The Sounds of Fundamentalism is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section. Let’s have some fun!
Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a video clip of Rep. Glenn Grothman claiming President Biden and his fellow atheists are trying to take over the United States.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
If you consider yourself an atheist today, or if you considered yourself an atheist in the past, I’d love to ask you some honest questions.
But I do not ask these questions to win a debate. Or to be antagonistic. Or to buttress my own beliefs by exposing alleged weaknesses in your position. To the contrary, I ask these questions so I can better understand your mindset as an atheist.
What follows are my answers to Brown’s seven questions. I will send my responses to Brown after this post goes live.
Before I answer Brown’s questions, I want to share with him my background.
I was part of the Evangelical church for almost fifty years. My parents started attending Tim LaHaye’s church, Scott Memorial Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, in the 1960s. Both made public professions of faith and were devout Christians until they divorced in 1972. Our family attended church every time the doors were open. At the age of fifteen, I went forward during a revival meeting and one of the church’s deacons led me to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Two weeks later, I stood before the church and confessed that I believed God was calling me to preach. Several weeks later, I preached my first sermon.
At the age of nineteen, I enrolled in classes at Midwestern Baptist College, a small Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) college in Pontiac, Michigan. While at Midwestern, I met a beautiful dark-haired girl named Polly. She was the daughter of an IFB pastor and the granddaughter of a United Baptist preacher. Two your later we married, and on July 15, we will celebrate forty-four years of marriage. We are blessed to have six grown children, thirteen grandchildren, and an old cat named Joe Meower.
After leaving Midwestern in 1979, I started working for a GARBC (General Association of Regular Baptist Churches) church. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, I also pastored two IFB churches, a Sovereign Grace Baptist church, a Christian Union church, a non-denominational church, and a Southern Baptist church, all in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan.
In 2005, I left the ministry, and in 2008 I left Christianity altogether. In early 2009, I publicly professed that I was an atheist. My wife would also later confess that she no longer believed in the Christian God.
Now that I have given a brief summary of my past, let me take a stab at Brown’s questions.
Question One: Would you say that you are (or, were) an atheist based primarily on intellectual study or based on experience? Or did you never believe in God at all?
While my personal experiences as an Evangelical Christian and a pastor certainly played a part in my deconversion, I primarily deconverted for intellectual reasons. My journey away from Christianity began when I concluded that the Bible was not inerrant or infallible. From there, I took a careful look at my beliefs, particularly the central claims of Christianity. I concluded that these beliefs could not be intellectually and rationally sustained. Once I came to this conclusion, I recognized I could no longer call myself a Christian.
Question Two: Would you say that even as an atheist you still have a sense of purpose and destiny in your life, a feeling that you were put here for a reason and that you have a mission to accomplish?
We give ourselves meaning and purpose. There’s no external force — God, the Universe, the Holy Spirit — that gives us meaning and purpose. While I recognized external human forces affect my life and the decisions I make, I am the captain of my ship. I see no evidence of an otherworldly being or force affecting my life.
Do I have a reason for living? Sure. This is the only life I will ever have, so I am in no hurry (most days) to die. I want a better tomorrow for my children and grandchildren, so I work to that end to affect social and political change.
Do I have a mission? Sure. I think Evangelicalism, especially in its Fundamentalist forms, is harmful, causing untold heartache and damage. As a writer, my goal is to tell my story and expose the abusive, harmful underbelly of Evangelical Christianity.
Third Question: Would you say that you are 100% sure there is no such being as God—meaning, an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing being? Or would you say that, for all practical purposes, you have concluded that this God does not exist, although it is impossible to prove such a negative with absolute certainty?
I am an agnostic atheist. I am agnostic on the God question. I cannot know for certain if a god of some sort exists. The evidence suggests such a being does not exist, but it is within the realm of possibilities that a deity may one day reveal itself to us.
When it comes to specific religions, say the Abrahamic faiths, I am confident these religions are myths.
Because I see no evidence for the existence of a deity, I live my day-to-day life as an atheist.
Fourth Question: Do you believe that science can provide answers for many of the remaining mysteries of the universe, including how the universe began (including where matter came from and where the Big Bang derived its energy), the origin of life, and DNA coding?
