Every Christmas season, I receive a handful of emails from Evangelicals irritated and upset by the fact that I still celebrate Christmas — which is my favorite holiday. According to these warriors for Jesus, Christmas is a CHRISTIAN holiday; one that atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians have no business celebrating. How dare I celebrate a holiday that ONLY belongs to them!
First, I can do whatever I want. Don’t like that I celebrate Christmas? Tough shit. Go concern yourself with something that matters.
Second, whatever Christmas may have been in the past, it is no longer primarily a Christian holiday today. Sadly, most Christians are ignorant about the history of Christmas. How many of them know that Christmas was, at one time, banned by Puritans — the godliest of godly people? Christmas has evolved over the years. Today, it is largely a secular holiday, sprinkled with myths about a virgin-born, sinless God-man. One can celebrate Christmas without all the religious baggage. Others enjoy a secular-religious mix of celebration.
Bruce, Jesus is THE reason for the season! Really? Do you want to put this notion to the test? If someone is a committed follower of Jesus, you would think that their yard and house Christmas decorations would reflect their devotion to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Take a drive around your community, paying attention to each home’s decorations. How many of them have solely religious decorations — say crosses, creches, or signs with Bible verses? Others may have a mixture of religious and secular decorations. And finally, some homes will only have secular decorations.
What you will find is that very few homes strictly have religious decorations. In my community most homes either have secular decorations or a mix of religious and secular decorations. Completely religious displays are far and few in between.
If it is hypocritical for an atheist such as myself to celebrate Christmas, what are we to make of Christians who have wholeheartedly embraced the secular aspects of Christmas? Talk about hypocritical. If Jesus really is the reason for the season, why didn’t most Christians get the memo?
Christmas is whatever you want it to be. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do for the holiday. And if Christians push the issue with you, I suggest asking for Biblical evidence for their assertions about Christmas. Better yet, point out the numerous contradictions in Jesus’ birth narratives found in the gospels. Or, just smile and ignore them. Remember, you don’t owe anyone an explanation for how you live your life.
All praise be to Loki for this wonderful holiday season.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Recently, I received the following email from a Christian man named William:
NOW THAT YOU HAVE RENOUNCED CHRISTIANITY DO YOU FEEL YOU OWE IT TO THE CHRISTIANS YOU PREACHED TO AN EXPLANATION – HENCE, YOUR BLOG? AND WHEN YOU WERE A PREACHER DID YOU “TRULY” BELIEVE(AT LEAST AT THAT POINT IN TIME) WHAT YOU WERE TELLING THEM? OR WERE THERE DOUBTS FORMING EVEN THEN?
Evidently, William must think I am deaf since he SHOUTED his message to me. That aside, Williams asked three questions:
DO YOU FEEL YOU OWE IT TO THE CHRISTIANS YOU PREACHED TO AN EXPLANATION?
WHEN YOU WERE A PREACHER DID YOU “TRULY” BELIEVE WHAT YOU WERE TELLING THEM?
WERE THERE DOUBTS FORMING EVEN THEN?
No, I don’t owe former congregants an explanation for my loss of faith. Why should I, any more than anyone else, owe people an explanation for the major decisions I have made in my life? I owe my partner, Polly, an explanation, and maybe my children, grandchildren, siblings, and close friends, but everyone else? I don’t owe them anything. That said, I have spent the past eighteen years explaining why I left Christianity. Anyone, including former church members, can easily read about and understand my story. Millions of words have been sacrificed in my attempt to share my past and present experiences. A quick search of this site will answer every question a person might have.
William asks if I “truly” believed what I was preaching to church members? Of course, I did. There’s nothing in my life that suggests I was anything other than a committed follower of Jesus. You will search in vain for someone who knew me at the time that would suggest otherwise. While I am now an atheist, at the time I believed the core tenets of Christianity and did my best to follow the teachings of the Bible.
Doubts? We all have them. Did I ever have doubts as an Evangelical preacher? Sure. The difference between then and now is how I handle doubts. As a Christian, I trusted God to make all things known to me at his appointed time, according to his perfect will for my life. Instead of trusting God, I now trust my intellect and the academic skills I have developed over the years. When doubts crop up, I try to resolve them. And when I can’t, I say a prayer to Loki and put the matter away until I have better knowledge and understanding. Doubt is very much a part of the human experience.
I hope I adequately answered William’s questions.
