Readers respond to that question with a variety of personal stories and reflections. (For related essays, see our special project Choosing My Religion.) To share the most important religious decision of your life, or remark on one of the accounts below, please drop us a note at hello@theatlantic.com.
From Michael, a reader who teaches at an evangelical Christian university:
I just read your series, forwarded from Editor & Publisher, about important religious choices. Mine was in 1973. It was the height of the Jesus Movement. There were hippies all over the country. Some of them were making music.
From that link, here’s a song from 1973 by Malcolm and Alwyn called “Fool's Wisdom,” off their debut album of the same name, “One of the finest spiritual works of musical art to come out of the period”:
Back to Michael:
I was a kid from a western suburb of Chicago from a mixed-ethnicity home. Religion in our home reflected that split. My Dad had come to Chicago from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and, having grown up Russian Orthodox, had been thrust into the Russian Baptist tradition by his parents. He didn’t much like it. My Mom, whose parents came to Chicago from Mexico in the 1920s, had been raised Roman Catholic. She didn’t like Baptists either.
But that summer of 1973, my Dad’s parents paid for me to go to a Baptist teen camp near Holland, Michigan. And it was there I made the decision that’s changed my life.
I knew God was out there, somewhere, as I grew up. I knew it from having been taken to church since I’d been born. I knew it from the music and programming on WMBI, the radio voice of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
So one night, a preacher told all us teens that the time for decision had come. Many of us, he said, had been fooling around the edges of what we knew had to be a firm commitment to following Jesus Christ with all the passion of our young souls. I’d mocked kids who acted like churchy geeks. I came to this camp feeling somehow above all these scrubbed church kids.
Yet that night I knelt on that pine floor and, with teenage impulsiveness, said to God, “Okay, okay. You’ve been after me. I’m done running. Take me if you want me.” He did. I felt it.
And it was like the lights turned on. Suddenly all that churchy talk made sense. The kids who seemed so stupid before were looking smarter. I was a changed person. I had a lot yet to figure out about who I was, what life was all about, what it means to follow God in a mixed-up world.
I boarded a bus back to Chicagoland a few days later and knew my life wouldn’t be the same. I’ve been living out that decision ever since.
I teach journalism now, and I’ve been at it for 26 years after a brief career in daily newspaper work. My calling isn’t just to teach students how to excel in the craft (my students have landed at the AP, L.A. Times, Orange County Register, and broadcast media all over the country.) No, my task is bigger. I teach students about how to figure out how to hear God’s voice like I did on that wooden tabernacle floor.
Update from a reader who went to a Christian camp right in the same area:
My first summer camp was very near St. Joseph [about 50 miles from Holland], on the west coast of Michigan on Lake Michigan. Went from age 9 to age 14 to two Congregational Church summer camps—Camp Warren and Pilgrim Haven. That was 65 years ago—I am 72—and I am thankful for those wonderful years. God entered my life and that still small voice has guided me all these years. And it still does whenever I go there and watch the sunset.
A staggering story just landed in our inbox. The reader begins by recalling a moment of divine revelation at a very early age, followed a few years later by a suicide bombing at his school that left him mangled for life:
I suppose the Sunday School teacher of the church three houses down the street from ours had just said something crucial to me. Had it been on the morning of that day? Because I remember a day when my field of vision to the right oriented me as being perpendicular to approximate middle C of the keyboard of our upright piano, which I saw out of the corner of my eye as I toddled toward something in our living room, or maybe toward the hallway, which turned to the right and led to my bedroom with the small round mirror on the right wall just inside the room.
It was in that moment I was irradiated with the knowledge that Jesus was the son of God, my God, the one with whom, as the writer to the Hebrews says, I had to do. The feeling that accompanied this sureness is best called ecstasy, though bliss will do.
If I was four years old, I couldn’t have been four years and two months old, because by then we’d left that simple little Levittown-like new house in the Belleville neighborhood, just west of downtown South Bend, Indiana, for Houston. There, three years later, I was almost killed in a mass murder that killed my two best friends, another little boy, and two impossibly courageous adults who tried desperately to save our lives.
I was left severely disabled for the rest of my life. Through the five-and-a-half decades since that day, many dear and worthwhile things have been denied to me because of a madman’s meticulously planned act. Often I’ve wished one of the best trained nurses in the United States hadn’t been a block away, hadn’t reacted instantly, hadn’t run without stinting into a mundane hell to save me just before I bled to death.
But I know that for me, as for every other Christian, the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in me through Christ Jesus, my Lord.
When I asked our reader who this madman was, he replied:
It was Paul Harold Orgeron who did this. Google “Poe school bombing.” The best article about it is “Suffer the Children,” published in the April 2013 issue of Houstonia.