I don’t know. Science continues to give us answers to previously unanswerable questions. Whether science ever explains to us what happened before the Big Bang is unknown. Science does adequately explain our world from the Big Bang forward, and that’s enough for me. Unlike many Christians and atheists, I have little interest in philosophical debates about the existence of God and the beginning of the universe. I’m dying — literally — so I choose to live in the present. I am far more interested in balancing our checkbook than I am the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
Fifth Question: Have you had any experiences in life that caused you to question your atheism? Has something happened to you that seemed genuinely supernatural or otherworldly? Or have you been confronted with some information that shook your atheistic foundations, such as a scientific argument for intelligent design? If so, how have you dealt with such doubts to your atheism?
No. One step in my deconversion was giving an honest accounting of the “miracles” and “answered prayers” in my life. My wife did the same. We concluded that we could rationally explain all but a handful of experiences. This was not enough evidence for us to conclude that the Christian God of the Bible did it. Unexplainable? Sure, but I reject the God of the gaps argument Evangelicals often use to explain the unexplainable. I am content with saying, “I don’t know.”
Sixth Question: Are you completely materialistic in your mindset, meaning human beings are entirely physical, human consciousness is an illusion, and there is no spiritual realm of any kind? Or are you superstitious, reading horoscopes or engaging in new age practices or the like?
Yes, I am a materialist.
I see no evidence of a spiritual realm or souls. I believe that new age practices, horoscopes, Tarot card readings, and homeopathy, to name a few, are in the same category as prayers and miracles: unsupported by evidence.
Seventh Question: If you were convinced that God truly existed—meaning the God of the Bible, who is perfect in every way, full of justice and mercy, our Creator and our Redeemer—would that be good news or bad news? And would you be willing to follow Him and honor Him if He were truly God?
I am already convinced that the God of the Bible does not exist, and I can’t imagine any evidence will be forthcoming to change my mind. Thousands of Evangelical zealots and apologists have tried to evangelize me, without success. It has been years since I heard a new argument for the truthfulness of Christianity. As Solomon said, there’s nothing new under the sun. Every few days, I will get an email, message, or social media comment from an Evangelical who is certain they have the remedy for my atheism Alas, they fail every time.
Even if I could be convinced that the God of the Bible is real, I still wouldn’t worship him. Richard Dawkins was right when he said:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Such a deity is unworthy of my worship. The only god I worship is my wife. 🙂
If you would like to answer these questions, please send your responses to info@askdrbrown.org.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
John Piper recently delivered the commencement address at Bethany College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Titled Seventy Years Without Shipwreck, Piper humble-brags about the fact that he has been a Fundamentalist Christian for seventy years; that God has never forsaken him; that he never deconverted.
Piper begins his address by letting students know that he doesn’t like the word “deconversion.” Piper thinks the word is trendy; a word devised by Satan to mask what is really going on; a word that has no basis in reality (since, according to Piper’s Calvinistic theology, it is impossible to “deconvert”).
The word deconversion is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. At least, not yet. Words are created to name reality, not the other way around. But we didn’t need the word deconversion. The Bible abounds with words and descriptions of some forsaking Christ:
apostasy (2 Thessalonians 2:3)
falling away (Matthew 24:10)
shipwreck of faith (1 Timothy 1:19)
turning back from following the Lord (Zephaniah 1:6)
trampling underfoot the Son of God (Hebrews 10:29)
going out from us (1 John 2:19)
cutting off of a branch (John 15:2)
becoming disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:27)
turning away from listening to the truth (2 Timothy 4:4)
denying the Master who bought them (2 Peter 2:1)
We didn’t need a new word. My guess is that the new word deconversion came into existence so that the old, foolish, tragic, heart-breaking reality could feel as trendy as the word. How shrewd is our enemy.
The overarching premise of Piper’s address is that people deconvert not for unresolved questions about “history, science, logic, or ethics,” but because they have a deep-seated love for “darkness” and sin. Yes, the reason you and I walked away from Christianity is that we wanted to sin; that our faith precluded us from fulfilling our lusts and desires, so we divorced Jesus so we could fuck, steal, lie, cheat, and murder to our heart’s content.
