Preaching and My Deconversion
By the time 2013 rolled around, I was fully entrenched as a Church of Christ member. I was leading prayers, passing out offering plates, and was one of the guys serving the tasteless crackers and wine (grape juice) for the Lord's Supper. In July of that year, I was talked into going to a preacher training program held at the 84th Street Church of Christ congregation in Oklahoma City. A few of the men had previously taken part in these programs, and were very much into the idea of going, so I did.
One of the biggest sources of stress when you're a Christian in the Church of Christ sense is the constant pressure to control your thoughts and to always make sure you're doing something for a reason that would be pleasing to God. If you don't, then it's just another thing to add to the list of a million other tiny things that could send you to Hell. The thing with the thoughts was a pain during those ten days. Why?
Up to that point, traveling via public transportation to another state was new to me. I had to ride the bus from the station in Little Rock, then transfer to another bus once I got to Fort Smith. After arriving in Oklahoma City, I found that my suitcase of clothes and toiletries was missing, so I already had one thing to panic over, plus I was dealing with the embarrassment from the family I was staying with having to help me replace my stuff. Still, I have to be thankful for how gracious they were to me, but more on my housing arrangements later.
Eight years later, I still have mixed emotions over the whole experience. Religious or not, when you're on the outside looking in, it can be easy to generalize people who preach as being power trippers or charlatans, but if you're sincere about it and are having to micromanage everything down to your motives with the threat of Hell hovering over you, it's not something to laugh at.
Our days at the church building typically lasted from seven in the morning to nine at night, so this was twelve hours of going over biblical geography, what terms meant when the books in the Bible were written, sermon outlines, rehearsing sermons, rehearsing salvation invitations, etc. plus a couple of lunch hours at a Mexican restaurant, a diner, or at one of the ladies' houses.
When I was religious, I had something that was quite new to me, and that was a support network, so the social anxiety that I was recovering from subsided some, but even still, I was wondering how in the hell I was going to be able to talk non-stop for so many minutes. I went ahead and played sick that Wednesday because the guys and I were scheduled to give a group sermon that evening; one guy would talk for ten minutes, the next guy would talk for ten minutes, so on and so forth.
I was also still quite limited in my Bible knowledge. Let's face it, without supplemental materials or a group to study with, it's hard to be motivated to read the thing. We were to choose a topic and our second Sunday there was our deadline to have our lesson ready. I went ahead and told one of my instructors about my weaknesses, and thankfully we were able to work through it all. I stuck with what I knew, and if I recall correctly, my topic was a lesson was about doubt. I haven't listened to it since 2013 and don't plan to, but I will post the link at the bottom of this page if any readers want to hear it.
The aftermath of preaching that first lesson of mine was quite euphoric, no doubt. One guy cried his eyes out, one of my classmates was taken aback by how effective I communicated given how quiet I was in our classes, and one of my instructors sent word back to my preacher about how I was a "breath of fresh air." I could definitely consider it the biggest highlight of my week, but it takes second place.
The biggest highlight involved my living arrangements. The family I was staying with had a guest house that their daughter was using, and she let me have the whole place to myself. They also had the kitchen stocked with groceries for me, and I found out there was a such thing as a shower system with a built-in stereo. If it weren't for having to get my five hours of sleep in a recliner after doing a bunch of homework to make sure I didn't wake up too late, I could definitely say I was living like the king of kings.
After returning home, I preached a few short invitation lessons and ten-minute sermons, including one regarding serving God without a spouse. That same euphoria would follow thereafter, and the compliments were stunning. I remember one dude who had been a member and had done song-leading, preaching, and the other things men in the religion do far longer than myself tell me about how he wished he had the stage presence and command of a lesson that I had.
Behind the scenes, though, it was getting harder to not be skeptical. I had started to see Jesus' sacrifice as being very overrated, and couldn't take part in communion without cringing. I couldn't bring myself to feel sorry for someone who was supposedly hurt according to his own plan and rose to eternal bliss to be all-powerful. I also could no longer reconcile why I was believing that a talking snake convinced a woman to eat fruit while at the same time finding it absurd to believe that one deity was born from the nostril of another deity. In addition, the "evidences" we studied in our Wednesday night classes (purpose, arguments from popularity, morality, design, etc) were arguments I no longer found to be convincing.
