Recently, I received an email from an Evangelical man in California named Craig. Instead of answering Craig personally, I thought I would turn my response into a blog post. Since I believe Craig was being sincere when he wrote me, I have removed all personal identifiers from his email.
Craig wrote:
Hi Bruce. Nice to meet you.
….
Full disclosure: I remain a follower of Jesus Christ.
Bruce, while I’m sure there are exceptions, the I.F.B. community is not known for either their scholarship or for reflecting the love of Jesus. Did you ever explore other Christian faith communities before leaving Christianity? Regarding scholarship, I saw on your website that you enjoy reading books by Bart Ehrman. I’m sending you two links to debates Ehrman had with James White and Michael Brown. The links are to Ehrman’s blog site. Ehrman posted the debates on his blog site. On the respective blogs Ehrman acknowledges that he had two very worthy challengers. The respective topics are the veracity of the scriptures and the problem of suffering. I appreciate Ehrman’s transparency. Listen to the debates and draw your own conclusions but please do watch them both.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of Charles Templeton. Did you ever read Lee Strobel’s account of meeting with him? It’s both profound and heart wrenching. It’s chronicled in the preface to Strobel’s book entitled “The Case For Faith”. Here’s the link to their encounter: Charles Templeton: Missing Jesus
I’d love to refer you to numerous books regarding the evidences for Christianity. One of my favorites is “More Than A Carpenter” by Josh McDowell. Bruce, go with the facts. I know you’ve been hurt. So have I. Regardless, go with the facts.
I’ll close with this fact: Jesus loves you Bruce.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this email. Take good care.
Craig read all of three posts on this site:
Based on reading these three posts, Craig concluded that I was uninformed about Christianity and that I was hurt in some way as a Christian and a pastor. In other words, I am an atheist due to a lack of knowledge about Christianity — Evangelicalism, in particular — and emotional harm caused by unnamed others.
First, I was in the Christian church for 50 years. I was an Evangelical pastor for 25 of those years. Yes, I pastored several Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches, but I also pastored a Reformed Baptist church, a Sovereign Grace Baptist church, a Southern Baptist church, a Christian Union church, and a nondenominational church.
Second, I spent thousands and thousands of hours preparing my sermons, investing countless hours reading/studying the Bible, reading theological tomes, and reading Christian biographies. At one time, I had over 1,000 theological books in my library. I remember a church teenager coming into my office one day, marveling at my library. He asked, “did you read ALL of these books?” I replied, “yes, I really have read all of these books.” I also had Bible study software on my computer that I used in my sermon preparation. By all accounts, I was a well-read pastor, especially from an Evangelical/Calvinistic perspective.
Yes, I read Lee Strobel’s and Josh McDowell’s books. Even in my solidly Evangelical days, I considered these books Christianity-lite, unpersuasive at best, pablum at worst. I have never understood how Evangelicals think Strobel and McDowell are pillars of Evangelical theology, when in fact their writings are little more than trashy Christian fiction.
My leaving the ministry and Christianity is not due to a lack of knowledge. I wish there were an Evangelical competency test I could take so it would put an end to believers thinking I am ignorant of their beliefs. I’m not. I know the Bible and cardinal doctrines of Evangelicalism inside and out. In the twelve years I have been blogging, I have yet to hear a Christian argument I have not heard before. In fact, since the Bible is a closed canon, it is unlikely that Evangelicals will have original thoughts — outside of their attempts to revise their interpretations to better “fit” in a culture that increasingly rejects them.
Let me move on to Michael Brown and James White. I follow both of them. I was actually casual friends with White years ago. That said, both men are Fundamentalists. They may be more educated than the average Bible-thumper, but their theology is the same as some hillbilly preacher who pastors a church on the backside of a hill in West Virginia. They may be more “sophisticated,” but once you peel away the patina covering their arguments, what you find is generic Christian Fundamentalism. I appreciate Dr. Bart Ehrman’s willingness to engage these men in debates. Personally, I am not a fan of debates. I prefer reading to debates that are most often decided by who has the best personality and rhetorical skills. I own all of Dr. Ehrman’s books, and they are, for my purposes, intellectually satisfying.
