Growing up, I never bought what my church was selling. I’m not sure exactly why, although I have some theories. I was stunned at a comparatively young age to discover that my parents were flat-out lying to me about the existence of Santa Claus. The tooth fairy and Easter bunny and other tales parents playfully tell their children also offended me when I realized that they were deceptions. It was a small step from those experiences to an overall skepticism that what adults told me was likely to be true.
I remember a period of time, although I can’t precisely pinpoint my age, when I used to have a conversation with myself in church. I’d listen to what was being said and I’d think it was the most implausible malarkey. And then I’d look at the congregation and it appeared for all the world that they sincerely believed what they were hearing. I’d ask myself, “how can so many grown-ups be wrong about this?” For a while, this left me with an open mind. I knew that adults would lie to children, but would they actually lie to themselves? I knew the Santa Claus story wasn’t malicious. I knew that leaving a quarter under my pillow and telling me the tooth fairy left it there was supposed to be good fun. But this religious stuff wasn’t supposed to be any kind of joke. It wasn’t supposed to be fun.
What I actually had to resolve was how so many adults could agree about something and still be wrong. The outcome was probably inevitable, but I was kicked out of confirmation for expressing mocking doubt about things like Jonah and the whale. I don’t know all the details, but I know my father spent the next twenty years helping to reform the confirmation process in the church.
The thing is, now that I am much older, i’ve begun to ponder how that church molded my progressive values despite my deep skepticism and eventual hostility to their teachings. And it really comes down to one thing. I never had the slightest interest in the individual message of Christianity, which pertained to my personal relationship to God and the potential for personal salvation and everlasting life. I just wasn’t born with any fear of annihilation or much propensity for feelings of guilt. Everything I absorbed from the religion and from the story of Jesus Christ had to do with communal values and social justice. What made Jesus exceptional wasn’t that he was willing to die for my sins but that he was willing to hang out with tax assessors and prostitutes and criticize people for acting righteous when they did nothing for the needy.
In retrospect, I think a lot of it is just personality type. Left to my own devices, I never would have attended church in the first place because I really didn’t need it. But, since I was there, I focused on the stuff that spoke to me and scoffed at all the rest. The miracle stories about loaves and fishes and bringing the dead back to life left me thinking that the whole story was completely made up. But when Jesus said that you should bend the rules of the Sabbath to help people in need, that made sense.
Someone said about me recently that I was one of the few people who never had to unlearn religion because I never bought into it in the first place. I don’t really think that is true. I bought into religion. I just think religion should call you to be a good person, not call on you to worry about the fate of your soul.
