Dionysus on a Bike

by Justin Marquis

Previous Post – My So-Called Faith

The beginning of my studies at Purdue University was a time of intensifying my commitment to my Evangelical Christian faith. My high school part-time job had been working at the public library, first as a page and then as a clerk. A lot of my high school friends worked there, including most of my friends who didn’t go to church or share my religious outlook. Shortly into my first year of university, I quit that library job and furthered my social isolation by taking a job at a small independently owned Christian bookstore. The owner and manager of the store was a domineering, joyless patriarch who pressured my conformity in behavior and appearance toward what he considered respectable and Christian. I was told not to paint my nails or have longer hair. My work there furthered my movement toward listening to only “Christian” music, as I was put in charge of the CD department.

At the same time that changed my employment to an evangelical context, I stopped attending the Methodist church where I grew up altogether and started worshiping at an Evangelical campus church that met in a university classroom. It was a non-denominational church, pretty much Calvinist Baptist in theology without saying as much. At that church, whatever was left of my belief that Jesus’ teachings related to hope for the oppressed and lifting up the poor was replaced with an attitude that the most loving, important thing a person could do for another is “witness” to the gospel, i.e. attempt to convert them to my version of Christianity. This was the most loving thing to do in another’s life because it helped them avoid a punishment from God of eternal conscious torment in hell. Other than “witnessing,” the only other important things were to avoid sin via “accountability” groups and partners and praise the Lord through Bible study and singing. It was a fairly one-dimensional life. The church put increasing demands on my time, so that all I had left outside of church was my part-time job, and my studies.

Following the advice of the Methodist pastor who convinced me not to go to Bible College, I started off as a philosophy major. I was not at all prepared for my first philosophy class. The first paper in that course, my first ever philosophy paper was a disaster. We were reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling where he talks about the “leap of faith,” the central and defining act in the life of a Christian. Among the thing that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous narrator asserts is that it is not the objective, certain knowledge of the truths of Christianity that matter, rather it is the subjective relation of complete surrender to something that cannot be objectively known that actually matters. To my fundamentalist ears, this dismissal of objective truth and knowledge of that truth sounded like heresy, so I wrote a paper arguing that Kierkegaard was wrong, and I made that argument on the basis of scriptural quotations, proof texts, as they are often called. Kierkegaard wasn’t wrong for any other reason than his view of the faith was different than what I took to be the literal teachings of scripture (as I interpreted them). Getting the graded paper back from the professor was a rude awakening. I realized that doing philosophy would require me to reason in ways that challenged my faith, and so for the time-being I stepped away from the philosophy major, turning to the study of history, especially the ancient history of the near east, history relevant for understanding Biblical texts and their background.

The first two years of university were ones where my time was dominated by the church I was attending, reading the Bible, and trying to screw up the courage to tell people that they were hell bound unless they found Jesus (in the particular way my church prescribed). There was lots of pressure to attend every church function, so I didn’t have much of a social life outside of church. My classes did offer a connection to the outside world, and I was enjoying every minute of getting to know people my age from all over the country and from lots of different backgrounds. As I got to know a more diverse group of people, as I learned more and more in my university classes that challenged my worldview, and as I explored the political and ethical implications of my values and the faith I was being taught to practice, I started to seek time away from the church I was attending and apart from the people who went there with me. I needed time and space to figure out the world for myself, and I was being led away from the worldview and beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity that were being taught there and which I had accepted.

By the summer of 2001, I was barely going to that church at all because I felt so alienated from it and the people who went there. The experiences that were forcing me to question my beliefs and values came to a head, and I had what I would later recognize as one of the most liberating experiences of my life, leaving the church, renouncing my faith, and exploring new identities and ways of relating to the world.

I often tell people that ultimately I left the church for three reasons:

1. I could no longer tolerate the ethical and political implications of my conservative evangelical fundamentalist worldview and belief system. This brought me to an unsustainable evaluative dissonance.
2. What I was learning from science, history, philosophy, and other humanistic disciplines showed me that the beliefs of biblical literalism as objective truth were untenable, meaning that core tenets of my faith were also untenable.
3. The Christian life, as I understood it, with its high emphasis on sexual purity was untenable for me as a horny 20-year-old college student.

I will deal with each of these reasons for leaving the church in turn over the next three posts.