Hi, and possibly a different experience?

[plastivore]

Hi everyone.  I was drawn to this forum out of a recently reawakened interest in theology, moral philosophy, and my own spiritual concept.  I get the sense from these forums that a lot of people have had pretty terrible experiences with what I'd classify as the more literal/fundy/conservative denominations of Christianity.  That isn't my background, and I don't think I qualify as an ex Christian, but I still wanted to share what I have been thinking about and some of my spiritual journey, maybe as a study in contrasts, or maybe as a study in how we're all searching for the same things.  I'm not really sure.  But I think this is an important subject.

 

I grew up in a UCC congregation.  There was no fire and brimstone, and the pastor was a really great guy who I'd classify as more of a moral philosopher than anything.  While I didn't particularly understand church as a kid, going through confirmation with him helped me to form my own conception of faith, which is centered around good works, non-literalism, etc.  Brief summary of my views, which were partially formed through my conversation with him:

 

1)  I do believe in God or the idea of a creator or creative force in the universe.

2)  I don't know, and cannot know, if that force knows or cares about me.  I think God is unprovable, and outside our ability to experience while we live.  Anything powerful enough to set the universe in motion from the absense of space and time is unknowable and unfathomable and to me that is pretty godly.  But he/it is a magnificient force.  I see it in my kids and I feel it when I experience awe in the natural world, or when I feel goosebumps from music or learn about atoms. 

3)  I think the old testament is mostly the recorded oral history of the Jews or other tribes from deep antiquity up till a few thousand years ago, and attempts to capture how they perceived their own relationship with God/the creative force/etc.  I think a lot of it is metaphorical, and owing to centuries of translation and politics, may or may not be accurate.  But the stories, like in other folk traditions, do speak to human nature. 

4)  I think Jesus was an important if flawed moral philosopher that had some really important and possibly revolutionary ideas about the worth of all people, which may have echoed the stoics.  For his time and place, he appears to have been pretty progressive.  Was he the literal son of God?  In the sense that he sought to spread a philosophy of equality, the same as any of us who try to make the world better - he says of the title "you called me that" or something to the effect.  In the immaculate conception sense?  Doubtful, and not that important.  Did he rise from the dead?  Not in body, but in the spirit of his ideas - to me that's the point of the resurrection, that you can't just kill the originator of an idea and expect it to go away.  It will live on.  How accurately are his ideas represented?  Who knows - again a lot of politics of the Roman empire, evangelizing by Paul, all decades after his death, so it's hard to know with certainty.  But if you get to the seeming essence of his ideas, the idea of what they mean in regards to "holiness" or goodness, is worthy of following. 

5)  The mission of the church is to cultivate a moral awareness, concern for our fellow people, foster a stewardship of the natural world, and point us toward a more perfect tomorrow, with the hope or faith that some aspect of our consciousness lives on after we die. 

6)  If God does care about us as individuals, he/she/it/(?) is probably a lot more concerned with what we *did* with our time on earth than whether we are "saved" or whatever happens in fundy churches.  He probably doesn't care whether or how he is worshiped, probably doesn't care if people believe or don't believe, but doing good can't hurt. 

 

Some time within a couple years of my confirmation, there was a big row about how he wasn't the right pastor for the church.  I don't really know why, it was politics of the older people in the church, but it put my family off that church and it would seem churchgoing in general.  I became pretty cynical to the idea of organized religion, realizing that the church was only as good as the people in it chose to make it. 

 

I continued to be mindful of my actions in the world, and how they impact others, but didn't go to church.  This all is against the backdrop of the 1990s/2000s, by the way.  So even though my own experience with faith was/is fine on a personal level, on an outside world level, I was/am completely horrified by the stuff I hear(d) from the evangelical side of the fence.  To the point that I struggle to call evangelicals Christians in any meaningful sense - I just see them as being so the opposite of how I understand it all.  And I think the evangelicals did a lot of lasting damage to Christianity in the public mind, by being belligerent, mean, and intolerant, and warping what is so clearly a message of love, peace, simplicity, into a terrible and never ending purity test that alienates. 

