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.
Dylan, a young Millennial reader, revives a really interesting subthread on Jewish identity (starting here, here, here, then here) within our overall discussion on religious choice:
I was amazed to read Lekha’s struggle with her Jewish identity because I am in almost exactly the same situation: Both of my parents are Jewish, but my mother is a convert, originally from India (like Lekha’s mother). I grew up in New York and was raised Jewish. I went to Hebrew School, had a Bar Mitzvah, and had Jewish friends. For the most part no one questioned my Jewish identity until I was in my teens.
It’s not easy convincing people you’re Jewish when you look more like one would expect a Muslim to look like. It’s an ongoing battle within myself.
I also don’t agree with your Orthodox Jewish reader, Esther, when she said that someone who converts to Judaism but doesn’t follow Jewish practices will “naturally” be viewed as an “outsider.” I know plenty of Jews who don’t practice the religion or even believe in any of its tenets but who consider themselves and (more importantly) are considered by other Jews to be Jewish.
This standard doesn’t seem to apply to me because of my mixed ethnic background. When talking to other Jewish people, I’m often forced to explain that, yes, my mother converted before marrying my father. Although even this isn’t enough for some people; my grandmother still didn’t want my father to marry my mother because even they she had converted she would “never really be Jewish.”
Here’s an older reader, Irene, who talks about the tension she experienced growing up with Jewish identity in the 1950s:
If there was one subject I thought I wouldn’t have much to add to, it’s religion. But when the subject took a whole different turn, to “who is a Jew and who decides?,” I knew I could relate.
My dad was Jewish; my mom was Christian. They met in Nazi Germany and fell in love there. My dad and his siblings and parents escaped to Britain and the U.S.; my mom survived the war in Germany.
My parents reunited after the war when he came back as an American soldier and joined his family in the U.S. once he was allowed to marry an enemy. During my young childhood, I was immersed in my dad’s family, but his parents had both died by the time I was six and we moved away from the extended family.
Although my mom half-heartedly tried to interest me in religion (mostly because other families sent their kids to Sunday school in the 1950s), it didn’t take for very long. By the time I was 13, I had learned what all the whispering among adults had been during my childhood: the Holocaust—who died, who escaped, their lives before and after. It impacted me very hard.
As I got older and started to date, religion took on a new importance. Jews were concerned that I wasn’t Jewish enough but generally accepted me; Christians considered me a Jew. Culturally I was drawn to Jews, and most of the guys I dated were Jewish. The one Christian I dated seriously dumped me the moment he found out my dad was Jewish. I saw it in his eyes immediately. He just couldn’t tell his family (his dad was an Episcopal priest) that he was dating me. I never dated a Christian again.
I went on to marry a Jewish man whose family was as unreligious as my own. When our children were young I thought about converting for their sake, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it and my husband had zero interest in pushing them toward any religion. I had grown up in a cultural world that was heavily Jewish but religiously pretty agnostic. Those were my own tendencies and still are. It’s just not possible for me to pretend to believe what I don’t believe.
I also am repulsed by the people who believe that there is only one way to be Jewish and that is to be an ultra orthodox Jew. They remind me of those Christians for whom Christianity is limited to the most conservative fundamentalist sects and who want to limit the entire realm of Christianity to their own narrow beliefs. So I’ll stay agnostic and remember the culture of both of my parents fondly even if I do see myself as more culturally and ethnically Jewish than Christian. Theirs was a very special union and reminds me that love can conquer—if not everything, an awful lot.
Here’s another Boomer reader, Mike, who, like darker-skinned Dylan, doesn’t look like most Jewish people—but in the opposite way:
I was born a Protestant and then my father died of polio. My mother re-married to a Jew and so at the age of 2, I became a Jew too. I got a Jewish-sounding last name. I lived in an increasingly Jewish neighbourhood, so the majority of my friends were Jewish and so I just went along as one. Not to be racist, but I did notice I didn’t seem to have the appearance of a Jew (blonde hair, blue eyes).
I never really did feel 100% acceptance, but I went along playing the role expected of me. I was even Bar Mitzvah’d, and this made my step-dad happy, as he fit in properly with the rest of his chosen Jewish community. My mother went along acting her part, which helped me do the same.
My upbringing always had me question this religious thing, being born into one ideology and then converting to another but never feeling accepted, feeling like an outsider. But I went along and felt I could continue to pull this charade off until one time at Synagogue during Yom Kippur time during yet another Israeli conflict. This rabbi, who was very accepted by the congregation, started talking about how the congregation should come together to support Israel in wartime and they passed the hat around to “buy weapons to kill Syrians.”