Saved by Reason,
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
When you read articles like this who say people are leaving Christianity, they are not really leaving at all. What is happening is that fake Christians are leaving long dead churches that have the appearance of life.
Kevin Schaal would have us believe that the people leaving Christianity are all fake Christians; that anyone who deconverted is a fraud. Surely Schaal knows this claim is a lie. Surely he knows people who left Christianity who were committed followers of Jesus Christ. Does he really believe that these former Christians, who were pastors, evangelists, missionaries, youth pastors, worship leaders, deacons, Sunday school teachers, or junior church workers — all people who were devoted believers — are all frauds?
No, the real issue here is Schaal’s Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) soteriology. Once a person is saved, they never, ever can lose their salvation. Whether called once-saved-always-saved or the perseverance/preservation of the saints, the bottom line is this: once a person prays the sinner’s prayer, they are forever saved. The problem, of course, is that born again church members can and do walk away from Christianity. Some IFB preachers claim that these scoffers are saved, no matter what; that they will lose rewards in Heaven because they weren’t faithful until the end.
I suspect Schaal finds the very thought of people such as the Evangelical-preacher-turned-atheist Bruce Gerencser being in Heaven with him disgusting, so he cooks up ways to claim that these defectors were never Christians. According to the quote above, Schaal believes people like me were fake Christians. Talk about a conspiracy theory. Schaal would have us believe that these former servants of the most high God deceived everyone around them. Does he realize how absurd this is? I would have had to deceive scores of people, including close friends, colleagues in the ministry, professors, IFB family, and five IFB preachers in my wife’s family. This is about as believable as the moon landing hoax or the existence of God.
Regardless of Schaal’s rigid theology, followers of Jesus do deconvert. They do reach a place in their lives where the central claims of Christianity no longer make any sense to them. The deconversion process is messy, but in the end, those who deconvert do so because they can no longer buy what Christianity is selling.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse, for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened.
Engage in discussion and debate with Evangelical apologists long enough, and Romans 1 is sure to come up. The moment an atheist or other unbeliever denies the Evangelical God’s existence, Evangelicals will quote Romans 1, saying that unbelievers KNOW the truth because God has revealed it to them, so they are without excuse.
According to Evangelical apologists, God revealed himself to all of us several ways:
Creation
Conscience: the law of God written on our “hearts”
Divine revelation:the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God
The thinking goes is that all any of us need to do is look at the wonders of creation and conclude, “God did it.” Fine, I always say. Which God? Why do apologists assume the creator God is their deity? I have yet to have an Evangelical connect the dots between the God of creation and the triune God of the Christian Bible.
All of us have a conscience, but there’s a lot we don’t know about it. Evangelicals, on the other hand, are convinced that their deity has written his law on the conscience/heart/mind of every human being. This is how mortals determine right from wrong, Evangelicals say. However, left unanswered is the question, “What law?” The Ten (or nine) Commandments? The law of Moses? Where is this “law” so we can know exactly what God expects of us.
Evangelicals will confidently state that God supernaturally gave us the Bible so we can know exactly what it is he requires of us. The Bible is the divine blueprint for life, teaching believers everything they need to know about life and godliness. If this is so, why are so many Evangelicals stupid as a brick, showing that they know very little about what the Bible says? You would think Christians would make studying, knowing, and understanding the Bible the most important priority of their lives. But, they don’t. Why is that?
As an atheist, I am not suppressing anything. I am willing to embrace truth wherever it is found. If Christian apologists can provide compelling evidence for the existence of their God, I’m listening. Whether I would convert remains to be seen, but I would, at the very least, give their evidence a hearing. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced. I haven’t heard an Evangelical apologist give a compelling argument for the existence of God and the veracity of Christianity in years. Same old arguments over, and over, and over again. Setting aside esoteric philosophical arguments for which I have zero interest, Evangelical apologists use a handful of arguments to justify their beliefs. Some of these defenses of Christianity are “interesting,” but none of them close the deal — at least for me, anyway.
Maybe Evangelicals should ask themselves whether they are the ones suppressing the truth; that conditioning and indoctrination keep them from hearing any other arguments but their own.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Sophomore class, Midwestern Baptist College, Pontiac, Michigan 1977. Polly is in the first row, the first person on the left. Bruce is in the third row, the eighth person from the left
Last week, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) pastor David Bulka stopped by to preach to me his peculiar version of the Christian gospel. Bulka left the following comment on the post titled Seven Reasons People Get Saved. He didn’t bother to engage my writing, choosing instead to preach and testify.
