A lifetime ago

Reflections on ten years since leaving the church

Ten years ago I drove away from the church I led for 20 years and never went back.

Actually, that’s not true. I did go back one time. With an attitude of defiance, I attended like any other worshiper and found that everyone still called me “pastor” and asked me what was going on, so I never went back.

That day, ten years ago, was the culmination of more than a month of agonizing conversations with the head of the denomination in Southern California. I had become less committed to the Seventh-day Adventist belief system and way of life with every passing year until, by the time I left, or was fired, I wasn’t really a what any respectable Adventist would call a believer, let alone a pastor.

Then, a few months later, I began a journey that would lead me to where I am today with respect to religion and spirituality. On December 31, 2013, I wrote a blog post at HuffPost called “A Year Without God: A Former Pastor’s Journey Into Atheism.” I had no idea what I was getting myself into with that post. For a year, between media appearances, interviews, and thousands of emails, I struggled between the faith that had shaped and guided my life for the first 40 plus years, and the now irresistible sense that there was no “there” there. I keep up writing that blog for the whole of 2014¹ and settled on atheism and humanism as my orientation towards all these questions.

I have several friends and even more acquaintances that stopped “believing in all that” who still stick around the edges of the church, maintaining relationships, attending to the cultural trappings of Adventism. That wasn’t my path. I don’t think I have a single Adventist friend. Sure, lots of Facebook “friends” and people who would be very kind to me if we crossed paths in public or at an event, but no one I speak to regularly or deliberately make plans to hang out with. I also know some ex-Adventists who keep up with the drama of the church and its regressive theology and politics. I just can’t be bothered. It doesn’t interest me at all anymore.

The ten-year anniversary of that rupture has me in a bit of a reflective mood. I’ll be writing periodically here over the coming weeks and months. I’d like to tease out some continuities (and discontinuities) between that old way of life and the one I embody now. There are certainly both, as well as things I just don’t care about. In the space of those ten years gone from Christian to atheist to humanist (still atheist), to not really caring all that much about atheism, to still being really frustrating by the hold that Christianity has on our collective consciousness, including atheists.

My primary political-philosophical identity today is socialism, which I know a lot of people will say is categorically separate from humanism. I disagree. And if it turns out that the two are, in fact, on two non-parallel diverging tracks, humanism as a posture toward ‘the gods’ is easily discardable.

I’d love to have you join me. Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments. What would you like to know about where I’m at today?

1. It seems that my Year Without God blog is no longer available online and I’ve lost most of what I wrote after the atheist vertical on Patheos went away.