What is it about Evangelicals who think that I am being less than honest about my past and present life? Rarely does a week go by without someone questioning my truthfulness or doubting my explanations as to why I left Christianity.
Today, I received an email from Pastor Mark (I know his last name, but I won’t mention it here). Here’s what Pastor Mark had to say:
I have read your stories. I’m not surprised by the way you feel. However, how could you be a minister for over 25 years unless you believed in Jesus Christ? Maybe you never had a true relationship with Him. Maybe you allowed other people, things to come between you and Him. I cannot answer those questions, but you can and you can answer them honestly.
It make me wonder if your family (wife, children, grandchildren, etc) feel the same way you feel about Jesus. One thing I know, Jesus didn’t leave you, you left Jesus.
Pastor Mark wonders how it is possible that I pastored for 25 years, but didn’t believe in Jesus. Here’s the thing, I did believe in Jesus. I was a devoted, committed follower of Jesus Christian. My beliefs, practices, and lifestyle testified to the fact that I was a child of God. No one, at the time, questioned my relationship with Jesus. It was only after I divorced Jesus that people doubted whether I was a True Christian®.
Pastor mark wonders if I had a “true” relationship with Jesus. I did. He also wonders if people or things came between me and Jesus. Sorry to burst your bubble, Pastor Mark, but they did not. I left Christianity for primarily intellectual reasons. Pastor Mark would have learned this had he checked out the WHY? page, but alas, much like most Evangelicals, the good pastor showed little, if any, curiosity about my story.
Pastor Mark asks me to answer his questions “honestly.” Have I been anything other than honest? Twelve years, almost 4,000 posts on this iteration of my blog, and people are still questioning my honesty. What more do I need to do? Post nude pics with every article, showing my nakedness before God and my fellow man?
Pastor Mark wonders about my wife, children, and grandchildren. Their stories are theirs to tell, but I can say that none of them is an Evangelical. I can also say they are atheists, humanists, agnostics, nominal Catholics, and generally indifferent towards organized religion. This is, to me anyway, good news. This means the Evangelical curse has been broken.
Pastor Mark is certain that Jesus didn’t leave me, but I left Jesus. First, Jesus is dead, so he couldn’t go anywhere. Second, I didn’t leave Jesus, I left Christianity. It’s Christianity that I reject. Again, check out the WHY? page.
There ya have it, Pastor Mark. All your Bruce Gerencser questions answered. I do, however, have a few questions about you. Are you the . . . Naw, I will leave it there.
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.
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“I have read your stories.” Really?
Which ones did he read, Bruce?
I don’t understand where all these guys are coming from.
Is there like a little factory that cranks out, well, cranks?
I don’t see any dishonesty from you here, although I’ve been reading a long time. I see dishonesty and male bovine fecal matter being dumped by the truckload by some of your evangelical visitors, though.
It seems they don’t like your beliefs and instead of realizing they have a problem, they blame you and call you a liar.
Once again I say they’re not really making a case for their beliefs.
They come across shrill, accusatory and not all that bright.
“Is there like a little factory that cranks out, well, cranks?”
Yeah, it’s called church.
Another self-worshiping pastor? I say that as he judges, he reads your mind, he tries to read others’ minds too. I’m not sure why they can’t just denounce on their own blogs and let it GOOOOOOOOO (and leave you alone)??
Yeah, you had the misfortune to believe for years in a non-existant supernatural being, but you corrected yourself as soon as you could. You didn’t leave the non-exister, and it could not leave you if it didn’t exist! These ministers can’t figure that out.
“Pastor Mark,” how fucking dare you! You are completely out of line when you imply that Bruce is not being honest about his own experiences — experiences that you are not privy to.
Give up the bullshit mind-reading act, O Amazing Cretin. You’re painfully bad at it.