When it comes to the “veracity of the Bible” and the problem of suffering, I have my own decided opinions, based on extensive study and reflection. I have concluded that the Bible is not what Evangelicals claim it is; that it is an errant, fallible, contradictory collection of texts written by fallible, uneducated men; that its central claims are demonstratively false (i.e. virgins don’t have babies, dead people don’t come back to life). I have also concluded that Evangelical apologists have no satisfactory explanation for suffering, especially when non-human animal suffering is included.
Craig makes an attempt to appeal to my emotions when he says, “we’ve both been hurt.” First, I don’t know anything about Craig, so it is impossible for me to know if he has, in fact, been hurt, or what he even means by the word. Second, Craig doesn’t know me, so he can’t possibly know whether I have been “hurt.” Had Craig delved more into my writing, he would have found that I have thoroughly discredited the “hurt” accusation. Sure, psychological reasons played a part in my deconversion, but the primary reason I divorced Jesus is because I no longer believe the central claims of Christianity are true. (Please see The Michael Mock Rule: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense.)
Craig implores me to “go with the facts.” And that’s exactly what I have done. Of course, Craig can’t wrap his mind around this fact. In his thinking, anyone who reads Strobel and McDowell and watches a couple of debates will immediately repent of their sins and ask Jesus to save them. Sadly, Evangelicals have little capacity to see possibilities outside the narrow confines of their peculiar religion. Such thinking is not surprising given the fact that Evangelicals believe right beliefs are what save a man and deliver him from Hell. Never mind my good works. Never mind the fact that I am a good, decent, kind husband, father, grandfather, and neighbor. All that matters is that I believe the “right” things. The Evangelical gospel is, in fact, this: “Believe THIS and thou shalt live.”
As far as whether IFB churches and pastors “love” Jesus, I would argue that I have met “mean as venomous snakes” Christians in all sorts of sects and churches. Non-IFB Evangelicals can be every bit as nasty and arrogant as people in IFB churches — and I have the comments and emails to prove it.
I spent a number of years in the IFB church movement. I met more than a few kind, decent, thoughtful people who deeply loved their version of Jesus. To suggest that the IFB church movement is somehow worse than Evangelicalism at large is a denial of the evidence at hand. Evangelicals are the most hated sect in America. Evangelicals, along with their counterparts in Catholicism and Mormonism are the primary drivers of the vile culture war that permeates the United States. It is Evangelicals who gave us our pussy-grabber-in-chief Donald Trump. Sure, IFB Christians are a subset of Evangelicalism, but they are hardly a blip on the religious/political radar when compared to Southern Baptists and nondenominational Evangelicals.
Let me conclude this post by answering this question posed by Craig: “Did you ever explore other Christian faith communities before leaving Christianity?”
Here’s my answer from a post I wrote in 2015 titled, But Our Church is DIFFERENT!
I pastored my last church in 2003. Between July of 2002 and November of 2008, my wife and I, along with our children, personally visited the churches that are listed below. These are the church names we could remember. There are others we have either forgotten or vaguely remember, so we didn’t put them on the list. Churches in bold we attended more than once. All told, from 2002-2008 we visited about 125 churches. If I added every church I have ever attended or preached for in my lifetime, the count would be over 200.
When Christians tell me THEIR church is different, I often tell them that I have been to THEIR church. Not literally of course, but one church or another that I have visited over the past 40+ years is just like theirs. Churches are not as unique as they would like to think they are. Polly and I concluded that the name over the door may be different, but after a while, they all look and sound the same. Congregation size, building, music, preaching style, government, and liturgy might be different, but this is nothing more than the man behind the counter at the ice cream shop asking you: regular cone, waffle cone, or bowl.
