Losing My Religion (13 page)

It was the first of many agonizing choices on my journey away from God. They would each come down to picking sides. Do I side with what I wish to be true? Or do I go with what I know to be true? I didn’t realize it at the time, but not becoming a Catholic was the first tangible sign that I was losing my faith. But the thought was so scary, so unwanted and so profound that it would be a long time before I actually admitted it, even to myself.

A few days later, I spent Easter at home for the first time in a dozen years.

Several months later, I stopped attending church on a regular basis. At first, I told myself it was because of my busy work and family schedules. But that wasn’t it. Before, attending church had been the number-one priority of my week. Now it was something I did if nothing else came up. Most weeks I just couldn’t muster the motivation to go. I needed my weekends to escape from the subject I was reporting on for 40-plus hours during the week.

The kids didn’t mind having their Saturday nights or Sunday mornings free, though my teenagers still attended popular weeknight youth programs at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (I suspected mostly because of the large number of girls present). My wife was struggling to reconcile the idealized vision of the Catholic Church of her youth with the institution portrayed in my stories. She welcomed the weeks off, too.

Soon, I found myself not going at all. In truth, I had sunk into a depression. My long honeymoon with Christianity had ended, and I wondered what was next. I still prayed and read the Bible each day, but I didn’t do it eagerly—I had to force myself. I started to go to therapy twice a week. Religion wasn’t the only problem in my life at the time. At the 14-year mark, my marriage had hit a particularly rough patch. Part of my motivation for going into the Catholic Church was so Greer and I could be married “in God’s eyes.” Now, Greer said she didn’t want to marry me again, even if I became Catholic. In fact, she wanted a divorce. She couldn’t repress any longer the unresolved issues of our relationship, especially its rocky beginning. We were learning the same lesson that the Catholic Church was: you can’t hide the truth forever. Eventually, it will come out. Greer and I informally separated but because neither of us would leave the children, we both stayed in the house, occupying separate bedrooms. Without kids, we would have been finished. But neither of us could face a life without living full-time with our boys. We decided to do whatever it took to save our relationship. Christianity can be a form of self-help, but now we started to see that we could also help ourselves. It took months and months and much of our savings to pay for counseling, but the marital seas began to calm down, thanks especially to a wonderful psychotherapist.

My faith was another story. As soon as I’d beat back one doubt, two more would pop up. I felt angry with God for making faith such a guessing game. I didn’t treat my sons as God treated me. I gave them clear direction, quick answers, steady discipline and plenty of love. There was little mystery in our relationship; they didn’t have to strain to hear my “gentle whisper.” How to hear God, love Him and best serve Him shouldn’t be so open to interpretation. It shouldn’t be that hard.

It started to bother me greatly that God’s institutions—ones He was supposed to be guiding—were often more corrupt than their secular counterparts. If these churches were infused and guided by the Holy Spirit, shouldn’t it follow that they would function in a morally superior fashion than a corporation or government entity? In general, I was finding this wasn’t the case. I started to see that religious institutions are
more
susceptible to corruption than their secular counterparts because of their reliance on God, and not human checks and balances, for governance. The answers to prayer or God’s desires, whether in a hierarchical structure such as the Catholic Church or the more representational form of governance in many Protestant churches, are prone to human interpretation that can be easily twisted for selfish and sinful needs. This is reflected in the lack of Christian unity, often described as the faith’s largest scandal.

Shortly before his death, Jesus prayed that all Christians “may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:21–23)

The Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals, after intense prayer and guided by the Holy Spirit, has selected popes for nearly a millennium. Some Holy Fathers have turned out to be saints; others became murderers (Pope John XII), torturers (Pope Urban VI) and adulterers (too many to name). Less reliance on faith and more, for example, on a democratized search for a pope might have kept the more notorious ones from office. And certainly a more practical belief that God had not ordained every pope to lead the church would have led to the quick firing of the most corrupt ones.

In the Protestant world, corruption often seeps into institutions under the cover of God’s will—or the belief by the congregation or the board of elders that pastors have a special connection to God. Only a relatively few churches decide God’s guidance is not enough and have put into place strict but commonsense rules to cut down on the potential for scandal.

