for this woman in particular, made her healthier, more whole, more in harmony with herself and with the world. Try as I might, I could not view her journey as a fall (and I did try, for several years). It was plainly an elevation.

So I decided that God must not have the rules about sexual morality that Christians have attributed to him. What exactly the rules were, I didn’t know, but it was clearly open for investigation.

Still, there was the matter of faith, right? I had this core, unshakable belief in God. If belief was virtuous and unbelief was sinful, it must be because everybody deep down knew that God was real, and that unbelievers were simply denying this, in their arrogance or lustful greed. I could comfortably believe this until I met Kurt.

I met Kurt at an important psychological moment, which I’ll talk more about in the next post. I connected intellectually with Kurt in a way that I hadn’t connected in years. We talked incessantly, often about religion in general and mine in particular. He did not believe in God. And as we talked, as we spent time together, I found it impossible to believe that he was arrogantly rejecting a God he secretly knew to be real. I knew him, I trusted his intellectual honesty, and I was sure that his unbelief was genuine and sincere. So fell one more piece of the crumbling edifice: I could no longer believe that whatever kind of God existed could justly punish unbelievers simply because of unbelief. Since my belief in God’s justice was stronger than my adherence to any particular doctrine, doctrines about the virtue of faith also fell by the wayside.

This about concludes the intellectual portion of my “What did it take…?” story. Three pieces of evidence (backed up by a number of smaller, more distant examples) against the conservative beliefs I grew up with: science’s persuasive explanation for the natural world; my best friend’s ascent into homosexuality; another dear friend’s noble unbelief. One could object that the last two are scarcely evidence. There’s no objectivity there, much room for human error. It’s true, and I would never hold up those specific examples to persuade someone else. All I can say is, I was close to both these people for a long time, and I struggled mightily before accepting what I saw in them. In the end, I was as sure of my perceptions of them as I am sure that my father loves me. Given a choice between that level of conviction and words on paper, I’m going with the evidence of my eyes and ears and heart any day.

Next time: the social and existential underpinnings of my faith, and how they crumbled.