Are You A Reluctant Christian?

I am a reluctant Christian.

When I was a child, I was a Christian because I had no idea there was a choice in the matter; in my world, one simply was a Christian or one went to Hell. Easy for even a child to make that choice.

Philip Yancy, a Christian author who was the first person I ever heard use the term “reluctant Christian”, recounts seeing a billboard alongside a highway that said, “If you’re looking for a sign from God – maybe this is it!”

If you think, “Yeah, I’m a reluctant Christian too…” or even “I don’t know what that means but it sounds like it might describe me…” then maybe this blog is the “sign” you’ve been looking for.

…maybe this blog is the “sign” you’ve been looking for.

So, what do I mean, exactly, when I say I’m a “reluctant Christian”?

I mean that I was dragged back to it, kicking and screaming.

I grew up as a Baptist in the Southeastern United States. Kentucky and Tennessee, to be precise. The churches I attended as a child were ultra-conservative, fundamentalist, literalist. We believed, among other things:

• Every word of the Bible was literally true. Including Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Jonah’s Whale, and all the spooky-weird stuff in the Book of Revelation.
• Everyone who wasn’t a Christian was going to burn in Hell, which was a real place with real fire. And it was never going to stop burning.
• No other religions were valid, including any form of Christianity that wasn’t exactly like ours. Especially Catholics.
• Evolution and any Science that was in contradiction to the most literal interpretation of the Bible was not only wrong, but was evil.
• There was a real Devil; and he was really out to get us.

Now, please understand – I am not ridiculing these beliefs, nor am I belittling anyone who holds them. I am simply trying to give you an idea of what being a “good Baptist” meant in my family, and in the churches that I attended, and to the best of my recollection and understanding.

I am not ridiculing these beliefs, nor am I belittling anyone who holds them.

When I was in my teens, my family attended Bighamntown Baptist Church, in Middlesboro, Kentucky. I remember a particular summer - I must have been about 13 years old - when I was going to Saturday night meetings we called “Training Union”. There was a very delicious young blonde girl, whose name I can’t recall, who was also attending, and I always sat next to her. She said she liked me because I was “big and quiet, like a Cadillac”. I don’t know what she meant, exactly, or even if it was complimentary… but at the time it made me dizzy. I wasn’t going to miss Training Union after that.

Until, that is, the leaders decided to have a “youth rally” where the kids would bring all their “satanic rock music albums” and burn them in a big bonfire. It seems they had discovered there are backwards messages in rock albums, and that the group KISS had so named themselves as an anagram which stood for “Kings In Satan’s Service”. I’m not kidding.

I was horrified.

I started reading books that were critical of fundamentalist leanings in the Christian faith. I started asking questions. I started talking to friends who said, “Well, yeah, all that Christian stuff is superstition, and they don’t even let you listen to KISS albums…”.

I started doubting.

But this was a crisis for me. You see, despite its shortcomings and the newfound problems with my religion - I really loved it. I loved God. I loved Jesus. I loved that the good guys would win, that there was a reason for suffering in the world and that in the end all things worked together for God’s purposes. That was a story that gave my life meaning. I didn’t want to lose it. And, truth be told, I didn’t want to stop seeing that little blond girl whose name I can no longer remember.

Finally, I decided I needed to meet with my Pastor and talk to him about what I was feeling and thinking.

The Reverend W.B. Bingham was the closest thing to a rock star I had ever known (well, I was young and this was Kentucky, so give me a break, okay?). I regarded him with a mixture of fear, awe, and love. He was like my Grandfather, only “Preacher Bingham” (as almost everyone called him) was God’s spokesman on Earth.

I can’t emphasize this enough; in my mind, this guy could not speak wrong. He knew what God wanted us to do. He knew what God’s will was. This man stood up in the pulpit every Sunday in front of over a thousand Baptists in the sanctuary of the church named after him, and they hung in his every word. And I loved him.

We met in his study, which in my memory was large and very richly decorated. Lots of pictures of bobcats and cardinals and lots of books on the shelves.

He listened as I outlined my doubts and fears, as I told him how I didn’t want to lose my faith but that it was being challenged. I knew that Preacher Bingham would be able to tell me what to do. He would have the answers.

I was in essence saying to him, “Please help me, you’re my Pastor. One of your sheep is in trouble. What should I do?”

His answer would set the course of my life for the years that followed.

He said (and I’m paraphrasing now, through the lense of 28 years of elapsed time), “Son, there’s some things we just don’t need to be questioning if we’re good Christians. You need to pray for God to take these evil thoughts away from you.”

I was stunned.

Had my Pastor just told me to shut up and stop asking questions?

I became an agnostic on the spot.

I became an agnostic on the spot.

Agnosticism (the belief that “I don’t know” about God and other such unseen things, and that nobody can know about them) led me further away from the church until I became first a tentative atheist, and then a virulent one.

I was hurt. I was angry.

And pretty soon, I think, I was out for some vengeance.
I was a crusader for faithlessness. I gleefully told people that there was no God, and they should set themselves free from such tribal superstitions.

I thought, during those days, that you couldn’t believe in logic and science and still be a Christian.

I thought, during those days, that once you had surveyed the religions and spiritual traditions of the world, you would see Christianity as just one more among many superstitious belief systems.

I was a smart guy – I had a higher than average IQ, and to my shame I was very quick to tell people about it – and I could lay out logical, blistering, and bewildering arguments in favor of those viewpoints.

I won’t bore you (or titillate you) with the tales of the tawdry adventures I had while I wore the cloak of the unbeliever; let’s just agree that when one believes there are no absolute “rights and wrongs”, one is free to do many things. Most of them I’m not proud of.

