By Neil Robinson, who blogs at Rejecting Jesus
I’d be interested to know, of those of you who are no longer Christians, what led you to become one in the first place.
There are thousands of websites and books that argue philosophically for the validity of Christianity, presenting their evidence for the resurrection and generally taking an intellectual approach to promoting the faith.
I’d be very surprised if this ‘evidence’, which is poor at best, and Christians’ philosophical arguments lead anyone to Jesus/God/faith.
My own experience is that conversion is an emotional experience. As a teen I listened to speaker after speaker at the YMCA I attended tell me how their sins had been forgiven and how getting to know Jesus had given them a great sense of peace and purpose. I originally went along to the Y, as we called it, to meet friends, play table–tennis and drink coffee while listening to the jukebox. I had no idea I was a sinner, nor that I needed forgiven, but I liked the enthusiasm – they said it was ‘joy’ – that the speakers conveyed. I thought too I could maybe do with a sense of purpose though I was, as a fifteen-year-old, quite happy drifting along relatively aimlessly.
The persistent drip feed of what Jesus could do for me (and others) was persuasive. It sowed the seed, as the Christian cliché has it. It took a lively young American evangelist from Arthur Blessitt Ministries to convict me. Jesus had turned his life around and he was on his way to Heaven. Denying Jesus, he said, was to crucify him all over again. So I prayed the sinner’s prayer and gave my life to Jesus too.
Nowhere in any of this was there anything philosophical; no ’proof’ of the resurrection; no explanation of how the Bible was the Word of God. All the talks were appeals to emotion: how I could feel forgiven, how I could know love, joy, and peace, how I could live forever after I died, up there with God in Heaven.
All the rationalisation came later, like it always does. Psychologists tell us that the intuitive part of the brain makes decisions ahead of the rational part, which seeks to catch up afterwards, supplying the reasons why the decision we’ve made is a good one. We’ve all done it when we’ve bought that item we don’t really need and have justified it all the way home. Religious conversion follows this pattern.
The thinking mind only becomes involved afterward, hence ‘post hoc rationalisation’. We then become complicit in our own indoctrination: Bible study (both group and individual), listening to sermons, learning from more mature Christians, worship (all those song and hymn lyrics reinforcing the mumbo jumbo), reading Christian books, immersing ourselves in the complexities of the religion. This is how it’s always been. As Paul puts in 1 Corinthians 3:2, we move from milk to meat as we delve further into ‘the mysteries of Christ’. Or, more accurately, we become more deeply indoctrinated.
But all of this comes later. The emotional experience is first, as it was for Paul, C S. Lewis (who described it as being ‘surprised by joy’), George W. Bush, and millions of other converts. In my Christian days, I personally ‘led people to the Lord’ by ‘sharing my testimony’ (I’ve still got the jargon!) and can assure you, those involved felt the Holy Spirit with a profound intensity. Only kidding. They became pretty emotional.
I know of no one who became a Christian by assessing the evidence for the resurrection, reading Paul’s theobabble, or analysing the central claims of Christianity. I suppose there might be some who, like Lee Strobel, insist they ‘came to faith’ this way. But faith and rational analysis are incompatible. When the writer of Hebrews (11:1) says: ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ he is oblivious to the fact that there isn’t any ‘evidence’ of unseen spiritual ‘things’. There are only our own feelings and emotional confirmation bias.
So that’s how it was for me. How was it for you?
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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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There was no defining moment for me becoming a Christian. I was simply born into it and trustingly accepted that what I was taught accurately described the condition of world. I received Jesus as my saviour and was baptized at a time when I couldn’t ask questions or think rationally. Once I stepped out the IFB cloister (enlisted in the military) things appeared very differently than what I was led to believe. I won’t go into any long stories here, but the road to nonbelief was slow and painful.
My parents required that I attend a church.
I became a Christian at around age 11. You are right, that it wasn’t the evidence. At that age, I couldn’t properly evaluate the evidence. I did like the moral teachings of Jesus, though within a few years I was beginning to notice that most Christians weren’t even trying to follow those teachings.
At around age 17, I was rereading the account of the resurrection (in Matthew). And I found it unbelievable. I guess that and the hypocrisy are what started me questioning it all.
I grew up Roman Catholic. I “accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior” during my freshman year in college because I was always something of a social misfit. When I look back on it, I realize that, if nothing else, joining the campus Christian fellowship and an Evangelical church simply felt more palatable and safer than, say, joining a fraternity with all of its exaggerated adolescent masculinity.