If the church has a website, I linked to it. A handful of these churches are no longer open.
| Churches We Visited 2002-2008 | Location |
| Our Father’s House | West Unity, Ohio |
| First Brethren Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| First Baptist Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| Grace Community Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| Lick Creek Church of the Brethren | Bryan,Ohio |
| First Church of Christ | Bryan, Ohio |
| Eastland Baptist Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| Bryan Alliance Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| Union Chapel Church of God | Bryan, Ohio |
| Celebrate Life Christian Fellowship | Bryan, Ohio |
| Faith United Methodist Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| Trinity Episcopal Church | Bryan, Ohio |
| Archbold Evangelical Church | Archbold, Ohio |
| Sherwood Baptist Church | Sherwood, Ohio |
| Ney Church of God | Ney, Ohio |
| Ney United Methodist Church | Ney, Ohio |
| Sonrise Community Church | Ney, Ohio |
| Farmer United Methodist Church | Farmer, Ohio |
| Lost Creek Emmanuel Missionary Church | Farmer, Ohio |
| Hicksville Church of the Nazarene | Hicksville, Ohio |
| Community Christian Center | Hicksville, Ohio |
| Grace Bible Church | Butler, Indiana |
| St John’s Lutheran Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| Harvest Life Fellowship | Defiance, Ohio |
| Community Christian Center | Defiance, Ohio |
| Second Baptist Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| First Baptist Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| Grace Episcopal Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| First Assembly of God | Defiance, Ohio |
| Defiance Christian Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| First Presbyterian Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| St John’s United Church of Christ | Defiance, Ohio |
| Peace Lutheran Church | Defiance, Ohio |
| Pine Grove Mennonite Church | Stryker, Ohio |
| St James Lutheran Church | Burlington, Ohio |
| Zion Lutheran Church | Edgerton, Ohio |
| Northwest Christian Church | Edon, Ohio |
| Restoration Fellowship | Williams Center, Ohio |
| Pioneer Bible Fellowship | Pioneer, Ohio |
| Frontier Baptist Church | Frontier, Michigan |
| Salem Mennonite Church | Waldron, Michigan |
| Waldron Wesleyan Church | Waldron, Michigan |
| Lickley Corners Baptist Church | Waldron, Michigan |
| Prattville Community Church | Prattville, Michigan |
| Betzer Community Church | Pittsford, Michigan |
| Fayette Church of the Nazarene | Fayette, Ohio |
| Fayette Bible Church | Fayette, Ohio |
| Fayette Christian Church | Fayette, Ohio |
| Morenci Bible Fellowship | Morenci, Michigan |
| First Baptist Church | Morenci, Michigan |
| Demings Lake Reformed Baptist Church | Demings Lake, Michigan |
| Medina Federated Church | Medina, Michigan |
| Thornhill Baptist Church | Hudson, Michigan |
| First Baptist Church | Hudson, Michigan |
| Rollins Friends Church | Addison, Michigan |
| Canandaigua Community Church | Canandaigua. Michigan |
| Alvordton United Brethren | Alvordton, Ohio |
| Pettisville Missionary Church | Pettisville, Ohio |
| Vineyard Church | Toledo, Ohio |
| Providence Reformed Baptist Church | Toledo, Ohio |
| Lighthouse Memorial Church | Millersport, Ohio |
| Newark Baptist Temple | Heath, Ohio |
| Church of God | Heath, Ohio |
| 30th Street Baptist Church | Heath, Ohio |
| St Francis De Sales Catholic Church | Newark, Ohio |
| Bible Baptist Church | Newark, Ohio |
| Cedar Hill Baptist Church | Newark, Ohio |
| Eastland Heights Baptist Church | Newark, Ohio |
| Northside Baptist Church | Newark, Ohio |
| Newark Brethren Church | Newark, Ohio |
| St John’s Lutheran Church | Newark, Ohio |
| Vineyard of Licking County | Newark, Ohio |
| Vineyard Grace Fellowship | Newark, Ohio |
| Grace Fellowship | Newark, Ohio |
| Faith Bible Church | Jersey, Ohio |
| Vineyard Christian Church | Pataskala, Ohio |
| Cornerstone Baptist Church | New Lexington, Ohio |
| St Nicolas Greek Orthodox Church | Fort Wayne, Indiana |
| Nondenominational Church | Angola, Indiana |
| Nondenominational Church | Fremont, Indiana |
| Victory Baptist Church | Clare, Michigan |
| First Assembly of God | Yuma, Arizona |