Up until now, I had, as a Christian, been able to quickly repel doubts about my faith, whether by study or prayer, or simply by ignoring them. Now, doubts were hitting me from all angles and sticking to me like Velcro. I couldn’t free myself of them.

Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant…There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord…Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.

—1
CORINTHIANS
12:1–7

 

W
ITH MY NEW
set of doubts, I started to obsess about hell, worrying that I would wind up there if I tumbled into disbelief. I didn’t think of hell as a fiery pit, but something closer to C. S. Lewis’s vision of it in
The Great Divorce
—a place of unending blandness far from the pleasures of God:

I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in the evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town.

 

Except for the right-wing fringe of Christianity, I didn’t see many other people worried about hell; it was as if the place was never mentioned in the Bible. In covering the Catholic sex scandal, I often wondered: Did these people truly believe in hell? It’s an important part of their doctrine, but no one seemed concerned about eternal damnation. I saw that the Catholic bishops believed deeply in their institution and their office—enough so that they routinely lied, violated secular laws or put children in harm’s way to protect the church. Their actions show that they had dedicated their lives not to the Gospel, but to a Roman system that valued loyalty and obedience to superiors and punished those who brought scandal. It was easy for the bishops to appear to be holy when celebrating a Mass or tending to the sick; it was much more difficult when they actually had to sacrifice something—such as the derailment of their careers by the Vatican if they turned in a molesting priest to civil authorities and created a scandal, rather than dealing with the matter internally and making it neatly disappear. As a reporter, I couldn’t find the maverick bishop who stood up to the institution and protected the children in his charge. And I could find only a relative handful of priests who tried to buck the system—most of whom paid the price for turning in a brother priest with their careers.

I met one of them, Father John Conley, in San Francisco. In November 1997, the priest came home early one evening to his parish, only to find his pastor wrestling in the dark with a young boy. Conley, a federal prosecutor before becoming a priest, believed he had witnessed an act of sexual abuse. According to depositions and other legal documents, he reported the incident to San Francisco archdiocesan officials and told them he was going to file a report with civil authorities, as required by law. Conley said one official asked him, “Now, are you sure you want to do this?”

The archdiocese backed the priest suspected by Conley of molesting the boy, and Conley was soon removed from active ministry (church officials said his demotion was unrelated to his whistle-blowing). Eventually, the accused priest admitted that he had sexually abused several boys, and Conley filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the Archdiocese of San Francisco, winning a large settlement in 2002. William Levada, now a top official at the Vatican, was then the archbishop of San Francisco.

In his deposition, an angry Conley said he asked the vicar of clergy to relay a message to the archbishop: “The message was to tell the archbishop to grow some balls and start acting like a man.”

Conley explained his anger by saying it was “because I felt this was a very serious matter involving child abuse and that they were hiding their heads in the sand, refusing to deal with it.”

I wondered: Shouldn’t faith, if you truly had it, give you the strength to grow some balls and do the right thing, no matter the consequences? According to Christian tradition, the apostles suffered martyrs’ deaths because they refused to renounce their belief, after the Resurrection, that Jesus was the Messiah. Christian apologetics use this as a key piece of evidence to prove Christ’s divinity; if the apostles hadn’t witnessed the resurrected Jesus and had simply been promoting a lie, they certainly would have recanted in the face of death.

The Catholic bishops, facing only the potential death of their careers, ignored the teachings of Christ—and the laws of the land. It’s impossible even to skim the pages of the Gospels and not see the importance Jesus placed on children and their protection. If the Bible were true, many bishops would have been better off placing millstones around their necks and jumping into the ocean than behaving the way they did. According to Scriptures, they face a hellish future.