That essay was published in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre and its devastating details are set against the ones from the suicide bombing at Edgar Allen Poe Elementary on September 15, 1959 that left three children, two adults, and the perpetrator dead and nearly 20 injured—including our reader, grievously so. Orgeron, a three-time convict, showed up to the school that morning with his young son and six sticks of dynamite in a suitcase. From Houstonia:
The bell rang and announcements began. Poe’s principal, Ruth Doty, then in her fortieth year of working in Houston schools, got on the loudspeaker to lead the children through the Pledge of Allegiance before reciting her famously sing-song, falsetto renditions of the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me… [...]
At around 10 a.m. on the playground at the rear of Poe Elementary, Orgeron and his son approached second-grade teacher Patricia Johnston. “Teacher, read these,” said Orgeron, handing Johnston two notes. Johnston had trouble deciphering the chicken-scratch that Orgeron, himself a second-grade dropout, handed her.
Meanwhile, he mumbled about “the will of God” and “power in a suitcase.” Looking down at the case, Johnston made a chilling discovery: there was a doorbell-type button affixed to the bottom of it. She became even more alarmed when Orgeron began insisting that she gather all her students around him.
Continued here. (And here is a related Notes discussion about theodicy—the question of why a benevolent God would allow for so much suffering in the world.)
A cisgender woman in New England writes, “The religion I want does not want me”—because her church does not accept her long-time marriage to her newly out, transgender wife. The struggle between her competing loyalties is really palpable here, especially when the values her church instilled in her—love and forgiveness—are at odds with the church’s view on transgenderism and thus her marriage. In her own words:
I was raised Catholic. As a young adult in the early 2000s, I fell away from the Church, repelled by several factors, including the Church’s stance on civil marriage for same-sex couples, the horrors of the sexual abuse crisis, and my own doubts about the existence of God as a force that exists beyond myth and metaphor. Yet, I was still Catholic enough at 23 to be married in the Church.
Eight years and two children later, my spouse came out to me as a woman. We are staying together, working on our marriage, raising our children. But the foundations of our modern marriage are in shambles.
In my secular understanding of marriage, it is a relationship between two people who negotiate, agree, and consent to an arrangement that makes them happy and fulfilled. That doesn’t work for me anymore. My spouse has changed the foundations of our marriage so profoundly and asked so much of me, including the alteration of my own sexual orientation. By the logic of secular marriage, I should leave.
I don’t want to leave. I want to stay, to forgive, and to turn the other cheek to a person who has both loved and hurt me beyond what I thought possible.
I have found great comfort in my latent Catholicism, particularly in its call to love beyond justice. The rosary and the confessional have been indispensable to my ability to heal and to forgive. Last week, I read many parts of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia through tears, thankful for its teaching that “Love always has an aspect of deep compassion that leads to accepting the other person as part of this world, even when he or she acts differently than I would like.”
But, in that same document, I read that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.” How can it be that my marriage to my wife is in no way similar to my marriage to my husband?
I know that many would simply insist that my spouse is delusional and that transgender women are really men. My priest says as much. And yet, there she is, beautiful and beloved. Denying her is an act of violence that I will never, ever perpetrate.
If I must choose between believing, loving, and respecting my spouse and the cruel demands of the religion that has helped me love her, I will choose my spouse. The banners, “Catholics Come Home!” speak to me. But the Church doesn’t want my family, so they don’t really want me.
My biggest religious choice was to follow Jesus. Others in this discussion thread have alreadysharedsuchexperiences. It’s not simply a decision to assent to a particular belief or doctrine. It is the beginning of a personal relationship with God. God has long been as real and vibrant a presence in my life as any of my family or friends. I could no more doubt God’s existence than that of any human being I know.
But we can have our doubts about those whom we know. For many years I doubted whether God really loved me. It seemed to me that he had badly let me down. I’d tried to live and make decisions as I believed God wanted me to. And everything seemed turn to out wrong!
I was like the characters in the story by [Italian writer] Italo Calvino who wondered whether they had either completely misinterpreted the divine will, or whether their awful situation was in fact the result of that will. This period of disappointment and doubt culminated when my spouse—whom I loved more than anybody else in the world—decided to abandon God, and also abandoned me in the process.
Only after that did I finally come to understand what is perhaps the hardest of all Christian teachings: It’s not about you.
A common thread among many who have discussed their abandonment of their previous faith was the decision that they had to leave in order to seek their own happiness, be true to themselves, accept and love themselves, etc. But to follow Jesus involves recognizing and admitting just how unlovable we—myself as much anybody else—really are.
We’ve all messed up our lives. We owe God everything. He owes us nothing. Jesus warned his followers plainly that following him in a fallen world would not spare us any of the world’s problems.