| Desert Grace Community Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Calvary Lutheran Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Bible Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Calvary Chapel | Yuma, Arizona |
| Oasis | Yuma, Arizona |
| Faith Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Valley Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Calvary Assembly of God | Yuma, Arizona |
| Foothills Assembly of God | Yuma, Arizona |
| Morningside Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Faith Horizons Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Stone Ridge Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Old Order Mennonite Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Grace Bible Fellowship | Yuma, Arizona |
| Calvary Temple of Christ | Yuma, Arizona |
| Maranatha Baptist Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Independent Lutheran Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Community Christian Church | Yuma, Arizona |
| Church meeting in funeral chapel | Yuma, Arizona |
| Pentecostal Church | Winterhaven, California |
| North Holtville Friends Church | Holtville, California |
| Sierra Vista Baptist Church | Sierra Vista, Arizona |
| Hedgesville Baptist Church | Hedgesville, West Virginia |
| New Life Baptist Church | Weston, West Virginia |
I think I can safely say that I have covered all my bases when it comes to Christianity. I would ask Craig: have you done the same? Reason loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 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.
Connect with me on social media:
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
All of these evangelists have the same approach to you: read a couple of your blog posts, then implore you listen to So and So and you will be convinced. And then, if you decline, they end up becoming angry. I feel impressed more than ever that Christianity is a failed religion.
I read stuff like what Craig wrote, I read the news, I read about the stupid behaviors of Fundies (Evangelicals/Conservative Catholics/Conservative Mormons) with regard to pademic, sex-abuse scandals, human rights protests, whatever…and I begin to think it’s hard to even get my mind around the SCOPE of the blame due to Roman emperor Constantine for officially endorsing this accursed religion. Without official recognition, it might well have died the swift death that it deserved.
The NAKEDPASTOR illustrates a pattern of witnessing or presenting our beliefs. I recall being trained, when invited into someone’s home during Church Visitation/Soulwining, to complement on something to the person I was speaking with before addressing the urgency to be saved or attend church.
https://www.nakedpastorstore.com/blogs/news/how-to-convert-heretics-online
Hmmm. Open mouth, insert foot…I trust that Craig read your reply, and will be wiser about these things in the future.
He read it. I sent him a link to the post. 🙂
Bruce, you obviously haven’t hit upon the correct iteration of Jesus. Surely there are more churches, you should be able to find the right version of Jesus soon! ****** terms and conditions apply
Yes, to quote U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” 🙂
When Bruce is implored to acknowledge ‘facts, I cannot help but notice that it is the same doublespeak over and over. These ‘facts’ are really feelings dressed up to present as immutable, dressed up as a king but the obvious lie cries out from the words: the king has no clothes!
Really, I would appreciate these letter writers putting away their pens and instead recording videos of themselves singing to Bruce:
One door and only one and yet its sides are two… I’m on the inside, on which side are you?
Maybe with a wee dance, a twerk, or even the twist!
Re “The Evangelical gospel is, in fact, this: ‘Believe THIS and thou shalt live.'”
I am so tired of this “promise.” I am told that if I believe what they believe, I will have eternal life! In the next breath they explain that each of us has an immortal soul, a consequence of which is every danged one of us will live forever. What they should be saying is “Believe THIS, or our god will be sure to burn your soul in everlasting fire forever and ever, Amen.” Now that would be honest.
