Several days ago, an atheist told me I must have been pretty “stupid” if it took me fifty years to realize that Christianity was false. He proudly told me that he figured out as a child that God was a myth, and from that point forward he was an atheist. He added that “God” was no different from Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. In other words, he was saying that I must have been pretty dull if it took me five decades of my life to figure out what he figured out as a mere child.
Most atheists who take this approach with me grew up in nominal Christian homes Typically, they have little to no understanding of Evangelical theology and practice. Lacking knowledge and understanding of that which they criticize, these atheists set themselves up as the standard for deconversion. In their minds, anyone with any sense at all should be able to figure out there’s no God by the time he reaches sixth grade.
These hyperbolic atheists seem to not understand how Fundamentalist religious indoctrination and conditioning make it impossible for people to “see” the truth about God, Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity. I grew up in a dysfunctional Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) home. God, church, and the Bible permeated every aspect of my life. One-hundred-eighty times or more a year, I attended services and events that reinforced IFB theological and social beliefs and practices. That’s one service every other day. And then there were private acts of personal piety: daily prayer and Bible reading.
At the age of five, I told my mom that God wanted me to be a preacher when I grew up. Ten years later, I got saved and baptized, and two weeks later I stood before the church and told them God was calling me to preach. Several weeks after that, I preached my first sermon. At the age of nineteen, I enrolled at Midwestern Baptist College to study for the ministry. I married a preacher’s daughter. Together, we spent twenty-five years in the ministry. My life was all about the Evangelical God.
I spent almost fifty years in the Evangelical bubble. In the bubble, everything made sense; everything was internally consistent. Imagine a world where everyone has similar beliefs and moral values. Imagine where everything modeled to you as a child by adults and people in positions of authority reinforces IFB beliefs and practices. Imagine being part of a sect that separated itself from the “world”; from everything contrary to their version of “truth.” Imagine long lists of rules and regulations (church standards) that governed virtually every aspect of your life, from the length of your hair to the clothing you wear. Imagine being taught that God is all-knowing and all-seeing, and he will punish any deviations from church standards. All of these things taken together make one thing very clear: I couldn’t have been anything other than what I was.
My path in life was predetermined by my upbringing and intense religious conditioning and indoctrination. By the time I was old enough to understand life, it was already too late. Both counselors I have had over the years have told me that it is remarkable that I escaped the Evangelical bubble — especially as a preacher. By the time people reach the age of fifty, they rarely are willing to abandon beliefs they have held their entire lives. For me personally, I had invested my entire life in servitude to God and the church. I had sacrificed my financial and physical well-being seeking spiritual fulfillment and eternal life. The sunk costs were so great that it was almost impossible for me to walk away (and for Polly to walk away with me). Yet, I did. Why? Because I valued intellectual honesty. So stupid I was not. When my beliefs were challenged by evidence I couldn’t overcome, I changed my beliefs. And that’s why I am an atheist today.
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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Most nominal religious homes.
You did come to examine Christianity. And you escaped from the IFB cult. Sounds pretty smart to me!
Bruce, that person didn’t come from a hardcore Fundamentalist background like yours. For that person to say you’re “stupid “‘because you “took too long” to leave Christianity is like someone who had a cold berating a cancer patient for not making a faster recovery.
You just can’t live on someone else’s schedule.
Absolutely what MJ said.
Always walk in another man’s shoes first so your words don’t feel so feather weight. I’m talking to that traditional atheist.
Yes, it’s hard now to believe I was very much like you say, Bruce. For 50yrs, I was at services, doing evangelistic stuff etc a thousand times a year. I was totally inside that bubble, never questioning it. It’s the unspoken arrogance and sense of superiority that I can’t now believe I had. I thought my life had such PURPOSE, I was so fortunate to be Living For Jesus and all heathens around me had that god-shaped vaccuum in their hearts that he’d so wonderously filled for me and the prospect of eternal reward was therefore so thrilling! But then all the niggling little dissonances came together 8yrs ago and I applied reason….folk said I was brave. Not so, I could do no other than deconvert – unless I wanted to carry on living a lie, based on a bronze age book of fairy tales.
I don’t know what to make of these militant anti-theists. I wonder if they ever stop to see themselves in the mirror. They aren’t much different to fanatical religious followers, and it seems they struggle to respect the experiences of others.
I find them really annoying, especially when they start calling religious people “psychotic” or “delusional”.