While this argument may work with those uninitiated in Evangelical Christianity, those who spent their lives working in God’s vineyard (and coal mine) know better. There’s plenty of fucking, stealing, lying, cheating, and murdering going on among God’s elect. Murder, you say? Yes, murder. One church member I pastored murdered his infant daughter by shaking her to death. Another church member slaughtered his ex-girlfriend with a knife in a fit of rage. He is presently serving a life sentence. While neither of these men were “committed” followers of Jesus, they both professed saving faith in Jesus Christ. Besides, I personally know a number of on-fire Christians, pastors, evangelists, missionaries, and college professors who committed adultery and fornication — both heterosexual and homosexual. Piper has been in the ministry too long not to know these things. There’s no difference between how Christians live and how the unwashed, uncircumcised Philistines and Jezebels of the world live.
Piper goes on to list five ways the deconverted sin. First, they have a love for “life’s cares, riches, and pleasures. Second, they have a “love for the present age.” Third, the deconverted “reject a good conscience.” Forth, they become “re-entangled in worldly defilements,” and finally the deconverted have been led astray by the “deceitfulness of sin.”
Piper sums up his five points this way:
I don’t think you will find any exceptions to this in the Bible. The root cause of apostasy, or falling away, or making shipwreck of faith, or deconversion, is not the failure to detect truth, but the failure to desire holiness. Not the absence of light, but the love for the dark. Not the problems of science, but the preference for sin.
In other words, Piper only sees one reason for our apostasy: sin. No matter what we say, no matter how many times we tell our stories and explain ourselves, the Pipers of the world refuse to accept we what say at face value. I can only conclude, then, that Piper and his ilk deliberately lie about unbelievers and their motivations, using their apostasy to justify their theological beliefs.
Piper concludes his address by saying that Christians who deconvert were never True Christians®. Of course, he does . . .
Piper states:
We all know — you have been well taught — that God never loses any of his elect. Not one of his predestined children is ever lost. “For those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:30). None of them deconverts finally. The ship of saving faith always makes it to the haven. “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us” (1 John 2:19).
With a quote from the Bible and a wave of his arrogant, self-righteous hand, Piper dismisses millions of people who were once devoted followers of Jesus; people who loved the Lamb and followed him wherever he went; people who committed their lives to sacrificially serving the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords; people who were Christian in every possible way. I was part of the Evangelical church for fifty years, and a pastor for twenty-five years. Much like Piper, I was a Christian for a long, long time. Imagine if I dismissed Piper’s faith out of hand. After all, he has not lived a sinless life; marital problems, disaffected children, and all sorts of less-than-Christian behavior. Piper would rightly be offended if I dismissed the totality of his life, focusing, instead, on his “sins.” Maybe the good pastor secretly has hedonistic desires, and not the Christian kind that he loves to preach about.
How about we accept each other’s stories at face value? That’s what decent, thoughtful people do. When a Christian tells me their conversion story, I believe them. I expect the same treatment in return. I once was a Christian, and now I am not. But, Bruce, the Bible says ____________. That’s your problem, not mine. My past life was one of devotion to Jesus and the work of the ministry — in thought, word, and deed. It’s your thinking that needs to change, not mine. And as long as Piper and his merry band of keepers of the Book of Life continue to ignore the stories of those who have walked away from the faith, they will never truly understand why an increasing number of believers are exiting the church stage left.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
“It happened gradually, and then it happened suddenly, as Hemingway would put it,” Pete Hegseth explained.
Hegseth is a best selling author, and co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend. His co-author, David Goodwin is president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. They write that educational reformer John Dewey advocated progressive teaching in the 1920’s. And in 1935, after they fled Nazis Germany, Marxists from the Frankfurt School of Social Research introduced their views to students at New York’s Columbia University.
“These were all atheists. These were all socialists, or almost all of them were and their goal was social change, and they knew the schoolroom was the place they could do it. And it started with the removal of God,” Hegseth said.
David Goodwin believes the biggest change sidelining Christian education occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, removed God from the classroom.
“They gradually took prayer out of school, they then took the Bible out of school, and they then forbid really any teaching of Christian instruction in school, ” explained Goodwin. “But that was the kind of the capstone of a long effort. It wasn’t the beginning, it was really the end.”
Also, Goodwin and Hegseth contend that progressives intentionally replaced classical Christian education with American nationalism.