‘Pastor mark wonders if I had a “true” relationship with Jesus.’ Like you Bruce and others here, I jesused my socks off for decades, convinced I had jesus in my heart commanding me to do the joyous task of evangelism in every possible way. I’m paraphrasing a favourite comment by Neil Carter of Godless in Dixie. It says it in a nutshell for me. ‘We didn’t deconvert because we were the lukewarm x-tians the bible warns against, we worked 24/7 for jesus and it was with mounting horror and extreme reluctance realised…none of it made sense…we were following a complete fiction.’
Sigh. There’s a lot going on for folks like Pastor Mark. They have built their whole lives around a belief system that you did too, but then you rejected it as false. That’s incomprehensible to them. Plus, it brings into question what they are basing their life on, and they just can’t handle that.
OC, I remember when I was super duper religious I was afraid to listen to anything perceived to be against God, the Bible, Jesus, or my church. Because listening to other thoughts and opinions and learning facts tears down most Christian foundational beliefs. (Not all, but once you realize the Bible is flawed you have to figure out where to go from there.)
I’m still afraid to listen to such things myself.
Pastor Mark is a real evangelical Christian fisherman. I know this because his evangelical bent to undermine others is evident in his query to Bruce Gerencser, casting his hook and snagging at his fish with gross insult that shows ignorance and insensitivity on his part. Does he offer a wee Jesus worm of enticement for the fish to nibble at or gobble? Oh no, he snags in the direction of his prey and does not seem to notice the ‘style’.
Pastor Mark, your faith, your choice is to harm others in this way and then to bring them into your stained-glass kictchen to be further insulted and dissected. You stand before them as if you know something. One little exchange with Bruce and it is clear from wayyy over here that you are rude, a typical bully of the faith. Have you done anything seriously for a quarter of a century or so? Try to stand aside a moment from your great commission for a second and wonder how it would feel for a stranger to approach you and say, Were you ever a true ____?
It’s rude, Mark. An apology is indicated and if I may be so bold, an hour or so of reading Gerencser’s story.
It is this kind of display that helped show me over and over again how bankrupt evangelical faith is in America, how much it mirrors the blind flag patriotism that elected Donald Trump to further ruin a nation. Why not stop harming others for profit, Pastor? You believe you are doing the will of a God by snagging at people? Really?
Let me answer your questions, Brian. I have had people ask questions to me, just as I have asked Bruce. I wasn’t trying to pass judgment or trying to start fight. Actually, the question or questions I asked him were for him to answer to himself and to ponder. He chose to share with others, which is fine too.
I will apologize to Bruce or anyone for making them feel unwanted, undeserved, not appreciated or if they feel I have past judgment on them. That isn’t and wasn’t my intent.
Your email arrogantly assumed that after 12 years (I deconverted in 2008) I have never thought of and answered these questions. Wouldn’t it be absurd and lazy for me not to answer these questions — which I have done a number of times on this blog. Seek and Ye Shall Find . . . Or use Google Search — the true GOd of this world.
I shared your email publickly because you ignored the fact that I asked you to not send me such emails. After 12 years, such emails are redundant, irritating, and tiresome.However, I do think readers find them instructive, so I share them
Where did I ask you not to email me? On the Contact Page, it states:
You ignored my request, and decided to email me anyway. Don’t expect me to ignore Evangelicals who show no regard for me personally or no respect for my wishes.
The best thing you could have done is actually read my writing before emailing me. Remember, based on your IP address, I know excatly what pages you have read on this site. Had I seen that you had read some of my autobiogpraphical work or the posts on the WHY? page, I might have actually responded to you privately. Of course, had you read these things, you wouldn’t have asked the questions you did.
I guess what I am saying is this: I think readers understood your intent quite well. In the future. you might choose to engage someone like me differently. Or bettter yet, ask yourself, what good will come from me emailing an Evangelical pastor-turned-atheist (unless you have doubts and questions about your own faith)?