I am not sure what Bulka hoped to achieve. We both went to Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan at the same time in the late 1970s. I only knew him in passing since he didn’t live in the dorm. Bulka surely knows that I was a pastor for twenty-five years, so I am at a loss to understand what value his comment may have to me or the other readers of this blog.
SEE YOU LATER”. I am 69 years old.
Burba tells me “SEE YOU LATER” four times. See me later, where and why, exactly? Is he meeting me at the strip club?
I want to ask you these Questions. Did Jesus Christ Rise from the dead after he was crucified?
No. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is a myth.
Is He the son of God?
No.There is no God. No God, the Father, no, God, the Son, and no God, the Holy Spirit.
Is He the way the truth and the life as He said He was?. John 14:6.
No.
You will respond, either, yes , no or I am unsure.
You do know these are claims, and not evidence, right? If you want me to believe a Jewish apocalyptic preacher was executed and resurrected from the dead, you are going to have to provide evidence for your claim. Not the Bible, either. The Bible is a book of claims, and if you want to convince unbelievers of the veracity of your claims, you are going to have to do more than preach sermonettes and regurgitate prooftexts.
My personal experience, and Faith, say YES. and since Jesus Christ has changed my life to a better life and I have seen Him work miracles in my life and others. I have decided, What Jesus is, was and will be…. I will follow and encourage others to do like wise.
Surely you know — well, maybe not since you went to Midwestern, with its Sunday school-level classes — that personal and anecdotal stories aren’t evidence. Your testimony applies to you alone. I have no way of knowing whether it is true.
You said, “I have decided.” All well and good. Go with God, right? But, I have no intentions of following after a Christian pied piper. You want me to follow along? Please provide actual evidence for your claims.
My advise after studying the Bible for over 55 years. Is Doubt your Doubt, and have child like faith. I respect all people, but warn them not to risk being wrong, especially in believing HELL is real or not.
Childlike faith has led many people to deconvert. A childlike faith is no match for rigorous arguments against Christianity. That may play well within the walls of the church, but here in the real world, lambs with “childlike faith” tend to get eaten alive by wolves like me.
It was created for the devil and his angels. John 8.
No Hell, either. According to your theology, most of the people in Hell aren’t devils or angels. Hell is filled with your friends, neighbors, and church members. It seems, then, that Hell was created for humans too.
I have enjoyed the Christian life.
And I enjoyed the Christian life too, but not as much as I enjoy my life as an agnostic atheist and humanist. Sleeping in on Sundays, watching NFL games, sex in positions other than the missionary position, watching nudity on TV and not feeling guilty, drinking a shot or three of whiskey, and making liberal use of curse words — ah, the wonders of a secular life.
The Kingdom life which gives peace, Joy, righteousness.
Okay? I have similar feelings, as do most atheists (and other religious practitioners). Do you really think these character traits are reserved for your brand of Christianity alone?
My faith in a Holy , loving God, the God of Abraham, Issac Jacob, Sarah…etc has worked for me.
Okay? Your anecdotal stories are unable to provide evidence for the truthfulness of your claims. That’s why you ultimately appeal to childlike faith.
…. SEE YOU LATER….when we stand before the JUDGE of ALL CREATION. If you do not believe, Then thats on you. SEE YOU LATER…If it is not true… At least I have enjoyed life basking in peace, Joy, righteousness loving and serving the LORD Jesus Christ. A Atheist might say, in their faith…”.you Christians were wrong.” We will have to wait and see. But I have enjoyed the Kingdom Life, no regrets. “SEE YOU LATER”
There is no afterlife; no final judgment either. One life, twill soon be past, and then you are dead. Are you a Muslim? Are you a Buddhist? Why not? You using Pascal’s Wager reveals a fatal flaw in your argument. You only want to apply this to your particular flavor of Christianity, when you must apply it all of man’s extant religions. Surely, you want to cover all of your bases. If not, why are you unwilling to do what you are asking me to do?
