Gennaro Brooks-Church

John
Southern Baptist upbringing, currently an apostate (somebody who has lost their faith).

My father was a Southern Baptist Minister, and I was raised deep in that tradition. I was taught to believe that the Bible should be interpreted literally and that Jesus is the only path towards salvation. Fundamentalism in Christianity, and I guess in any religion, does not allow you to compartmentalize your life. So, the religious beliefs we were given intended to permeate every part of our life.

It informed how we related to others, what type of television we watched, and whether we drank alcohol or not. Proselytizing, sharing our faith with others, was also a huge part of the religious experience. And the religious experience was everything. I remember in high-school, in addition to playing football and being in student government and all that, I was known as the devout Christian. I would take my Bible to study hall to read.

I can remember a particular time in study hall when someone came to me and they were having some problems in life. It was an opportunity for me to share the idea of salvation, as I understood it, and we prayed on the spot. He became a born again Christian, right there in the study hall. It was exhilarating!

I was like this everywhere. Because I was a quarterback in football I was welcomed into the party circle in high school. I would go to these parties and make a point to get a clear glass and fill it with milk. While everyone else was getting wasted and engaging in all sorts of licentious, sinful behavior I walked around with my glass of milk and my Bible.

As I look back at it now, it is like remembering another person. It is interesting, though, that the seeds of my faith’s own destruction were formed in my very desire to be a better Christian. In college, and I went to a religious college, I got into Christian Apologetics, which is the study of Christian philosophy, because I wanted to be a better defender of Christianity. I wanted to learn how to counter those people who pointed out Christianity’s flaws.

This lead me to study philosophy, and was an important part in my becoming doubtful of my religion. At the time that was a big thing. There was a year or two when I literally didn’t go a day without breaking down and crying. When you are in the fundamentalist evangelical tradition you take faith seriously, and when you begin to question it, then it is not simply a small tinkering with the beliefs, you are engaging in a complete overhaul of your entire being.

Because the religion deeply affects your whole identity, your whole concept of reality, to change it is a very painful transition. But I had to change. One of the things that really bothered me was the concept that people were going to spend eternity in torment, anguish and hell if they did not accept that Jesus was the son of God, that he came and died for our sins, and that he rose from the grave.

I remember one night, I was sharing my new doubts with a Christian friend, and, after listening to me quietly, she looked at me with concern and sadness, and said, “John, I think you might be the Anti-Christ.” But I kept thinking of the majority of the world who would never be exposed to Christianity and thus, according to what I was taught, were destined for hell. It seemed profoundly unfair. I decided that if it is true that they are going to hell, then I did not want to worship a God that lets that happen.

My mother was very sad about my decision. I had became an Apostate, she would say. That’s somebody who has lost the faith. She has only recently realized to what extent I’ve drifted way from the beliefs she so tried to instill in me. I get an e-mail from her everyday now asking me to go to church, and saying how much she loves me and is praying for me.

I have mixed feelings about this because I know she wants me to believe the right things, but at the same time I feel like a tool. Christians have this way of being so nice and solicitous to you, but it is always doubtful whether they really like you or whether they want you to change your beliefs. I even feel this with my mother.

Up until recently I had tried to be honest with my parents regarding my changes, but that just got me nowhere. It was just a source of frustration for all of us, because I would attempt to articulate my new views, but for my mother they were simply incomprehensible. Her understanding is that once you become a born again Christian, then you have reached the goal, and there is nowhere to go from there.

So, it is a conundrum for her that I could once be a devout Christian and now no longer have those beliefs. That’s why I’ve started lying to her, telling her things like, “Oh yes, mother, I’ll be in church for Easter. As a matter of fact I’m looking forward to church. And I’ll be thinking of you mother.” But I’m not going to church. Since it makes her feel better about her only son’s eternal destination, I don’t feel so bad about lying.

But I’m not an atheist now, because I still feel there is a God. I’m perhaps an agnostic, or a deist, even though deism went out a few centuries ago. As much as I’ve purged myself, there’s still the notion that something much bigger exists. It is probably impossible for me to ever comprehend it.

I have a faith in something I can not understand, so I don’t put much importance into it. My faith now is mainly an ethical one, as opposed to being metaphysical or spiritual. The pivotal value now is really about being a good person, treating other people with respect. To me that’s what Christianity is really about. Christ emphasized your interaction with others as the starting point for your relationship with God.

I still think Christ was a good example, just like Gandhi or Mother Theresa. Christ was a liberal, a revolutionary. The only condemnatory language he ever had was directed towards the religious leaders. And at the same time he hung out with those who were considered the most corrupt in his society: tax collectors, people in cohoots with the Roman empire, prostitutes.

After all, his first miracle was to change water into wine. It was at a wedding, and back then they didn’t just have a wedding celebration for a few hours; it lasted days. They drank and danced and had huge parties. So, at one of these parties that Jesus was attending, after a few days they ran out of liquor. And who do they turn to? Jesus. He stepped up to keep the party going! That may be a liberal interpretation, but it shows how He embraced humanity.

We don’t have a God’s eye point of view and it would be dishonest to try and live our lives as if we did. We have a lot of questions and very few answers. And we should embrace that. We should be more tolerant, with humility, admitting that we don’t have all the answers. I remember my father telling me that any problem in life can be answered by the Bible.

That was certainly how he dealt with any problem he had with my mother. Before they got divorced, she wanted to go and get counseling, but he would refuse and say the Bible was the only counseling they needed. Yet, since he was a Southern Baptist Minister, he was the final arbiter of what the Bible meant. This created an authoritarian, oppressive family life – not good. Not good at all. I’ve been estranged from my father for some time.

Interestingly enough, though, recently I’ve begun to reexamine my relationship with my father,. Up to this point I’ve always had forbidding, ominous dreams about him. They were very unpleasant. But over the past few weeks I’ve been having sympathetic dreams towards him.

Frankly, I’m not sure that I’m too crazy about my new dreams, because it was much easier for me when I didn’t see any humanity in my father at all, when I just saw him as this monster. Now, these dreams have been portraying him in a much more human light, with faults and shortcomings. Oddly, these subtleties are more difficult to live with.