The Biggest Loss Of My Deconversion

I met my best friend, Andrew, in college over twenty years ago. We lived in adjoining dorm rooms our freshman year and shared an apartment our sophomore year. I dropped out of college after that and got married the following winter but lost touch with Andrew until early the following year when I contacted him and we started getting to know each other again. We weren’t terribly close in college, but somewhere in our early twenties we started to click a little more and began sharing some heartaches and struggles. Well, I would share a ton and he would share a little, but that’s just our temperaments and it worked well for years. We became best friends. In fact, he was pretty much my only friend.

We lived several hours apart until our late twenties when our families moved to the same town in southern California. It was a fun time where we got to hang out several times a week. We even wound up attending the same church. Sadly, however, those good times were short-lived. After a couple years he and his wife felt “called” to spend the next twenty years at an orphanage in North Africa, being foster parents to up to ten kids and helping to establish a school there. Twenty years was shortened to three, however, when there were some major personality clashes among some of the couples and my friends were essentially asked to leave, which also meant leaving behind the three kids they had so far taken in to raise as their own. Needless to say, it was a very difficult time for them and it caused a fundamental shift in how Andrew viewed his Christian faith. The best way I can describe the shift is that he became a bit more jaded. And who wouldn’t? His whole “life’s purpose” had been yanked right out from under him.

Even before that experience he was never very demonstrative in his beliefs, but our mutual faith was something that really kept us together over the years. We didn’t talk about it a lot, but just knowing that we shared some core beliefs always provided a sense of camaraderie and comfort, even after his experience in North Africa. Sure, we had some other mutual interests, such as our favorite college football team and our families, but our faith played a pretty big role in our friendship. As it turns out, it played an even bigger role than I ever realized.

When I came out to him as an atheist a few years ago, he was definitely taken aback. He didn’t judge me or curse me or anything, but things were definitely different between us after that fateful conversation. We have stayed in touch since then – mostly through texting – and have even visited each other across the thousands of miles that now separate us. We always have a good time together drinking, watching football and playing poker, but it just doesn’t quite feel like it used to.

My atheism is the elephant in the room that we almost never talk about. It just sort of sits there, blocking the light from the windows and casting a shadow across our friendship.

When I visited him last year, his wife, who I hadn’t spoken to much after my deconversion, started asking a few seemingly harmless questions about how my morality has changed, etc. I answered them as best as I could during a very cordial, brief discussion and that was that.

Or so I thought.

Later that evening she started talking about how legalized gay marriage in Canada is causing problems up there and then wanted to ask me what my thoughts were on it, leading into what I can best describe as an attempt to “witness” to me.

A woman I have known and been friends with for over twenty years. Witnessing. To me.

I was so stunned by her interrogation that it took me a good ten minutes to even realize what was going on. I mean, how could I? Not only was I not expecting this from her, I had never been on the receiving end of it before.

It was surreal.

During the hour long conversation, Andrew didn’t say much, but he did interject a few comments to support her beliefs. She’s his wife, so I can’t say I blame him, but he certainly didn’t come to my defense. Earlier that day in a private conversation he had even told me he didn’t know why someone would have a reason to be moral without God.

At some point during that visit is when I came to terms with the reality that things would never be the same between us. I also realized that I had been the pursuer in our relationship for the entire twenty years or so. I can’t recall more than a handful of times where he suggested we get together or hang out, and especially not since The Patient One and I moved out of state six years ago. Nearly all the times I have seen Andrew since then, it has been because I planned the get together.

He rarely texts me anymore. I can go weeks without hearing from him. This, from the same guy who used to text me almost daily.

Even if he can’t admit it, something has changed. We don’t talk about religion at all anymore, other than the occasional “joke” about my atheism or his Christianity. Sure, we had a few Q&A discussions about my deconversion in the months following, but since then, nothing.

It’s just sad, is all. I know he cares about me. I can see that he misses what we had and that he has been struggling in his faith ever since that North Africa incident, but he doesn’t ever talk about it. As tight-lipped as he was before, he’s even more so now that I’m not on the same team.

