Losing My Religion (3 page)

My heart threatened to beat out of my chest. I was at the edge of a cliff, weighing whether to jump. I wanted to take the plunge, but I didn’t want to be looked at as a freak. I didn’t know how I’d explain my conversion to my atheist friends. I didn’t want to imagine how I would change once Jesus truly became the centerpiece of my life. Would I be wearing a rainbow wig and handlebar mustache inside a football stadium, waving a “John 3:16” sign at the television camera? Would I be compelled to walk away from material pleasures and devote my life to helping the poor? I didn’t want to find out.

Barris was very good at his job. Not in any rush, he said he still felt there were others in the chapel who wanted to become Christians today. He’d wait a few more minutes, in case anyone else wanted to raise his hand. Was he talking to me, I wondered? Or was it God who was speaking? My pulse actually slowed as, at last, I obeyed. My arm seemed to float up on its own until it was over my head.

Barris asked those of us who raised our hands to repeat the sinner’s prayer. I don’t remember the exact words, but it went something like this:

Father, I’m a sinner, and I want to repent. I believe that your son, Jesus Christ, died for my sins, was resurrected from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus into my heart to become my personal Lord and Savior, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send your Holy Spirit to help me obey You, and to do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus’s name I pray, Amen.

 

When I repeated the line “I invite Jesus into my heart,” I experienced what I can only call a vision. Time slowed. In my mind’s eye, my heart opened into halves, and a warm, glowing light flowed right in. As my heart melted back together, it remained illuminated with a soft light from the inside. I felt instantly the light was Jesus, who now lived inside me. A tingling warmth spread across my chest. This, I thought—no, I
knew
—was what it meant to be born-again.

I opened my tear-filled eyes and was quickly surrounded by my new brothers in Christ, men who had been strangers less than 48 hours before. They slapped me on the back, hugged me and shook my hand. They congratulated me on making the best decision of my life, one that would have eternal consequences. As happy as they were for me, I was even happier for myself—I now had Jesus in my heart.

An hour later, Hugh and I were driving down the mountain. I was still trying to sort out what had happened.

“What made you publicly decide to accept Jesus today?” Hugh asked.

“It was the weirdest thing, Hugh,” I said, as I steered the car along the road carved into the mountain wall. “I think I had a mystical experience up there.”

I told him about my vision. Hugh, born and raised in Ohio, is a guy with Midwestern sensibilities who became a Presbyterian because it was the church in which he was least likely to be hugged. He’s an analytical thinker who keeps his emotions tightly under wraps. Yet in a voyeuristic way, Hugh was fascinated by what had happened to me, and he didn’t doubt for a minute that it was true.

“Did you see Jesus?”

I explained about the vision and warm light.

“Did you feel His presence?”

I told him about the tingling.

“How do you feel now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, still trying to figure it out. “I’m a little stunned, I guess. Excited. Anxious. I don’t know how this all will play out.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “God will show you the way.”

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

—
HEBREWS
11:1

 

D
RIVING DOWN THE
mountain, Hugh and I made a pact to meet each Monday at dawn to run along Newport Beach’s Back Bay, a 752-acre saltwater estuary in the heart of Orange County. The oasis of open space serves as the community’s Central Park, a haven for cyclists, runners, kayakers and birders, who track the 200 species—from blue herons to brown pelicans to light-footed clapper rails—that make the estuary their home.

We quickly developed a pattern on our runs. We would spend the first 30 minutes talking about our week at work, our families, sports, politics and anything else that weighed on our mind. At the turnaround point, we stopped chatting and started praying. Right there on the road, we would talk to God for a half hour, asking Him for His help and guidance. We weren’t bold enough to pray within earshot of others, so our prayers oftentimes were interrupted if anyone passed by. Many of our petitions changed from week to week, but several stayed the same: Good health for our families and friends. Peace around the world. Career success. Comfort to those in need. The ritual seemed a little strange at first, but soon it became one of the highlights of my week. The prayers put me into a one-on-one relationship with God. They also made me focus more on others. And it felt like I was actually
doing
something about the problems and injustices in the world.

As the months passed, I also made sure that God knew how thankful I was for all that He had done for me. My marriage had moved to solid ground. Greer had given birth to our second healthy son, Tristan. And my career was taking off as the brass at the
Los Angeles Times
—which owned the
Daily Pilot
—put me in charge of a rapidly expanding chain of local dailies and weeklies, which were winning statewide awards. Wanting to make sure the blessings continued to flow, I went to church each week with my wife and children. I attended a weekly Bible study. I volunteered my journalism skills to edit a book for my pastor, Kenton Beshore. I volunteered to deliver Christmas presents to an orphanage in Tijuana. And I continued to read everything I could to deepen my faith. On my bookshelves, Christian books now crowded out my previous staples of mysteries, biographies and adventure books.