Hell has a fundamental role in Christianity. The Scriptures tells us that God sent His Son to Earth to die for our sins and if we believed in Jesus, we could avoid hell and eternal separation from the Lord and be ushered into heaven. The Bible doesn’t mess around when describing hell. It’s a dreadful place where souls languish in unspeakable pain for eternity. Jesus calls hell the “outer darkness” consumed by “everlasting fire.” The book of Revelation warns that sinners will be “thrown into the lake of fire.” Matthew’s Gospel offers a soundtrack: the “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In the New Testament, hell is also described as “everlasting destruction,” “blackest darkness” and a place where people are “tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a lurid image of hell was firmly cemented in people’s minds by the church and many faithful thinkers. Dante wrote that within the seventh circle of hell runs “the river of blood, within which boiling is/Whoe’er by violence doth injure others.” Artist Hieronymus Bosch depicted naked souls being devoured by a birdlike creature, pierced by spears and tormented by half-human demons.

Today, it’s rare to hear about hell from a member of the clergy. The Catholic Church, the original promoters of a Dante-esque hell, has softened its view quite a bit. In 1999, Pope John Paul II made headlines by saying that hell should be seen not as a fiery underworld but as “the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”

Evangelical pulpits have banished hell as well. Log onto www. pastors.com, the website run by Saddleback Church, whose senior pastor, Rick Warren, says the Bible’s teachings on hell guide his ministry. Scan the scores of sermons available for free and for sale. There are messages on abortion, addiction and ambition. Laughter, leadership and love. War, work and worry—but nothing on hell.

Six months into my reporting on the sex scandal, I teamed up with colleague Mike Anton for a story on the state of hell within American Christianity. I was startled to find that the subject was rarely brought up in church these days. Though 71 percent of Americans claim they still believe that hell exists, the concept is simply ignored by most pastors, even conservative ones. Many of them fear a backlash from their congregants, who don’t want to hear such unpleasantness on their Sunday mornings. In short, hell has been frozen out mostly because of consumer desires, not theological concerns. Pastors are unwilling to risk market share by tackling an unpopular topic.

Robert H. Schuller, the
Hour of Power
televangelist and founder of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, stopped preaching on the subject 40 years ago, moving on to a theology that stresses individual success in such books as
If It’s Going to Be, It’s Up to Me!

“I don’t ever want people to become Christian to escape hell,” Schuller told my colleague. He added that people shouldn’t be threatened with God’s stick when dangling a carrot is enough to close the deal.

One measure of hell’s continued decline can be found in the changed attitude of the Reverend Billy Graham, who came to prominence in the 1940s as a fire-and-brimstone Gospel preacher. His depiction of hell was unequivocal, an unpleasant address for unrepentant sinners. Now he’s not so sure.

Graham told an interviewer in 1991: “…I believe that hell is essentially separation from God. That we are separated from God, so we can have hell in this life and hell in the life to come…But to describe hell in vivid terms like I might have done 30 or 40 years ago, I’m not at liberty to do that because…whether there is actually fire in hell or not, I do not know.”

We found that traditional denominations also have pushed hell to the margins. The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s first catechism, approved in 1998, mentions hell only once. George Hunsinger, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the catechism’s principal author, would have liked the document to address hell more directly and “talk about divine judgment in a responsible way.” But the committee rejected the idea without much debate.

“It’s a failure of nerve by churches that are not wanting to take on a non-popular stance,” Hunsinger told us.

The pastors who speak regularly about hell are, for the most part, far-right preachers who are viewed as wacky by most of Christianity. Mike talked with Pastor Ray Comfort, who believes hell is as real and as bad as advertised in the New Testament. The New Zealand transplant crisscrosses the country to preach at churches that still embrace the old-fashioned concept of hell. He warns that churches that sugarcoat or ignore the Bible’s warning about hell will become irrelevant. “God will remove his spirit, his power from them, and they will become just like social clubs,” he said.

It’s possible that 71 percent of us really do believe hell is real, but just don’t want to hear about it, leading to a theology of market denial. Or possibly, many of us say one thing to a pollster—not wanting to appear so cocky as to be beyond the reach of godly justice—and another thing to themselves—not really being so sure after all. But most of us commit lesser sins. We’re occasionally thoughtless or mean, or we cheat on our taxes. We stop short of rape, molestation and covering up such evil. Seeing so many priests do what they did, and so many bishops cover for them, I wondered whether hell frightened them at all. Or maybe they were so far beyond reality, they didn’t think of their behavior as sinful.