I finally realized what I as a professing Christian should have realized all along: God never let me down. It was my own frustrated sense of entitlement that caused me to feel that way—and robbed me of the great blessing of simply being content in God.
This realization wasn’t a fatalistic acceptance on my part. It liberated me to stop being angry about the bad hand I thought I’d been dealt, and to start enjoying my life, as a servant of God, and as a servant of my fellow human beings. It means giving up many human “freedoms.”
I’m not free to hate anybody who does me wrong, or hold grudges. I’m not free to ignore the suffering of others, or try to shut the world out of my life. I’m not free to pursue my own idea of happiness at somebody else’s expense. I’m not free to ignore New Testament teachings I might personally find hard to accept or follow, or abandon them in favor of what society now considers acceptable in hopes of escaping modern society’s growing hostility.
In return for all that, I have in recent years been in the process of gaining new freedoms. Freedom from fear. Freedom from anger and frustration. Freedom from having to have my own way. Freedom from lack of purpose. Freedom to begin to experience the love of God and the peace that surpasses understanding.
I’ve found it a wonderful life, even as I’ve had to say goodbye to some things, like marriage and children, that I’d always wanted very much. It’s not a matter of choosing religion or love. God is love—a much more genuine and lasting love than anything in this present world can offer.
Our reader follows up with some devastating news:
We learned yesterday that one of our staff members at work was murdered. Her teenage granddaughter, whom she was raising, was wounded and survived by playing dead until the assailant left. He reportedly stole a microwave oven and a cell phone. [News report here]
We live in a small town, so it has been a great shock to the whole community. We’re thankful she was ready to meet God, and that their church has stepped up to care for her granddaughter. I don’t think people around here want to think about having to face such things without hope in God, however many questions regarding theodicy they may have.
I am not sure if you are still running your series on religious choices, but I feel like this topic is especially poignant to me. My biggest religious choice was when I chose to stop following Jesus when I was 24. I’m 28 now, and it is still one of the hardest and most painful decisions I have ever made.
From my high school days up through the end of college, I was madly in pursuit of a relationship with Jesus. As a Christian, I felt it my calling. I would go to church on Sunday by myself and sit in the pew and bask in the glow of fellowship with other church members who also searched for His presence and warmth.
When I got to college, I joined a “non-denominational” contemporary Christian college ministry and it was the perfect fit. All of my friends were in the church. I traveled across North America on missions to Colorado, Memphis, Mexico, and Honduras and had the time of my life seeing various cultures and feeling a closeness, a connection with God. I felt his presence in my prayers, felt it when I was in the woods, walking with Him in closeness. There were intense joys but also intense sorrows when I would fall short. But I knew I was imperfect, and that all my shortcomings could be made up by seeking His presence.
But when I was 21, I decided that I wanted to start being honest with myself and respect my wants/needs more often. I was gay and closeted and living in fear that God could never love someone so different and unnatural.
Up until that point, I always did what I was told and always did what others wanted of me. But I knew I was not living. I was loyal and good in my relationship to God but not myself.
Suddenly, I felt a weight I could not shake. I don’t know if I would call it walking out of a closet door, as it was a slow unraveling. I no longer felt peace at church or peace in nature. I just felt tired and lonely and angry. And I would go into the woods to yell at God so that I could be alone and tell him how angry I was that he could not let me be at peace with being gay or wanting to explore my needs and desires.
And then I could not take it. I could not take being in a church and worshipping God when I was so openly wanting to be gay and to explore relationships with men. I was tired of pretending to be sorry for sinning when I truthfully felt weight lifted off of my shoulders when I began to explore a culture of people who were like me, who felt what I felt. I was tired of asking for forgiveness for what I did not need to be forgiven for. I was emotionally spent.
So I left my college town, left the church, and moved away so I could be free from judgment to explore the life I wanted to lead. I searched for churches, but God and his love slipped away from me.
After I had my first gay kiss, I felt so much shame. But I also felt relief. And I knew after that first kiss I could never go back to who I was before. It was a very raw, very real emotional break from the sheltered, buttoned-up person I was before. I was a new person, and Jesus did not seem to gel with my new sense of my self.
To make it easier, I broke it off cold turkey and no longer prayed or went to church. I could not take another moment of feeling shame. And that’s why I stopped following Jesus. Because there was no longer joy in being with Him—just shame and an endless cycle of repentance. I realized I would never grow, never be vibrant or alive if I focused on all of my faults.
I am happy and living my life today but religion is not a part of it. And I still feel the pain of loss over the innocent, care-free person I was when I was religious. I miss the peace that comes from the confidence of belief in a higher being. I feel I shoulder more worries that I used to displace onto my prayers and my faith.
But I know in my heart giving up religion was worth the pain and the heartbreak if it meant identifying my authentic self and living life on no one’s terms but my own. And I take solace that today I can hold my head up high and be proud of how I fought to be who I am today.
