I have a secret.
I no longer identify as a christian.
Maybe you live in a bigger city or some place where that’s no big deal, but putting those words out there in my town, where a church sits on every street corner, is social suicide.
I can’t say I haven’t occasionally felt pulled to “spirituality”. I also can’t say that I have explanations for everything. I can, however, say that I don’t think the best explanation can be found in any of the current popular religious texts. I don’t fit in with any of the top 3 (the Abrahamic religions), if I may be so bold.
I identify as agnostic. According to the oxford dictionary agnostic means holding or showing the belief that it is not possible to know whether God exists or not. Religion does interest me. I enjoy researching and hearing about the different belief systems. I’m just interested in them in the same way as I am interested in sociology and psychology. I feel religion is just another way to explain people and why we are the way we are.
Having grown up in a deeply religious town in the south it would be nearly impossible to have no religious experience.
Vacation bible school in the summers (way back in the 90’s at least) was essentially free childcare and I went to multiple ones from June to August every year until I was nearly 12 years old.
The baptist church I attended most of my life, the same one my husband and I met in when we were young, was a five minute drive from my home. Some of the families that attended included a few kids from school but the majority were those I saw while working alongside my father in the fields around our house.
When I was younger I felt like the small town I grew up in was similar to Walnut Grove from Little House on the Prairie. There was a small country store where many in the community, mostly farmers, met regularly for lunch. Like the show, these farmers all worked with and helped one another and then most of them would be in the pews on Sunday.
It was my grandmother, my fathers mother, who played the biggest role in my religious experience. She was a Sunday school teacher who only allowed religious television and music in her house. She bought me several christian mystery novels as a way to divert me from my fondness for things that were “a little bit scary” (my mom was a horror fanatic-John Saul books, ghost stories- and I really liked those things too).
She attended multiple churches when I was young (I still don’t know why). The churches were not the more conservative Baptist church that I was used to, as my grandmother was Pentecostal. One visit included an hour of what to me, a 7 or 8 year old girl, looked like people screaming and throwing themselves on the floor while appearing to have convulsions. My father told me later that they were speaking in tongues and “letting God speak through them”. I still didn’t understand but I also never went to church with her again.
I was “saved” when I was 9 years old. It took place after months of my grandmother praying for me at meals to “accept Jesus Christ into my heart” and playing movies for me (cheap christian made projects) about the Rapture. There were also recordings of plays called Heaven or Hell that always “just happened” to be on when I came over.
Church at the time was actually beginning to bore me. I’d been moved out of the fun “kids church” and into “Junior church”. There were no snacks or songs. There were no puppets and much of the bible lessons didn’t make sense. As a kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs and Jurassic Park, I had a lot questions that were almost always answered with “Just trust in God”.
The joy that my grandmother had for Jesus eluded me and the heaven she spoke of, where everyday would be like Sunday church, didn’t sound so wonderful. Looking back I can say I didn’t have much love for Jesus.
I had a hell of a lot of fear of Hell though.
By the time I begged my grandmother to help me ask Jesus into my heart and save me I was a nervous wreck. When she told me after the prayer that it was all okay and that I would not be sent to hell, nor would I be burning in the pits for all eternity, relief flooded through me.
“That feeling,” she said, “That’s God in you.”
My grandmother died of colon cancer not long after and before she passed she mentioned that “bringing me to Christ” was one of her happiest memories. I loved my grandmother fiercely. She was kind and always ready to help anyone who needed it. She was the kind of grandmother that is shown on television. She played dolls with me and made me hand sewn outfits for them. She was a good cook and her home was always cozy and warm.
I know now that she truly believed what she had told be me and that she was very much afraid that I would end up in Hell.
The are few people who have realized that I no longer identify as christian. Unless they are family, they tend to avoid me as though I have an easily transferrable disease. Although, over the past few months, with the current political climate, I’m finding a few family members have decided that they do not want to be contaminated by my “sinful ways”.
I have no desire to spread my lack of faith. I have no overwhelming urge to bring people over to the “darkside”. I don’t really have a side. I’m just like everyone else except on Sunday I don’t feel any guilt for sleeping in. Like the majority of people in my community I’m a parent and my life pretty much revolves around keeping my three kids alive. In my free time, however few and far between those short minutes are, I read and I garden.