This is when I took pause to consider this whole religion thing. Something yet again just didn’t add up for me.
My last confirmation that these feelings of conflict and confusion were confirmed to me when the very Jewish high school and graduating class decided to have a reunion. I will never forget that when I received a letter from an old friend requesting “that we get together for lunch and that he would even call some OUR NON Jewish friends”!
I declined the invitation, and I went back to living a peaceful and fulfilling life in the community of the world around me. I was astounded yet amazingly relieved that I had escaped that world. To this day when I hear John Lennon’s “Imagine,” I still smile, knowing that we can independently find that world.
If you’re interested in more reading on the subject of Jewish identity, Abigail has you covered:
I don’t actually have a very good personal story for you. My own story involves giving up the Reform Judaism in which I was raised and pursuing an orthodox Jewish conversion. (My father is Jewish, not my mother, so only Reform Judaism considers me a Jew.) Dramatic though that choice has felt at times, it has come on so gradually that I cannot place a finger on the beginning or any particular turning point.
What I did want to tell you, though, is Rolling Stone magazine published a really thorough and incredible article by Ellen Willis in April 1977 which talks about this phenomenon of liberal Jews turning orthodox (“Next Year in Jerusalem”). Maybe you already know about it, or maybe it is of no use to you, and at any rate it is a bit dated now, but I just wanted to note it because a lot of what it talks about is still happening among American millennials.
Update from an old compatriot of mine, Max:
Hey Chris, long-time reader from back in the Dish days. I swear this isn’t intended as self-promotion (not least because I didn’t write anything I’m about to link to), but seeing all of the stories from Jews of mixed ethnic background made me feel like I needed to share.
I work for an organization that has been providing material assistance to Jews of Color (“JOCs” in our parlance) who are organizing themselves for greater recognition and leadership in American Jewish communities. They’re also pushing those majority-white communities to invest more heavily in confronting racism against people of color generally.
Last month, a lot of leaders in this growing movement held a national convening in New York. I thought some of your readers might be interested in seeing some of the output from that convening, which was covered in several Jewish media outlets, most thoroughly Jewschool.
I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, although as the son of a convert of German descent, my blond appearance also results in frequent, irritating comments on how I don’t “look” Jewish. (A tip for readers: just never, ever say that. Just don’t.) But although it’s outside my realm of personal experience, forming relationships with Jews of many ethnicities has been eye-opening and drives home for me how much work our communities have if we are going to be welcoming places for everyone who identifies as Jewish. I hope readers who are struggling with this will connect to Jewish Multiracial Network and the other organizations that hosted the national convening.
And if you’d like to connect with Notes to share your own personal struggle, the door is always open.
I was born into a long line of imams of a Sufi order. My father is an imam, all my paternal uncles were imams, and my six brothers and I are supposed to be imams. My father studied religion, as his ancestors did, by going from village to village, master to master, until he was “ordained.” My mother is illiterate, but she has a vivid imagination and took on the task of scaring her children straight with colorful stories of hell and, less often, of heaven, while my father took on the task of teaching us the Koran.
One my mother’s favorite theme was that of Shaitan (Satan) and his habit of influencing youths to veer them off the righteous path. One of these ways, she would tell us, was that if we whistled, Satan would appear in some guise to convert us and pervert us, be it the form of a cockroach, a goat, a snake, or even—gasp—an attractive woman. (This one would cause me to whistle frequently as a boy, to the point where I am now an expert at various methods of whistling).
When I was about 9 years old, I went on a week-long field trip.
One evening I found myself walking alone between the gym and the camp, whistling absentmindedly and happily, now that I was away from home. Then I realized my mistake: I was all alone, in the dark, calling Shaitan! I froze in my tracks, stopped my song, and waited for Him to appear—hoping for a cockroach rather than a sexy maiden.
Nothing appeared. Doubt started to creep into me. So I whistled again, this time loudly, while standing in the dark street, daring him to show up. Nothing. I continued to call Shaitan—not even a cameo. That’s when it hit me: Shaitan does not exist.
I whistled and continued on my way, but a realization was nagging at my young mind: If Shaitan does not exist, then his counterpart does not either; there can be no Good if there is no Evil. No Shaitan, no Allah.
Before I got to my cot and went to sleep, I had lost the religion of my forebears and would never pick up the mantle of my father’s lineage, all thanks to my mother’s stories. I am nearing 40 years old now and have never looked back to either God or Satan ... though I still wonder how nice it would be to summon an attractive companion by simply whistling.
