Week 10: An Atheist Feels the Gospel Spirit

I’m in way over my head.  There have only been a handful of times in my life when I’ve said to myself, “How the hell did I get myself here?”  Shivering in the dark with no car on a Cree Indian reservation in northern Quebec.  Stopped at a military checkpoint in Nepal with drugs (not mine) in the car.  Standing on top of a spikey, iron stockade fence, trying to untangle my pants, so I could escape a graveyard.  Yes, that about sums up the most adventuresome moments of my life.

But here’s an honorable mention: church this week.  I realized that I have no idea what I’m doing on this project.  It seems simple enough.  Just visit a church each week.  And it is that simple, and I plan to continue doing it, but this week was the first time when I just thought, “What the hell am I doing?”  I thought this during the few seconds it took the pastor to walk down the aisle and hand me a microphone, as 200 African American faces turned around to look at the white atheist in the back row explain why he’d sat down in their church.  The pastor had asked if there were any visitors.  What was I going to do, blend in?  Hope nobody had noticed me?  So I had raised my hand and stood up.

Perhaps I’m being a bit dramatic.  It was just a church like thousands of others.  But toward the end of the service, as I sat and watched people falling on the ground in hysterical shrieking prayer, I realized that I just don’t know shit about religion.  My upbringing, my religious study, my book-learning, my self-indulgent Churchgoing Atheist project—it is all dwarfed by everything I don’t know.

So let’s get the easy things I do know out of the way first.  First, people look ridiculous when they are screaming and crying about God in a wild frenzy.  Most observers would laugh if they were not wide-eyed with incredulity. Second, I am a voyeur who deceived good people in order to write about how they are delusional.

But when I stood up I didn’t say that, of course.  I was partially truthful.  I told them my name, and that I had seen their church on the news when they donated all the collection money to Haiti earthquake relief, and that their church had looked like a joyful, interesting place and I wanted to visit.  Everyone said “Welcome”—and a few said “Praise God!”—and I took my seat.

Now on to the tough stuff.  I’m not going to criticize these churchgoers for their worship style.  To do so would be a failure to recognize the dramatic difference in culture.  To expect them to act “normal” according to my white-middle-class norms would be narrow-minded and ignorant.  It would be arrogant at best and racist at worst.  Besides, I already decided I don’t know shit.  But all this is beside the point, because I don’t want to criticize the service anyway.  I loved it.  (Well, some of it.)

My experience with religion has been narrow.  Even for this blog, I’ve gone to a fairly similar group of churches.  Never had I seen anything like this.  This church was genuinely uplifting.  People had passion!  There was a raw, naked, honest quality to impassioned worship that I have never seen before.  The music was deeply moving.  I don’t believe in God, I don’t think Jesus is listening, I don’t think there’s an invisible holy spirit in the room with me, and even I was nearly moved to tears.  It was joyous, infectious. 

There’s something about a specific organ sound that gets me.  Not a church pipe organ, but a jazz organ, a gospel organ.  That vibrating sound that warms the bones.  It’s a living thing.  And the jazz organ played for nearly the whole two hours.  It sang during the hymns, riffed during the prayers, and conversed with the pastor during the sermon.  It pumps life into the soul, even of an unbeliever.

Please don’t get the idea that I’m converting.  Still pretty confident there’s no god.  But I have to say, if gospel churches dropped Jesus and just started worshipping the gospel organ, I’d consider it. 

The atheist worldview, however, dilutes all of those good feelings.  The joy one feels is cheapened when one recognizes what’s actually going on, even if only imperfectly.  The bottom line is this: all the passionate worship, the hysterical prayer, the uplifting message—it’s all a mistake.  Once we begin with the premise that there isn’t a god that's listening to any of that, the atheist eyes begin to understand, and it’s way more complicated than simply explaining it away with God.