My relationship with God was going well, but it didn’t keep me from selfish thoughts. I began to pray for money for my family. In one of his sermons, Kenton advised us to be specific about what we pray for, so I decided to ask for $50,000. I wasn’t sure where I got the 50K figure, other than that it seemed like a big round number.

After a few months of praying along these lines, I drove home from work one evening and spotted my old boss in front of my house. Why in the world was he here? The last time I had seen him, I told him that I felt cheated—in an ethical, not legal, sense—when he sold his business lifestyles magazine just after I had left the company for the
Daily Pilot
. I had helped build it. I had owned a 5 percent share in the magazine, which I forfeited when I left. I told him it didn’t seem right that he received all the benefit of my seven years of work but because of a very short gap of time—a matter of a few months—my ownership was void. He said he didn’t see it that way, but did write me a $5,000 check that he believed was generous considering he didn’t legally owe me anything. I thought it was about $45,000 short of what was fair.

Now, months later, he greeted me warmly on the darkened street in a quiet Costa Mesa neighborhood and explained that he and his wife had become Christians, and this rift with me had been bothering them. So they had prayed about it and decided to make things right. He handed me an envelope and told me to open it up with Greer once I got inside my house.

Walking back into my home, I tried to imagine what was inside the envelope. I quickly ruled out the possibility that it held $45,000. My former boss had many good traits, but generosity wasn’t one of them. Maybe it was an apology letter. Or an explanation. Or, best-case scenario, another $5,000. I called Greer to the front room and told her about my encounter and held up the envelope.

“Well,” my wife said, not wanting to get her hopes up, “let’s see what’s inside.”

I tore it open, pulled out a letter and unfolded it. Tucked inside was a check. My hands started to shake as I read the amount: $45,000. Without a word, I handed it to Greer. She kept looking at the check and then at me. “He just gave you this?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, he said he’s become a Christian and this has weighed on him,” I said. “Can you believe this? If you add the $5,000 he had already given me, this is exactly the $50,000 I have been praying for.”

“He’s a Christian now?” Greer asked, still trying to wrap her mind around the difference between my ex-boss’s former and new selves. Together we read the heartfelt note that accompanied the check. He said, in brief, the Lord had told him to give the money to me. I had goose bumps. I hardly needed more evidence of God’s existence, but I thought He had just delivered 50,000 more reasons to cement my faith—and He had transformed my former boss.

Since entering the Christian world, I’d frequently heard stories like this—miraculous coincidences and life turnarounds credited to Providence. In evangelical circles, the unofficial term for what happened to me was called “a God thing”—something wonderful and unexplainable that pops up in a believer’s life and can only be the work of the Lord. Evangelicals don’t think much of coincidence. Wonderful events are God’s work. Bad events are attributed to human sinfulness, the devil’s work or, when those two are ruled out, a mystery only God can solve.

Believers see God’s work everywhere, and the God things I saw all around me cried out to be covered by a journalist. The more I heard about, witnessed and experienced these moments of grace, the greater disconnect I saw between what was happening in the faith community and the coverage of religion in the mainstream media. Why were so many of my journalistic colleagues around the nation missing the real stories on the faith beat? Why were most stories about Christians negative or dismissive? This quickly became a major topic of conversation during my runs with Hugh. We ticked off the outrages in media coverage of religion each week. Too much of the journalism was either repetitive (concentrating on a few issues such as abortion and homosexuality), boring (detailing the latest internal denominational squabbles, usually about homosexuality), lacking in nuance or simply not an accurate reflection of what was going on in the nation’s churches, mosques, synagogues and temples.

One example—which became infamous among Christians and is still cited as the nadir of sloppy religion coverage—happened in 1994 when the
Washington Post
casually described conservative evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command” in a news story. The characterization provoked a slew of protests and forced the
Post
into running an unintentionally funny correction: “An article yesterday characterized followers of television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as ‘largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.’ There is no factual basis for that statement.” Can you imagine a journalist writing off any other large group in the United States that way? It’s not just that a reporter wrote it; that description sailed past a gauntlet of editors whose job is to scrub away bias. The story struck a chord with Christians because it was hard evidence of how some journalists really thought of evangelicals. Most of the time, the bias was more subtle and harder to put a finger on.

The poor quality of religion coverage in the 1990s (it has improved greatly in recent years) wasn’t surprising to anyone who worked in a newsroom during that time. Few journalists volunteered for the religion beat, which was seen as a place to warehouse burned-out or incompetent reporters. It was one step lower than writing obits, traditionally the last rung of the ladder before a reporter was drummed out of journalism (that has changed in recent years, too). Many editors—most of whom didn’t regularly attend worship services, according to several studies—saw the religion beat as an antiquated part of newspaper tradition, surviving only because the “Faith” section on Saturdays made money and needed some filler to surround the listings of houses of worship and church advertisements.