Pastor Mark- I have a personal relationship with my wife. If I am away from home I can call her and get useful information from her, like what is on the store list. You think you have a relationship with Jesus and I have no doubt you get warm and fuzzy feelings confirming that, but people who belong to false religions get those feelings too. Personal experience is only evidence to the person it happens to. To everybody else it is hearsay.
If you really have a personal relationship with the almighty, you could get useful information from him like I can from my wife. Something he would definitely know, but we don’t. Ask him the street address of where some woman is being held as a sex slave in somebody’s basement in the US. After the stories from recent years, you know there are more out there. The real God would know where they are.
If you say “It doesn’t work like that” I will assume it is for the same reason a fortune teller gives that answer when you ask for the winning lottery numbers, namely. it doesn’t work at all.
If you give a “free will” answer, I’ll wonder why a rapists free will is protected, but the rape victim’s is not. Plus I’ll quote you a bunch of Bible passages where God violates people’s free will all over the place, so the free will defense for God is B.S. according to the Bible.
If you say God can’t be ordered around, the Jesus shouldn’t have said “And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me for anything in My name, I will do it.” Take Jesus at his word, and if it doesn’t work, don’t make excuses for him. He doesn’t have God’s ear.
In 1 Kings 18 Elijah demands 450 prophets of Baal perform a certain miracle, and he took their failure as proof that Baal either wasn’t real, or was weaker than Yahweh. I am simply judging your God by the same standard as Elijah judged Baal. I know, the story says Yahweh did perform the miracle, but I’ll bet the prophets of Baal had stories of Baal performing miracles. Elijah didn’t settle for stories of miracles Baal had preformed in the past. He required a real time miracle.
At least the prophets of Baal had something most Christians don’t. They really believed Baal would answer their prayers. They had real faith and were willing to show it.
As my dear departed, very Catholic, mother would say: “Bruce you’ve got the patience of a saint” to put up with the BS these Evangelicals throw at you.
Folks like Pastor Mark are afraid: They have devoted their lives to something that has no basis and there’s a voice within them asking, “What if?”
Instead of listening, they attack those who have answered that question, honestly, for themselves.
Very interesting observation, MJ… I immediately found myself thinking of a bully I knew in my public school days: That is exactly what he did, took his misery of the day, his chaos living with parents who were extremists (in this case, beer not religion) and when anybody would even look sideways nearby, he would go after them. It seems to me a very similar reaction as what I might term, the great commission reaction practiced by Mark here and countless others who pass this way. Mark points out that many people have asked him questions just as he asked Gerencser, as if to say, ‘What’s the big deal?’ Or, as he did respond here, “That isn’t and wasn’t my intent.”
Mark has an opportunity here in real life among people not under his authority (as at church) to look with an open heart at what he is being told about his behavior. Perhaps he really believes what he says about intent, both past and present but what he is being offered is, ‘No, Mark, you are not being responsible for your own attitude toward others and you can if you like, use your ‘faith’ to blame it on Jesus telling you to go into all the world…
Mark, what if Jesus the man, meant to go and do the life, not preach it… What if he gave money instead of collecting it for real estate and wages. What if he insisted on paying taxes for medical care and education among those around him…
The non-believers who hang around this blog have offered you real value in terms of possible insight regarding how you interact in the world. There will be no offering plate passed now or any requirement of you to admit what a wretch you are in your own heart. Your Christianity does that well enough. The harm it does is not cloaked here but quite quite naked.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the most unreasonable and prejudicial comments Bruce gets from fundamentalists – i.e. the ones that state the kind of assumptions about him that a real read through his site ought to have dispelled – are quite possibly doubters at heart themselves. Even if they don’t admit it to themselves – and maybe never will. It’s classic projection as a method of psychological defence. They have all these thoughts and feelings that they just can’t face accepting in themselves – so they project them onto ‘Bruce The Atheist’. As in – “It’s not ME that never really, truly believed – it’s HIM!”