What I see is a fascinating combination of history, culture, biology, and psychology.  Trying to explain this complex blend of factors could fill a library.  I’ll just take one aspect that intrigued me.  Since I loved the organ, I'll build on that—there was an improvisational quality to the whole service.  Yes, there was a bulletin with a plan for the service, but each part of the service was flexible and open-ended.  The prayers seemed unscripted.  The band played along without music.  The congregation spoke or stood whenever they were moved to.  It was as though the speakers and the singers and the band and the congregation (or audience, if I may) were all interacting parts, playing off one another in a grand improvisation.  And this improvisation is part of black culture.  Jazz grew out of it.  Rap grew out of it.  Certain kinds of dance grew out of it.  And all of those cultural ingredients were in the religious stew that I tasted.

Several days later and I’m still not sure what to make of it all. Part of me wants to laugh and sneer and mock.  Part of me wants to pity them for wasting such time and energy.  Part of me wants to recognize that their lives are filled with joy and community so even if they’re “wrong” it doesn’t matter.  And part of me wants to just join in and feel the love.

I can’t just feel the love, though, if my head says it’s an illusion.  Still, I get the attraction of it all.

Week 1: The Uncomfortable Start of a Project

"This is the day the lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."

-Common expression to open church services

"Little Darlin', it feels like years since we've been here."

-The Beatles

Waking up on Sunday mornings is pretty alien to me, at least recently. 8:30 seems ungodly early for a weekend. But I am intent upon suffering so for my first trip to church in two years. It would not be church if it didn’t feel like a chore, right? But as I wake up, I get this unusual feeling—I’m looking forward to church. Weird, I know. I begin the drive to church, and it’s a beautiful fall morning. The air is fresh. I see neighbors walking dogs, raking leaves, talking to one another, and they seem happy. The sunlight is coming from a strange direction, lighting the trees into a blaze of orange and yellow. I turn on the radio, and the Beatles are singing “Here Comes the Sun.” The world is conspiring to make me happy about church.

One cannot help being tempted to see God’s hand in this beautiful morning. It’s as though he is thanking me, welcoming me, approving of my decision to attend church again. Or perhaps he just made such a beautiful morning in an attempt to prove his existence to me, an unbeliever.

If there were a God, he would know that I’m attending to church in order to look at it with atheist eyes. He would be offended that I will sit and pretend, sing along, read the prayers, listen to the sermon, and not believe a word of it. But I’m not worried about an imaginary God being offended and striking me down for unbelief. I will pursue my project: I will attend a different church every Sunday and write about it from an atheist’s perspective. Simple as that.

But where to begin? I want to ease into this project—nothing too crazy yet. So I choose a mild and liberal Baptist church near my house, and a church that will probably be similar to the Presbyterian ones I spent so many Sundays at earlier in my life. It will be nice to start with something familiar.

Approaching the church, I begin to worry about the empty parking lot. And where is the front door, anyway? I end up circumnavigating the building looking for a front door, but there are only about 15 cars in the parking lot, and no obvious influx of people. My plan to blend in and observe inconspicuously will not be easy if there are only a few people here. Not finding the front door, and feeling pretty stupid about it, I make my way in through the church office, and find the sanctuary. I must be early.

I'm not early. It's 9:55, and there are still only 10 people in the congregation, and I’m feeling pretty conspicuous, but at this point I’m committed. Five people in the front row. Not wanting to be too rude sitting in the back row, and I take a seat a few rows behind the crowd at the front, thinking I can hide behind them. 9:59. The five in the front row get up and relocate to the choir’s bench, leaving me in the very front of the congregation, right as the music begins. Awesome.

As the service starts, though, I’m oddly relaxed. Who cares if there are 10 blue-hairs wondering about the random guy in the front row? I do a half-turn and get a quick glance at the crowd behind me as the service starts, and I realize I’m attending a dying church. There’s almost nobody here.

It’s a strange mix of emotions I feel. There’s something comfortable, familiar, and almost joyful about being here. I spent so many hours in church growing up that it’s like returning home, or seeing an old friend again after many years. The comfort to be found in church is real. But I’m conflicted because the premise on which it’s all founded is nonsense. I’m angry I spent so many hours praising something that was never there. The people sitting in the rows behind me draw inspiration and guidance from a system that is a lie. So why am I depressed to see so few people here?

