Walk Away Losing faith By Dan Barker It was some time in 1979, turning thirty, when I star

Walk Away

Losing faith
By Dan Barker

It was some time in 1979, turning thirty, when I started to have some 
early questions about Christianity. I was working on a musical for 
Manna Music (working title, "Penny," about the one lost lamb who was 
missing from the other ninety-nine), which I never finished because 
my views were changing while I was trying to write it. I didn't have 
any problems with Christianity - I loved my Christian life, I believed 
in what I was doing, and it felt right. I just got to the point where 
my mind was restless to move beyond the simplicities of fundamentalism. 
I had been so involved with fundamentalist and evangelical matters 
that I had been ignoring a part of myself that was beginning to ask 
for attention. It was if there was this little knock on my skull, 
and something was saying, "Hello! Anybody home?" I was starving and 
didn't know it, like when you are working hard on a project and you 
forget to eat and you don't know you ar hungry until you are really 
hungry. 

I had been reading the Christian writers (Francis Schaeffer, Josh 
McDowell, C. S. Lewis, etc.), and really had not read much of anything 
else besides the Bible for years. So, not with any real purpose in 
mind, I began to satisfy this irksome intellectual hunger. I began 
to read some science magazines, some philosophy, psychology, daily 
newspapers (!), and began to catch up on the liberal arts education 
I should have had years before. This triggered a ravenous appetite 
to learn and produced a slow but steady migration across the theological 
spectrum that took about four or five years. I had no sudden, eye-opening 
experience. When you are raised like I was, you don't just snap your 
fingers and say, "Oh, silly me! There's no God."

The first timid steps away from fundamentalism were more traumatic 
than the huge leaps that came later. When you are raised to believe 
that every word in the Bible is God-inspired and inerrant, you can't 
lightly change your views on scripture. For example (I'm embarrassed 
to admit this now, but it was a big deal back then), I used to believe 
that Adam and Eve were literal, historical persons. The Bible said 
they existed, so they existed. I could have no true spiritual fellowship 
with anyone who thought otherwise because to doubt God's word was 
to doubt God himself. But I got to thinking that there are parts of 
the Bible that are obviously metaphorical. Jesus's story about the 
Prodigal Son, for example, is just a story. It doesn't matter if the 
Prodigal Son ever existed as a real person; Jesus told the story to 
make a certain point. The message contained within the story is what 
is important, not the literal truth of the story itself. But if Jesus 
could do this with the Prodigal Son, then why couldn't the early Hebrews 
have done this with Adams and Eve? The Garden of Eden could have been 
a Hebrew "parable" to explain God's involvement with the human race 
regarding origins, good and evil. I wrestled with this for months. 
My first tiny step away from fundamentalism was not to discard the 
historicity of Adam and Eve (because, unlike the Prodigal Son, the 
Bible does not specifically say that Adam and Eve is a parable), but 
to realize that it shouldn't matter to me whether other Christians 
held it historically. I could still fellowship with these "liberal" 
Christians. Sounds silly, but that was a big step in the direction 
of tolerance. 

Since I had become an independent evangelist, with no local church 
to answer to, I perhaps felt freer to experiment intellectually, and 
to investigate what other Christians believed. From there I continued 
a gradual swing across the theological continuum, becoming less and 
less fundamentalist, more of a moderate evangelical. I was accepting 
invitations to preach and sing in a variety of churches, including 
many liberal congregations.

After a couple of years I migrated further into a more moderate position 
where I still held the basic theological beliefs but discarded many 
lesser doctrines as either nonessential, or untrue. I remember the 
way I was thinking then: every Christian has a particular hierarchy 
of doctrines and practices, and most Christians arrange their hierarchy 
in roughly the same manner, with the existence of God at the top, 
the deity of Jesus just below that, and so on, down the bottom of 
the list where you find things like wearing jewelry or makeup in church. 
What distinguishes many brands of Christianity is where they draw 
their line between what is essential and what is not. Extreme fundamentalists 
draw the line way down at the bottom of the list, making all doctrines 
equally necessary. Moderates draw the line somewhere up on the middle 
of the list. Liberals draw the line way up at the top, not caring 
if the Bible is inerrant or if Jesus existed historically, but holding 
on to the existence of God, however he or she is defined, and holding 
on to the general usefulness of religion, and to rituals, which many 
people claim to need despite its irrelevance to reality, to give structure 
or meaning to life. 

