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J.A.G.: The Psychology of Religion
“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”
Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses in 1517, posting them to a door at Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. His document is widely recognized for fueling the Protestant Reformation. In it, Luther criticized the practices of the Catholic Church for, among other things, his perception of Church abuses, particularly regarding the sale of indulgences. Nearly 500 years later, a Lutheran, who wished to be identified through his initials, J.A.G., began to criticize his own Lutheran faith after experiencing panic attacks brought on by religious fear. He didn’t eat enough, didn’t sleep enough, and was terrified by the possibility of going to hell.
J.A.G. spent his high school years in Colorado Springs, CO, one of the most religiously conservative sections of America. The more he understood science, particularly evolutionary biology, the more he was able to quiet his noisy mind. He began to view all life as the result of a natural process, free from deistic observance or intervention. Empowered by knowledge and assisted by mild antidepressants, J.A.G. has overcome his childhood fears.
My mother was raised Catholic, but my family is Lutheran. She converted when she married my father. Therefore, I was raised in the Lutheran tradition. I was sent to religious schools until I was in eighth grade. I was extremely religious when I was young.
There are several Lutheran denominations. The biggest one is ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and, overall, it’s quite liberal. It ordains women and is gay-friendly. Another branch of Lutheranism is Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, LCMS. The most conservative branch is called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, or WELS. The WELS branch is very fundamentalist, very literalist. Women aren’t allowed to vote or hold positions of authority. At different times in my life, I’ve been a part of each of these denominations.
From the age of 12 to 14, religion began to have a negative influence on me. I started to have panic attacks, which I think were related to my religious beliefs. The attacks manifested because of my fear of going to hell. I was afraid of even thinking weird or irreverent thoughts like “I’ll sell my soul to the devil!” because if I did, I thought that I would have committed a grievous offense against God. It’s like the trick where someone says, “Don’t think about an elephant,” and you automatically do.
I often felt like I was going crazy, and it was very disturbing. An idea or thought would pop into my head, and I would think, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to hell.” I’m not sure that words can describe how it feels to believe that you are going to spend the rest of your human life knowing that in the future, no matter what you do, hell will be the outcome of your existence because of thought-crimes that you had committed years ago. It sucked the life out of me. There were nights when I wouldn’t sleep; it became a major mental preoccupation. I probably wasn’t eating as much as I should have, too, and it hurt my performance in school.
If someone had asked me back then what I thought my odds were of going to hell, I would have estimated about 80%. I think back and realize that I was enduring a low-grade mental illness enhanced by religion. Interestingly, something that I’ve realized about this fundamentalist outlook is that seemingly everybody has that fear of hell. I’ve talked to a lot of other ex-fundamentalists who have admitted that to me.
In high school, religion started to have less of a hold on me. I began to feel as though I didn’t fit in at my youth group. At the time, I was living in Colorado Springs, which is the headquarters of Focus on the Family. I remember in 2004, in history class, I was one of two people who said that they would have voted for John Kerry for President of the United States. I think of Colorado Springs as Bush’s America. It’s very, very WASPy, and I never felt like I made a connection with that community.
It wasn’t until around the time that I went to college that I really started to question religion as an institution. I found a blog that made me realize that atheism isn’t a crazy, evil, awful thing. It had always been portrayed to me in that way. I also began to realize that I didn’t know much about biological science. I knew that I needed to further educate myself about the debate between evolution and creationism. I went to a lot of Christian apologetics websites to read more arguments in favor of Christianity. I also started reading PZ Myers’s evolution and atheism website, Pharyngula. After a lot of research, I concluded that evolution is a sensible explanation of how life on Earth came to exist. I know that many try to downplay the implications of the naturalistic worldview on religion and say that there are plenty of liberal, educated religious people who believe in evolutionary science, but that argument didn’t persuade me. I began, for the first time, to consider the possibility that God may not exist.
I continued my search and bought a few books, like Atheist Universe by David Mills, which is written for fundamentalists. I read it and found it convincing. I remember sitting in my dorm room one Saturday morning thinking, “I’ll try for a minute believing that there isn’t a God and see what it’s like.” I did. It was a shocking moment. I realized, “Yes! This makes sense!”
I left my church and didn’t tell my parents about the change that had occurred within me. I wasn’t sure how they would react, and I didn’t want them to have negative feelings toward me. More than anything, I didn’t want my parents to think that I was going to hell. I care about them and they care about me, so, for a while, I kept my true beliefs from them.
Despite my attempts to conceal my atheism, I knew that it would have to be unveiled at some point. They found out in an interesting way. One day, I searched for myself on Google, and one of the results that came up was an obituary for someone with my name. I told my dad about that, and when he looked it up by searching for my name, he found my Atheist Nexus profile as one of the top results. My cover had been blown.
A few weeks later, my parents talked to me about it, and I told them the truth. Thankfully, that conversation was very positive. My dad told me that if anyone ever harassed me about religion, I should let him know so that he could go after them. My mother didn’t cry; her biggest concern was that I wouldn’t be able to find a wife.
I thought that my parents’ reaction would be one of sadness. I know for a fact that they genuinely believe in heaven, and I was worried that they would tell me that I was going to hell. They did say that they were not thrilled about this change in my life, but they also stressed that they supported me. In fact, they said that they were worried that I had thought that they wouldn’t be supportive, which is why I hadn’t told them for so long. They wanted to be good parents, and they were concerned that I felt a bit unwelcome in our family.
My parents are fairly liberal and open-minded, which is likely why they reacted the way that they did. I visited them recently, and my dad was talking about how he had seen a gay couple walking down the street and how, at first, it made him feel a bit uncomfortable, but then he felt badly for feeling like that. He said that he should be more accepting. Fundamentally, there’s a lot of mutual care, mutual love, in my family, which, in the end, informed how we dealt with my atheism. Our bond was able to see us through.
Despite his relative openness, my dad did say that he didn’t want me walking around our house wearing offensive t-shirts like one he had seen with a Christmas tree and the words “Merry Christ Myth” on it. I wouldn’t do that anyway. That’s not really who I am. I’m not ostentatious or extremely outspoken about my atheism. My main challenge as an atheist has been staying aware of the fact that we really are a minority, that there really are people out there who truly do hate us.