Which brings me to another reason I “got saved.” I was confused about my gender identity and sexuality. More precisely, I couldn’t make sense of it because the language wasn’t available to me. The only “transsexuals” I knew about were Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards—and the then-common stereotypes of transsexuals and transvestites (who were usually conflated with each other, or gay men) seen in movies and occasionally on TV. I didn’t feel l was like any of them but I also knew I wasn’t a man. I was scared to death—almost literally: I attempted suicide several times.
I believed—or, more accurately, hoped fervently—that Jesus could “save” me from my “confusion “ and despair. In other words, I thought faith would make me into a man and accept that identity. That, by the way, was also a major reason why I got married and joined the Army. Emotional decisions all the way around and they all failed.
Ironically, I as a pacifist can now say that of those emotional decisions—accepting Jesus, getting married and joining the Army—if any had a rational component, it was the last one: It at least helped me to pay for school!
when i was in high school, a lot of people bought into the “I Found It” movement. everybody had a bumper sticker that said “I Found It”, and, when you asked what “It” was, it was “god”… i drove around in a car with a bumper sticker that said “I AM IT”…
but, when i didn’t immediately tow the line and fall in with the rest of the crowd that was becoming “christian”, they started bullying me, and that was when i discovered a book called “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” in our school library. there were two copies, and neither one of them had ever been checked out, but i very quickly discovered that MERELY CARRYING the book around with me, pretty much, eliminated any bullying that might have happened… i never actually READ “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” (until much later, which is a different story), but, apparently, just seeing a big, thick book with the word “Gospel” on it, was enough for them. 🤣
ultimately, i decided that if i ever wanted to talk with these people about things they cared about, that i was going to have to learn the bible, which i did… and what i discovered was that 99.8% of what the bible REALLY says, is 180 degrees in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION from what the “christians” want you to believe. i spent several years in a Christian seminary, but, ultimately, left it all and became a hindu. 😉
That essay made me realize I never was a “Christian” as such. I grew up “blessed” to be surrounded by chaotic unreliable unreasonable adults, an experience that taught me to be a skeptic and to distrust authority. I was never more than superficially invested in the hocus pocus of Christianity and Catholicism so rejecting the nonsense was effortless, gradual, unemotional, and uneventful. Learning about evidence, what is and what isn’t, confirmed to my mind that religion was irrational and unreasonable. Indeed, evidence of things that can’t be verified or tested in any way is not evidence at all. That being so, I can’t help distrusting anyone educated in the science of evidence who nevertheless claims to be religious. The contradiction simply can’t be resolved.
My parents had a mixed marriage, and though I attended the Catholic church until my confirmation, I felt cynical about religion from a very early age.
In my late twenties, I had a crisis in which I began to question my character and choices, and felt that I needed to be remade in some way. I guess that left me wide open to a born-again experience, since I had just left the part of the country where I grew up and moved to a much more religious environment. Everyone down here in the south is constantly inviting you to their church. I felt lonely and out of place, and it’s an age when many people start to reevaluate. So after a visit to one very friendly small Baptist church, I decided that I wanted to know more about this stuff. So yes, there was the emotional component for sure, but in another way, I was almost like an undercover investigative reporter. I wanted to learn and make no assumptions, so I put aside my liberal, feminist, atheist sensibilities to see what all the hoopla was about. True, I learned much more about the Bible than I had ever known before. I learned the lingo and the culture. I think I was also tired of trying to run my own life. I had decided I wasn’t terribly good at it. So in addition to learning all this new christianity, I became passive. I became enough of a believer to think that anything that happened was in God’s plan. But under this plan, I lost both my parents, one pregnancy, and my marriage. Before that, things had been going a long reasonably well! I patiently going with it for 15 years, however.
One day, very suddenly, I was alone at work and had the opportunity to think a bit about the big picture. Suddenly, I realize that I had contracted with God to improve my life. He had not lived up to the bargain. I realize that I had forfeited my ego, my desires, and my hardwired personality, hoping for results that had never materialized. Suddenly, a motto of a previous employer popped into my head: “If it is to be, it’s up to me!” At that moment, I resolved to waste not one more second of my time on religion, and to plow ahead and use my own judgment, or, as the saying goes, to lean on my own understanding. Things began to improve from that day forward. They haven’t been perfect, but I have at least felt in control, rather than trusting some dodgy person at the wheel who may not even have a license!
When I was very young, my very religious aunt would give me books of bible stories, often in comic strip form, it took very little to realise the comic books I had were telling stories, and so were the bible ones
Butt hurt Dr. David Tee pontificates:
Unbelievers now think they can determine if someone’s salvation and redemption experience was real or just an emotional act. One atheist wrote an article titled “Why Most People Become Christians”.