As I traveled across the spectrum, I kept drawing my line higher and 
higher. I studied some liberal theologians, such as Tillich and Bultmann. 
These authors, though perhaps flawed in this or that area, appeared 
to be intelligent and caring human beings who were using their minds, 
doing their best to come to an understanding of truth. They were not 
evil servants of Satan attempting to distract believers from the literal 
truth of the Bible. I came to respect these thinkers and even to admire 
some of their views, without necessarily embracing the whole package. 
After a couple more years of evolving theology, I became one of these 
ominous liberals myself and remembered back to some of the fundamentalist 
sermons I had preached against such heresies. There is a place in 
the Bible where God says, "I know thy works, that thou art neither 
cold nor hot: I would though wert cold or hot. So then because thou 
art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my 
mouth." (Revelation 3:15-16) To the fundamentalist, liberal Christians 
are worse than atheists. I remember having despised liberals who have 
"a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof," and who offer 
more of a temptation away from devout faith than any atheist could 
pose. At least with atheists, you know where they stand. Attempting 
to learn what a liberal Christian believes is like trying to nail 
jello to a tree. To my amusement, I had become one of those despised 
liberals.

At that time in my migration I believed in a God, but had no idea 
how to define God. I was not uncomfortable with Tillich's idea that 
God is the "ground of all being," or some other vague notion. All 
the while, however, I was till getting invitations to preach and sing 
in various churches, many of which were fundamentalist and conservative 
evangelical. Long before that time I had stopped my direct "soul winning" 
sermons, and managed to tailor my message to be palatable to just 
about any church. This was easy since most of the churches that invited 
me at that time were interested in my published music, so I could 
simply perform a number of songs with brief inspirational introductions, 
keeping the "preaching" to a minimum. I was able to adjust each presentation 
to the expectations of the audience, becoming more or less evangelistic 
according to the flavor of each individual church. Even then, I felt 
hypocritical, often hearing myself mouth words about which I was no 
longer sure, but words that the audience wanted to hear.

In my "secret life" of private reading I was impressed with enlightened 
writers in science magazines. In particular, an article by Ben Bova 
about "Creationist's equal time" in _Omni_ magazine turned the lens 
around so that I was gazing back at the fundamentalist mindset. The 
article laid bare the dishonesty of the "equal time for creationism 
in the science class" argument by asking how many Christians would 
welcome a chapter about evolution inserted between Genesis and Exodus. 
I became more and more embarrassed at what I used to believe, and 
more attracted to rational thinkers. 

Finally, at the far end of my theological migration, I threw out all 
the bath water and discovered there is no baby there. There is no 
basis for believing that a God exists, except faith, and faith was 
not satisfactory to me. It was like peeling back the layers of an 
onion, eliminating the nonessential doctrines to see what was at the 
core, and I had just kept peeling and peeling until there was nothing 
there. The line that I was drawing under essential doctrines kept 
rising until it popped right off the top of the list! To my list of 
religious metaphors, which included the Prodigal Son and Adam and 
Eve, I now added God. That made perfect sense.

It was during the summer of 1983 when I told myself that I was an 
atheist. Nobody else knew this for about six months. Some of my friends, 
and my wife, were suspecting something, but since I still had a pretty 
successful ministry, the outward appearance was as if nothing had 
happened.

Between the summer and Christmas of 1983 I went through an awful period 
of hypocrisy. I was still preaching, and I hated myself. I was living 
with the momentum of a lifetime of Christian service, still receiving 
invitations to minister, still feeding my family with honoraria from 
preaching and singing engagements in churches and Christian schools. 
I knew I should have just cut it off cleanly, but I didn't have the 
courage. In preparation for some vague need for what might lie ahead, 
I took some classes in computer programming, telling my wife that 
I enjoyed computers and that perhaps I could supplement our income 
with this skill. Right away I got a job as a part-time programmer 
for a company that makes monitoring systems for the petroleum industry. 
A year later, I worked as a programmer/analyst designing and coding 
dispatching systems for the railroads, and I got to do a lot of fun, 
on-site installation and testing for N&W and Burlington Northern in 
the midwest. This provided me with the perfect transitional job - 
a way to ease out of evangelism. I was still preaching on the weekends 
and doing some occasional record production at nights, but in my mind 
I was giving up the ministry. 