The wounds are still deep, however. I would like to be at peace with how things ended some day, but I don’t know if I ever will. And while all of that may sound sad, I am happy for the experience because I know how far I’ve come. And I know now that my sense of self and identity are everything and that I can not give any part of myself to others if I don’t know who I am.
And that’s my story. I hope it was worth reading. Thank you for this opportunity; it was actually very therapeutic. I look forward to reading more fascinating stories on your site.
If you have a story of you own about the biggest religious choice if your life, tell us about it.
A reader recounts a horrifying early childhood in which she was regularly abused—physically, sexually, psychologically—by her mother’s boyfriend. That suffering severed her faith in God:
I feel compelled to share my story because it illustrates a fundamental flaw in religion that is often overlooked. As a young child, I enjoyed Sunday school, and I learned to put all my trust in God. I was five years old when my mother, who had divorced my father when I was two, met a monster and moved him into our house. He was a violent child molester who tortured me for the better part of a year, and the abuse was too graphic to describe here.
I prayed constantly for deliverance, for help, for relief, for anything other than what was happening to me. He told me he would kill my mother if I told anybody what was happening, and he showed me a handgun to prove he could do it. My five-year-old self was convinced that he could do it because he was just so mean.
When I found a few baby birds that had fallen from a nest in our backyard, he fed them to his dog. When he entered a room and I flinched, he would slap me for flinching. He forced me to drink beer out of a shot glass, pouring more and more in until I got sick. He threw me into a swimming pool and held out a hook for me, but once I grabbed hold of it, he dunked me over and over. He did a thousand other horrible, inscrutable things to me.
But before long, my mom married him, and I couldn’t understand how God could let this happen to us.
She worked nights and I begged her to take me with her so I could avoid being hurt. She took me sometimes, but most of the time, I was at home, alone with him and vulnerable. He would tell me to take a bath and show up in the bathroom in his robe, and the sickening feeling was indescribable.
I kept praying for a long, long, time—to a suffering child, it seemed like an eternity, but I knew God sometimes tested people’s faith. God also punished people, so I tried to remember if I had done something bad that I deserved to be punished for, but I couldn’t think of anything. Nobody had ever done anything bad enough to deserve what was happening to me.
The only time I ever talked the monster out of hurting me was the night before Christmas Eve, and I said, “Please, no. Santa will see.” Many times he promised me he wouldn’t hurt me anymore, and I thought, maybe, that God had finally answered my prayers. But the monster always did it again, and I finally decided that God wasn’t going to help. What kind of God wouldn’t help someone like me?
After a whole lot of suffering and misery, I finally figured it out: There was no God. Everybody had made a terrible mistake.
Once I decided it was up to me, I told another family member what was happening and hoped that if she called the police fast, the monster wouldn’t have time to kill my mom. She called the police, and when they arrested him, he had illegal guns in his truck, and a collection of girls’ panties (they were trophies from his other victims, I learned later).
I had two grown brothers from my mom’s first marriage, and someone in my family said the monster would be lucky if they didn’t kill him. I was disappointed when they didn’t.
As it turned out, he was a bigamist who had a wife in another state, so his marriage to my mom wasn’t legal. The police took custody of me that day and brought in a lady—probably a child psychologist—who interviewed me before they gave me back to my mom. When she got me back, Mom told me I was lucky they didn’t take me away for good, and she wanted to know why I didn’t tell her about the abuse instead of telling the other family member. I didn’t have an answer for her.
The monster was violent and abusive toward her, too, but I could tell she loved him. To this day, I haven’t forgiven her for her poor judgment and I doubt I ever will.
We lived in a small town, and everybody knew what had happened. I didn’t care because I was too young to be ashamed, and it wasn't happening anymore. I was delivered from hell, as far as I was concerned. I was blissfully happy because the monster was in jail, and my family told me they would never let him out again.
There was a trial, and I had to recount the whole story, everything that had happened, so they could record it on tape for the judge. By that time, I was six years old, but they still had to teach me the proper words for private parts so my testimony would be legal. My mom and I were both sent to court-ordered counseling. I was never told how long he would be in prison, but for years afterward, we got an annual letter from the parole board, asking if we thought he should stay in prison. The answer was always yes.
He sent cards and letters and even a decorated T-shirt, and my mother stupidly gave these things to me. I wish she had thrown them in the trash. I think she still loved him for a long time, but she eventually married a terrific man, a friend of the family, who turned out to be a shitty husband, but he was a great father to me. He once told me he didn’t believe a word I’d said about the abuse, and that telling stories like that could ruin a man’s life. He was afraid I would tell lies about him, so he didn’t touch me at all—not a hug, not a pat on the head—and that suited me just fine. I didn’t want anybody to touch me.