“We look at our Pledge of Allegiance – at least we do as conservatives and patriots and say, ‘Hey, that’s a great thing under God.’ Well, the original pledge was written in the late 19th century by a socialist who ultimately wrote it without under God, because the pledge was meant to shift kids away comfortably from God at the center of the class, from the cross, at the center to the flag at the center of the classroom, which was an easier sell to parents at the time,” Hegseth explained. “And now, of course, fast forward to today, and they’re happy to get rid of the flag.”
So, do Hegseth and Goodwin believe that America’s elites possess a well-devised spiritual strategy that transcends politics?
“You see, we fight in terms of politics now and may win incremental battles here or there. What the left understood is they had to go to the heart of what made us who we are. What do we value? What’s our vision of the good life? What do we consider our virtues?” Hegseth explained. “And when they targeted that, they targeted at the foundation of who we really are, really the current underneath the top waters of the stream of cultures, the top waters, the current is paideia underneath, and they targeted that.”
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Today, I received an email from an Evangelical Christian named Karrie. Karrie is a student/professor/employee at The University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Karrie read all of two posts before emailing me:
Karrie spent a total of five minutes reading my writing before emailing me. While she accessed the WHY? page, there’s no record that she clicked on any post. (Please see Curiosity, A Missing Evangelical Trait.) As her email below will show, Karrie seems to know that I have health problems. Since neither of the posts she read mentions these things, it’s possible she has read other work by me.
Here’s what Karrie had to say:
Hello Bruce, do you believe that God is able and willing to heal you of the sickness you are suffering?
Most people who read this blog know I have serious health problems. I have (in the order of diagnosis) fibromyalgia (1996), osteoarthritis (2000), gastroparesis (2020), and degenerative spinal disease (2021). I also take medications for high blood pressure, diabetes, an irregular heartbeat, low potassium, and low B-12. I am anemic, and since being diagnosed with gastroparesis, I am having problems with my eyes. I was nearsighted for almost fifty years. I am now farsighted, with every eye exam I have (six in the past eighteen months) different from the others. Quite frankly, the only time I wear glasses is when we go out on the town, and this is mainly because I am vain. I stopped driving two and a half years ago due to declining motor function. I walk with a cane, and when covering longer distances, I must use a wheelchair. Throw in peripheral neuropathy in my feet, legs, and hands, and I spend every moment of every day fatigued and in pain. I take numerous medications to combat these symptoms, but unless I want to sleep all the time and be a lobotomized robot, all that narcotics, NSAIDs, and high-powered muscle relaxers do is keep me from wanting to kill myself. And some days, these drugs don’t work very well; those days I wish I could die. Currently, both of my hips are inflamed. I have gotten steroid injections, to no avail. No explanation for the inflammation. I just woke up one morning and my hips hurt. Gastroparesis, an incurable stomach disease, causes unrelenting nausea, bouts of vomiting, and horrific — and I mean horrific — bowel problems. (Yes, I eat right and take fiber supplements, so don’t, please don’t, for the love of Loki, do NOT email me your unsolicited medical advice. I have a team of doctors who care for me. Unless you are Dr. House, please keep your opinions to yourself. I am being nice. Email me anyway and I will set your house on fire.) Next week, I see a dermatologist. I have had three bouts of skin cancer, so I must see a dermatologist every six months. I have several growths that will likely need to be removed. I also have a purplish spot on my right breast that concerns me. I’ve had pneumonia twice, battled bronchitis for years, and almost died from mononucleosis in 1991.
