John - Apostate

John
Southern Baptist upbringing, currently an apostate (somebody who has lost their faith).

My father was a Southern Baptist Minister, and I was raised deep in that tradition. I was taught to believe that the Bible should be interpreted literally and that Jesus is the only path towards salvation. Fundamentalism in Christianity, and I guess in any religion, does not allow you to compartmentalize your life. So, the religious beliefs we were given intended to permeate every part of our life.

It informed how we related to others, what type of television we watched, and whether we drank alcohol or not. Proselytizing, sharing our faith with others, was also a huge part of the religious experience. And the religious experience was everything. I remember in high-school, in addition to playing football and being in student government and all that, I was known as the devout Christian. I would take my Bible to study hall to read.

I can remember a particular time in study hall when someone came to me and they were having some problems in life. It was an opportunity for me to share the idea of salvation, as I understood it, and we prayed on the spot. He became a born again Christian, right there in the study hall. It was exhilarating!

I was like this everywhere. Because I was a quarterback in football I was welcomed into the party circle in high school. I would go to these parties and make a point to get a clear glass and fill it with milk. While everyone else was getting wasted and engaging in all sorts of licentious, sinful behavior I walked around with my glass of milk and my Bible.

As I look back at it now, it is like remembering another person. It is interesting, though, that the seeds of my faith’s own destruction were formed in my very desire to be a better Christian. In college, and I went to a religious college, I got into Christian Apologetics, which is the study of Christian philosophy, because I wanted to be a better defender of Christianity. I wanted to learn how to counter those people who pointed out Christianity’s flaws.

This lead me to study philosophy, and was an important part in my becoming doubtful of my religion. At the time that was a big thing. There was a year or two when I literally didn’t go a day without breaking down and crying. When you are in the fundamentalist evangelical tradition you take faith seriously, and when you begin to question it, then it is not simply a small tinkering with the beliefs, you are engaging in a complete overhaul of your entire being.

Because the religion deeply affects your whole identity, your whole concept of reality, to change it is a very painful transition. But I had to change. One of the things that really bothered me was the concept that people were going to spend eternity in torment, anguish and hell if they did not accept that Jesus was the son of God, that he came and died for our sins, and that he rose from the grave.

I remember one night, I was sharing my new doubts with a Christian friend, and, after listening to me quietly, she looked at me with concern and sadness, and said, “John, I think you might be the Anti-Christ.” But I kept thinking of the majority of the world who would never be exposed to Christianity and thus, according to what I was taught, were destined for hell. It seemed profoundly unfair. I decided that if it is true that they are going to hell, then I did not want to worship a God that lets that happen.

My mother was very sad about my decision. I had became an Apostate, she would say. That’s somebody who has lost the faith. She has only recently realized to what extent I’ve drifted way from the beliefs she so tried to instill in me. I get an e-mail from her everyday now asking me to go to church, and saying how much she loves me and is praying for me.

I have mixed feelings about this because I know she wants me to believe the right things, but at the same time I feel like a tool. Christians have this way of being so nice and solicitous to you, but it is always doubtful whether they really like you or whether they want you to change your beliefs. I even feel this with my mother.

Up until recently I had tried to be honest with my parents regarding my changes, but that just got me nowhere. It was just a source of frustration for all of us, because I would attempt to articulate my new views, but for my mother they were simply incomprehensible. Her understanding is that once you become a born again Christian, then you have reached the goal, and there is nowhere to go from there.

So, it is a conundrum for her that I could once be a devout Christian and now no longer have those beliefs. That’s why I’ve started lying to her, telling her things like, “Oh yes, mother, I’ll be in church for Easter. As a matter of fact I’m looking forward to church. And I’ll be thinking of you mother.” But I’m not going to church. Since it makes her feel better about her only son’s eternal destination, I don’t feel so bad about lying.

But I’m not an atheist now, because I still feel there is a God. I’m perhaps an agnostic, or a deist, even though deism went out a few centuries ago. As much as I’ve purged myself, there’s still the notion that something much bigger exists. It is probably impossible for me to ever comprehend it.

I have a faith in something I can not understand, so I don’t put much importance into it. My faith now is mainly an ethical one, as opposed to being metaphysical or spiritual. The pivotal value now is really about being a good person, treating other people with respect. To me that’s what Christianity is really about. Christ emphasized your interaction with others as the starting point for your relationship with God.

I still think Christ was a good example, just like Gandhi or Mother Theresa. Christ was a liberal, a revolutionary. The only condemnatory language he ever had was directed towards the religious leaders. And at the same time he hung out with those who were considered the most corrupt in his society: tax collectors, people in cohoots with the Roman empire, prostitutes.

After all, his first miracle was to change water into wine. It was at a wedding, and back then they didn’t just have a wedding celebration for a few hours; it lasted days. They drank and danced and had huge parties. So, at one of these parties that Jesus was attending, after a few days they ran out of liquor. And who do they turn to? Jesus. He stepped up to keep the party going! That may be a liberal interpretation, but it shows how He embraced humanity.

We don’t have a God’s eye point of view and it would be dishonest to try and live our lives as if we did. We have a lot of questions and very few answers. And we should embrace that. We should be more tolerant, with humility, admitting that we don’t have all the answers. I remember my father telling me that any problem in life can be answered by the Bible.

That was certainly how he dealt with any problem he had with my mother. Before they got divorced, she wanted to go and get counseling, but he would refuse and say the Bible was the only counseling they needed. Yet, since he was a Southern Baptist Minister, he was the final arbiter of what the Bible meant. This created an authoritarian, oppressive family life – not good. Not good at all. I’ve been estranged from my father for some time.