Actually it was Christians who came up with the Lake of Fire concept, so Hell as we know it is to be laid in Jesus’s lap and no others. The Jews only had Sheol and there was no fire there. But we are also told that in Heaven, Yahweh has a mansion which has many rooms, so supposedly we each get one of those. A better concept of Hell would be to make the non-conformers into servants in this mansion. The servants sleep on rude cots in cramped servant’s quarters, get no days off, and do all of the cleaning, food service, waste removal, etc. all the time seeing all of the Good Christians reveling in this mansion. Now that would be hellish! And certainly more kind then burning and being tormented by demons. In the Christian concept of Hell, more and more demons are needed to be created to handle the load down there, don’t you know. So, why would a system that required more and more demons seems like a good idea to any sane god?
Do these people actually think about their claims?
Thinking too hard about their claims will send them to eternal torture. But their god is GREAT!
I have made que a few mistakes in life. A few big ones, even. Embarrassing, as well. Let’s ignore, for argument’s sake, a good majority of them all, and consider only those that were made in sobriety
After decades of contemplation and evaluation, and careful consideration, in all truthfulness, I can only make this one statement that I deem to be 100% true, all the time: it never is knowledge that is the reason for erring – it always is the lack of said knowledge, whether intentional or unintentional
Not knowing makes for simple truths, black and white without any shade of grey, perfect two sides of any coin, perfect opposites, the epitome of which is that very, very ugly and failed political American system: Dems versus Republicans.
Perfect duality – yes, indeed
I know tens, hundreds of scholars and academics who have read the New Testament back and forth as I have, and the greater parts of the Tanakh as well, likewise – next to other texts, more or less adjacent to Christianity. And only a handful of extremely orthodox fundamentalists among them “still believes” “as they should” although even they do show some cracks – it is utterly impossible not to
Craig is ignorant. Craig is not here to find or discuss religion, for Craig it is only about one thing: include you back into his group, or exclude you the f*ck from it for ever and ever, and burn you beyond recognition while doing so
And you can’t teach Craig, you can’t enlighten him. Because he doesn’t want to hear what you have to say, he wants to hear what he himself has to say – which are the echoes of what he has been impregnated with by his group, his peers.
Christianity, Churchianity, Evangelism – it is always only about them demanding you to become part of their group. It never is about reason, it must certainly never is about reasoning. Only two things: either you’re in, yon which you must be grateful to be allowed in, or you’re out.
Is there anyone who finds the Borg from Star Trek anything but horrifically scary? Well alright, you can pity them, if and when feeling hugely compassionate. But never doubt that they can only persist in their behaviour
Dogmatic Christians are immortal – they can’t die anymore, simply because they’re dead already. That is what is meant in the gospel of Thomas, by the way.
You can’t reason with fundamentalists, because their faith has nothing to do with ratio – only emotion
So if you want their attention, play at that level…
You said “And you can’t teach Craig, you can’t enlighten him. Because he doesn’t want to hear what you have to say, he wants to hear what he himself has to say – which are the echoes of what he has been impregnated with by his group, his peers.”
So true, my friend.
Where does Craig get this strange idea that questioning and facts lead to religion? Craig is still religious because he doesn’t know how to approach the big questions without the crutch of religion. Evangelicalism has given entire generations crutches to stand up with before they learn to walk on their own. Hence, they have crippled those same generations forever. Why learn to walk when U have crutches to hobble through life with? Evangelicalism is where the real hurt is found. Secularism is the soothing jell that gently takes that hurt away. Anyways, the real cure is education. I loathe public school systems. But where R the private secular school systems? Unfortunately, they’re in still-birth mode.
I can recall prior to my deconversion feeling that my church was unique and had the real answers. Other churches could not be trusted and although they claimed to be Christian you really couldn’t be sure. I could never trust someone was really a Christian if they didn’t go to my church. How tribal and how arrogant! I think that’s a big reason mega churches thrive. You can look around you and see thousands of people who believe just like you do. Sure beats the dozens I would see all those years ago. Such nonsense
Oh, and Bruce, how the fangdang-it do you know all the churches you attended in the years 2002 to 2008? That just scares me and makes me look for valium! Is that the list-maker guy in you? My wife likes to make daily lists to keep track of a bunch of points as the day unravels but I am not aware of her making longer term lists. I tend to wander from one undone job to another, putter a bit and move along as a need arises. Yesterday it was the well-pump stopping that moved me to focus there… later I wandered back into the garden to weed carrots. It is wonderful to feel able to do this without being prodded by the great commission or cajoled by some religio-maniac to serve the master.