As far as his personal life, he’s in really deep. His dad is a pastor. His entire family is Christian, including the majority of his in-laws. And perhaps the biggest thing is that he and his wife are heavily involved in the church.

Meanwhile I just plug along, doing what I can to be a good friend, showing him that nothing about me has really changed, despite the fact that we don’t believe the same things anymore about God, faith, etc. But of all the things I lost after my deconversion, the bond he and I once shared is the most jarring.

Obla di obla da. Life goes on.

Paradigm Shift

Although I have been an atheist for almost three years, I have never forgotten what it felt like to hold a firm belief in a god – even if my view of that god changed over time – and how difficult it was to not only question his existence, but to eventually abandon the belief altogether. It was a given for most of my life and was the paradigm from which I operated.

So today when I speak about my atheism with a believer, I try to be empathetic, knowing that my lack of belief it is tantamount to saying I doubt the existence of his real flesh-and-blood father. And since doubting something like that just doesn’t make sense, he is left with one or more explanations as to why I left the faith:

1. I never met the “real god” (the one that he knows) in the first place.
2. Maybe at some point I did meet the “real god” but just didn’t practice my faith the correct way.
3. I was hurt by other Christians.

There are many others, of course, but the point here is that I completely understand why he would feel that way about me. Short of exploring the possibility that maybe his god doesn’t exist, those explanations are all he all he is left with.

What does bother me, however, is when he starts using words and phrases that sound like those of an abuse victim defending his abuser. You know what I’m talking about. At some point there will be a line or two out how important it is to give glory to his god or to obey him, or how we need to be more like his god (or Jesus), etc. And when I point out how insecure that makes his god look, he simply can’t see it.

Maybe if he’s a little more liberal, he will talk about the importance of doubt or skepticism, but it’s always a limited version, wherein the existence of his god is a non-negotiable. There is a wink and a nod that, of course his god is real, so we’re just playing around in the safe realm of the hypothetical. To go any further than that would be dangerous or blasphemous or whatever.

Look, I get it. We all have paradigms from which we view the world. Just because I’m an atheist now, doesn’t mean I am above being wrong about a lot of things. Important things. But to me the real question is, how open are we to having those paradigms challenged?

Note: This post is inspired by my parting comment in a very long conversation I had in a comment section over at Triangulations. Be forewarned: while the original post is concise and well-written, the comments are lengthy and will likely take you a long time to read, so it’s entirely up to you whether you want to brave the journey.

The Joys of Parenthood

So I’m raising a teenage daughter. Well, “raising” is sort of a loose term. For most of her life I essentially did two things: pray for her and leave the heavy lifting to my wife,  because, hey, God knows what’s best more than I do and my wife is a woman and understands these things, right? So long as I jumped in with the occasional lecture when things got bad, I was doing my part, or so I thought. (Mind you, I never intended them to be lectures.)

In other words, I buried my head in the sand.

My daughter is sixteen now. She was fourteen when I became an atheist. The last two years have involved me figuring out how to parent better by reading advice from various books and websites. I’ve gotten some great tips and tried to implement them, but sometimes it feels like it’s too little, too late. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve had my own post-Christian shit to deal with along with trying to figure out how to do this parenting thing.

And for the record, just doing the opposite of what your parents did is not the same as doing what’s best.

So lately she has been making what I would consider some poor decisions. I feel like I failed miserably at teaching her about cause and affect, actions and consequences. I rarely let her fail at anything. I would always jumping in to rescue her. I didn’t let her climb the slide by herself as a toddler or get a failing grade for the paper she waited until the last minute on as a freshman in high school. The result is that today she doesn’t make connections: bad things happen and it’s always somebody else’s fault.

For my part I have gotten better at dealing with the bad stuff that happens to her. I’m able to detach and remain dispassionate more than I used to. But just standing back and letting her know I’m there for her is tough when it seems like she’s making decisions that will be painful down the road. She doesn’t seem to want to have a relationship with her mother or me, seeing us as the enemy or cause of her pain. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s what it feels like much of the time.

I know I’m not alone in this venture. Countless others have gone before me. But it doesn’t make it much easier.