…..
It is amazing how unbelievers have developed these great powers. First, they say there is no God, without evidence. Second, they say God did not protect Mr. Trump, again without evidence. Now they claim they can speak for everyone in the world and insult their redemption by Christ. Again, without real evidence.
Where do they get these cognitive abilities to be able to read everyone’s mind at the same time and come to these hysterical conclusions? It is just totally mind-boggling that the unbeliever can know everything and the Christian does not even know their own salvation experience.
Talk about being arrogant. The unbeliever knows nothing about the salvation experience and it is a low act saying that they can. The Bible says by their fruits we will know them so we take people at their word about being saved until we know a little more about them.
We don’t pretend to know everyone’s salvation experience and the unbelievers should follow suit. They are not the last word on anyone’s salvation.
https://theologyarchaeology.wordpress.com/2024/07/22/the-audacity-of-it-all-2/
If God was indeed involved in the Trump assassination attempt how about a different interpretation along the lines of “that was a warning, next time I won’t miss!” There’s just as much ‘evidence’ for this interpretation as any.
Yep. Maybe “God” is telling Trump to repent or stop his lying, wicked ways. “I won’t miss the next time,” Jesus allegedly said. 🤣🤣
Truth is . . . Trump is damn lucky the shooter missed. And so are we. I can only imagine how the gun-carrying, AR15-loving MAGA crowd would have responded had the shooter succeeded. They would have made 1/6 look like a Baptist Sunday School picnic. I fear similar violent behavior if Trump loses the election. Sadly, we are dealing with a well armed cult that thinks violence and murder is justified if it means their man becomes king.
Someone else DIED. That seems to have been conveniently (ahem) missed in the discussions about Trump’s miraculous escapes. “fuck it” said God, “the equation still balances, I’ll nail the other guy”
David Tee writes that “Second, they say God did not protect Mr. Trump, again without evidence.”
Well, we know for sure that God did not protect the firefighter who was killed or the other two people who were seriously injured. I guess God doesn’t care about them. Or maybe He does, and it’s all part of some twisted master plan for the greater good. Whatever that could possibly be…
This is a test from a testy tester who is tired of being tested. 🤣
Thanks everyone for your responses. They’re all really interesting and seem to have left many of us with issues to deal with long after deconversion.
As for Fake Doctor T, he dismisses everyone’s experiences with an overwrought hissy-fit: ‘The unbeliever knows nothing about the salvation experience and it is a low act saying that they can.’ Does he not understand that many of us were believers and have every right to share our conversion experiences? Talk of arrogance! The man is completely lacking in empathy and intelligence.
This is a portion of a blog I wrote years ago Neil. I think it probably fits here.
Intermingled with the fun of camp was a pressing and somber theme. This camp was part of the Jesus movement that was taking place in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This was an evangelical camp, a born-again camp and the place where the choice of heaven or hell was presented. Jesus and heaven, or Satan and hell. Hormones, Jesus and Hell, what a lovely basket of goodies, eh?
The Bible studies at camp, were the typical stuff that most of us knew by heart. Most of us, including myself, had grown up in the church, had been confirmed and were members of our churches. Here though, at this camp, there was a constant additional theme tacked on to each study presented. We heard, over and over again, that one must be “born-again” to enter into heaven with Jesus when we died. This could be achieved by “asking God to forgive our sins and then accepting Christ as our Saviour.”
Counsellors would get up and share testimony after testimony of being better people after being born-again. Campers were given the chance to respond to the gospel message by going forward to announce their decision to follow Christ. At times, it felt like a popularity contest or a way to get the attention of the holy hot guy counsellors. If we didn’t go forward, we were reminded of how we needed Christ in our lives and how to ask Him into our hearts. Honestly, I’d only ever known Jesus to be in my life and yet, over and over again, I heard about two choices. Heaven or hell. Jesus or the devil. Life or death. Until this time in my life, Jesus had always been about love. Apparently, He was also about judgement, because I learned at camp that if you didn’t accept Christ as your Saviour, and you died, you’d go to hell. The very idea, that someone like me, that had never “not” believed in Jesus, would go to hell, was absurd.
Have you ever wished you could go back in time and change things up just a bit? Part of me wishes I had gone to the Director of the camp and asked, “What the hell are you people talking about?” Well, I didn’t and as camp progressed, I couldn’t for the life of me even imagine hell and being separated from Jesus. One foggy morning while laying there in my bunk, I gazed out my cabin window and thought about the choices presented to me. As I have said, I had always chose Christ. I didn’t know anything else. The born-again rhetoric had gotten to me. I talked to God.
