I grew up in poor neighborhoods around people who didn’t value critical thinking and like most people from her generation, my mother had grown up with a smattering of religion. She was a regular Sunday church-goer when I was a boy and she would dress me up and cart me off to sit on the wooden pew, daydreaming about action and adventure while a boring man droned on in monotone from the front of the room. About halfway through the monologue, we small children were brought downstairs into “Sunday school,” a place that I only remember for its truly extensive set of Legos. For all that I wasn’t predisposed to pay much attention to religion, I was as surrounded by it as any other kid. My parents were moderately religious. My grandparents were definitely religious. All of my aunts and uncles were religious. My peers and their parents; my schoolteachers; my bus drivers; my babysitters; friends; acquaintances; playmates; bullies; pretty much everybody I knew was at least a little bit religious and most definitely believed in God. People talked about it all the time. This was 1985, a very WASPy time for my hometown of Everett, Washington.
I was six years old and I was in trouble. I didn’t understand the scope of my dilemma at the time, but I was finding it more and more difficult to believe in God. Every night at bedtime, left to my thoughts, I would obsess about it. I would try to force myself to believe, to have faith in something that I couldn’t see or feel. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody about it for fear of what they might say or do. One night, it just happened: despite all of the pressure from pretty much everyone I ever interacted with, I finally had to admit to myself that I did not and could not believe in God, Jesus or the rest of it. At first I felt a terrible guilt, but as that washed over me I began to feel a little bit liberated. The only way to really have faith is to obsess over it, since it has no momentum of its own and is entirely the creation of the imagination. Now, my six-year-old imagination was freed up to explore new ideas and concepts without the underlying fear of some oppressive deity judging my thoughts and actions.
This certainly wasn’t the end of my exploration into religion and faith, as my teen years were as full of attempts to identify as anybody’s, but this was certainly the first time that I’d been that honest with myself and in the end, better represented my actual stance on the matter than my later youthful meandering. I had never heard the word “atheist” before and so I didn’t know that there was a name for how I felt and thought. I felt very alone, a feeling that has been a theme throughout my life probably because of that very event. But there was certainly no going back.
Lucas Parker
United States
I often wonder just how many of the faithful sitting in the pews every Sunday have admitted to themselves that they cannot force belief or faith but, thanks to that ‘terrible guilt’ are unable to liberate themselves?
Thank you. Interesting persepective.
Weird. I hadn’t ever really thought about “that moment” of my own when I first dabbled with throwing the “faith” switch off — until I read this:
“Every night at bedtime, left to my thoughts, I would obsess about it. I would try to force myself to believe, to have faith in something that I couldn’t see or feel. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody about it for fear of what they might say or do. One night, it just happened: despite all of the pressure from pretty much everyone I ever interacted with, I finally had to admit to myself that I did not and could not believe in God, Jesus or the rest of it. At first I felt a terrible guilt, but as that washed over me I began to feel a little bit liberated.”
That was nearly the identical thing I went through– though I wasn’t fortunate enough to have this moment as six (My moment waited until college) but it happened around the same time — 1985. I wonder if there was something external going on at that time that might have aided indirectly in de-conversions? Perhaps Huey Freeman was right about Ronald Wilson Reagan (6-6-6) being the antichrist?
This is certainly the only way I can imagine coming to faith. Being an athiest has, for me, been the most natural of positions. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I often wonder just how many of the faithful sitting in the pews every Sunday have admitted to themselves that they cannot force belief or faith but, thanks to that ‘terrible guilt’ are unable to liberate themselves?
I suppose for some it’s guilt, but I think the majority of silent unbelievers are being pragmatic. They simply don’t want to incur the social cost of non-participation. A couple of hours on Sunday mornings probably feels like a small price to pay for a lot of people.
So … just to clarify: can gay Catholics adopt an atheist?
I grew up near Everett and never met a single churchgoer (who mentioned it to me anyway) until I went to college. In Everett, a few years before your childhood anyway, :), religion was almost entirely divorced from public life. In some ways, you might have been lucky to grow up there without public pressure to maintain membership in a church for social sanctification. In the 80’s, all 3 of the big mills closed and Boeing had huge layoffs. Those were dark days in a town which had, up to then, not found a need to have a particularly educated citizenry.
So many people are “weakly religious” as opposed to “weekly religious”. Now if only they would take those last few steps toward rationality.
I remember my ‘liberating moment’ happening when I was 13. I had serious doubts about religion but the concept of a god was still meandering around in my brain. On the way to school a couple of boys I knew were arguing about religion. One of them stopped and shouted as he looked up at the sky saying “Fuck you God!”. My first thought was that he was surely going get fried by lightning or hit by a car or something worse. Of course, nothing happened and we all continued on our way.
The event played on in my mind all day until it came to me that nothing was going to happen as a result of his blasphemy and never could. I recalled a lot of threats being issued about not believing or obeying religious edicts. It was just like the bogey man that parents used to keep their kids in line; just a lot of empty threats.
Brilliant! I have never thought of expressing it this way before. I know people announce that they are having problems with their faith/spirituality. I’m in 12 step programs, BTW, where obsession is a dirty word, synonymous with addiction.
Either way, faith or spirituality, I can’t wait to tell them that they need to obsess more because it isn’t natural, or real. I’ll say, “That common sense sure is a bitch, eh?”
Congrats on reasoning your beliefs out at such a young age. Oh, I almost forgot! Looks like the Lego room at a church(mayhaps yours?) influenced this: http://www.thebricktestament.com/index.html
Sam’s bookstores stopped stocking it recently because the lego people appeared ‘naked’ and were shown in ‘compromising’ situations, LMAO!
Thanks for posting my testimonial. I’m glad you liked it.
Interesting. You and I must have had pretty different experiences. The people around whom I grew up certainly were no bible thumpers, but there was always at least an undercurrent of belief. It was a bit of a bulwark, I suppose, though you’re right that there wasn’t the actual pressure to attend church services, as such, and people generally didn’t pry as to things like denomination.
But I definitely remember the poorly educated citizenry you’re talking about. Incidentally, you being from nearby Everett, you might remember the area where this event happened. Casino Road, at an apartment complex long since renamed and repaved. If Everett can be said to have “bad” neighborhoods, that’s certainly one of them. They’ve taken to gentrifying it a block or two at a time, but they can’t seem to keep up with the incredible rate of decay.
That seems like a bit of a paradox. 12-step programs often have a sort of watered-down faith component to them, but because faith requires the same kind of energy to maintain as an obsession (and often presents with the same symptoms), it seems counterproductive.
Good luck in your program, though. I’ve been down several dark roads myself and managed to make it back in few enough pieces to keep rolling on, but it’s a tough thing and I commend anybody trying to keep themselves together.
Hey Lucas, since you’re around I take this opportunity to congratulate you on your excellent piece. I hope it heartens others.
(BTW, you were way ahead of me, at age six! At that age, I was still accepting all I was told as true (though I was already showing signs of anti-authoritarianism))
Thanks. Glad you liked it.
I remember the event very well. It was one of the defining moments in my life. I had already had it pretty rough by then, so it could be that cause and effect simply became important to me at an early age out of adaptive necessity. I think that most six-year-olds are pretty accepting.
This is not to say that I wasn’t gullible in any of myriad other ways. I was a very gullible kid, but for some reason, the whole god thing just wasn’t working for me. I was the kind of kid who’d believe any lie anybody told me, so this god business must have been pretty faulty to hit the extremely high bar of my childhood bullshit detector.
Thank you for your excellent essay, Lucas. You were a precocious kid to have discovered atheism at age 6.