I have at times berated myself for not figuring things out sooner but having grown up in the evangelical bubble I’m surprised that I finally did. When you are indoctrinated on a daily basis from birth in any belief system it is incredibly difficult to escape. When your family and social supports are immersed in these beliefs and everything you hold dear including your supposedly immortal soul will be lost if you abandon these beliefs all the more difficult. We are very much the product of our environment and upbringing.
I hear you, Bruce. I started to feel bad that I didn’t get put sooner too. I was questioning it as a child too – and I got put into fundamentalist Christian school around that time. What did that mean? 6 days a week of indoctrination at a time in my life when my brain wasn’t developed enough for critical thinking skills. We didn’t have the internet then, so I didn’t have access to much outside information. And by the time I did have access, I was so thoroughly indoctrinated that I was scared. My husband and I were discussing last night how college was a pivotal time for both of us. I admitted for the first time that it took 2 years for me to stop going to the Baptist Student Union every day and stop going to church on Sundays. That was a HUGE step. And it took me 2 years after college to be able to move away from the Bible Belt entirely. I left everyone and everything I knew to escape evangelicalism (though that concept wasn’t clear in my head, I just knew I had to get away from the Bible Belt).
We weren’t stupid. We had to work through mountains of sh!t without a lot of resources. It’s a wonder we succeeded.
I’ve been on the receiving end of these kinds of comments as well Bruce from the non-believers. 🙂 A lot of it was misogyny. I was use to it though as it was common in Christian circles too. Stupid Christian. Stupid atheist. sigh
Anyone who hasn’t been raised in a fundamentalist evangelical household cannot comment about conversion (or reconversion) to atheism. In my 20s, I had become disillusioned and tried to distance myself from my fundamentalist Baptist upbringing. However, it wasn’t until my 50s that I started to consider myself ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’. When you’re raised in a home with wall-to-wall Jesus, coupled with a fear or Hell, it’s not easy to decry the God, Jesus and Holy Spirit you were raised with. You are steeped in fundamentalist ideology almost from the moment of conception. When I was six months old, my older brother (then two years old) died. Several psychologists have suggested to me that this event, combined with my evangelical background, was likely to have had some traumatic effect on me. Decades later, I discovered cards sent from my father to my mother, purportedly from my deceased brother who was in Jesus’ arms in heaven. My father (speaking as my dead brother) was exhorting my mother to bring me to love Jesus, as he (my brother) did. I didn’t stand a chance.
Bruce, I come to your site because your experience, and that of many of your regular readers and participants, so closely matches my own. Cracks in my faith started appearing long ago but the path of deconversion led into my 50’s. I’m still traveling it.
Looking at certain other atheist sites (various subreddits for example), I can find a lot of young, hostile “atheists” who seem, to me, to mistake normal teen angst/rebellion and a rage against authority as deconstruction. These people are not helpful to me as I try to make sense of what happened to my faith and worldview. I admit I’m painting with a pretty broad brush; I also find some very detailed de-conversion testimonies from folks who really do understand, and can articulate, the faith they came from and the theologies that held them there.
You, and most everyone else here, understand how Christianity makes sense when you are in it. You know how its self-verifying nature, reward and punishment systems, and the community built around it all are hard to break free from. At the risk of invoking the “no true Scotsman fallacy”, I question just how “Christian” some of these folks were if they gave it up so easily.
I was raised US Catholic in the just-post-Vatican II years when parts of the US Catholic church were overjoyed that the religion was finally catching up with reality. From first through twelfth grades, I was taught by liberal nuns and lay teachers in the very much post V-II tradition. My mother was a much more conservative Catholic, my father was a lapsed Lutheran, and I saw enormous traps to discussing religion unnecessarily at home. Because my Catholic schools were supposedly on it, my parents didn’t question my beliefs.
And so, starting in college, I began an exploration of belief that I didn’t mention to my family of origin, that pinged Evangelical Christianity and even Paganism before accepting that no, there is no credible evidence for any sentient supernatural entity. And so, as someone who was most emphatically NOT raised in an Evangelical tradition, let me assure everyone: it’s STILL difficult to chuck the teachings of one’s youth. Fiercely painful. So is engaging with family you love who are still committed Christians, Catholics and Evangelicals alike. (In-laws are Evangelical.) Requires being on your game always, ready with the redirects and changes of subject. I love my family, but got used to keeping them all on a religion information diet sometime back as an undergrad. Life happens.