 

I took a course in world religions in college, because I wanted to understand more about how other cultures understand faith and God and so forth.  It was eye opening, and in a lot of ways cemented my belief that we all shared a common spirit. 

 

Also in college I occasionally participated in events at the college ecumenical center, which was supported by the Presbyterian Church USA, UCC, UU, Quakers, and a couple other groups.  It was a hub of activity for lots of social justice intitiatives, womens equality, doctors without borders, food not bombs, LGBTQ, animal welfare, healthy living, environmentalism, and cultural learning activities, as well as a student co op I unsuccessfully applied to live in.  The pastor -  a thoughtful, ethical guy - married my wife and I. 

 

I'll continue in another post.

[plastivore]

Had to do stuff in the kitchen...

 

So my wife and I were married, and we moved, and dove into our first jobs and being DINKs in the city.  That was challenging, fun, and it ate up our twenties. 

 

We had kids, and moved home.  And then 2016 happened.  I am a person for whom politics and values, and therefore the way in which one approaches their faith, are often inseparable ideas.  As I mentioned above, I was horrified by the evangelicals in the 1990s.  On the one hand because I found the evangelicals terrible for the reasons already stated, on the other hand because they were building a machine aimed at taking political power and destroying that which I value, on the moral authority of a highly warped idea of a religion of hatred.  They definitely soured me on the idea of calling myself a Christian - I felt as if they, through sheer numbers and brute force - took the ability to use that name from me.  Culturally, they had become the living definition of what it meant to be a Christian in 21st c America.  I can't name a single depiction of Christian faith in the popular culture built on liberal ideas, aka the religious left.  I felt as if, and still feel, that there is no effort made in public discourse to make a distinction between the views of evangelicals and people like me - all Christians get lumped into this one nasty, vile bucket of evangelical hate and intolerance and cultural terrorism.  I think it is no coincidence that in this same time frame, when these churches have grown, the more mainline and liberal churches have shrunk.  My guess is that lack of distinction in the public mind has had a similar effect on others that may consider themselves people of faith, but got soured by what they saw grabbing all the headlines and getting all the attention. 

 

And in this same time frame, I was reading about the civil rights movement, BLM, the leadup to the civil war - in short, our country's total inability to confront a racist past (or a collective disregard for those who aren't white - a key theme of the '16 elections).  I found myself unable to look away from the contrast between the religious underpinnings of these movements, how it was a source of moral authority, and the largely secular way we in the left try to address issues today.  And I got to wondering, is this why we struggle?  Have large parts of the left, by looking away from faith and in some cases taking a dickbag Dawkins-esque stance on all religion, abandoned any traditional claim on moral authority, and in so doing widened the chasm between left and right, and made the work of bringing those working against the common good over to our side even harder? 

 

As I said above, the measure of a church is the character of the people in it and the good works they perform.  There are a lot of good people on the left.  With a lot of good ideas.  Scattered/balkanized into a thousand progressive groups that don't have a physical presence in the local neighborhood level community.  But churches are a physical presence at that level and there is a core group of denominations that share our values, I am coming to realize.  Many of us still have faith, but aren't active members of a congregation.  Myself included.  And probably for the reasons stated above.  And I wonder if we have in the process lost to claim to a very powerful force that we could have harnessed to shape our society for the better. 

 

The journey is ongoing.  And I guess it comes down to, as an ex attender of church, did I lose an important avenue for extending the reach of my own moral values?  There are more, better questions buried between the lines in here. 

 

So this is how I have not necessarily lost faith, but perhaps been coming around to the realization that a faith that isn't actively used in a communitarian way doesn't get things done. 

 

As I said, probably a pretty different type of experience than most posters write about here.  But it seemed like a good place to post. 

[Orbit]

Welcome to ExC. If you aren't losing your faith, what brought you to Ex-christian.net? I'm just curious.

[plastivore]

Well, i think it came down to wondering if the collective aabandonment of the religious institutions -both by people who have lost their faith, and those who became estranged from a congregation-  has resulted in a situation in which the inmates are left running the asylum so to speak.  Sort of a situation of giving up rather than reorienting the direction of churches.  As i said and as the direction of our culture has shown, a big part of controlling the narrative may simply be showing up, and evangelicals show that the church is a force to be reckoned with.  And I just used a whole bunch of cliched idioms.