I came to view the religion beat as an untapped vein of gold. It offered complex stories of great human interest that could be unearthed with minimal effort. I’d seen lives, including my own, dramatically changed by faith, but most of the stories seemed to be located away from where mainstream journalists liked to dig for their articles.

After months of complaining about media coverage of religion, I had an epiphany that felt as if it came straight from God. “Why don’t you become a religion writer?” asked the inaudible voice. “This is a way for you to use your gifts for the Kingdom of God.”

The idea excited me. I could be both a mainstream journalist and a devout Christian, simply by writing about the impact religion had on the lives of everyday people. I thought God’s plan for me (for such it had to be, I was sure) was ingenious. It played to my strengths—my “gifts,” in Christian parlance. I needed only to produce solid journalism about faith in America, and I would be fulfilling God’s call
and
my career ambitions.

I told Hugh about my idea—God’s idea—but I warned him there were too many barriers for it ever to work. As the editor in charge of the
Los Angeles Times
’s local news division, I was making good money. Taking a pay cut to write for a smaller paper wasn’t an option for the sole breadwinner of an expanding household, and I didn’t want to uproot my family to work for another big-city paper. Besides, I hadn’t been a reporter in more than a decade. Who would hire me at even a low salary to write about religion? My choices narrowed to one paper: the
Los Angeles Times
. Even there, my ambition seemed impossible to fulfill. I worked for its local news division, and there was a Grand Canyon–sized gap between the local division, where we concentrated on covering suburban city councils, school boards and prep sports teams, and the newsroom of one of the world’s largest papers. Bridging the gap would be like having a young minor-league manager in the New York Yankee farm system called up to play center field for the big club. It just didn’t happen.

“You’re putting limitations on God,” Hugh said when I finished explaining why this would never work. “Just pray for the job. He’ll find a way to get you it if that’s what He wants.”

So I began to pray. I asked God for a religion-writing job at the
Los Angeles Times
. I prayed for it in the morning, at night and in between. On my weekly runs, I asked again. So did Hugh. We prayed and prayed and ran and ran—and nothing happened. The prayers continued for four years. But my faith remained strong, and I didn’t think about giving up. Sometimes, being a believer means being stubbornly persistent. Moses waited patiently for 40 years in the desert, and he didn’t even get to enter the Promised Land. I was certain that getting the job depended on God’s timing, not mine.

In the meantime, word began to leak out about my conversion, and I became sought after in some circles because of the shortage of evangelical Christians who were also mainstream journalists in Southern California. When my church organized a 24-hour prayer vigil, I was asked to lead an hour-long prayer session for the media. I was self-conscious and barely managed to stumble through it. Sixty minutes had never gone by more slowly. It was like standing up and giving an impromptu speech in junior high, only this time I had my eyes closed and my audience consisted of not just devout Christians (many of whom had a gift for prayer) but also God Himself. My voice quaked, and my mind went blank several times as I tried to figure out what the media needed from God. I had to be the worst prayer ever.

I declined an invitation to join an international group of evangelical Christians who worked in secular newsrooms and banded together for support. I didn’t see the need. People of faith weren’t especially embraced in newsrooms, but they also weren’t rejected. When it came to evangelicals, the newsroom had an informal but polite “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Conversations at the water cooler rarely strayed into personal matters of faith.

I was asked to teach a journalism class at a Christian college to show how evangelicals can survive in a secular newspaper. I declined that offer, too. It felt like the educators really wanted me to show how Christians could infiltrate—not “survive”—the newsroom. The covert approach turned my stomach.

I came to believe that if people were going to be drawn to Christianity, it would be because of quiet examples set by Christians. I had adopted the faith because people whom I admired were living more satisfying lives than I was, and a belief in Jesus seemed to be at the center of their contentment. They proselytized simply by living authentic Christian lives, not by preaching, badgering or threatening hellfire. St. Francis of Assisi put it best: “Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary use words.” My faith and experience told me that the lives of nonbelievers would change radically for the better—here and for eternity—if they accepted Jesus, just as I had. I wanted people to see me as an attractive example of the Christian life. It was a goal of which I repeatedly fell short, but toward which I still kept striving.

I started to find excuses for why God hadn’t given me the job at
The Times
yet. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it. I’d be on a national stage if I got the position, and perhaps this was my time in the desert to pray and fast and prepare. Yet four years into praying, I saw no progress. Finally, I decided to find another way to get my foot in the door. God helps those who help themselves, right? Maybe, I thought, my mistake was trying to find a way to get a
full-time
writing job, and I was praying for the wrong thing. What about starting with something part-time? I could propose writing a regular religion column for the paper’s Orange County edition. That way I could still keep my day job and the edition, with more than 200,000 subscribers, would be able to connect more deeply with a remarkably religious community that flourished among Orange County’s 3 million residents.