Losing Your Religion

(Excerpts from my memoir “Hearts Wide Open, Leaving Religion, Finding Faith” at www.cedricbjohnson.com)

The REM song blared out from my wife’s playlist. I thought,

“How did I, an Evangelical Christian, lose my religion?”

I was confident in my beliefs during my decades as a card-carrying evangelical.

Was the world created in six days? Sure.

Did Jesus turn water into wine? Yes.

Would he return to earth and beam me into the clouds with other properly converted Christians? Absolutely.

Seldom in forty years did I buck the system?

As I began to challenge my own tribal beliefs. I stopped attending an evangelical church during this period and gravitated toward a more progressive faith orientation.

My religious views moved from “I know for sure” to “I don’t know, and that’s okay.” When the tribe mandated certain behaviors, I asked, “Why?”

Once, I expressed my curiosity about reincarnation to an evangelical pastor who abruptly declared, “I believe in the resurrection.” I saw his mind snap shut like a mousetrap, and his clear message was, “Don’t mess with my certainties!”

Amidst that whirl of mental conflict, I decided to join a progressive Church.

A confirmation class was the rite of passage into this community.

About thirty of us assembled at various stages on the journey of faith. Given my rigid evangelical background, I was struck by how diverse the group gathered that day regarding age, religious experience, race, and their reasons for attending.

Some were outright agnostics where any thought of the transcendent raised hackles. I felt like a reptile shedding the last vestiges of my evangelical skin.

Throw a few atheists into the mix, and one encounters a

Dogma Doubt Fest.

When it was my turn to share, I confessed, “I can no longer recite the words in the creed.” It felt radical and somewhat dangerous to admit this.

The pastor’s reply took my breath away:

“You don’t have to view those statements solely as literal truth to belong here. What you seek is not something handed to you by church authorities. It is something you intuit in your innermost being. Trust that and not humanly constructed beliefs.”

How refreshing!

Kicking the wheels of biblical interpretation had been discouraged or forbidden in my tribal past.

A while later, a participant raised the question of the relationship of Christianity to other world religions.

I squirmed a bit in my seat as I remembered how, in my early twenties, I had been an evangelical missionary in South America. Our mission was to convert others, even Roman Catholics, to our tribal club.

That day, I was embarrassed by my former ways; I wanted to keep my old proselytizing tricks under wraps, so I asked a question:

“I’ve never seen this church try to convert others to Christianity. Why not?”

Now red in the face, the pastor sputtered,

“It’s the height of arrogance to think that we Christians have the only way to heaven. What happened to the millions who lived before Jesus? Could they not experience God?”

A chill ran down my spine. Finally, I’d found a place that viewed religion as a universal quest and did not exclude other faith traditions.

It so happened that I had invited a friend, a senior leader in the church I had pastored in South Africa from 1969–73, to join me at the class. He and his wife visited us in California, though we had not seen each other in over a decade. However, when we moved to the USA, we lost touch.

I knew it was risky for me to bring him to the class. Yet a part of me wanted him to see my religious metamorphosis. I observed him closely as the course progressed.

He emitted occasional sighs and grunts when statements, often mine, questioned his cut-and-dried beliefs. On the way home from church, he squirmed in his seat until what had been bottled up popped out in a torrent of emotion.

In a “Get thee behind me, Satan” moment, he shouted,

“How can you accept what the rector tells you? You were so grounded in your beliefs. You’ve changed so much. What happened?”

Yes, what happened, indeed?

How could I explain my shift from blind loyalty to a dogma inherited from childhood?

How could my friend identify with someone who had made a midlife religious pivot away from the evangelical camp?

For me, the inerrant Bible was out, and the symbolic interpretation of the Bible became my new way of reading the Scriptures.

Relying on centuries of humanly devised dogma was out. Direct knowing of the eternal One who sought me personally was in.

“Only the born again gain access to heaven” was demolished.

Being born again daily was my new adventure in faith.

My new mantra was,

“Everyone has a soul; that is the face we had before birth.”

And that soul was both eternal and a part of the vast ocean of the sea of consciousness that I new see to be Source.

Predictably, my blatant discounting of our past beliefs disturbed my friend.

He had no way of appreciating that my questioning process had become a prelude to a new dimension of faith. No wonder, then, that the discussion hit his panic buttons.

Meanwhile, in the words of theologian Walter Brueggemann,

I was beginning “to think the unthinkable, to imagine the unimaginable, and to utter the unutterable.”

Question

How did you lose your religion?

How did the Eternal One encounter you directly?