(As a side note, I think my mother invented, or maybe perpetuated that myth of whistling, as a way to have peace and quiet in our small home where she was trying to raise 11 children. She did not want to be the conductor of a symphony of whistling adolescents. Also, if she were to find out that SHE is the cause of one of her sons straying from the righteous path, she would have a heart attack on the spot. So thanks for letting me share this, but please don’t publish my name if you publish my story ... I do not want my mother to die yet!)
A patron going in colored entrance of the Crescent Theatre in Belzoni, Mississippi, in 1939 (Wikimedia)
In this latest note for our religion series, a reader who grew up in the American South during segregation recounts two evil forces in his childhood, one real and one imagined: Satan and institutionalized racism. Confronted with both, the reader’s biggest religious choice was to leave behind the dogma of his family and “rely on my own intellect in dealing with people”:
When I was a child, my mother often referred to the Devil in some form or the other to threaten or keep the children in check, especially if we had been bad or were somewhat hesitant about getting ready for church on Sundays. So we would merrily go off to church each and every Sunday in an attempt to keep a step or two ahead of that ole wicked and evil Devil.
In a child’s mind, as much play as this devil entity received, he had to be some real mean and powerful dude. If one wasn’t careful, this Devil dude would enter your mind and body and take full control of you. You would not even be able to recognize yourself or your family. He would make you do evil thing to others.
I was told that the only power that could protect from the Devil was God. That just blew my mind.
I would often ask my mother if she loved her children. Of course she said yes. I would then ask if she’d stand by and allow a force or some power to do harm to her children, especially if she had the power to control everything. She said no.
I then said, “You tell me that God loves all his children and yet, if I go uptown and drink from the whites-only water fountain, I would be beaten like an unwanted animal or maybe even killed.” I would ask, why must I who is black and one of God’s children be allowed to suffer so much and can’t even do all the things that he allows his white children to do?
She would say “Son, we really don’t know why God allows certain things to happen, because he works in very mysterious ways.” I would then say “Mom, that is my point; we really don’t fully understand or know how God works and if we fail to understand him in any one area, we may just be misunderstanding him in all other areas.” I told her that most things just didn’t make sense to me, especially when dealing with God and religion.
At that point, she may have thought I was the Devil.
In my mind’s eye, the Devil was this dude who stood more than 10 feet tall and wore the brightest red jumpsuit. He had two long horns that protruded out the top of his head. His body was always aglow in fire. He stood at Hell’s gate with a long pitchfork flaming with fire in his hand. To keep Hell’s fires hot and burning, he would from time to time go to the basement and retrieve another sinner and place him/her over the fire—you know, in the same manner one would place a chicken over a rotary fire. All day and night, the sinner can be heard screaming out and begging and pleading for water to quench the thirst.
While a child, and even sometimes today, I would have nightmares about this Devil. Our true inability to clearly discern what will happen to us after we die leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of unscrupulous people with the sole intent of taking advantage of the weak and confused. Some folks will have you to believe you can buy your way into Heaven.
It is said that God made everything and everything he made is good. Yet, I am suppose to hate the Devil. Please don’t tell me that the Devil decided he wanted to rule God. Remember, God made the Devil and he must have known what he created, especially since he made everything. Then again, if God made the Devil and said the Devil was flawed, what does that say about the creator?
I am told that unless we are born again, we will not enter into the kingdom. What about those who can’t read and understand the Word? Will we be so-called judged on a sliding scale based on one’s intellect or the lack thereof?
I just try to treat people the way I would like to be treated. I don’t want to hear anything about your religion. If it works for you, fine.
But I have come to the conclusion that man has no knowledge of any of the unknown in life. It is all based on guesswork from the folks in control and the masses should just follow them because they are the rich and powerful. Not me. If I go to Hell or wherever, it will be on my own terms.
The final paragraph in this reader note from Amy is the most powerful, showing how she was able to embrace who she is without rejecting religion altogether:
I grew up at a Southern Baptist church in Louisiana, where I was homeschooled and then attended a fundamentalist evangelical high school. Religion was never a choice there, starting the day that a Sunday School teacher said that if I didn’t have Jesus in my heart, the afterlife would be like putting my whole body on a hot stove—forever. What 6-year-old would choose that?
In middle and high school, I realized that I was a lesbian, but I managed to hide it until college. It also didn’t make sense in my head that I could be gay, because my church only showed us videos of crazy adults at Pride Parades that apparently hated God, and that wasn’t me, so how could I be gay?
Although I attended a Southern Baptist university, it was a moderate one with plenty of nonreligious students (and even a fairly large Muslim population). [CB: Many more readers talked about their same-sex attraction at Christian colleges in this Notes thread.] So I had the choice to go to church or not, and I chose not. Because my entire worldview was shaped by fundamentalism, I couldn’t be a part of a religion that pointed to hell if I fell in love.