Now I am a grown woman, happily married to a wonderful man who has helped me overcome my past, with kids of my own. My mother is not part of our lives. I still have occasional flashbacks of the abuse, and I doubt I will ever get completely past it, but that misery has the capacity to consume my life. I have plenty of good memories that I choose to think about instead.
I cannot understand how people think it’s a good idea to teach a helpless child that God, whose existence is entirely unproven, has the capacity to help them or save them from actual harm. I had no doubt that God was real and that he would help, and because I had faith, I suffered for a lot longer than I would have if I'd have known I was on my own. I wasted so much pain and suffering on faith. Children who have cancer and other terrible circumstances are no doubt praying, just as I did, for help that will never come. It is extraordinarily cruel to teach children to have faith, when it is possible to teach them instead to rely on themselves and on real things.
My children’s grandparents are vaguely religious, and my mother-in-law in particular is talking about taking my kids to church, but I won’t ever let that happen. Religious people don’t realize that some people have very good reasons for hating religion. Some religious people might be interested in helping me find God again, and to them, I would say, “Fuck off. You’ve done enough damage already.”
A previous reader in our religion series also contributed a story of immense suffering as a young child—a school bombing that left him severely disabled for life—but in contrast to the reader above, his faith in God endured into adulthood and to this day.
For a previous Notes discussion on theodicy—the age-old question of why a benevolent God would permit so much suffering in the world—go here. Here’s an unaired email from reader Joseph:
The responses from readers over theodicy are very interesting (and I’m always happy to see Sully [former Atlantic writer Andrew Sullivan] make an appearance as well). One thing I haven’t seen brought up is a resistance among many theologians to engage in theodicy at all. Questions of theodicy often end up trying to rationalize suffering or come up with some explanation for why it exists. In its most crass forms, that gets you Pat Robertson saying that Haiti made a pact with the devil. In its more common forms, it gets you ideas like “God uses all things for good.”
Karl Barth is probably the best representative of a school of thought that says that since evil exists and was not created by God, its existence is a scandal, an impossible possibility. The human response to suffering is not to try to explain why it exists, but to fight against its manifestation in the world. To explain suffering is to minimize it or justify its existence. The psalms of lament are especially instructive in this regard, in presenting prayer as resistance.
Some of your readers interested in how suffering is related to creation and the cross might enjoy a lecture that Barth scholar Bruce McCormack gave last year. The argument is basically that in Christ, God chooses to die on the cross as a way of taking responsibility for creating a world in which suffering is possible. It is as compelling as it is unorthodox.
Another unaired email from that point in the discussion comes from Bert Clere, a long-time Atlantic reader and frequent contributor to Notes (as well as the broader site):
Theodicy is the great question at the root of all religion, I think. Way back in 2007, you and Sullivan published this email from me on God and Einstein. That was nine years ago, and I can’t say that I’m any better or any worse with regards to my severe anxiety. Some days are good, other days not so much so.
I don’t know why we suffer. Sometimes you can tie it in with original sin and make some kind of sense of it. Other times it feels totally meaningless and causes you to question everything.
I always return to the Shadowlands [a 1993 film about C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham]. C.S. Lewis thought he had answered the question. Then he watched his wife die of cancer and realized all the theology in the world didn’t take away the intense pain and senseless feeling of it. If C.S. Lewis couldn’t solve it, then I don’t think any of us will.
All you can do is to return to the mystery of the cross and say we see through a glass darkly. I realize for some that’s a cop out. But for me it is the only signpost to the resolution of suffering and divine goodness that we have. At the very least, what the cross tells us is that God chose to suffer as we do.
Bert followed up at the time:
Admittedly, I wrote that before seeing [reader Elizabeth write] “He’s the God who suffers with us. And I love Him for it.” I feel stupid repeating what others have already said, but at the same time it’s an example of how all we can do is circle back to the cross.
I find the other idea, that this world is actually in the hands of a devil, both terrifying and fascinating. It would explain a lot. But it still raises the same question about God’s omnipotent goodness. Because even if we let Satan in, why did God allow a world in which that could happen in the first place? And how do we square that idea with what we know of creation and evolution? There was no literal Adam and Eve, Tree, and Snake. Was there a set point at which we chose to embrace the bad and thus let suffering in? Science would argue pretty heavily against it, I think.
If you’d like to join the theodicy discussion, or share your story of religious choice, drop us a note. Update from a reader, Ryan:
No one who follows Taoism could even fathom the question that so perplexes Christians inculcated in the idea of an omniscient, benevolent, omnipresent, all-powerful God. The symbol of the East, the Yin/Yang circle, clearly demonstrates that good exists in evil and vice versa. The cross represents suffering, death and release ...