You seem to ignorantly think that there is no life (meaning and purpose) outside of faith in Jesus Christ. This is patently untrue. I live a good life. I have a wonderful partner. We’ve been married for forty-seven years. We are blessed to have six children and sixteen grandchildren. All of our children are gainfully employed and generally live good lives. Two of our grandchildren attend college, one at Miami University (Ohio) and the other at Ohio State University. Our four inside cats are fat and happy, and we do everything we can to give our outside feral/stray cats a similar life (Tonight we put lights in their crates (27 gallon plastic tubs with a cut a hole inn for the cats to enter, and then put straw in tubs to keep the cats warm).
David, you have been lied to about unbelievers. Either that, or you have constructed a straw man in your mind, one that bears no resemblance to non-Christians like me.
Let me be clear, I don’t need God, Jesus, the Bible, the church, or saving faith to live a good life. You seem to forget that I was a pastor for twenty-five years. I pastored scores of born-again Christians; that I had numerous ministerial colleagues. I know first hand that things within the church are not as you seem to think they are. I’ve concluded that there is little to no difference between the lived experiences of Christians (of all stripes, including IFB believers) and those of the unwashed, uncircumcised Philistines of the world.
I am more than happy to discuss or debate these issues with you, David. All I ask is that you provide actual evidence for your claims, and not anecdotal stories, sermons, and prooftexts.
Be well.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I was an Evangelical Christian for fifty years, and a pastor for twenty-five years. I had a lot of personal experiences with the God of the Bible. How could I not since the Holy Spirit lived inside of me 24/7, teaching and guiding me in everything pertaining to life and godliness? My life was littered with personal interactions with the thrice holy God.
At the age of six, I had my first supernatural encounter, not with God, but Satan. One day, I “sensed” the Devil’s presence in my bedroom. I left my room, and when I came back, I found that my clothes that were on top of the dresser were thrown all over the room. Who did this? I was certain Satan did. The more likely culprit was my Satanic five-year-old brother or three-year-old sister. 🙂 However, thanks to the indoctrination and conditioning I had already received at Scott Memorial Baptist Church (now Shadow Mountain Community Church) in San Diego, I was certain that Satan was real and personally involved in my life (just as Jesus was).
At the age of fifteen, I attended an Al Lacy revival meeting at Trinity Baptist Church in Findlay. By then, I had attended church almost 1,500 times, both with my parents and by myself. I heard scores of gospel sermons, yet until the Lacy revival, I had never repented and put my faith in Jesus Christ. On that night, I “felt” deep Holy Spirit conviction. At the appointed time, I went forward and was instantaneously saved. I had no doubt that it was God himself speaking me.
Two weeks later, I again felt Holy Spirit conviction, this time over what to do with my life. I decided on that night that God was calling me to preach. I went forward during the altar call and professed before the church, including dozens of my high school friends, that God was calling me to enter the ministry. Several weeks later, I preached my first sermon before one hundred or so junior high school students. My text? 2 Corinthians 5:20: Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. (KJV)
Over the years, I had numerous personal experiences with God. I sometimes felt his presence while I preached, and there were times when the presence of God was felt by most people in attendance. There were times when I felt God’s presence when praying, especially when I was praying by myself in the darkness of the church sanctuary.
For most of my life, I believed God was ever-present in my life, even though he rarely, if ever answered my prayers. How did I KNOW that I was experiencing the presence of God? What evidence did I have for those experiences? None, outside of faith.
A common thread in these programs is the requirement that religious believers (mainly Christians, Muslims, and Jews) provide EVIDENCE for their claims, and not personal stories and testimonies. The reason for this is simple. Personal experiences apply to the individual person alone. I shared several personal experiences in this post. Are these stories evidence for the existence of God? Of course not. All these stories say is that I had these experiences and believed they were true. By faith, I believed God was speaking to me and working in my life. Could I justify these claims? No, but I believed them to be true.
Over the years, scores of Evangelicals, along with a handful of Catholics, Muslims, and Mormons, have dumped their personal testimonies in the comment section, thinking that I would be won over to Jesus by their experiences. And when I reject their supernatural stories, believers storm off in anger, thinking they have provided me evidence for the existence of God and the veracity of the Bible. They haven’t. No personal testimony is going to reach me for Jesus. Just because Evangelicals say that God did A, B, C, and D for them doesn’t mean he actually did. I remain unconvinced until empirical evidence is provided for supernatural claims. And until that evidence is forthcoming, I cannot and will not believe. I am unwilling to “faith it.”