But I live in a world that feels as though it’s rapidly becoming a modernized Puritan village.
Christianity in the south is already as thick and heavy as the humidity, and just as hard to escape, but over the past decade the seperation of church and state has been almost completely erroded.
While bible school is no longer the free summer childcare it once was, christianity is still at the forefront of nearly all early childhood educational offerings here in the bible belt.
Almost every form of preschool education, that isn’t income based or offered through the public education system, is based in christianity. When I needed to put my own children in childcare, because I didn’t qualify for the public schools pre-k program, I had no choice but to place my kids in one.
Church groups, or youth ministers, often come in to the schools in the area, usually middle and high school range, with donuts or pizza in exchange for prayer and bible lessons before or after school.
Recently in our area, a new start up church, began holding its Sunday services in the local public middle school. The Sunday banners and posters were often left up on Monday mornings.
As a parent I know from my own kids and their friends that there was a certain level of pressure from the school to attend the church, which was popular with many of the teachers and administrators.
Now that the church has its own property, it often functions as an offsite facility for many of the educational field trips.
I’ve lived in this area so long that having an opinion on the whole thing feels like trying to find my way down a dead end road. I’m sure the powers that be in this community have done everything in their power to toe the line on legality. Not to mention the fact that the majority of people in this community are supporters of the cause of converting children to christianity, so is there a point in getting “riled up” about it?
My kids have grown up in a household where they have access to books and education which allows them to make up their own minds about religion. I was able to attend the local University, which is not religiously affiliated, and through education was able to experience, and learn from others experiences, a world outside of small town theocracy. Many, if not most, in this area never get that chance.
The town I grew up in is still the town that I live in. The country store is no longer the same. It’s changed many hands over the years, with each new owner attempting to make it something that it isn’t.
The farmers who used to eat lunch there during the week and then sang hymns next to us in church on Sunday have either died, retired, or disappeared (this usually means married someone young and moved off). Most of the land is now owned by about four people and they won’t be around very long. From what I know, bigger fish are waiting in the wings to snatch it up.
I found out a few years ago, from my mother, the preacher from our church had told her and a few other wives suffering from abuse at the hands of their husbands that divorce was a sin. He never preached or “ministered” to the husbands. This was all around the same time that the umbrella of protection theory was playing heavy in churches across the country.
Growing up has a way of taking the shine off of most things. We find out how the magic trick is done and we see what’s behind the curtain. Sometimes our good memories of the past have a way of clouding over as we see the truth more clearly in the present.
I know that it is through all these personal experiences that I now find religion so distasteful. I know there are others who don’t share those experiences and I don’t begrudge them that. If religion gives you peace, if it helps you get through this thing call life, which is almost never easy, then so be it. As long as you don’t hurt others, treat others as you want to be treated, and all that good stuff, then in my book it’s none of my business.
But religion in the hands of some can be a tool for terrible gains and there are a great many in this country right now using their influence to twist scripture into a scapegoat for their hatred, anger, and most of all their ignorance.
Recent events, which I will not mention here, (mostly due to the fact that there have been more than can be justifiably discussed in one post) have led many to openly and loudly declare themselves in the camp of christian nationalism. This includes many whom I once sat next to in the pews of that small town church.
These declarations have been followed by a severing of ties with those of us who do not feel the same. Those of us who no longer find comfort in religion as well as those who do not wish to use religion as a sword against those who simply wish to exist.
Separation of church and state hasn’t existed in my small bible belt town for a while though now not many are hiding it. However, I fear a much deeper line is being drawn as I write this. A line between those who will follow that church wherever it decides to go even if it’s off a cliff…and everyone else.
So why admit this? Why confess to my lack of faith?
Because it’s important to know that you aren’t alone. That in the south, or in the midwest, or even in the bible belt, there are more of us than anyone thinks. That we work with you and go to school with you. That we exist, and we live, and we vote, and that number grows more everyday.
Every day there are more non believers, more agnostics, more atheists.
More heathens.
A Hermitess 