Evangelical to Atheist in Five Books
I recently “outed” myself as an ex-believer. I’m sure that came as a shock to many who know me as I’d been avoiding the topic for so long. It’s not an easy conversation to have, especially for someone like myself who was at one time, a fairly devout evangelical. For about 13 years, I attended church, went to small groups, lead small groups, helped with youth groups, and even went to missionary school.
How do you explain to friends who are still making life decisions based on beliefs, that you no longer share those beliefs? They’re still giving up jobs to become missionaries, still handing over a tenth of their paycheques, and still devoting their lives to these beliefs. Not surprisingly then that people can get a little defensive.
I can only imagine what explanations friends have conjured up to explain my un-conversion. He was lead astray! The devil got him because he stopped going to church! But for me it’s quite simple — my beliefs were changed by the books I read. What follows here is an attempt to reconstruct and explain that literary journey.
There were certainly more books than the five I’ve listed here, but I’ve chosen these ones in particular because for each, I can remember that moment somewhere in the midst of the book where I thought: this makes more sense that what I believed before.
Love Wins (Rob Bell)
I recall the controversy when Love Wins was published. Many evangelical leaders rushed to condemn it and it was barely in the bookshops before the rebuttal books were being published. All of that told me that this was a book worth reading.
The book is a reductio ad absurdum of traditional evangelical theology and an argument for a kind of Christian universalism. Bell forces us to confront what it really means if God condemns people to eternal punishment for not believing in him. No amount of theological spin can reconcile that with a belief in a truly loving and just God.
When I finished this book I was a Christian universalist. If God was worth worshipping, and Jesus worth following, then he wouldn’t condemn billions to eternal punishment simply because they were born in the wrong country and didn’t go to the right type of church.
The Book of Job: Its Origin, Growth and Interpretation (Morris Jastrow Jr)
Public domain and available online
I studied the Bible for years, listened to weekly sermons, went to study groups, lead study groups, even taught myself basic Hebrew — and yet I feel now like I never really studied it. To me the Bible was always unquestionably the divinely inspired Word of God. A verse might appear to be inconsistent with other verses only because of my limitations as a mere mortal trying to understand a divine book.
This was one of the first truly scholarly books about the Bible which I read. It approaches the Bible as we would any other historical piece of literature and the author makes a convincing argument that Job was compiled from several different sources. One of those sources was a non-Jewish story which questioned the omnipotence of God. That story asked why good people so often suffered in life, and bad people so often prospered. The popularity of this skeptical tale was a threat to Jewish orthodoxy, so someone edited it and gave it a new ending. When you take a close look at the mishmash of ideas and writing styles in Job, the author’s thesis makes a lot more sense than any vague idea about how it was divinely inspired.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across this book, but it left me with some serious doubts about divinity of the Bible. If the Book of Job was so clearly the product of zealous priests, what about the rest of the Bible?
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
(Reza Aslan)
What kind of man was Jesus? What motivated John? Did Paul have an ego problem? A faith based reading of the Bible doesn’t answer any of these questions because it doesn’t look for the real human beings behind the stories. For most Christians, the characters in the Bible are like the images we see in the stained glass windows of old churches. We study them not to understand them as real people, but to find lofty spiritual lessons for ourselves.
In Zealot, Aslan pieces together what little we know about Jesus, what is likely to be true, and what is very unlikely to be true about Jesus. Sometimes he appeals to history and archaeology — but much of the time he simply appeals to our common sense.
When I finished this book I didn’t know what label to apply to myself other than that vague moniker “spiritual but not religious”. Desperate to still cling to some part of my former faith, I wondered if maybe the Old Testament was still a source of divine truth. Maybe it was just the New Testament authors who got carried away?
The Age of Reason (Thomas Paine)
Public domain and available online
It can be frustrating listening to contemporary popular atheists such as Dawkins or Harris talk about religion. They know so little about the religions they rail against and have such a hard time understanding followers of those religions. Not so with United States’ Founding Father Thomas Paine who wrote the first part of The Age of Reason from a French jail, based on his memory of the Bible.
The book goes from Genesis to Revelation cataloging the numerous mistakes and highlighting the countless horrific passages which endorse violence and genocide. For Paine the Bible is not just uninspired — it is a grotesque misrepresentation of God.
When I finished this book, my belief in the divinity of the Bible was finished and I was a deist. On reflection I think I was just relieved to have something left to believe in. Paine’s arguments for deism were like a lifebuoy after his thorough dismantling of the Bible and everything I’d believed for so long.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
(Yuval Noah Harari)
Sapiens takes us on a whirlwind journey through the history of our species, and Harari devotes much time to discussing why we started believing in things that exist only in our collective imaginations — like nations, money, human rights, and spirituality. He takes us through the evolution of religion from animist, to polytheist, to monotheist.
About half way though this book, I became an atheist. Of course it’s always possible that there is a divine purpose to the universe, but it’s also possible that we were all created yesterday with implanted memories. Maybe the world is just a simulator running on a very advanced computer? All we can do is look at the world around and ask - what is the most plausible explanation for all of this. For now I don’t see any credible reason to include a god in that explanation.
As a general rule, I think people believe what they want to believe, and have an almost impressive ability to keep believing something even when the evidence screams the opposite. I’m sure it’s possible for a devout believer to read these same books and finish up something other than an atheist. I find it very hard to imagine however, that they could read them and remain unchanged in their beliefs.