Are you a former Evangelical Christian? Did you have supernatural interactions with God/Jesus/Holy Spirit? Did you ever sense the presence of God in your life? How do you explain these experiences now that you no longer believe? Please share your stories in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
If is carrying a lot of weight in this question. How would one go about “proving” Christianity? So far, every argument I have heard from believers allegedly “proving” Christianity comes up short. Quite frankly, many of the arguments Christian apologists use are fantastical or absurd. These arguments may work with people already predisposed to Christianity, but they won’t usually work atheists. Apologists continue to churn out books defending Christianity, but these books aren’t for unbelievers. The target audience is believers, and the goal is to provide them with “evidence” to reinforce and justify their claims, along with settling their nerves after having an atheist eviscerate their beliefs. (Many atheists are former Christians themselves. They know the Bible inside and out.)
Is it possible that someone could convince me that Christianity is true? I would like to say yes, wanting to keep an open mind, but knowing all I do about Christianity, the Bible, and the various arguments used by apologists to defend the faith, I can’t imagine any Christian being able to convince me that I should return to Christianity. If you are a Christian, you are welcome to try to convert me, but I hope you can handle rejection and disappointment; that’s likely what you will experience by trying to put another notch on your gospel six-shooter.
Will this post stop apologists from trying to evangelize me? Of course not. As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, a believer will leave a comment on this site or send me an email detailing their supercalifragilisticexpialidocious argument they are sure will lead me to the light. Sorry, but I was a Christian for most of my life. I spent five decades in the “light.” I was a pastor for twenty-five years. I am confident that I have heard every possible argument for the existence of the Christian deity and the alleged veracity of Christianity. What could you possibly say that I haven’t heard countless times before? Feel free to advance whatever argument you think will reach me, but understand that there is little doubt about whether I have heard it (or used it myself) before.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I love it when a new reader assumes that I am just an illiterate atheist who doesn’t know anything about the Bible. Typically, such people lack curiosity, so they don’t read my ABOUT page. Then I let them know that I was part of the Evangelical church for fifty years; that I spent twenty-five years pastoring churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. When told this, their arguments switch to questions about what I “really” believed or what hurt me enough to cause me to leave Christianity. Sometimes, Evangelicals, with a wave of their sanctimonious hands, dismiss my story out of hand, saying I never was a believer. What they never do is engage me on what the Bible actually teaches.
Sometimes, when confronted with posts by me that challenge their beliefs, Evangelicals dismiss me by saying that it is evident I have never read the Bible. I snicker when someone says this to me. I have read the Bible from table of contents to index numerous times — more times than MOST Evangelical Christians. Further, I spent 20,000 hours of my life reading and studying the Bible, reading countless (well, I could count them if I were inclined to do so) theological tomes in my studies. Years ago, a Christian school student walked into my study and looked at all my books, saying, “Preacher, did you read all of these books?” I smiled and said, “most of them.”
Recently, I bought an NRSV study Bible. I plan to re-read the Bible as time allows. I am interested in seeing how my thinking about the Biblical text has evolved over the past seventeen years. Granted, some atheists are illiterate about the core teachings of Christianity. Believe me, I find their pontifications embarrassing too. Atheism is not well served by apologists who are too lazy to study and understand that which they criticize. The good news is that many atheists are former Christians. We are not ignorant of what the Bible teaches.. Contrary to what Thiessen said above, We know the Bible inside and out — no Holy Ghost needed. We are living testaments to their false claim that people deconvert because they were poorly taught or lacking knowledge about the Bible. If you happen to think all atheists are stupid, by all means press your claims in the comment section. Let’s see who is stupid.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I recently received an email from a seventy-five-year-old attorney — a former atheist — who wanted me to know exactly what he thought about me and my deconversion from Christianity. Much of the letter was spent on the man telling me how smart he was and how he came to learn that materialistic atheism (his definition) is “the one ism I can say with near-certainty is flat-out false.” What does he believe?
I am content with a belief in a higher intelligence, a genuine meaning and purpose to human existence, and the continuation of consciousness after physical death – all because this is where I believe the best evidence firmly points.
Okay? And he felt the need to share this with me why, exactly? I have been an atheist for seventeen years. In all those years, I have never gone to someone’s blog or social media page unsolicited to attack their religious beliefs or deconstruct their story. I don’t understand the logic behind such behavior other than it makes the person passing judgment feel right or superior. Explain his motivation for saying things to me such as:
No need to respond, because I’m not really interested in you either!