In November I accepted an invitation to preach in Mexicali, a Mexican 
city on the California border. I like that town. Even though I no 
longer believed what I was preaching, I still enjoyed the travel and 
the many friends I had south of the border. The night after a service 
in an adobe mission in the Mexicali Valley south of town, I went to 
bed on a cot in the Sunday School room that doubled as a guest room 
for visiting preachers. I didn't sleep much that night. I remember 
staring up at the ceiling as if I were gazing right up into outer 
space, contemplating my place in the universe. It was at that moment 
that I experienced the startling reality that I was alone. Completely 
and utterly alone. There is no supernatural realm, no God, no devil, 
no demons, no angels helping me from the other side. There is just 
nature, and I am a part of nature, and that is all there is. It was 
simultaneously a frightening and liberating experience. Maybe first-time 
skydivers or space-walkers have a similar sensation. I just knew that 
everything had come to rest, that the struggle was over, that I had 
truly shed the cocoon, or snakeskin, and I was for the first time 
in my life that "new creature" of which the bible so ignorantly speaks. 
I had at last graduated from the childish need to look outside myself 
to decide who I was as a person. This was no mystical experience, 
but it was refreshing. I suppose it would be a similar exhilaration 
to learn that the charges against me had been dropped for a crime 
of which I had been falsely accused. I was free to put the matter 
aside and get on with life. 

To be fair to myself and to everyone else, I knew that I had to cut 
it off quickly and cleanly. In January I sent a letter to everyone 
I could think of - ministers, friends, relatives, publishing companies, 
Christian recording artists, fellow missionaries - and told them that 
I was no longer a Christian, that I was an atheist or agnostic (I 
didn't have the distinction clear in my mind then), that I would no 
longer accept invitations to preach or perform Christian music, and 
that I hope we could keep a dialogue open. The responses to that letter 
were all across the board: everything from friendly curiosity to outright 
hatred. But I wasn't at all worried about the reactions; I had done 
what I had to do. Some responses in fact welcomed my invitation to 
dialogue, and that is where I began sharpening my skills as a freethought 
debater, as a new kind of "minister," I guess, spreading the truly 
good news that there is no sin, no hell, no cosmic guilt. (Once a 
preacher, always a preacher?)

My Christian marriage came apart in 1985, due mostly to the tension 
between viewpoints. I lost a lot of friends, but in retrospect I consider 
that if the friendships could not tolerate a difference of philosophy, 
they were not true friends in the first place. Some friendships are 
based on mutual respect and admiration regardless of views, and others 
are contingent on things that are external to the relationship, such 
as belonging to the same church or club. Leaving the club is a sure 
way to test the friendship. Then I discovered a whole new batch of 
friends. Though harder to find, the world is filled with freethinkers 
who are smart and caring individuals. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, 
where the Freedom From Religion Foundation is located, and in 1987 
I married Annie Laurie Gaylor, editor of _Freethought_Today_.

My parents were fundamentalist Christians, and they now admit that 
they made some mistakes in raising their three boys. My mother says 
that their motivation was to do "the right thing." In spite of the 
religious overkill, I had a very good childhood. Sure, we were indoctrinated 
with an illegitimate and intolerant world view; but my parents were 
good people in spite of their faith. They raised me with good principles. 
One thing they taught me by example is that you should never be ashamed 
to speak what you think is the truth. My earlier ministry in the pulpit 
and my current activism for freethought are really one and the same 
thing. The message has changed, but I haven't. I still consider that 
I have a "calling." Not a calling from out there somewhere, but a 
calling from within myself to pursue truth, and not to be afraid or 
ashamed of what I find.

_Reprinted_with_permission_from__Losing_Faith_in_Faith:_From_Preacher_
to_Atheist_ by Dan Barker._


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