Here are two stories from readers who attend a Unitarian Universalist church and how it differs from more traditional churches in the U.S. The first reader, John, describes how being exposed at an early age to a very different faith in a very different culture opened up his mind—and then closed it off to religion:
Fascinating collection of personal essays. Here is mine.
I grew up in Northern Virginia and was raised Episcopalian going to a long established Episcopal parish in Fairfax and being confirmed there. In 1962 my father joined the U.S. Information Agency. That September we moved to Ankara, Turkey. I was a few months short of 12.
The move exposed me to the Turkish version of Islam. It was also the beginning of what I like to think of as an appreciation for what William James termed “the variety of religious experiences.” My father was a great believer in getting out and exploring the country, for which I will always bless him. We travelled all over the Turkish Mediterranean coast, to Istanbul and to Greece. This exposed me to Greek and Roman polytheism and to the Greek Orthodox traditions of the Byzantine Empire and modern Greece. At around the same time I was beginning to explore Western classical and American history, including the impact of the Enlightenment on Revolutionary America.
After my parents separation in 1965, my mother, sister, and I returned to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I was quite offended by the lack of understanding she received from the Episcopal minister there. I don’t recall the impetus, although I think I can infer it, but in 1966 she left the Episcopal congregation for the Kalamazoo Unitarian congregation. It is possible that my mother’s Quaker heritage on her father’s side could have played a role. We continued as Unitarians when we moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1967, when I was 16. In my 20s I gradually drifted away from organized religion.
I have recently begun connecting with the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, where I now live. I consider this an intellectual, not a spiritual, connection—one prompted more by my respect for the ethics and intellect of the two ministers leading RRUUC and a personal quest for community after my wife entered long-term care for Alzheimer’s.
How would I characterize my religiosity at age 65? I would say that I have none. I don’t find a belief in a higher power or a system to worship one rational and for me, intellectually satisfactory.
Looking back 50 plus years, I would say that my move to Turkey may well have been transformative from a spiritual standpoint, although perhaps it only accelerated an intellectual journey that I would have made regardless of place. I think I realized in Turkey that religion is a human construction and that because it is a human construction, it is expressed in a great variety of ways none ultimately relevant to the existence or more likely non-existence of a deity. From that I believe I derived that there is no one “right way” and that any attempt to impose a “right way” is not only morally wrong but socially destructive. I think I also concluded that while I may not share the beliefs of another, that person’s personal quest is entitled to respect and not for me to judge.
The other reader, Kelsey, is more deeply involved in the UU church:
It was years since I’d given a sermon. There I was, back in the pulpit of my childhood congregation, and I was about to talk about drones. I grew up deep in the church, or at least, as deep as a Unitarian Universalist gets: I almost had the exact wording of all seven principles memorized, but without a specific sacred text to sink into, I found myself instead on committee after committee, from the time I was 13 until I was 22.
Ours is a non-credal faith, which puts us on a very fine sliver between not a religion at all, in the eyes of the dogmatic, and too much of a religion, in the minds of many burnt by previous exposures to faith. Our ritual calendar is, like that of America itself, not explicitly Christian but functionally so. Our hymns replace “world of sin” with “worldly din,” and at times worship felt like a book group meeting in the back of a library.
We are, fairly, described as “the church of NPR,” and while there is great diversity of belief and people within the faith, the overwhelming impression is one of well-meaning upper-middle-class whites who listened to NPR, voted Democratic only because the Green Party wasn’t viable, and who marched against the last war, this war, and the next war. Our faith at large, and perhaps my congregation especially, during the 2000s, was deeply skeptical of American power at home and abroad, and with a ministry focused on this world and not the next, that translated to protest, marches, and a general outrage at the entire defense establishment. The question over coffee hour (it was always coffee hour) wasn’t “was the Iraq war a bad idea?” it was “should we even have a military, if we can misuse it like that?”
In as much as I had a conflict with my faith, it was that I was fascinated by how we got into our bad wars, and rather than turning away, I wanted to know more. Ending the draft clearly hadn’t stopped the risk of foreign policy adventurism abroad, and the protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq didn’t work either. Years later, with college and a temp job behind me, I started work writing about military technology professionally. My work life was filled with fact sheets about bombers and drones and laser weapons and killer robots, and every Sunday I found myself in the pews of my new congregation, singing odes to a “Spirit of Life” [embedded above].
My home congregation invited me back to speak. The sermon I gave, after three days furiously refining it, was an attempt to reconcile that disconnect. How does one cover the minutia of war, and especially of future war, while remaining opposed to very real and human consequences of what happens in war? I gave the sermon, but the question never really went away. It’s the ever-present disconnect of my life, as a member of a faith deeply committed to repairing our broken world, and as a journalist narrowly focused on how, exactly, the world breaks.