I am somewhat older than you (75), highly educated, and have traveled a not-dissimilar path. However, my landing spot was entirely different and has left me, I hope, less bitter and consumed by anger than you seem to be.
The posts of yours that I have read strike as exemplifying the familiar figure of someone who once bought into beliefs that are patently silly, felt angry and betrayed when the silliness finally became apparent to him, and now harbors deep anger and bitterness beneath a not-very-convincing facade of “atheist liberation.”
I have to wonder to what extent your current position reflects an atheism that is more a knee-jerk embracing of beliefs that are the polar opposite of what you formerly believed (or at least pretended to believe) than a genuine commitment arrived at after a diligent exploration of the best evidence and arguments.
As much as I have enjoyed Bart Ehrman’s work, this was definitely his path as well – “If what I formerly believed isn’t 100% true, none of it is true.” This is a very lazy and short-sighted approach to the big questions.
To summarize, this man thinks:
I am bitter (stated twice)
I am consumed by anger (stated three times)
My deconversion was a knee-jerk reaction to Christianity
I took a lazy and short-sighted approach to the big questions of life
None of these claims is true, as I have made abundantly clear in numerous posts over the years. This means that this man has either not invested much, if any, time in reading what I actually wrote about my journey or he has constructed in his mind a straw man of the Evangelical-turned-atheist Bruce Gerencser. I suspect both are likely true.
This man declared, “All I care about, or have ever cared about, is what is ultimately, ontologically True.” To that I reply, “Not me.” I care about a lot of things of life, but “what is ultimately, ontologically True” doesn’t make my top ten list of important things to care about in life. Sorry, but I am sixty-eight and in poor health. I am on the short side of life. Knowing this, I focus on that which matters the most to me: my partner of forty-seven years, our six adult children and their spouses, our sixteen grandchildren, and, yes, our cats — both the four inside cats, and ten or more outside cats (all of which are either stay or feral animals).
Christianity told me that the Bible had the answers to the big questions of life. I learned that this claim is false; that religion has no better (and sometimes worse) answers to these questions than secular worldviews. People are free to ponder their purpose, meaning, and whether there is life after death, but we are under no obligation to do so. For me personally, life is too short to spend much time pondering what life might be instead of living life every day to its fullest.
My reply to this man was direct:
Why did you write me? Your email is no different from those I receive from Fundamentalist Christians. Your false judgements reveal you haven’t read much of my autobiographical material.
Try harder, friend.
As of the writing of this post, I have not received no response from him.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Recently, a young Evangelical pastor emailed me and asked me two questions:
What made you leave the faith?
Why [would] you would leave a faith that you defended for a long time?
I am frequently asked these or similar questions. Usually, I refer people to the WHY? page for answers to their questions, but there’s something about this pastor — maybe it is his age or proximity to where I live — that interests me, so I thought I would attempt to answer his questions.
I was raised in an Evangelical Christian home. From the time I was a child until I was fifty years old, I attended church every time the doors were open. Saved at the age of fifteen and called to preach two weeks later, I was a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. Imperfect, to be sure, the bent of my life was towards holiness (without which no man shall see God).
At the age of nineteen, I moved to Pontiac, Michigan to enroll in classes at Midwestern Baptist College — an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution. While at Midwestern, I met Polly, and two years later we married. Polly and I spent the next thirty years faithfully serving Jesus. Whether between churches or pastoring them, our lives revolved around the ministry (for good or ill). If I counted my entrance into the ministry from the first time I preached to when I deconverted, all told I preached for thirty-three years. (Unlike most of my fellow college students, I regularly preached all through school at a drug rehabilitation center in Detroit.)
After leaving Midwestern, I began a ministerial journey that took me to churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. While I entered the ministry as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, my path later led to ministry opportunities at Southern Baptist, Christian Union, Sovereign Grace Baptist, and Non-denominational churches. Along the way, we were blessed with six children, including a daughter with Down syndrome.
Fast forward to 2004. I decided that I was done with the ministry. The reasons were many, but not the focus of this post. Suffice it to say, these reasons played an insignificant part in my loss of faith. Polly and I decided that we were at a place in life where we wanted to help a congregation without being its pastor. We spent the next four years visiting churches in Ohio, Arizona, California, Michigan, and Indiana. We cast a wide theological net, but after visiting over one hundred churches, — attending some of them for months — we concluded that the only difference between the churches was the name over their doors. After buying in home here in Ney in 2007, we primarily attended mainline churches — a sign of our increasingly liberal politics.