My conversation went something like this:
Dear Jesus,
I love you. I’ve always loved you. I want to be in heaven with you when I die. These people here, tell me that I need to accept you as my personal Lord and Saviour, so that I can go to heaven to be with you when I die. I don’t want to go to hell Jesus. My heart ached at the thought of not being with Jesus. With tears in my eyes, I asked Jesus to forgive my sins and come into my heart.
The Christian life as I had known it, ended that day. I was heaven bound. I was born-again.
There was no public display of my decision. My prayer had been spoken in private and the seriousness of that moment as I perceived it, was too important to me to be flaunting it about in front of anyone.
Towards the end of camp, I noticed a friend of mine was kneeling down beside one of the older camp counsellors, at the foot of an outdoor wooden cross. Wow, had she been so moved, to just fall to her knees like that? I stood and watched for the longest time, but eventually wandered off as they continued to kneel at the cross. Later, she came up to me, and the look on her face told a story. She had that, ‘What the hell just happened?’ look on her face. Then she told me that this counsellor basically took her from the campground and put her at the foot of the cross. He was telling her, she must be born-again. She did not resist because he had frightened her and she couldn’t understand what was going on. He persisted in preaching to her about her heaven or hell choice and in order to escape from his clutches, she eventually prayed the salvation prayer. It was then, that he let her go.
It is too easy to take advantage of the vulnerability of adolescence, to secure another name in God’s book of life. How sad that evangelicalism at its core, is suppose to be about “life” but really it’s all about “death.” This threat of death and hell, propels the evangelist to keep on keeping on with warning anyone within his or her reach. Don’t wait, it might be too late. Salvation camps, can quite literally, scare the hell out of anyone, including some of our most vulnerable people, our children.
Originally blogged in 2008.
‘…..It is too easy to take advantage of the vulnerability of adolescence….’ I believe its called ‘The 4-14 window.’ Most conversions take place during those formative – and insecure – years. Once at a conference for church Youth Leaders, we were asked to raise our hands if we’d been converted in our teenage years. Nearly every hand went up.The guy was proving to us how valuable and special our youth leadership roles were in preying on the vulnerabilities of those unconfident and uncertain years and grabbing unguarded and sometimes naive kids for the kingdom!.
I’ve really enjoyed reading people’s comments here about how they became Christian. My story is similar. I grew up in a Christian family. When I was 3, NY parents separated, and my mom and I moved in with her parents who were devout Southern Baptists. Grandpa was a deacon and Grandma was a Sunday school teacher, choir member, Women’s Missionary Union teacher. We were at church multiple times a week – it wasn’t an option not to go. I was a curious child and had a lot of questions, and my mom tried to answer them by saying that some Bible stories were allegory, or stories to teach lessons, but others were definitely real life the virgin birth or resurrection. I couldn’t figure put how to tell the difference. My mom said some things I would just have to wait to ask Hod in heaven.
My family sent me to a fundamentalist Christian school when I started 5th grade, so I had sermons or Bible class 6 days a week. My critical thinking skills weren’t developed yet, and I had so much indoctrination, so there was no choice. After I was older, I felt the cognitive dissonance, but I was afraid to question too much because of fear taught by Christianity about leaving, doubting, hell, etc. It was a hard road out where emotion and reason collided.
I feel fortunate in that I’m not sure I ever truly believed god was real, even though I attended multiple Protestant churches as a young person. (My mom was a church-hopper.) Still, I went through the motions, got a little emotional over the alter calls (all that weeping over Jesus is contagious) and went to church camps, the most painful clique-ish experiences I’ve ever had. Once I went to college I couldn’t have cared less about religion, then I met my husband, who was deeply into the Church of Christ at the time, and I went along to please him.
We moved to Montana and after checking out the Church of Christ here, rejected it immediately because the only time we visited the preacher was ranting about how AIDS was god’s punishment for gay people. Then we found a nice Mennonite Church down the road and attended there for a few decades. About
a dozen years ago I started playing hockey on Sunday mornings and never went back to church. I’ve had zero emotions about fading away from any faith, but I think my journalist’s training taught me to be skeptical, so that’s been helpful.
I’m sure Bruce knows lots of Mennonites in Ohio and the progressive-type Mennonites are, to my mind, one of the more benign denominations. I appreciate their emphasis on simple living, and they also do good in the world without all the pushy evangelizing. I liked the people at our local church and miss regular interactions with them, but I can’t go to services and pretend that I agree with the god stuff. Plus I have better things to do than sing boring songs and listen to dull sermons.