I have given you my medical history so you will understand that I have had health problems since I was a teenager. My wife, Polly, and I married in July 1978. While she remembers a strong-as-an-ox, athletic Bruce, she doesn’t remember a time when I wasn’t battling some sort of health problem. When we were younger, I still had the proverbial tiger by the tail. Those days are long gone. The tiger now has me by the neck and is swinging me back and forth. There will come a day when he will finally succeed in ending my life. Not today, but maybe tomorrow, next week, or next year. I have no illusions about living a long life. My goal on any given day is to get up, move, do a few things around the house, write, and collapse on the couch watching TV before I haltingly and slowly make my way to the bedroom, hoping to get a few hours of sleep. (Typically, I sleep in 90-minute to two-hour segments. Sleep, wake up, sleep, wake up, hoping to get six or so hours sleep.) The goal is quality of life, not length of life. Imagine every time you eat the first feeling you get is not pleasure, but wanting to vomit. This is my life. Fortunately, I take a medication (typically used for chemotherapy patients) that curbs the urge to upchuck — usually in minutes. On those days it doesn’t work? I worship the porcelain God, violently offering it the contents of my stomach. Ain’t life grand. 🙂
Karrie fails to understand that virtually ALL of my health problems can be traced back to the days when I was a devout Evangelical Christian and a pastor. I prayed countless prayers to God, asking for strength and deliverance. These prayers were met by indifference and silence. In 2008, I left Christianity and embraced atheism. While the reasons for my deconversion are many, one reason I divorced Jesus is his indifference towards my suffering and that of billions of humans (and animals). God’s silence and apathy led me to conclude that he/she/it doesn’t exist; that he/she/it is a mythical being who is unable to do anything for me or any other human being.
So, to answer Karrie’s question: do I believe the Evangelical God is able and willing to heal me of the sickness I am suffering? The answer is an emphatic NO!
Evangelicals have had fifteen years to show me compelling evidence for the existence of their deity. None has done so. Outside of quoting Bible prooftexts, pointing to creation, or using lame philosophical arguments, no satisfactory evidence for the existence of God has been provided. Karrie makes no attempt to provide evidence for the existence of her peculiar God. She assumes I know that her deity is the one true God. I don’t. And even if she could provide such evidence, it still doesn’t follow that her God can and will heal me of gastroparesis, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, and degenerative spinal disease. I have watched scores of Christians and unbelievers alike horribly suffer and die. I have stood by the bedsides of devoted lovers of Jesus as they draw their last breaths. I have watched them writhe in horrific pain, with God nowhere to be found. You see, from my seat in the atheist pew, the problem of suffering, along with the problem of evil and the hiddenness of God, are insurmountable problems for Christians. I have heard every possible argument regurgitated by Christian apologists, and all of them come up short. You just don’t want to believe, Evangelicals say, but this is patently untrue, as I shall show in a moment.
Here’s a promise I will make to Karrie: if her God instantaneously heals me, without medical intervention, of gastroparesis, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, and degenerative spinal disease I will “believe.” The ball is in your court, Jesus. You are allegedly the “Great Physician.” Work your magic, and I will believe. The Bible records stories about you healing all sorts of people from serious diseases. You even raised the dead. And believe me Jesus, I am not too far away from needing resurrection. After I am dead and burnt into ashes that will be cast into the waters of Lake Michigan, perhaps Polly will ask you to recombine my molecules and give me a young, healthy body. That way, she can have some sexy eye candy by her side. 🙂 Do either of these things, Jesus, and I will believe, and I suspect Polly will believe too.
Of course, no healing or resurrection will be forthcoming. Expecting Jesus to do either of these things is akin to me going to my mom’s grave and asking her pop out of the ground fully clothed and with no bullet hole in her chest so we could share a cup of instant coffee (mom’s favorite) and have a chat. Well, we’d share a cup of coffee right after Mom lights up a Virginia Slim. “Butch, I have been hankering for a smoke for thirty years.” 🙂
To Karrie, I say, “with God all things are possible” and “if you ask anything in his name he will do it.” If you are as connected with the triune God of the Bible as your email suggests, surely God will answer your prayer for the healing of the unrepentant atheist Bruce Gerencser. Think of all the souls that will be saved if your God healed me. Why, I suspect my healing would cause reverberations across the world. “Is anything too hard for God?” Karrie, if Jesus can resurrect Lazarus from the dead, surely he can heal a lowly atheist who really, really, really wants to “believe.”
With bated breath, I await my healing. Time is running out . . .
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Today, an Evangelical (IFB?) woman named Donna Flowers came to this site and read one post: Emotionally Manipulating IFB Church Members through Music and Preaching Styles before sending me an email. Afterward, she read the post titled Why I Hate Jesus. Flowers read none of my autobiographical material, showing the curiosity of a dead armadillo in the middle of a rural Texas road on a hot July day. That’s “none” for you who are metaphor-challenged. 🙂
Here’s what Flowers had to say:
My heart goes out to you. I will pray for you that you will turn your life around and go back to the place you decided to walk off from Jesus in your Christian walk. Jesus loves you! Have a blessed day!
