A seventh-grade Jennifer McCreight answered with a nonchalant “no” when asked whether she believed in God. This was just the beginning of her involvement in all things Godless. Once she became aware of the social stigma associated with being an atheist, she frequently withheld her true beliefs until she entered college. As a founder of the only secular group at Purdue University, a public, conservative, predominately Christian college in Indiana, she was surprised by the amount of support that the group received from the student body and its professors. It had 400 people on its mailing list by the time of her graduation, more than most of the Christian clubs on campus.
Jennifer feels as though she went through two phases of atheism: the first, when she wished that religion was true, and the second, when she no longer did. She began to feel incredibly lucky for this one life. Through her college group, numerous speaking engagements, and a popular blog, Jennifer has become a recognizable figure in secular activism. She looks forward to the day when the movement makes itself obsolete.
I grew up in northwest Indiana right on the border of Illinois, in a suburb of Chicago. I was born into a fairly secular household. Both of my parents had been raised in religious families, but when I was growing up, we never went to church. We celebrated Christmas and Easter solely because we liked presents and loved chocolate. In truth, I wasn’t really exposed to religion until I was in middle school, when my peers started talking about the subject. Many of them had begun going to church camps and CCD. I didn’t even realize that religious people existed until then. Around that time, when I was in seventh grade, a friend asked me, “Do you go to church somewhere?” I bluntly responded, “My family doesn’t go to church.” He then asked, “Do you believe in God?” I said, “No, I guess not.” He said, “So you’re an atheist then?” I replied, “Is that what the word means? I guess so.” It was a really simple interaction. I had no idea how big of a deal religion was for so many people.
The middle school that I attended was pretty cool regarding religious discussions. We had Jewish students, Hindu students, Muslim students, and Christian students. No one really seemed to care about religious differences. I remember conversations in which my friends and I would talk about religion and openly ask philosophical questions. Looking back, those were oddly precocious exchanges to be taking place among 12-year-olds. They were more civil than most of the discussions that take place about these topics throughout the country.
Part of the reason I likely resisted religion was because my dad had always instilled in me a healthy dose of skepticism in all subjects. Growing up, he never identified as an outright atheist, but he also made it clear that he didn’t believe that people needed to go to church to be good. He loved to play the devil’s advocate. I remember one time we were watching a commercial that showed two squirrels high-fiving each other. He sarcastically said, “Oh, I wonder how they trained those squirrels to do that!” I said, “Dad, that’s a computer! They don’t train actual squirrels!” He said, “How do you know?” He would always ask silly questions like that to try to get me thinking. He is also a huge history buff and often said that more people had been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. While he has always been very vocal about his skepticism of religion, he never used the “A” word until after I began my own atheist activism much later in life.
My grandparents have always been religious. They’re Greek Orthodox. When I was seven years old, they asked me why our family celebrated Easter. I answered, “Because that’s when the Easter bunny comes!” They were very upset that I had never even heard of Jesus. Since that incident, we’ve had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy regarding religion.
An important intellectual moment happened to me when I was 14. That was the first time that I heard about the theory of evolution. At first, I was convinced that the theory couldn’t be true. I thought, “Life is too complex to have happened naturally” and couldn’t understand how people could answer very basic evolutionary questions.
These concerns were stirring in my head right around the time that I began to participate in the academic competition Science Olympiad. I loved my coach, who was my former science teacher. He was very pro-evolution. When I told him that I couldn’t grasp evolution, rather than ridiculing my confusion, he said, “I understand why,” and he patiently educated me on the subject. I later found out that he’s agnostic.
Looking back, my fundamental source of bewilderment about evolution stemmed from the fact that I couldn’t understand its basic definition. At first, all I knew was that evolution taught that life changed over time, that living organisms somehow got new traits. To me, that seemed nearly impossible. I couldn’t understand how if something evolved to be male, a female would somehow also simultaneously evolve in the exact same way to be its partner. It appeared to me that the two had been intentionally guided to reproduce.
Over time, as I learned more, a light bulb went off in my head. In reality, evolution works very gradually, with many changes taking place over millions and millions of years, having its effects on populations that are isolated from each other. To humans, a year seems like a lot of time, and contemplating millions and millions of years is not easy for us. Beginning to comprehend the time span of evolution — and the changes that can occur within that amount of time — was the tipping point for me. I finally began to see how all of life could have evolved through natural mechanisms.
This subject got me thinking about God and religion. I started to think, “Maybe God does not answer prayers, but there must have been something that set up everything that we see around us, something that has guided life’s process. The universe is too awesome to be explained in some other way.” I believed the “I can’t comprehend it, therefore there must be something” argument for awhile. I went through a deist phase. Eventually, I realized that, in truth, nothing needed to fill that void.
I became totally fascinated with evolution and had been freed from the need for some sort of creator to guide the process of life. For the rest of high school, though, I didn’t call myself an atheist because I had become more aware of that word’s social stigma. I found that as my peers were getting older, they were going to church more, and they were getting involved in religious organizations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I found that if I told someone that I was agnostic, they respected that, like it was a better philosophical position than atheism. To them, it meant that I was still questioning. I think people assumed that if I identified as agnostic, I would eventually agree with their religious perspective. I was very non-confrontational at that time.
The issue of my religious beliefs continued to come up in my personal life, though. I had a very religious, conservative boyfriend at the end of high school. I continued to use the word “agnostic” because I knew that he could deal with that idea. Whenever I actually talked about what agnosticism meant or examined the lack of evidence for God, he would get pretty upset. In retrospect, I think that he was the person in my life who kept me from calling myself an atheist.
At one point during our relationship, he asked me if I would go to church with him. I had never been to church before, but I told him that I would go because I loved him and because I knew how important it was to him. I said that if he wanted me to come with him to check out his church, then I would. The next day, he called me up, and he dumped me. He said that he couldn’t date someone who didn’t want to go to church for the right reason: because they believe in God. That relationship had a significant impact on me. It made me realize that I didn’t have to conceal my identity just to make someone else happy. I realized that, first and foremost, I should be honest.