“My path in life was predetermined by my upbringing and intense religious conditioning and indoctrination.” Me, too. I also found comfort and unconditional love in a God who was not judgmental and capricious, at least by my lights. That was in contrast to the atmosphere in my childhood home. And I didn’t wake up to reality until I was in my fifties, as well. Religious conditioning and wishful thinking make it hard for some of us to confront life’s stark reality at all.
I’m struggling with this now. Both Christians and Atheists and even New Agers all name calling each other either idiots, crazies or “evil”. I’ve been thinking about this all weekend. I can’t even handle being around other people anymore or on social media because of all the anger, hatred and division between people right now concerning religious and “moral” beliefs & politics. Or the other huge division in America over dietary/nutrition advise and everyone following their own trendy diet be it veganism, carnivore, the new lion diet nonsense, or keto as if it was a religion. At this point I believe it has become a new form of religion or rather control group. It’s all destroying society.
Is this atheist smart enough to not reproduce and spare a few humans from suffering and death, not to mention having this atheist as their pompous progenitor?
Wow, making a post to call Bruce pompous on his own blog?? That’s not ironic at all. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
For those who are condemned to be the have-nots, all the parsleys, rosemary, and thymes consumed will not make one a sage. Condolences to you and yours. Better to not be. Pray that you still can marry up like Bruce.
Ah, now you revert to the condescension of the ignorant. That is a truly ingenious way to prove my prior point.
Sage reflects the color, although that may be more than your intellect can fathom. All of my marriages, including the current one, have been fine. So many good relationships which included lots of fun scenes 😉😇 I will assume you misunderstand that as well.
As for wishing me dead, that is a very long line and you can just queue up and wait.
I apologize for letting his comment get through. He was previously banned. He is using a sock account.
No worries Bruce. 🥰🥰🦄🌈
You are banned and blocked. I see this is a sock account for Jaqen H’ghar. Your IP address gave you away. Now, fuck off.
There are many intelligent people who are religious. It isn’t an IQ test. There are also ways for an intelligent person to intellectually patch up the holes. Conversion to atheism isn’t just one zinger either, the psychological phenomena known as schema comes in play. To deprogram oneself out of fundamentalism is difficult too. All of your peers accept something, it is insulating. Not related to IQ is the courage it takes to remove oneself from all social circles. I suspect your point and laugh smug atheist isn’t as swift as he believes himself to be.
Troy–Good point. I admit that one reason I held on to faith for as long as I could was a person whose intelligence I respect to this day. She wasn’t, as best as I could tell, a fundamentalist, but she was a Christian in a mainstream church and was, actually, more socially liberal than I was.
“He proudly told me that he figured out as a child that God was a myth, and from that point forward he was an atheist.”
Zoe: Well thank God for that!
(P.S. Couldn’t help myself Bruce.)
I was almost 40 when I quit, I didn’t want to be a quitter, and I didn’t want to simply toss aside what I had invested in, I don’t think I was stupid for not quitting religion earlier. If I’d quit earlier, I might have questioned whether it was my own decision or if I were doing it for someone else. I took my time and therefore I can own my decision.
Besides not wanting to deal with prejudice bigots the other reasons I quit going to church as soon as I became an adult is because who wants to get up early on the weekend and go sit for hours hearing some old man scream from the pulpit condemning everyone to hell who’s different from him. All that Southern Baptist screaming makes me nervous. Not to mention have to wear a dress and makeup too to avoid being made fun of. It’s actually a wonder anyone willingly goes.
Also, just because someone is smart enough avoid committing to a religion, doesn’t mean they are smart in other areas. I deconverted at 40 whereas my brother stopped believing as a little kid, but he is pretty dumb in other regards (money, relationships etc).
Chikirin,
Did you consider yourself a Christian when we first met in 2007-2008? I know I was an Emerging Church Christian — barely hanging on to my faith. That’s when I met Jim Schoch. We went down the drain together. 🙂
Yes, I was a 2nd-generation Christian.
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Presently, only the members of my household are aware of my stance.
But when I finally come out, I know my friends are gonna laugh at me.
They will laugh & mock until their bellies hurt. Godless heathens & pagans, the bunch of them!
When the time comes, would they lovingly accept me as one of their own?