I realized I was an atheist in October 2013, but continued to play a regular role in the church. Faking my way through things is something I'm not too bad at, but with this, I couldn't do it for too long. It was December 2013 when I came out, and it was kind of a crazy process. I will talk more about this in my next post, but I had taken a job at a poultry plant and did not last long at all. Given the views on how the man is expected to work and how it's sinful for him to not do so, I was very embarrassed and stopped attending services because of the humiliation I was feeling. This was part of a big coincidence because it was a couple of weeks later when I left a message on the congregation's answering machine explaining my position on things.
One of our key members at the time was an old lady who walked around with an oxygen tank, but still led ladies' Bible studies and all that good stuff. Frankly, if the Bible wasn't so anti-woman, she could easily fit into a Women of Faith series of lessons. I spent a lot of time with her during those two years. Nine days after I left the voice message, I get a Facebook message from her asking if I'd like to come over to stay with her and another one of our elderly members some, and so I did. The guy who did the evidence lessons on Wednesday nights, along with his wife, drove me to the apartment. I thought I was being dropped off and was wondering why they were walking in with me.
To sum it up, it was an ambush. It started with the guy assuming I decided to leave the faith because of how my job "kicked me in the mouth, & because of how rough my life has been.
It didn't take long for me to feel like I was being interrogated because I had four sets of eyes on me and was being bombarded with one question after the other, some of which I had no idea how to answer. They included:
"Are you pretending there's no God because you're planning to do something dangerous?"
"So are you just giving up?"
With the guy, he had always had a bit of a snarky personality about him to begin with, but he crossed the line with a question of his.
The thing with religion is that regardless of whether you're a believer or not, the topics within make for interesting reads and discussions. Eight years later, I still kill time looking through La Vista Church of Christ's Q&A archive because of some of the most random topics that are asked about ("What should I do with a video game that has an indecently dressed character?"). Looking back, it's safe to say their impression was that I was pretending there's no god so I could do whatever I want and not give a single mind to anything related to religion, which couldn't have been further from the truth. Even though my nonbelief is genuine, I still struggle with the fear of Hell.
I told them that I would definitely be studying this stuff to see where things go, and the guy, in the most hateful tone you could imagine, responded with "Oh you will, huh???!!!” That was when I had had enough, and so I stormed out. I walked everywhere I went because of my driving phobia, and so I set off to my aunt's house, which was a few blocks away. Another church member found me and gave me ride, but it wasn't much better because I got my first dose of "What if you're wrong?" As I was knocking on my aunt's door, the guy and his wife found me and stopped by for a second so that he could tell me, "Remember buddy, I'm just trying to help you."
I had to get some water to calm my nerves and to stop myself from bursting out crying. I then opened up my Facebook to find messages that made things worse. One was from a guy who was a few years younger than me talking about how he cried upon hearing the announcement about my atheism. That hit hard because of how I was someone who was being looked up to. What gets me to this day is a Facebook status that another member posted:
"I don't see how anyone could go from preaching the word to suddenly not believing. Or maybe they were just fakes the whole time. But who needs rules, right? Oh well, not my problem."
After a month and a half of responding to everyone's questions, even going so far as to write ten-page letters to the old folks who don't use social media, I finally realized I was wasting my time. With exception to one member who eventually left and had to deal with similar baggage, no one seemed to be considering my side of things. Everything was going in one eye and out the other, so I stopped. That came with feeling like a fugitive on the run because I was still having to avoid phone calls, having to ask my grandma to answer the door in case it was one of them was knocking, and having to block them on Facebook.
My excommunication letter came in during late March of 2014, and I just ripped it up and threw it away. Not everyone socially withdrew from me. The lady who drove me to my aunt's never obeyed that rule, and so we hung out a few times thereafter. Looking back, though, I have resentment for what she said to me when talking about the letter.
"Just do me one favor: please don't post any more atheist stuff. I find that offensive."
Before I started blocking my former church friends, I was posting clips from The Atheist Experience in hopes they would see where I'm coming from. When my preacher and I talked about atheism before I deconverted, I would send him clips from The Atheist Experience because I wanted his input on how to respond to the hosts' arguments and it made for good conversation between us. With other members, it dawned on me that they just didn't give a damn about what an atheist has to say. They were still going to automatically believe the Bible's words on "suppressing the truth in unrighteousness" over anything I had to tell them.
After that discussion, I shut down my Facebook altogether, and even though I was continuing my college education and enjoying my job working for the chancellor (more on that next time), I otherwise kept a low profile for the time being.
Next time, I will be going into more detail about the aftermath of my deconversion and the effects religion has had on my mental health. I hope you found my story to be engaging and something to learn a lot from!
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