I was born and baptized into the Catholic Church. My mother was a devout Catholic. We attended church every Sunday as well as the Stations of the Cross, the extraordinary holiday masses, and the many other types of services. Although I was an altar boy for nearly a decade, I never really had “faith” as it is viewed from a Christian perspective: The Catholic orthodoxy stressed commitment and loyalty to the Church itself.
I first noticed the misguidedness of this dogma when my age group was preparing for the sacrament of confirmation. It was incessantly preached that this ritual marked a mature and decisive commitment to the Church. No longer were we to behave like the teenager we were. Among the confirmees was an assortment of teenagers who, like teenagers, did not take the confirmation process seriously. Yet, much to my dismay at the time, they were confirmed and, except for those holiday masses that everyone attends, they never returned to participate in the weekly drudgery.
In 1994, my family and I moved to Delaware. For some reason I began attending a predominantly Southern Baptist school named Christian Tabernacle Academy. The school and church had an active and boisterous group of youth and I enjoyed singing the catchy I-love-Jesus and we-are-God’s-soldiers hymns during the Monday services. It was a unique and inspiring experience.
However, being Catholic came with an enormous stigma. I was ostracized and bullied by my peer group every school day. I was even condemned to hell twice by a teacher. The history book blamed all of histories miseries on the Catholic Church and never mentioned, for instance, that Martin Luther didn’t like Jews. Over time, my anger at the sheer ridiculousness of my treatment rose and I began to wonder, “Is this what it mean to be a Christian?”
To answer that question, I may have been drawn deep into the Baptist orthodoxy. It was made clear to me that their path was the only path to eternal salvation. The proverbial straw came when I brought in a book on cults to read during my daily free period. First, my classmates became upset and told me that we were not allowed to know the information presented in the book. Second, my teacher-a man who believed that listening to patriotic country music is a Godly endeavor and frequently argued with another teacher who believed that God considers all things secular, including secular music, sinful-confiscated the book. Finally, he gave it to the principal who looked it over and told me that I was never to bring it in again.
I’ll just say that I was a bit peeved. Who was he to tell me that there are some things that I’m not allowed to know? After that, I no longer considered Christianity to be a worthy endeavor. Not only did they argue over ridiculous ideological minutia and actively encourage bullying, they tried to stop me from reading a book. Who does that? And. at that age, even if I had no desire to do something, if I was told “no” I was sure as hell going to do it.
Eventually, my academic pursuit led me to college where I drank a lot and met a few folks who were honest and genuine and others who were largely unimpressive. The honest and genuine folks did not profess a symbiotic relationship with God. They were firmly planted in the humanistic side of intelligentsia. It was the Christian youth who shunned everyone who even slightly disagreed with them.
Eventually, I had a middle-of-the-night revelation that I was no longer Catholic and that I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. After that, I thought, “Well, what now?” Some time later, I understood that I was an atheist and that I was mentally and emotionally free to roam without the specter of eternal damnation on my shoulder. Up until then I had not understood that sin wasn’t my prison-mine was the pursuit of a sinless soul.
I had been taught in Catholic school that a soul is stained by sin much like a white shirt is stained by just about everything. If a soul were to become too stained, I would become physically decrepit and emotionally paralyzed. Only the sacrament of confession could clean the soul. After my conversion, I realized that that is a bunch of hooey. If I can act with free will and am responsible for myself, I’m ultimately accountable to myself.
I had been angry at religion and no one in particular for a long time. I was angry at my treatment, angry at the hypocrisy, and angry that I had no one to talk to about my journey. Unfortunately, my parents were completely unequipped to help me with my dilemmas. When I was in high school, I was involved in something benign that my parents didn’t understand. So, after they talked to some police officers, they forced me to stop participating because they believed that I was literally worshiping Satan. And so, they’ve remained far from my closest confidants and, frankly, I don’t care to burden them with questions of faith.
By the end of my journey I had learned a valuable lesson that has guided me since. All persons of ideology, regardless of denomination, faith, or common denominator, can be abusive, cruel, sadistic, greedy, power hungry, depressed, lonely, detached, and, most notably, wrong. We are all cut from the same cloth. We isolate those of us who need companionship and love when we become so damn attached to an ideology that we forget our mortality and fallibility. Rigid “good versus evil” and “us verses them” dichotomies plague all ideologues. They believe that they have a lock on all that is good and moral and that those people over there in that corner, or in that restaurant, or in that country are evil and amoral. They’ll never understand that that sort of thinking damages and dooms the rest of us. But, hey. They, like all of us, are only human.