But the biggest decision wasn’t the decision to come out and date a woman.
Really, the biggest and most difficult decision was to let go of the idea that everything in the Bible was intended to be taken literally. From that, everything else followed, as I started working at a PCUSA [Presbyterian] church. (Such churches tend to be more progressive, such as approving gay marriage and supporting Planned Parenthood.) Suddenly I didn’t have to deny the science pointing away from a 6,000-year-old Earth, I didn’t have to struggle through another unhappy relationship with a man, and my once-a-year-Catholic relatives and agnostic friends weren’t going to hell.
Whenever I hear Southern Baptist students at my school debating fine points, like whether it’s a sin to refrain from spanking your child due to a single verse in Proverbs, I don’t feel that old sense of anxiety and urgency now that I’m not tied to a literal reading of a 2,000-year-old collection of poems and letters.
My conservative friends think it’s funny and a bit odd, but for most of them, I’m the only person they know in the PCUSA church. My parents find it odd that I’m the most overtly religious of their kids, yet am also not a Republican, and I’m openly gay. I hope to be a good example of how one can let go of literalism yet still enjoy a deep faith. Being able to let go of the threat of hell, I realized that non-Christians, feminists, and science gifted me a faith that truly feels rooted not in fear, but love.
This reader, J.E. Park, doesn’t have HIV himself, but the way he saw many religious leaders talk about the afflicted—including someone very close to him—made him deeply cynical of organized religion:
When I was young, 12 or 13 or so, the U.S. was reaching the zenith of AIDS hysteria. Back then, an HIV diagnosis was a virtual death sentence, as there were few ways of treating it. And to complicate the situation, there was a huge stigma that went along with the discovery that one was carrying the virus. We had a very young child in our family who had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, so we were all too aware of the horrible social consequences of this affliction: isolation, harassment, rejection, being forced out of school, and, in extreme cases, assault.
Obviously we were very sensitive to the fear and ignorance surrounding HIV, so we kept this child’s condition a secret, constantly listening to people pass judgement upon an afflicted, powerless segment of the population because they knew no better. I soon discovered that those most vocal and zealous in their condemnation of HIV victims were the very religious.
Don’t get me wrong; there were churches and devout Christians taking a very active and compassionate role in caring for these people. But the worst of those persecuting these sick folks did so because they felt that AIDS was God’s way of removing homosexuals, prostitutes, and drug addicts from this world so that He could torment them in Hell.
I found that at best, these misguided religious leaders were blinded by their interpretation of their scripture. They just could not conceive that AIDS was not some sort of divine plague upon the wicked. At worst, I thought many of the more vocal instigators were just playing upon the tragedy to gain more publicity for themselves and their churches.
Either way, I discovered as a young teenager that religious leaders were just as ignorant and gullible as the rest of us and enjoyed no more of a special insight on man’s place in the universe than anybody else did. I eventually concluded that the more consumed a person was with their religion, the less connected with reality they were, even in matters that had little to do with the divine.
By the time I graduated high school, I had little patience for church and no desire to participate in it, in any manner whatsoever. Sure, I went when my family went, and I’ve always been respectful of others’ religious beliefs, but at its core, I considered the Bible little more than a collection of fundamentalist fairy tales, something developed by early rulers to keep those they ruled acting in the manner that they wanted them to.
Funny thing is, I am not an atheist. I think that there is a place where science ends and God begins, but I have no idea where that is. I think of God as an entity that is just far too complex for the mortal mind to really comprehend.
After decades of meditation and contemplation, I have concluded that our purpose here is not to spend the eight or so decades we have on Earth praying and tithing, but rather to embrace the gift of life that we have been given and live it to its fullest, experiencing all that we can and learning all we can possibly learn until our time here expires. I am not enlightened enough to know to what end this serves, but if I am certain of one thing, it is that no one else does either.
My best guess is that we use our knowledge to advance to a higher life form, be it in a trans-humanist conversion to the next step in the evolutionary ladder or the promotion to a higher level of some spiritual plane, but I cannot say for certain. I have no doubt that if God wanted me to know what my purpose in life was, He would possess the power to make me know it.
My life after rejecting conventional religion was truly liberated. My unwillingness to follow the herd allowed me to take novel approaches to my life choices. Seeking the answers to life’s big questions gave me an overwhelming curiosity of other people’s views and caused me to travel the world extensively to learn from them.
If you or someone close to you has HIV and it affected the way you thought about your religious faith, send us a note.
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.”
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