Hell has always been a stumbling block for me as a Christian. Anger welled up inside me when evangelicals talked about how sad it was that people who didn’t believe in Christ would be sent to hell. I could never imagine banishing one of my sons to eternal damnation because he walked away from me. That wasn’t unconditional love. I had faith that He wouldn’t send my own two brothers and sister—who are my moral superiors though not believers—to hell for even one second, much less an eternity. But I chalked it up to one of the mysteries of faith I wouldn’t solve in this lifetime. Soon enough, I believed, God would make it clear for me what hell was about and who, if any, were banished there. It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but at the time, it was enough.

I did feel my lack of certainty about hell was a shortcoming as a Christian. With the Bible’s rather straightforward language about hell, it was difficult to wave it off as unknowable. But as for those pastors who said they believed in hell, why in heaven’s name would they skirt the issue so completely in public? After all, it’s a teaching with eternal consequences. To banish hell from the pulpit was to avoid talking about an elephant in the room. Even if I personally didn’t want to believe in that elephant, it was there.

The thought of hell haunted me. I had hopscotched from an evangelical church to a Presbyterian congregation and finally to a Catholic parish. During that time, I never considered my soul in danger, because I still believed in Jesus. He was my Savior and my insurance policy. If I was wrong about hell (and it did exist) but right about Jesus, I was still safe. Believers use the term “Savior” for Jesus, and all it really means is “saved from hell.” If there is no hell, the term is meaningless. As doubts about faith crept into my mind, hell—even just the remote possibility of hell—was a great motivator for me to redouble my spiritual efforts.

Though I questioned the existence of hell, I did accept the notion that evil, or Satan, operated in the world and was trying to lure us away from God. I believed this was done in mostly subtle ways that we don’t recognize until it is too late. He works through the flirty co-worker who creates lustful thoughts. He amplifies your unrelenting desire for a tropical vacation, pushing you into taking a trip that puts you deep into credit card debt. He uses your envy of your wealthy neighbor to make you feel miserable about your own life. I believed Satan was tempting me at every vulnerable part of my life, expertly manipulating my fears, desires and weaknesses. C. S. Lewis said that each action you take either brings you closer to or farther away from God. I was easily led away from holiness. I often looked up from my daily travels only to discover I was far from God.

By the internal logic of Christian belief, there are other ways of looking at hell’s disappearance from the pulpit beyond denial and disbelief. Perhaps Satan has done a remarkable job of convincing pastors and their followers to soft-pedal hell. Maybe the Bible—though divinely inspired—is a flawed document that should be interpreted liberally. Or perhaps the Bible and hell are works of fiction, something some believers may sense, and fear, deep in their souls, allowing them to ignore one of its essential teachings.

For a dozen years, I had been blessed with an unshakable faith that seemed to get deeper with each passing year. Now, my backstage pass to the world of religion had become a curse. I no longer gathered information about my faith from carefully written books, inspiring sermons, classes taught by and filled with fellow Christians, and well-choreographed church services. Starting with the Catholic Church scandal, I began to cover much less bright, shiny stories. I began to look behind the front of many bright, shiny facades. I didn’t like what I saw, and I didn’t like the questions that continued to surface within me because of it. Why did I keep circling back to these stories about corruption and hypocrisy within the Body of Christ? I couldn’t figure out an answer until I read a biography of St. Francis of Assisi (my third or fourth) and began to think my calling from God had shifted. Maybe the Lord wanted me, as he did St. Francis, to “rebuild His church”—in my case, not in some grand way that would lead to sainthood but by simply reporting on the corruption within any and all churches. This thought—which I believed came from God—gave me great comfort. It gave me something to hold on to, something that made sense of what I was going through. The Body of Christ was sick. My investigative reporting skills could help uncover the infection and promote the healing. I was sure this had been part of the Lord’s plan for me all along. Maybe I, like St. Francis, just didn’t understand Him at first. When St. Francis heard God’s voice commanding him to rebuild His church, he initially took the Lord quite literally and began fixing up a chapel that had fallen into ruin near his home. Only later did Francis understand that God wanted him to reform the church.