Not much to respond to here. I’m inclined to just say “sigh” (Why I Use the Word “Sigh”) and move on, but it’s Monday so I am raring — well actually in a lot of pain and fighting nausea — to respond to several emails and comments I have received in recent days.
Flowers’ email is dripping with Evangelical “love.” You know the kind: cheap, superfluous, and conditional. Her “heart” goes out to “me.” Goes out to who, exactly? Flowers made no attempt to read anything about me besides the two posts mentioned above. She made no effort to understand my story; how and why I became an atheist. Instead, she offers cheap Christian love, the equivalent of “I’m praying for you.”
Based on what she wrote, Flowers evidently believes I am still a Christian; that I am just backslidden. All I need to do is return to the Lord. I just need to find that moment in time where I walked away from Jesus and return to that spot and start serving (preaching?) the Lord again. Is it really that simple? Can I undo the past fifteen years? How absurd. First, my wife is no longer believer. Second, my children are no longer believers. Third, my life is better in every way post-Jesus (except my health, which Flowers will likely attribute to God’s chastisement). Fourth, even if I embraced some sort of religious faith again, I most certainly would not return to Evangelicalism. Never, ever, not in a million, billion, trillion years. Evangelicalism causes harm (as we see in the recent overturning of Row v. Wade) and in its extreme expressions is a full-blown cult.
How does Flowers know Jesus loves me? Did he tell her? By all accounts, I am an apostate and a reprobate. It’s likely I am not elect. I would love Flowers to theologically explain to me how she knows “Jesus loves me.”
Flowers ends her missive by telling me to have a “blessed” day. I shall, all without the God of the Christian Bible. Having a “blessed” day is not contingent on faith. I will gladly explain this fact to Flowers if she’s interested.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Recently, a man named Bradley Brown left the above comment on YouTube. Brown wants to know if I returned the money I earned pastoring churches when I became an atheist. Evidently, Brown’s Bible doesn’t include the verse that says a “laborer is worthy of his honor” and that a pastor/elder is worthy of “double honor” (pay).
I spent twenty-five years pastoring Evangelical churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. All told, I averaged less than $10,000 a year as a pastor. Two churches paid me no money, one church paid me $26,000 and provided housing, and the rest of the churches I pastored paid roughly $8,000-10,000 a year. Total that up and I made around $250,000 as a pastor.
Not one church provided health benefits or any other benefits. We relied on Medicaid or paid cash for our medical care. We only went to the doctor if it was an emergency. Our children went years between doctor’s visits.
Our hillbilly mansion. We lived in this 720-square-foot mobile home for five years, all eight of us.
Only one church provided us housing. The rest of the time, we lived in rentals or two mobile homes we purchased. For five years, our family of eight lived in 12’x60′ mobile home — 720 square feet. Most years we drove cars that cost a few hundred dollars. We did buy a new Plymouth Horizon in 1984 for $6,000, putting 102,000 miles on it in two years. We also bought a spartan low-mileage 80s Chevy Cavalier for $2,900. We junked it at 176,000 miles.
Every church I pastored had my full attention, as I worked full-time even when I was paid paltry wages. In addition, I worked secular jobs to provide for my family. Every dime I ever made, I earned. So, to answer Bradley Brown, no I am not going to return the money I EARNED pastoring churches.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
My wife, Polly, and I will celebrate forty-four years of blissful, happy, serene, uneventful — wait for a minute while I get a hysterically laughing Polly off the floor — marriage. 🙂 Life has blessed us with six children, ages twenty-nine to forty-three — damn they are getting old — and thirteen grandchildren, ages two to twenty-one. And I must not forget our son-in-law and daughters-in-law. Without them there would be no grandchildren, and, though we don’t say it enough, we love and appreciate them. On balance we have lived a good life, blessed in every way.
