Like many children in isolated religious environments, during his youth, he was never exposed to the possibility of a secular worldview. His journey begins as one filled with anxiety. It concludes with a feeling of liberation that changed his life, one that increased his faith, not in Christ, but in people.
I was born to a factory worker and a farmer. I’ve lived in the same house in Kansas my entire life, baptized a couple weeks after entering the world. I grew up in the Christian faith, and my dad would take me to church every Sunday. I was raised as an Evangelical Lutheran and was a devoted believer.
Literature has always had a significant impact on me. Through seventh and eighth grade, I absolutely loved the Left Behind series. Those books were written by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, and they’re about a post-apocalyptic world. The plot follows an airline pilot at the Rapture, when many Christians believe that God will take his own to the kingdom of heaven, leaving all of their clothes and material possessions behind. It’s about one man’s journey as he goes through Armageddon in a modern interpretation of the Book of Revelations. To me, the books were incredibly suspenseful. They portrayed God as a badass action hero, like G.I. God, describing the sort of God that I hoped I would have in my own life someday. I wasn’t popular growing up, so the idea of an intercessory and personal God who would be there to stand up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself was really appealing.
My self-esteem was, I think, linked to some psychological issues that affected me in my youth and made me susceptible to religious ideas. In my freshman year of high school, I was diagnosed with depression and general anxiety disorder. I got on some medication. When I did, it seemed like something switched on for me. I suddenly no longer really wanted God in my life. My reason, which had been dulled for so long, came into its own, and, for the first time, I began to ask important questions about both the world and religion.
When I was growing up, I didn’t know that there was an alternative to religion. I’m sure that might be a shocking fact to people who grew up in big cities, but secular options simply were not available in the environment I was raised in. As my curiosity blossomed, I began searching for answers. The summer before my senior year of high school, I read The God Delusion, which had a huge impact on me. As I was reading it, it was as though rusty chains began falling off of my mind. I felt empowered, like I was finally free to think for myself, free to evolve out of my own cognitive dissonance. It changed my life and sealed the deal. I realized that I’m an atheist.
When the people around me began to learn about my atheism, many thought that I was going through a phase. Nobody ever threatened me, but I was mildly ostracized. In the Midwest, religion is considered to be a fairly personal topic, not something that comes up in polite conversation. By and large, when others found out about my beliefs, there was an unspoken agreement to disagree, and I never experienced too much backlash.
My family also found out. I have a grandmother who’s quite religious. Her rationale for belief in God comes from the sheer beauty of the world. She’s not a scientist. She doesn’t read about natural selection, and I’ve never tried to challenge her beliefs. At one point, though, she flat-out asked me, “Jon, you’re not an atheist, are you?” I felt that I needed to be truthful. I said, “I am.”
Religious is ubiquitous in Kansas. There was a girl I grew up with who was raised in the church, and her family members are as Christian as people can possibly be. I don’t think she has ever considered a worldview that wasn’t from a Biblical perspective. She was taught that everything good that happened in her life was a blessing from God and that everything bad that occurred was a test from God. She often said that she was going to rely on God to get her through difficult situations because what happens in life is part of His plan, that He’s going to make her a better person because of what happens. Over time, I began to increasingly see that type of thinking as a frightening act of submission.
She and her family taught me the ability of superstitious thinking to take over people’s rational thought processes. I once made a joke to her sister, who’s a Fulbright Scholar, about people actually believing that the Earth is 4,000 years old. She turned to me and said, “I believe it is!” She justified her belief by saying that she thinks that there are some discrepancies with scientific radio isotope dating. I didn’t try to challenge her because I was in utter shock that she’s a creationist. That flabbergasted me. She and her sister are very smart young women, but they’re absolutely blinded by their faith.
When I was finally done with high school, I was hell-bent on going somewhere liberal for college. I wanted to get out of small-town America. I decided to go to Boston University. When I arrived, I found a thriving atheist sub-community, the Boston Atheists. I also found a faculty member at BU who said that he’d be willing to sponsor the atheist and secular humanist group that I was trying to start. Over time, I learned that most people in the New England area are apatheist, rather than atheist or theist. They don’t really care either way. Coming from Kansas, indifference to the subject of religion really surprised me.
For me, whenever I see other groups that are persecuted by those on the religious right, be they atheist, gay, or any other minority, having grown up in Kansas, it becomes a personal issue for me. Most people in Boston and big cities have never seen the sort of fervor with which people can use religion to discriminate against others. In my experience, the closest people who live in metropolitan areas ever come to seeing religious fundamentalism is when they read articles about the seemingly-crazy Westboro Baptist Church. Learning about their demonstrations, they seem to think that they’re a bizarre group of people, a few wackos. But it’s not an uncommon belief in large segments of rural America that God hates fags. A huge number of people actually think that way.
Even with all of the problems in the world, I have faith in people no matter where they come from, and I think we can significantly change the world for the better. I recognize that atheism by itself does not offer a philosophy of values. My secular humanism, rather than my atheism, guides my moral reasoning. That philosophy emphasizes the here and now of human existence. The Catholic Church, in contrast, is one of the richest organizations in the world. It flies the pope around the world in luxury, while it should be wholly dedicated to distributing food to the impoverished, working to alleviate and end suffering. Many religions say one thing and do another. So many of their adherents appear to have wool pulled over their eyes.
My own evolution has had a profound impact on the way that I see the world and how I think we should be spending our time and resources while we’re here. I look at many poor, religious countries, and I see people who are starving to death. Their God isn’t providing. I don’t know what the rest of humanity is waiting for. There’s so much suffering in the world, and yet, so many people’s attempt to alleviate that fact is to pray to end the pain. We need action. We need philanthropy. We need people to feed the homeless. We are all people regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation, and some of us are simply born in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should take responsibility for helping our fellow human beings. It’s time to wake up.
XXIII.
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Jimmy Pianka: Outgrowing Greek Orthodoxy