Deprogramming : An Introduction

Just over three years ago I called up my pastor and asked if we could meet for lunch. Turned out we both had news for each other, so we got together the following week. I explained how my wife and I had decided to move to California. He explained how the church had grown to the point of being able to support us part-time. Needless to say it was a bittersweet conversation.

Today, I’m starting a series at An American Atheist, so obviously a lot has happened between then and now. That’s what this series is about, so we may as well get some basic pertinent information out of the way at the outset.

I grew up in an Assemblies of God home, got involved in music ministry in middle school, attended Bible College for music, served in various positions for nearly ten years, spending five of those on staff at a handful of relatively small churches in the upper Midwest.

Now, at 30, I consider myself non-religious and I’m about two years into a major worldview overhaul. In the coming weeks I’ll touch on many of the factors that shed light on the state of cognitive dissonance from which I have been recently trying to break free.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, allow me make an important distinction: The “deprogramming” of the 70′s and 80′s, where concerned families would hire someone to kidnap a relative from a cult and forcibly un-brainwash, or deprogram them; that’s not what I’m driving at, though there are obvious parallels in theory.

Truthfully, I don’t see the lion’s share of the Christian church (Catholic or Protestant) as particularly aggressive in their recruitment and conversion efforts, or in how they treat apostates. There are outliers (Jehovah’s Witnesses come to mind), but I intend to write about my experience.

The sort of deprogramming I’m talking about is subtle and self-induced, it employs an ever-broadening search for Truth in which the scales of blind faith slowly fall away.

In order to understand the problem areas in my thinking process, it’s important to get an idea of where it’s been misguided, and this is what my first few entries will cover: The emotional architecture of church services, the role of fear and the stifling of dissent, basic logical problems with the story of Jesus, etc…

I’d like to open the series, however, with a recent conversation I had with my father. If I’ve spent the last few years becoming more liberal in my thinking, he’s done quite the opposite.

I can’t recall just where the conversation started, but knowing me I’d likely called home wondering about a new noise under the hood of my old Plymouth, or how long a steak can stay frozen and still be grill-able; Something mundane like that. And like most mundane phone conversations with my father, it probably took sixteen tangents and lasted forty minutes longer than I’d intended.

As I write, this pivotal conversation took place about six months ago, and one statement remains crystal clear in my mind.

At some point the phone call took a religious turn. I remember pacing around the kitchen, the rising tide of anxiety giving way to exasperation, the conflict coming to a head as my father’s voice dropped, his tone changed, and he simply asked:

“How do you know what’s true?”

After verbally floundering for a minute or so, completely taken aback by the change in tone and approach, I finally replied, “I don’t know. This sounds like a trick question. I mean, you just look at the facts.”

And to my shock, he said:

“No.”

He went on to explain in no uncertain terms that nothing can contradict God or his Word, and any time you run into a so-called “fact” that runs counter to what you believe, “it just ain’t a fact.”

I must point out that growing up, it was my father who insisted we watch shows like NOVA, This Old House, National Geographic, Wild America and Nature, occasionally breaking away from PBS to catch Jeopardy! whenever it was on. I love (most) of these shows to this day.

And now, the man who first inspired within me such a deep respect for nature and awe at the universe growing up (though he always voiced his opposition to any mention of the word “evolution”); now he seems to be so divorced from reason that there is simply no fact, no statistic, nothing within the empirical realm that could ever challenge what he believes.

Now, we are opposites.

I believe in facts as our best approximation of Truth. We can always refine our facts or our methods for attaining them, but a demonstrable fact remains the most robust way in my mind to understand the world around me. I remain open to the possibility of being wrong so that no fact can become dogma, no truth unchallengeable.

My father does not share this attitude, and suffice it to say we haven’t breeched the topic since. That conversation was the first time in probably six years that we’d raised our voices in such a manner, and given our rather vitriolic past, or rather, my teenage years, it’s not something either of us are eager to revisit.

Before you think I’m just trying to make myself look good, I’ll be perfectly honest. At the end of that conversation it was me who slammed the phone down, shouting at the top of my lungs, “Then pray fire down from heaven you fucking lunatic!” Of all the stories to get caught up on, I honestly can’t remember how we got into it over the Prophets of Ba’al.

I’m writing all of this while the wounds are fresh, while many of my most basic assumptions about life, the universe and everything have been quite recently overturned, and I’m not here to gloat or make myself look good.

I’m still deprogramming, rethinking my outlook as a person, a husband, a father, a musician. This is all new ground and I’m currently sorting things out as the dust settles, and I hope this series can be helpful to others who find themselves in a similar position.

Next week, I’ll be dealing with something very dear to my heart: Music ministry, and what was probably the final straw that prompted my deconversion.