…when one believes there are no absolute “rights and wrongs”, one is free to do many things.

Something interesting is apparent to me now, as I look back over those years: for all my professions of unbelief, I had some mighty funny reading habits. I read the Bible. I also read the Vedas, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching, the major philosophers, and all the New Age and Eastern literature I could get my hands on.

I watched TV preachers and listened to preachers on the radio. Ostensibly, I told people that I was simply “keeping track of the enemy”.

The truth was of course more complex than that.

Looking now at my bookshelf, and seeing the pattern of how my library grew over the years, it’s obvious to me that I was always on the path of working my way back to Christianity. A different kind of Christianity than the one I started with, no doubt about that, but Christianity all the same.

That’s where I am today; I am a Christian (albeit reluctantly, at least at first).

And just so we’re clear, here’s what I mean by saying that I am a Christian:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
The third day He arose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven
and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.

You may recognize this as the Apostle’s Creed. It’s about as far from Atheism or Agnosticism as one can get.

How can this be?

How did I go from skeptical atheist to being a believer again?

Reluctantly.

I didn’t want to become a Christian again. I had left that life behind me. I had repudiated it.

“What if I’ve been wrong about this?”

I clearly remember one of the pivotal moments along the road to becoming a Christian “again” – sitting at my desk, reading some page or other on Billy Graham’s web site - and realizing the staggering implication that if I returned to Christ, it would change everything in my life.

I was thinking, “What if - what if I’ve been wrong about this?”

Coming back to Christianity meant I would have to give up a lot of my strongly held political, social, and psychological positions. I would have to give up doing things which I thought of as “fun” but which most Christians I knew thought of as “sinful”.

More painful than all of this, coming back to Christianity would mean admitting I had been wrong about the most important question in my life – and that I had led others to be wrong, too.

My work, my marriage, my relationship with others, how I thought about health, about social justice, about politics, my self-image. Everything.

I would have to admit to myself - and to God - the hideous nature of some of the things I had done in the years since my disillusionment with Preacher Bingham.

Could my ego stand up to such an attack?

Along this path, I wrestled with a lot of questions, doubts, and issues. Perhaps you struggle with some of the same questions. Questions like:

• Why believe in God at all?
• Why is the Christian God any better or different from any of the others?
• Why is there suffering and evil if God is all-powerful and all-knowing?
• Why does God need humans to pray - doesn’t God already know what to do?
• What if God is just “bad” – or worse, what if he’s crazy?
• How can we believe the Bible is the “Word of God” – and what does that mean anyway?
• What about all the other holy books and holy men, of other religions?
• Why did God have to become a man and die in order to “save” humanity? Isn’t that just a “weird” idea?
• How can a good God sentence people to burn in hell forever? Is a God like that worthy of worship?
• Why do Christians still have problems, still get sick, and still die?
• What about all the contradictions and errors in the Bible? How do we explain those?
• Jesus said he was coming back soon – so where is He?
• Isn’t the Bible just a bunch of pasted together myths from all kinds of cultures?
• What about all the evil that has been done by the Church and by Christians?
• What about people who just honestly can’t believe – even if they want to? Are they just doomed to burn in hell?

That’s not a comprehensive list, but those were (and are) some of the “biggies”. Many of them I still wrestle with today – and that leads me to the reason this blog exists.

I know I’m not the only person who is traveling this path – the Path of the Reluctant Christian. And I believe that one good use of my time and talent is to help those on the path to find their way.

I don’t have all the answers – I don’t even have all the questions.

But I do believe that there are some who will read this, and for them it will be an aid. It will be a light – however faint and flickering – that might illuminate just enough of their path to help them keep going. I believe that this is part of the ministry I have been given, to help my fellow believers with their unbelief; I know it so well.

My plan is to outline my own thoughts on each of the questions above – and others as they occur to me. I plan to share my own progress in answering and dealing with these difficulties, and how I’ve been able to move past them (most of them) to a belief in Christianity that nurtures and sustains me, and that I believe to be true.

I want to help those who are struggling along the same path as me

Some of the things I write here may offend you; if that’s the case, I hope you’ll understand that giving offense isn’t my intention. My intention is simple; I want to help those who are struggling along the same path as me, wanting to believe but needing some help to be able to.

To be completely honest, I have another motivation, too, one that is more self-centered: I am writing this for my own benefit. Getting these thoughts out onto paper (or onto the computer screen, as the case may be) helps me clarify them in my own head. Writing all this down, and sharing it with others, is part of my process for working it out for myself.

I just learned recently that Preacher Bingham died last year, as the result of a car accident. It breaks my heart to hear that; because, even after all my anger and bitterness, the simple truth is I still love the man. He was trying to help me, in the best way he knew, stay true to my faith.

Maybe I don’t even truly remember what he said to me; maybe time and the devious nature of memory have turned a more innocent piece of advice from Preacher Bingham into something it wasn’t intended to be, or twisted it into words that weren’t actually spoken. I won’t ever really know, at least in this life. I wish I had had the chance to go see him, talk to him about how I’ve come full circle; I think he would have been delighted. Because I think he loved me, too.

Just because I’m writing this blog doesn’t mean I’ve arrived at a final destination or “summa theologica”; I don’t have all the answers figured out. All I have to offer are some thoughts that have helped me, and some stories to share that might illustrate the points I’m trying to make.

I hope that something I write here might make it easier to understand how one person has begun finding his way along this dimly-lit and rocky path – the Path of the Reluctant Christian.