testimony of a former UCC

By Zaphod

I've been posting sporadically here on Ex-C for months, so I thought
I'd finally make a formal introduction. Like so many before me, I have
written a very long story of my loss of faith. I grew up in the Church
of Christ denomination (aka the "churches of Christ.") What mainly
sets this denomination apart from others is a lack of instrumental
music in the worship services and the belief that willful baptism by
immersion is an essential step in salvation. That last bit was
particularly awkward as a kid since it implied that even the
overwhelming majority of even my church-going friends were not saved.
When my mother referred to someone as a "Christian" or as a "member of
the church," I knew she meant someone who attended a Church of Christ.
The other denominations didn't count as "Christians." I think they're
loosening up a bit on that last point, but it was how we were raised.
I didn't question Christianity a whole lot as a kid. I was baptized at
age 11 because I didn't want to go to hell. Any doubts I may have had
were usually confined to questioning the peculiarities of our
particular branch of Christianity. I do remember one Wednesday night
service when I'd been asked to give that night's lesson, as the
baptized youth were occasionally invited to do, I stood in front of
those people and told them of a recent struggle I'd had with my faith,
but I'd decided that God must exist because Jesus had said, "In my
father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told
you," and I trusted Jesus. (It made sense at the time.) I also
specifically remember telling these people that I'd also decided to
accept the Gospel for my own sanity -- I just couldn't handle the idea
of a world without God. One little old lady came up and told me how
much she'd enjoyed my lesson, but I remember feeling surprised because
I really didn't think I'd done a very good job of justifying my faith.
That was about the extent of my questioning of my faith in general. I
always hated talking about baptism and musical instruments with my
friends. These issues made my church "weird" compared to the others.
(For those interested, baptism was required because of the way we read
Acts 2:38, and musical instruments were not used because there was no
biblical record of their use in worship in the first-century church.)
I took my faith seriously in my youth. I moved away for college and
joined up with the student group at the biggest Church of Christ in
town. My entire social life revolved around church. Didn't hang out
with classmates, and even had little interaction with guys in my dorm.
The summers of my freshman and sophomore years I went on mission trips
to Ukraine to bring Jesus to the former communists, and to finally put
my foreign language skills to use. I ended up flunking out of college
my junior year just because I've taken longer than most people to grow
up, but I got a local job and stayed in that college town.
Shortly after flunking out, I talked a young teen into being baptized.
I took that event as a sign from God and decided I would become a
missionary. Our church there ran a missionary training program that
consisted of one semester of full-time bible study followed by an
18-month apprenticeship overseas. It was during this bible study that
I really came to realize that the bible was not literally true. I
remember the specific incident. We were doing a comparative study of
the gospels, and I saw something that I had never noticed before. It
was one of those things that make you ask, "How is it possible that
I've never noticed this?" It was the story of Jesus going ape-shit in
the temple and wrecking the money-changers' tables. There's a HUGE
discrepancy between the way John tells the story and… whichever other
gospel tells it, but it's not one you'd really notice when the story's
read to you out of context. John's gospel puts this incident at the
beginning of Jesus' ministry, but the other gospel portrays this as an
incident at the end of his ministry, the week of his crucifixion. This
was huge for me. At this point in my life I was OK with the fact that
Genesis might just be a non-literal, poetic allegory about creation,
but this Jesus rampage story was something else entirely to me. John's
gospel was a book of history. This wasn't about two witnesses with
different viewing angles getting different parts of the same event.
This was a change in the timeline, a rewrite. This had happened in the
editing room. I was beginning to realize that the gospels probably
tell us as much fact about Jesus as the movie "Tombstone" does about
Wyatt Earp.
So I finished my bible study and told everyone I was going to go
overseas. Long story short, I kept dragging my feet until the day a
roommate of mine told about his summer mission trip to Kenya, and how
one man had lost his children because his family objected to his
conversion from Islam to Christianity. I decided I wasn't certain
enough in my faith to rip a family apart, and I dropped the idea of
becoming a missionary.
I was probably about 22 when I decided missionary life was not for me.
At 24, after six years in this town attending the same church, I came
out of the closet as a homosexual. That journey is a whole book unto
itself. Friendships did wither about that time, but maybe my sexuality
wasn't as big a deal as it seemed since I was in my sixth year living
in a college town and my friends had mostly graduated and moved away
by then. After coming out, I stopped going to church altogether for a
few months. I remember that I read The Case for Christ in those days
and was disappointed by it. It was at a time when I was trying
desperately to cling to my faith, but Strobel sounded to me like a
lawyer questioning his own client on the stand. I was not impressed at
the questions he was lobbing at his interviewees. I still wasn't quite
ready to give up on God, though. After a few churchless months I
landed at the town's gay-friendly church, a United Church of Christ
(similar name, but completely different denomination).
It was during this time of attending church that two things happened
that were the final nails in the coffin of my Christianity. First,
internet prayer requests started to become a big thing, at least in my
inbox. You've likely seen 'em. "Little Betty Sue in Tuscaloosa is
seven and has brain cancer. Imagine what would happen if 3.7 zillion
Christians prayed for her healing!" I realized that I wasn't
comfortable with the fact that Betty Sue, an American who is a day's
drive from St. Jude's, would be getting even more preferential
treatment because she was born into a society that worshipped the
"right" god and had electronic access to other worshippers of the
right god, none of which was available to a seven-year-old girl with
brain cancer in an Amazonian jungle.
Second, I found the book Why Christianity Must Change Or Die by John
Spong. (Well, I say now that this was the final nail in the coffin,
but it's been weeks since I wrote the previous paragraph and now I'm
not entirely certain that this is what I was originally talking about.
It'll do, though.) Spong is a retired Episcopal bishop who in this
book makes the case for a non-theistic version of Christianity. I
don't think he ever used the term "atheistic" to describe his outlook.
He says that Christians have to acknowledge the reality that we live
in a world where Darwin and Einstein have been shown to be right, that
there is no afterlife, that God may not actually be an intelligent
agent, and, most heretical of all, that Jesus was not born of a virgin
and today is still dead. Finally I had found a form of Christianity
that was consistent with the world around me. It allowed me to attend
church with a clean conscience for another few months, but eventually
my work schedule changed in a way that interfered and I quit going
again. I've been calling myself a deist or an agnostic for eight or
ten years now. Though it can be depressing and disorienting at first,
the most beautiful thing I have ever discovered is that life is empty
and meaningless. It's beautiful and liberating because it means that I
can go out there and find out what life means to me, and not worry
about fitting my life into a plan laid out by a bronze-age author who
didn't even know the earth orbits the sun.
Today I find myself in the awkward position of living with my parents
as I return to school to finish the degree I didn't finish nearly
twenty years ago. I've been here for just over two years. I have told
my folks I am a deist and I went to church with them with some
regularity for close to a year after I moved in. A couple of different
sermons over the past six months have pissed me off so much that I
have quit going. However things are especially awkward because my dad
is an elder in the church, a formal position of leadership. I'm not
sure how much their church friends have figured out about me, but some
in the church might argue based on scripture that my dad should be
disqualified from that post for having a son who is an apostate and an
unrepetant homosexual. I'd feel bad for potentially taking away this
post because it's the highest honor our sect can bestow on a layman.
I'm trying to walk a balance and live my life without screwing up
everyone else's as a result. Right now, though, I don't go to church
with them and they don't hassle me about it, even though I know it
disappoints them. We all still love each other, but I'm really looking
forward to transferring to an out-of-town four-year university.