Interestingly enough, though, recently I’ve begun to reexamine my relationship with my father,. Up to this point I’ve always had forbidding, ominous dreams about him. They were very unpleasant. But over the past few weeks I’ve been having sympathetic dreams towards him.

Frankly, I’m not sure that I’m too crazy about my new dreams, because it was much easier for me when I didn’t see any humanity in my father at all, when I just saw him as this monster. Now, these dreams have been portraying him in a much more human light, with faults and shortcomings. Oddly, these subtleties are more difficult to live with.A Very British Gangster divx Queen Cobra movie download

Tags: apostate, faith, John, religion, Southern Baptist

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Ronald - Seminary Student

Ronald
Southern Baptist upbringing, currently enrolled in seminary school to become a minister.

God to me is found in love, and the most perfect and most sacrificing love that I know, that I have felt, is through Christ. He’s who God is for me. He moves around. He is wherever I need Him to be. It’s the Spirit. Sometimes I feel It in my chest or in the pit of my stomach when I get scared, or when I want to say an encouraging word to somebody but I don’t know how they will receive it, or how I even will say it.

But I feel Him there helping me. I’m also exposed to Him through other people, through their generosity and openness. I get Him in people’s prayers, prayers that may have happened months ago, but when I reconnect with them again I immediately recognize a spirit of prayer and communion that’s been shared, even unknowingly.

My father is a Southern Baptist minister from Texas, so I grew up in a preacher’s household, but only in the sense that he was a preacher and I grew up in his house. It wasn’t a strict household. I wasn’t a typical preacher’s kid, meaning the Bible wasn’t burned into me. My dad was actually raised Catholic, and later converted. And now he associates with a Methodist congregation because he’s the president of a Methodist university in Texas. So he’s kind of enlightened, or at least part of many different denominations.

Despite my religious household, for me the real awakening happened when I was twenty, the summer before I came to New York. I was in Florida working at Disney World and I was going through a lot of personal issues. I just felt like I wanted to improve myself and I didn’t exactly know how. Then a friend invited me to church, where they were having a revival series with a guest minister. His sermon touched me inside. There was something in what he said that spoke directly to my needs. Up until then I had been in the battle to try and learn more about my faith so I could be more spiritual, but I hadn’t really made a commitment to Christ yet.

Sure I had been baptized at the age of seven and I went to church every Sunday as a child, but that was just more of the upbringing. My father was a minister after all. But the real impact came at this moment outside Disney World, when I felt that I could finally just give over to Him, submitting all my fears and cares to Jesus, trusting that He would help me. I found solace immediately when I made that decision. I felt a sense of empowerment that I had never felt before. I felt such peace. That really started me down the road of walking with Christ in a committed sense.

That’s been about four years now, and boy it’s been a journey! It has not been easy at all, no, no, no. And I’m glad it hasn’t been, because it’s been a growing experience. I think life in general is not easy. Trying to walk in the footsteps of a man who also didn’t have an easy life (Christ), I can’t expect everything to be roses and ice cream. It has been hard…but everything worth fighting for in my life has always been hard.

The hardest thing in this path has been letting go of who I thought I was and who I wanted to be. I’ve had to change a lot of my dreams. Even my biggest dream of coming here to NY to become an actor has changed. I wanted to be an example to young black kids, helping the community in an empowering, positive way by being in the spotlight.

But my perspective was turned around. Artists, singers, actors, people in those industries; I learned about what they have to go through in order to achieve influence, and I really began questioning: Is it worth going through those hoops in order to get to the level where you can speak to a lot of people? And the answer was, “No!” I decided I didn’t want to jump through the hoops. So then I began to ask in what other ways could I make a powerful impact. And the answer was simple: “Do unto others as what was done to me.” The word of the gospel was preached to me honestly, and that honesty is what changed my career sights. I decided to be a minister. I’ve quit acting school and I begin seminary study in the fall.

But I know that my theatre training hasn’t been in vain. It has opened me up, giving me confidence. Even something like talking to you now would have been difficult before. Also, I was a marketing major in undergrad., and I feel that will help too. All of it will come together, the acting, marketing and seminary training. In a way, I will be an actor and a salesman, but for something much greater than movies and products. The marketing background has taught me practical ways to get the Message out, as it is given, or revealed to me.

The theater, apart from helping me in the pulpit, will be a conduit in non-conventional ways, such as having different ministries in the media. I think everybody can cite a peace of music, film or theatre that has touched them. Using those avenues can be profoundly moving. Technology has always helped put out the Word. Look at the printing press way back when. So, I think just being in the field and using the tools that are out there in a way that is worthy of the greatness of God, and ultimately for the greater good of human kind, is important. I want to use everything to that goal, including my training.

But the issue of race and gender in regards to God can be such dividing issues, especially race, in that we don’t really know what Jesus looks like. To say that He was this color or that color, as has been done, is suspect at best because historically race has been used to dominate people all over the world. And that’s not right. That’s why the Bible focuses so much on the Holy Spirit. For me that’s the unifying trait. As far as gender, it is said that Jesus is the Son of God, and I know that that can be alienating for some people. Because we live in a male dominated society, sometimes gender can be used in a domineering way that is naturally off-putting. This is never explored, it’s always just commanded.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t have strict tenets for us to adhere to, but I think there’s a spirit and a way that we can explore what we are learning so that we don’t get intimidated by it, but that we feel welcomed. Women have brothers, fathers, and sons who they love and are loved by. So why not be the same with Jesus. Besides, we are all the children of our Lord and Savior, regardless of gender. God is Jesus, and Jesus is the Holy Spirit: the Trinity aspect. He is more than gender. I think we get caught up on technicalities that keep us apart and waste our time.

Tags: Ronald, Seminary Student, Southern Baptist

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