Brian, you make me smile. My mom wanted everything written down, and when I hit 40 I started in her footsteps because menopause really messes with short-term memory. My dad, an accountant by trade, wrote down numbers…and only numbers. Retired from his trade, he operated the same as you’ve described for yourself, because most of his projects couldn’t ever be done. Priorities would make themselves known, as your well pump did. And yet, he managed to blow his friends’ and neighbors’ minds with his veggie garden and fruit orchard, kept track of which neighbors needed good fertilizer manure delivered from a farmer down the road who sold it for $5 a load and filled the bed of your pickup with his backhoe himself, and always seemed to find the best sales in the hardware stores without ever reading their sale flyers. He also had a local lumber yard intensely grateful because he would come in the middle of the hot summer and empty their scraps bin for them; that was kindling for winter fires. Three cheers for wandering.
Oh, and while my mother was a devout conservative Catholic (who would have been appalled by my religious education at the hands of liberal nuns), my dad was technically Lutheran but never actually mentioned God, Jesus, or any bit of the Bible. His values followed the Sermon on the Mount, but always expressed in strictly secular terms.
We made that list several years ago. Had I made the list today, it would have taken me several days and a map to remember the churches we visited. Dying brain cells, unfortunately. 🙂
No UU church on the list, Bruce? 🙂 Ah well, we’re not really Christians per se, at least not by any definition Craig would put stock in. I’m curious about “church meeting in a funeral chapel” though–was it just the one meeting, or did they always meet in a funeral chapel for some reason?
It’s a shame that folks like Craig, who genuinely seem like kind sorts, can’t wrap their head around the fact that from the outside looking in their arguments are totally unpersuasive. Baffles me when evangelicals try to prove things to me by quoting scripture, to which my response is always “but why would I believe something just because it’s in the Bible?” I get that they do, but they don’t get that I don’t. Oh well.
NO UU churches. Not sure why either. I know, as it is today, there were no UU churches close to where we lived.
Not surprising, we tend to be a pretty urban-based denomination. Probably there are UU’s in Columbus; maybe in Richmond IN, though I envision them having late night gang throwdowns with the Quakers there… 😀
I haven’t won the lottery yet. Why? I haven’t bought the right ticket. I guess I just have to keep on buying tickets!
one more Christian looking for more external validation.
Bruce, your answers are always right on. I haven’t “come out” to my family yet, but I’ve dropped plenty of hints. I often talk to Fundies on Twitter & use my decent Bible knowledge against them & whatever the situation warrants. I’m just not quite to the point yet of making it all public knowledge. It’s a journey, I guess. They all know I’m an ex-fundy, but not that I’m to the point of denying God’s existence altogether. I’m slowly getting there.
Anyway, I wonder why, when people are blunt in expressing opposing views to these folks, that they always accuse us of having been hurt? And as a result, we are bitter, they say. Argh! I get so tired of hearing that!!
Thanks for always keeping it real, Bruce.
Hello Julie S. Happy for you being able to stand back from belief and question and to remove yourself from the extremism of fundagelical faith. Just wanted to express that I do sometimes feel bitter/hurt about what Christians have done to me and are now doing to others in our world.
The very idea that having appropriate feelings is wrong is the business of evangelical belief. They make a point of crushing natural human feelings, call them sins and evidence of the fallen nature of humans. It’s a big crock of sheep-shit fed to the hungry. I have a right to feel as I feel. I simply hate what Christians do to children. It is wrong. It is abusive. Christians are taught to lie to themselves and others.