Update from the first reader, John:
What a pleasant surprise. Thank you for running my piece. A great juxtaposition, by the way, as I agree with few of Kelsey’s views. I consider myself a center-left Democrat and incapable of viewing the world in the black-and-white shades that Kelsey seems to embody, especially on issues of foreign policy and national security. I am, at bottom, a pragmatist. Politically this probably makes me center-right on the UU spectrum.
I have come to see how very active RRUUC is on a range of issues. I have engaged, I think productively, on dementia—helping to arrange a series of seminars—I’ve joined in some very good dialogues on racial justice, and I’m participating in what will be a joint sponsoring with a Lutheran congregation of one or more refugee families. My respect for the two RRUUC ministers has continued to deepen as I have gotten to know them better.
Will I ever formally join RRUUC? I don’t know, but I was surprised and touched earlier this month when asked to participate in a brainstorming session on welcoming newcomers.
Kelsey replies, “Of course, ask two Unitarians for a perspective on the faith and you’ll likely get five answers.”
A Canadian reader, Jan, introduces a new spiritual practice, Falun Gong, to our ongoing series. He’s been a practitioner for 16 years and “came into my spiritual path in a most unexpected way”:
I grew up as a Catholic, though really only in the most basic sense of the word. Early on I tried to be a proper Catholic, was an altar boy, but I met with what I saw as sufficient hypocrisy in the church (no need for details here) that I proudly declared myself an agnostic in my teens. I came to see religion as a tool for powerful people to subjugate the masses.
I decided that science would be enough as a worldview, a paradigm. I dabbled in Daoist Tai Chi a bit, but purely for purposes of relaxation.
I studied to become a biologist, with particular interest in ecology, evolution, and conservation. I imagined myself becoming a professor. Things were going well. I was blessed with generous research scholarships. I made excellent contacts in my areas of interest, established great collaborations, found ideal field sites. What really interested me was non-Darwinian models of evolution. For my doctoral studies, I did field research in Madagascar to study apparent hybridization between different species of lemur.
Returning from the field, I began to feel weak, depressed, and after some time, my ability to do simple things progressively degenerated. Working with micro lab tools became progressively more laborious and difficult. I thought I was overworked, but no amount of sleep would help.
One day, running to catch a street light, my legs stopped working properly, and I barely made it to the other side. I checked myself into the university hospital.
I was diagnosed with Guillain Barre Syndrome. My immune system was attacking my peripheral nervous system, and I was slowly losing control. Having found a rare neurological disorder, doctors kept sending interns and residents to me to attempt a diagnosis. I wasn’t getting better or worse, but there was no known treatment. The day I checked into the hospital I also discovered that I had a parasitic worm infection, and later, mono. Basically, my body was toast.
A tough six months followed. I watched my career disintegrate. The academic partnerships I had developed evaporated, and I could no longer teach effectively. My already rocky romantic relationship further suffered.
I returned to my hometown, where my mother encouraged me to try “alternative therapies.” I did, but none were effective. So I went back to my university town. There, in a smoky coffee shop, I met an old acquaintance who had explored numerous Eastern disciplines. He gave me a DVD, saying that what was on it helped him recover from chronic fatigue syndrome, which he had experienced some years back.
I’ll never forget watching that video for the first time. It was a video introducing the exercises and meditation of Falun Gong—a style of Chinese yoga rooted in Buddhist principles, also known as Falun Dafa. After half an hour of trying to mimic the slow-moving exercises on the video, I started to feel better for the first time I could remember. It was really an indescribable feeling—my heart, body, and mind were all singing.
I read an introductory book of the Falun Dafa teachings, though many of the references to Chinese qigong and folk traditions were at first difficult to understand. All I knew was that, as I was learning these exercises day after day, I was feeling better. At some point, I realized that my reflexes had returned (reflex loss is a common symptom of Guillain Barre).
Some months into it, I went for a checkup with my neurologist. I’ll never forget her words: “Congratulations. You’re in complete remission. I have no explanation, but keep doing whatever you’re doing.” I did, and didn’t really look back.
There were some curious side effects, however. Within about a week of starting, I started hating the taste of cigarettes. I was never a heavy smoker, but I enjoyed the social aspect, and it was consistent. Some time later, I experienced the same thing with alcohol. As it happens, both these states are described in Falun Gong’s seminal book of teachings, Zhuan Falun. As a Buddhist school teaching, Falun Gong encourages the abandonment of unhealthy addictions and attachments. I was fascinated, because it wasn’t something I really expected or necessarily wanted to happen.