Yet, as a slowly dying, frail sixty-five-year-old man with fibromyalgia, gastroparesis, osteoarthritis, and chronic, unrelenting pain, I can’t help but reflect on my life. My new counselor has told me that I have a good sense of self-awareness. This, of course, can lead to me thinking too much about the past and my culpability in things that did or didn’t happen in the lives of my wife and children. I’ve been faulted for dwelling too much on the past, but this is who I am. Besides, I wouldn’t have much to write about if I let the past be the past. The important thing for me is that I don’t live in the past. I use the past as a teaching tool, as a way to measure progress in my life; as a reminder of what not to do. Being a committed, devoted Fundamentalist follower of Jesus Christ, a man with a slavish devotion to the literal teachings of the Bible resulted in me making choices and decisions I now regret.
While not everything on the list below is religion-related, many of them are. For the nominal, cultural Christian, their faith doesn’t make much difference in their lives. However, for those of us who were saved, sanctified, filled-with-the-Holy-Ghost believers; people who immersed themselves in the Bible, a book they believed was the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God; people who governed their thoughts, words, and deeds by the Bible and the leading of the Holy Spirit; people who devoted themselves to the work of the church and the ministry; people who gave thousands and thousands of dollars to their churches and other ministries; people who witnessed to and evangelized unbelievers; people who separated themselves from the world; people who homeschooled their children or sent them to private Christian schools; people who put God/Jesus/church/ministry above their families, friends, and job — their faith and its attendant beliefs and practices made an incalculable mark on their lives. And now that we are no longer believers or have moved on to less demanding expressions of faith, it’s hard not to look back on our lives without regret. In my case, I spent fifty years of my life in the Christian church, and half of those years pastoring churches full-time. It’s hard not to conclude, then, that I spent much of my life devoted to a lie, sacrificing my wife and children for an imaginary deity.
Ten Things I Regret
I regret not teaching my children to swim. We spent very little time at places where our children could swim and I had no time due to my commitment to Jesus and the church to take them to swimming lessons.
I regret not letting my children play organized sports. There was one hard, fast rule in the Gerencser household: the church always, and I mean ALWAYS, came first. Since practice and game schedules conflicted with the church calendar, there was no discussion to be had: no sports for the Gerencser children. Why play baseball when you can go soulwinning and street preaching with your preacher father, right? While I played baseball and basketball in school, I didn’t afford my children that same opportunity.
I regret not taking my family on vacations. The only “vacations” the Gerencsers took were trips to events or churches where I was preaching.
I regret not taking off time from toiling in God’s vineyard to enjoy nature with my children. We lived in a lot of beautiful, wildlife-filled places, yet I was too busy to take the time to enjoy what was right in front of me. Hell was hot, death was certain, and Jesus was coming soon! Who had time for trees, flowers, hills, rivers, mule deer, and bobcats? Souls needed saving and Jesus was fixing to split the Eastern Sky as he returned to earth to judge the living and dead.
I regret using disciplinary methods with my three older children that I now think are child abuse. While I moved away from such disciplinary practices later in life, there’s no other way to view the whippings and beatings my older sons received as anything other than ritual, Bible-inspired, Jesus-approved child abuse. I would not blame my oldest sons if they hated me and wanted nothing to do with me. That they still come around and we have good relationships is a testimony of love and forgiveness.
I regret using my children as unpaid laborers for the churches I pastored. My children spent countless hours working with their father on church projects. While they learned many skills that they still use today, I can’t help but regret viewing my children as construction workers janitors, and groundskeepers. They were never given a choice. Preacher Dad said ______________. End of discussion.
I regret not letting my kids be kids. Certainly, my sons and daughters did plenty of kid stuff — especially when I wasn’t around — but they lived in a glass house where appearance and perception were everything. God, church members, and the “lost” were always watching, I told my children, so we must always be kind and polite — even to assholes — and on our best behavior.
I regret not exposing my children to a secular worldview. Instead, I built a bubble around them, protecting my children from the big, bad, evil world. While they have recovered nicely from the Fundamentalist indoctrination and conditioning of their youth, I can’t help but think these things harmed them as young adults.
I regret not telling my children I loved them. I blame this directly on growing up in a dysfunctional home where my mom or dad rarely, if ever, expressed love for me. While I am a lot better with this now, I still could do even better. When I first embraced my youngest daughter and told her that I loved her, she had a shocked look on her face that said, “are you dying”? I can’t emphasize this enough: emotional distance between parents and children is often generational. I know it was for me. I look at my grandparents and parents and I clearly see this distance. They passed this on to their children. The only thing I know to do is to recognize this and do better.