[plastivore]

The loss of faith aspect if you can call it that was a loss of faith in people.  I never felt as morally isolated as i did on Nov 9.  It was crushing.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

I remember watching the church change in the 80s to 90s, taking on a far more political role as though they had to create the kingdom through passing laws restricting anything they found offensive. The Charismatic churches became a lot more vocal and popular, because believers were looking for power to go with all the stories. They wanted real change, and many mainline churches all but killed god with their theologies of dispensations and such. My Baptist church wouldn't even pray for healing because that would require god to intervene in reality, and they felt that because we have the Bible, that he could no longer speak or intervene until the judgment. Never could understand that outside of people concluding it based on the non-action of god, but wanting to keep faith. At the same time, the behaviors of the charismatic and pentecostal churches started appearing in mainline churches (lifting hands, choruses displacing hymns, some tongues from members if not from the pulpit). People wanted a god that interacted with them and was therefore REAL.

 

Now I see a far more political church that is still intent on bringing god's blessing through passing laws to show that our country should not be judged by him. They ignore things like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, visiting the lonely, giving what they have to the poor, having compassion on the wounded and needy. All of that has been replaced by seeking wealth from god, building bigger buildings, promising anything and then claiming god has a better plan when it doesn't pan out (bait and switch), selling sermon series that promise solutions to the problem of being human (snake oil), building monuments to the 10 commandments while defunding local clinics and services for the poor, and the list goes on.

 

I grew sour on church long before I left Christianity. I followed a preacher for a while that seemed to be living a devoted missionary life in very tough areas of Mexico. He claimed that all kinds of miracles were happening, and told of his many failures first. That caught my attention, and made his stories sound far more real. But after promoting him for nearly a decade, I caught even him making up long involved stories about miracles that never happened. That was the crack that started me questioning. Why would he have to lie when everything he preached was biblical? Why was the power not really backing him? Where is the god I kept trying to hard to follow? I began asking a lot of questions I had shelved over the years (all believers shelve inconvenient questions because they threaten the friendship with the imaginary buddy they have with the other believers). After about a year of hard questions and no answers, I found this website and realized that my answers were clear - I had been tricked in the first place when I believed the Bible. It had never been true, but the collective imagination of the other believers made it seem more real and I spent 30 years following whole-heartedly. Then that all ended 10 years ago when I deconverted.

 

I still have dreams where someone will ask me, "Is there nothing of value in it?" and I answer, "Yes, feed the hungry, clothe the naked; he who has two coats should share with him who has none." Human compassion instead of greed. Kindness instead of all the other options. We have this choice all the time, and we can each add our kindness into the mix of humanity and make it better. I work in a jail sometimes and the guys in the cells are some of the rudest crudest stupidest meanest people around. I am impressed by their devotion to the ruin of themselves and others. I faced some of that today and reminded myself to be kind to others and not become one of them. I think that is how to live well.

 

 

[plastivore]

I never experienced anything weird, or any of the bait and switch.  Or the biblical literalism.  Maybe that's why my pastor was let go and I don't feel uncomfortable in my version of faith.  Who knows.  What I do know, is that in terms of values, despite our differences in faith, we (non attending believers, scientific atheists, agnostics, "nones", ethical humanists, mainline followers, Quakers), we generally *seem* to be pointing in a similar, liberalizing direction.  Wanting to use faith and or reason to continue the march of human progress, as opposed to bring about the rapture or punish sinners or whatever the evangelicals are up to.  Your last paragraph.  The most important aspect of a church (or similar organization) is that it has the capacity to bring people together at the neighborhood level, and join forces for the collective good while looking one another in the eye.  This is what I think gives evangelicals a good bit of their power.  All the online organizing in the world isn't a substitute for that.  So maybe my question is, how do we all get together at the neighborhood level and share our values, look each other in the eye, and use our combined power to affect change?  What does that look like?