One night while meditating, I experienced what really set me on the path of Falun Dafa. I had the proverbial experience of having my whole life flash before my eyes. I’d read about such things, but it’s really difficult to imagine until you experience it. Basically, I saw vignettes from my life, step by step, from an early age. I experienced this as one would a film, I suppose, yet at the same time, time it was moving very quickly; I was able to see a lot of my life in a matter of minutes.
But it was odd: It was clearly my life, yet it wasn’t somehow how I remembered it. Not exactly. Mid-way, it dawned on me: It was my life seen through my mother’s eyes. It blew my mind. I cried for several hours.
My mother and I had a complicated relationship. We loved each other, wanted it to work, but we couldn’t be in the same room without tension for more than 15 minutes. With this experience, I really, for the first time, understood her, understood her trials and tribulations, understood what her pains and motivations were.
I also knew how to fix our relationship. The next time I was back home, I was able to initiate mending process in a matter of 24 hours. Not perfectly, of course, but the relationship became something completely different: fully loving and respectful.
I knew then that I had found something deep and profound. I understood from Falun Gong’s teachings that cultivation was a path of constantly getting rid of attachments, and of gaining a broader and broader, more tolerant and compassionate perspective of the world. Here I saw it manifest in my life in reality. Initially, I was physically healed, and now, I saw I was able to change behavioural patterns that didn’t think I had the power to change. With this, I decided to commit to the discipline.
It’s fascinating that many of the issues I’d had with organized religion are absent from Falun Gong. Collecting money? Forbidden, according to one of the few strict rules. Hierarchy? None, amazingly. One can only measure one’s progress against the teachings and against oneself, not against others. Taking others as role models is not an option, nor is imposing on another how they should behave.
Studying the teachings, I saw myself becoming more truthful, compassionate, and tolerant day by day. (Truth, Compassion and Tolerance are the core tenets of Falun Dafa.) I came into it being enthralled by physical healing, but what I found along the way was something much deeper—spiritual healing, and dare I say, in a sense, salvation.
When you are deeply immersed in a religious faith, there is always the guilty understanding that falling out of your chosen religion reflects your own inner weakness, a moral failing. Many religions are predicated on an “all-or-nothing” ideology, which implicitly separates “unbelievers” from “believers.” This segregation always bothered me, as a Christian. I could never reconcile the gritty lines carved between religions, forcing us to declare who was wrong and who was right. After a prolonged, painful struggle, I decided to leave my religion.
Immediately, it was like being unmoored in a vast, dangerous ocean. In an increasingly secular world where religion is no longer in vogue for young people, it seems like abandoning religion is an easy thing. Yet, what had always drawn me to religion was its capacity to comfort. It was an answer to the loneliness of the soul in a sprawling universe. It was the assurance of someone else being in the driver’s seat. So the abrupt disappearance of that after leaving Christianity was terrifying to me.
Then, one evening after work, I found myself standing in a circle of 20 strangers in a church in Washington, D.C. I was at the monthly meeting of The Sanctuaries, a self-described “spiritually diverse and creative community committed to personal growth and social transformation.” (I had heard of the group when it was featured in a CBS News documentary, “Faith, Spirituality & the Future,” a preview of which is seen below, and embedded above is a music video made by members of The Sanctuaries.)
The leader of the monthly meeting, a cheerful man who introduced himself as “Rev Erik,” seemed intent on assuaging away all awkwardness. “Why don’t we all just close our eyes,” he suggested gently, “And whenever you’re comfortable—only if you’re comfortable—feel free to say aloud the being or force that guides your life.”
The silence stretched. I peeked open my eyes. A girl across the circle in a hijab saw me and smiled.
“Adventure,” I offered, after a beat of hesitation.
Rev Erik then suggested (everything that evening was a gentle suggestion) that we spend the time dissecting our personal definitions of the night’s theme—“thriving”—and present them in artistic ways. Here we were, grown men and women of different faiths and colors, rapping or intoning or acting out what it was to thrive in our lives. It was awkward, imperfect, vulnerable, and a distinctly spiritual endeavor. It jarred me out of the morose lethargy that had characterized my post-Christian life.
As my colleague Emma has written, these days religion is not neat and tidy, but rather “a sprawling sphere of life that encompasses everything from saccharine celebrations to the search for ultimate meaning.” Interfaith worship had once sounded like an oxymoron to me. Yet, if being spiritual is about that ultimate search for meaning, the peacefulness of contemplating what aligns us, is it not possible to enter the quiet space together, without believing in the same thing?
It helps to believe in the same deity in order to forge a spiritual community, of course. But how beautiful it was, in that moment, when the 20 of us—Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, naturalists, and more—fell silent together, as we gave thanks for the broad spread of forces that guided us. It made me feel a little less lonely.
Have you had a profound experience of interfaith worship you’d like to share? We’d love to hear about it: hello@theatlantic.com.