As my politics and theology evolved, I asked myself what it was I truly believed? What were the non-negotiables of my life? This led to me carefully and comprehensively reexamining my political and theological beliefs — a process that continues to this day. Polly and I spent countless hours talking about our beliefs. I read aloud to Polly passages from books written by men such as Dr. Bart Ehrman. We talked about what it was we really believed about the Bible. These discussions, and my continued investigation of core Christian doctrines, led me to conclude that the central claims of Christianity were false. Teachings that were once dear to me, no longer made sense. (Please see The Michael Mock Rule: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense.) On the last Sunday in November, 2008, Polly and I attended church for the last time.
These days, I self-identify as an agnostic atheist. Polly is an agnostic, indifferent, and, at times hostile, to organized religion. Our life experiences were very different — even in the ministry — so it should come as no surprise that what motivated our deconversions might be different. Same zip code, to be sure, but different journeys. I am the intellectual of the family. I spent most of my life reading, studying, and preaching the Bible. My experiences are necessarily different from Polly’s, and that’s why our reasons for leaving Christianity vary.
Let me conclude with answering this pastor’s second question: Why [would] you would leave a faith that you defended for a long time?
I am sure this young preacher struggles to understand why I would leave something I dedicated my life to for so many years. Makes sense, right? Most men or women who leave the ministry do so when they are young or youngish. They enter the ministry and find out it is not what it is cracked up to be (and boy, it’s not!) or they had some sort of crisis of faith, and after a few years they decided the pastorate was not for them.
It is rare for men or women to leave the ministry in their 50s. It happens, but not very often. Why are older people hesitant to leave the ministry? Two things come to mind:
Commitment bias, also known as the escalation of commitment, is the tendency to remain loyal to a previous decision, behavior, or course of action, even when it leads to negative outcomes. This often occurs as a result of a desire for consistency with one’s past words and actions, especially when that commitment was made publicly.
Sunk Cost Fallacy, the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
I struggled with these things too. I had spent my entire life in the church. I had spent most of my adult life pastoring churches. Polly, a Baptist preacher’s daughter, and I had committed ourselves to the work of the ministry, regardless of financial renumeration. Both of us, at one time or another, worked outside of the church to provide for our family. Not one time did we doubt that this was God’s will for us — until we did. How could we throw everything away? For what? Atheism?
Only those who have walked in our shoes can understand and appreciate our emotional struggles with leaving the ministry and our later deconversion. Many a tear was shed before we walked away. We asked ourselves, Are we sure? What if we are wrong? Do we really want to throw in the towel and walk away? Does this mean we wasted our lives in the ministry? Wouldn’t it be better for us to fake it — it’s not hard — for the sake of family and social connections? What would we do if we weren’t in the ministry?
While the struggles in the dark of night were painful and real, I eventually concluded that I had to be honest: I no longer believed the Bible was the Word of God. I no longer believed the central claims of Christianity. This meant I wasn’t a Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. (Some Baptists think I am just backslidden, and I am still a Christian. This is absurd.) Truth mattered more to me than the ministry and our Evangelical way of life. This was true when I was a Christian, and it is true today. I am open to having my beliefs challenged, albeit I haven’t heard a new or persuasive argument for Christianity (or any other religion) in years. Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to Christianity. I am confident that no new evidence will be forthcoming; so much so, that I am, when it comes to the Christian deity, an atheist. To paraphrase the book of Daniel, I have weighed Christianity in the balance and found it wanting.
Do I miss the ministry? You bet. I miss preaching, teaching, and ministering to others, but whatever yearning I may have, it cannot overcome my desire to know and live the truth. While there was certainly an emotional component — how could there not be? — to my deconversion, the primary reasons for my loss of faith were intellectual in nature. I desperately looked for a place to stop on the proverbial slippery slope, but I slid all the way to the bottom, and, in the end, I concluded I was no longer a Christian. And seventeen years later, I remain an unbeliever. Labeled an apostate, reprobate, or follower of Satan, I am routinely pilloried by God’s chosen ones, ever present reminders of Evangelicalism’s ugly underbelly. If I had any doubts about the veracity of Christianity, I no longer do, having experienced seventeen years of character assassination, threats of violence, and attacks on my family.
Please leave any questions you might have or email them to me. I will do my best to answer them.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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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