But when the pastor speaks, I like him immediately. He’s wearing a bowtie. He begins, “So the hated Yankees have won the world series,” and proceeds into a discussion of sports. Interesting, but it doesn’t seem like a sermon. I look at the bulletin and realize this portion of the service is the children’s lesson, and then it really hits me—there are no children here.

What do I really believe about the church? If I believe there is no god, and I believe religion is an enormous delusion, then should I be happy that there are no children to hear this lesson? Certainly church is not going to disappear anytime soon, if ever, but this one is—that is a near certainty. A church without children is doomed.

Growing up, I never used to listen to the sermon. But this one is good. The pastor touches on one of the best aspects of religious belief: charity. I cannot deny that religion makes people more selfless and compassionate than we are naturally inclined to be. The pastor builds his sermon around the passage from Mark in which a woman pours expensive oil on Jesus, and the bystanders protest that it could have been sold to give money to the poor. The pastor attempts to make sense of this strange action and Jesus’s approval of it. It is a perplexing section, and the pastor weaves it together with stories of charity and transformation from the local Rochester community. He focuses on Foodlink, an organization that provides huge amounts of free food to hungry families all over western New York. He asks the questions: will there always be destitute people? Will it always rain in our lives? Will there always be suffering around us? He answers those questions by saying that there will always be suffering until the kingdom comes and everyone is called back to god again. In the meantime, though, in our lives, god will rain blessings upon us in unexpected ways, as Foodlink does for the Rochester hungry and the woman in the gospel does for Jesus. People can give of their deep passion as expressions of charity, and others can be transformed by that.

A beautiful message, and artfully delivered. I wholeheartedly approve of his message of charity, and I believe the congregation, small though it is, follows through on this message with their actions. But do we need the Bible to inspire this? No. In fact, I do not believe that the gospel passage he analyzes conveys this message of charity. Though it was a passionate sermon, it was based on an illogical interpretation of the passage. If Jesus really believed in charity, he would not have applauded the woman for her kind act of anointment. The bystanders were right; the woman’s action was foolishly wasteful. I’ve been to Foodlink to volunteer*, and they have pallets of food as far as the eye can see, and each day we’d move a different food item. One day I was there, it was bananas. The Foodlink analogy doesn’t work, because the modern day equivalent of the woman’s action would be a Foodlink worker taking a pallet of bananas, turning them into a giant banana milkshake for Jesus, and then pouring it down the drain after he tasted it. Those bananas might be given to Jesus out of her deep passion, it may be a beautiful gesture of appreciation, but it removes food from the destitute who need it. The bystanders were right to protest. As far as I can see, this Bible story doesn’t make any sense in a 21^st-century context, and maybe not in any context. Unfortunately, every Sunday religious leaders must attempt to explain and find relevance in Biblical texts that sometimes defy logic. Jesus was dead wrong here, if we read the story from the perspective of the hungry.

I believe human morality has its basis outside of God and religion. We do not need to play games of logic in order to find moral messages in a biblical text that may contradict what we know to be right. The church's minister, in his message of charity, was right, and Jesus was wrong. But the logical gymnastics are a sad necessity of religious belief, and one that most believers choose to ignore.

As I leave the church, I shake the pastor’s hand and thank him for having me as a guest. I genuinely liked the service, the sermon, and the people. Still, I feel like a liar and a snake, because I’m pretending to be a believer but I’m secretly there to dissect and criticize. Those few people in the congregation will stay to discuss their charity work, and I will go home to type up an arrogant critique and then watch football.

This church is dying, and it does sadden me. Though I am sure belief in god is wrong, I’m surprised that I find myself thinking the world will be slightly worse off if this congregation dissolves. I realize that I should approach this project with a spirit of intellectualism, but also with humility and an open mind. I have much to learn.

*Incidentally, I can’t claim to be a particularly charitable person. Saying I volunteered at Foodlink makes me sound much better than I am. The volunteer work at Foodlink was part of my college fraternity’s charitable work. We figure that a few days of volunteering balances out four years of reckless drunkenness.