I regret being a hypocrite. As a pastor, to church members and the world, I was a pillar of morality and virtue, a man who always had his life under control; a man who rarely expressed anger. Behind closed doors, I could be a different man, far more temperamental, more easily provoked to anger. Oh, the stories that could be told to illustrate this point. I hope to get some of my children (and Polly) to come on my podcast and talk about these things someday.) Today, I want to focus on why I was this way. I was a loving, kind, generous man, especially towards church members and unbelievers. Yet, when it came to my family, I could, at times, be unloving, unkind, and lacking in generosity. Granted, I’ve come to this opinion thanks to hindsight. At the time, I thought I was just being a good Christian husband and father. Why was I this way? My version of Christianity demanded that I deny self, take up my cross, and follow Jesus. In doing so, I lost all sense of self. Thus, when I was behind closed doors, pent-up frustrations would come out, often in anger. If I had had a healthy view of self, I suspect things would have been different. I know that TV (which I deemed sinful) wouldn’t have gone flying out the front door. 🙂
The past is the past. There are no do-overs. At best, we get second chances to right the wrongs of the past or at least model and show that we have learned from the bad things we did previously. I know that’s the case for me. I see my grandchildren as an opportunity to do things differently, and I hope in the latter years of my life to forge better relationships with Polly and my children.
Does this mean that I was a bad man, unfit to pastor churches? I am sure some will come to that conclusion — thus finding yet another reason to dismiss my story out of hand — but I see myself as a broken, flawed man, someone deeply affected and scarred by his upbringing and immersion in Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Christianity. It would take me five decades before I realized how much harm IFB (and later Calvinistic) beliefs and practices had caused me, harm I passed on to Polly and our children (and Polly had her own dysfunction to deal with). I see that growing up with a mentally ill mother who tried to kill herself numerous times, constantly living in new houses and attending new schools, being sexually abused as a boy, and being left to fend for myself during the most formative years of my life, extracted a horrific price from me. Sure, I survived, but not without lasting scars. All I know to do is make an uneasy peace with the past and try to do better. I will leave it to those I love to decide if I have successfully done so. If not, I will keep trying. What else can any of us do?
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
When you say homosexuality is an abomination . . . you are saying your gay son and neighbor are abominable.
When you say all non-Christians will go to Hell when they die . . . you are saying your non-Christian mother, son, and neighbor will be tortured by God in the flames of the Hell for eternity.
When you say abortion is evil, sick, and murder . . . you are saying those who are pro-choice are evil, sick murderers.
When you say Christians are idiots . . . you are saying your Christian mother and grandfather are idiots.
When you say people on welfare are lazy, good for nothing bums . . . you are saying your out-of-work cousin with cancer is a lazy, good for nothing bum.
When you say atheism is immoral . . . you are saying that your atheist daughter and cousin are immoral.
You can’t divorce your words from their implications.
Words matter.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
According to an email I received several years ago, my present life is NOT how I present it within the pages of this blog. A Christian man by the name Nathan Smith says I am lying when I say I am happy. He also says my life is absent of compassion, freedom, and happiness, despite me saying differently. Smith challenges my manhood, saying that if I truly was a brave man I would ask a cognitive behaviorist to render their opinion on my written work. You mean the secular psychologist I see every week, the woman who reads my writing and encourages me to keep telling my story?
Smith writes:
Reading your blog doesn’t give any impression that the humanistic life is full of the kind of compassion, freedom, and happiness you say it is. If Christians serve something man-made, then they are simply doing what comes naturally to them as humans; something any true humanist would be able to understand with a lot more compassion than you seem able to demonstrate. If you were free, you would not feel compelled to continue in your devotion to Christ and His Church; albeit in hostility. Moreover, if you were happy, you would not view everything through the lens of this hostility. If humanism were true of Bruce Gerenscer [sic], the battle would have ended when he left the Church, yet here he is still playing the part with fervor.
You will be glad to hear that your new life’s work is questionable without even invoking God or scripture. If you are brave enough, let a cognitive behaviorist evaluate this blog and compare it with your stated reasons for writing it; that way you can hear from the kind of secular, educated, scientific individual you now esteem that you are completely full of it.
I will leave it to you the reader to decide if Smith’s observations ring true.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
