On Losing My Religion
By the time the band R.E.M. released “Losing My Religion” in 1991,[i] it had been ten years since I lost mine. I remember it happening, like so many “Light Bulb” moments, as I was standing at the front of the church for confirmation in 1981. They had the twenty-six of us repeat the vows that included “To confess Jesus Christ as my Saviour. To put my whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as my Lord.” It was the “promise to serve him as my Lord” part that was a step too far for me.
It was the first time that I remember saying one thing and thinking another. Lying felt wrong. Reverend Bruce seemed like a cool guy, and I didn’t want to disappoint him or my parents. Dad was a religious man since childhood, who often turned to his Bible and once wanted to become a minister. Mom came to the Methodist church through exploring different denominations as a teenager in Deadwood, South Dakota, and brought her mother along once she’d found friends there.
Soon after my shameful confirmation, I began sleeping late most Sundays and said that I needed to spend the time studying. I had already quit the church choir after puberty ruined my voice, and singing didn’t bring me the joy it once had.
How did I end up there? In elementary school, I cried over dead birds I found in the backyard and prayed, “God, why did you let them die? Can't you bring them back?” I really believed, but God never answered, and I began to suspect that he didn’t exist.
I also discovered Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull in the church library, reading the short novella there in a frenzy of enlightenment. I took the book’s lessons to heart and realized I had to find my own path. Organized religion wouldn’t help me find my passion and freedom. Two of the passages that made the biggest impressions were: “Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect,” and “For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see the truth for himself.”
The key to heaven for me was defining “perfect,” and it was finding the state we now call “flow,” where I escaped distracting thoughts. Becoming a professor and instructor brought me full circle to childhood aspirations springing from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Richard Bach was a pilot, like my father—a flight instructor—and my paternal grandmother was an elementary school and part-time piano teacher. Teaching felt right and a natural inheritance.
To be fair, my survey of other Christian religions was cursory at best. I attended a Catholic service with neighbours, and everyone seemed so dour. I also attended a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran service where the women sat in the back of the church. That felt so wrong, even to the elementary-school me sitting with the boys and men. It seemed everyone worshipped a slightly different God, and some religions had multiple gods.
When we sat around the table in the church library to read key passages from the Bible, I’d already read so much dramatic literature. I loved Ray Bradbury’s science fiction, Orwell’s 1984, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, All Quiet on the Western Front, Catcher in the Rye, Robert Frost’s bleak poetry (e.g., “Out, Out—”), and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”
Although Jesus had some good things to say, the Bible couldn’t compete with other literature I’d read, and the whole heaven-and-hell thing seemed as imaginary as science fiction. The logical holes in the afterlife didn’t fit with what I was learning about the solar system, the universe, and science. Souls didn’t make sense either. We, the moving things on the planet, are all animals, made of the same molecules, and many are as intelligent as we are. So do animals have souls? If not, why not? We all have brains and hearts.
And don’t get me started on Shoa (The Holocaust) for its repudiation of much religious belief.[ii]
The 1970s and early 1980s left me jaded by TV shows that touted the power of pyramids to keep razor blades sharper and to keep fish alive out of water longer. I really wanted to believe pyramids had mystical powers, only to feel duped later when I realized it couldn’t be true.
When I was older, I watched an interview with James Randi, who talked about his journey from palm reader and fortune teller to a skeptic after he discovered that it didn’t matter what he said. He believed the lines on a person’s palm could reveal their identity and future, but when he told them the opposite of what his training dictated, his customers enthusiastically agreed with the results. He also demonstrated how horoscopes worked the same way—people believed that randomly selected fortunes described them as well as those based on their star signs. Randi was a consultant on Jonny Carson’s interview with Uri Geller, during which the famous psychic’s powers didn’t work when he couldn’t touch the props beforehand. Randi also exposed the “psychic” James Hydrick after he appeared on one of my favourite shows of the time, That’s Incredible.[iii]
Even at our church, a woman in polyester asked parishioners to hold vials containing drugs and toxic substances, then claimed that when she pressed down on their outstretched arms, she could tell the vials contained something dangerous. I think she was selling an allergy-testing “service” using the same technique.
I felt like I’d followed Randi’s path from believer to skeptic. I came to realize I was fine without spirituality or religion. Memories of loved ones were all I had and needed—if I was wrong and heaven existed, it would be a bonus. Kindness here on earth was all that mattered. In 1993, the Crash Test Dummies made me feel less alone in my lack of faith when they pointed out some of the many unanswerable questions about heaven in their song, “God Shuffled His Feet.” I watched an interview with Richard Dawkins that helped.[iv] Monty Python’s The Life of Brian highlighted the absurdity of overzealous worship, and the 2009 movie The Invention of Lying was an enjoyable parable on the origins of religious belief (alas, few critics agreed).
When I became aware of my gender in 2015, I was fortunate that the shame many religions place on LGBTQ2+ folks never became a barrier for me. I don’t recall the topic of gender being discussed during my time in the United Methodist Church, nor in the polite Minnesota society of the time. The invisibility of the queer community and my abandonment of faith and religion made it a little easier for me to transition into the “enby girl” I am today.
Religious spirituality could ease some of my anxiety about doing the right thing and let a higher power direct my life. But it feels like taking my hands off the steering wheel might be a bad idea, and anxiety is the price I pay to avoid the avoidable mistakes. I think it’s also that step of believing in a “higher power” that sets up an unhealthy dynamic—it often leads to a hierarchy of sinners, the righteous, and non-believers, which is hard to come back from.
I see the good work churches do to provide social connections through volunteering and donations, but there are more than enough secular organizations that do the same. I find community in volunteering, activism, and keeping up with friends. If I need more, there are many naturalist, vegan, and humanist organizations near me that I can join.
I admire people who can take all the good that religions teach them and yet refuse to judge anyone, consider everyone and every living thing their peers on this planet, and believe in science. They are true “unicorns.”
When I look back on losing my religion, I see it as an awakening to the reality of life and a way to avoid yet another form of dangerous wishful thinking. It’s already too easy to imagine that I can avoid going to the doctor by eating well and exercising, or that buying a lottery ticket is a wise investment. Religion is a mixed blessing that I’m better off without.
What did you think? How are you doing? I’d love to chat…
[i] The title comes from an old U.S. southern phrase that means losing patience or temper, not losing faith. Like, “If you keep that up, I’m going to lose my religion!”
[ii] An academic paper I encountered years ago included the joke that’s been told, probably since the Holocaust, something like that told by Alex Edelman: This guy dies and goes to heaven, and he meets God, and they’re chatting, and he says to God, “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?” “Yeah, I love jokes.” And the guy tells God a holocaust joke, and God says, “You know, I have to tell you I don’t find that joke funny at all.” “Well, guess you had to be there, huh.”
[iii] I spent a few hours learning to replicate Hydrick’s moving pencil and phonebook tricks afterwards. I got them both to wiggle a bit, but never as masterfully as Hydrick, who had more time to practice while in prison for child sex abuse.
[iv] Both Dawkins and Gervais have expressed anti-trans views and are two of many insensitive, bordering-on-bigoted people I least admire. Learning about their humanist views made me feel less isolated, but they’re not shining examples of humanism.