As a Christian I believed that “all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28, NASB). No matter how difficult or tragic the circumstances, I believed there was always a silver lining that could justify whatever happened to us, whether or not we could discern God’s purposes. An illness might help me take a break from my busy life and draw closer to God. A stubborn root in the ditch I was digging was a chance to develop my muscles, gain some exercise, or nurture a strong work ethic. The death of a loved one meant that the loved one would have a better life in heaven in God’s presence. A persistent backache presented an opportunity to develop my character, to strengthen my ability to depend on God. to exhibit grace in the midst of my pain, and to relate to and console others experiencing similar hardships. As Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 1:4, God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God."


As a secular humanist, I no longer believe there’s an omnipoent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being watching out for me and orchestrating every event to ensure it works out for my ultimate good. This means I can no longer look at everything that happens to me as good; there really are some bad things that come my way, things I wish hadn’t happened, things that have no silver lining, no redeemable value. This doesn’t mean I can’t seek to make the best of a difficult situation, to “turn lemons into lemonade,” so to speak. It doesn’t mean I can’t use my experiences of adversity to comfort others who are going through similar adversity. It doesn’t mean I can’t allow hardships to soften my pride and sharpen my character. It just means I can accept the reality that life would have been better if certain things hadn’t happened or that some things just suck, end of story.

On the downside of this secular realism, I can no longer take emotional comfort in the certainty that every difficulty I face has a reason that will make it worthwhile in the end--indeed, that will make it so that life will be ultimately better when anything unimaginably awful happens than if it had never happened.

On the upside of this secular realism, I have more of an impetus to redress wrongs in this life. We have some Christian friends whose twenty-something son died several days after the mast of his sailboat struck a 14,000-volt power line above a Minnesota lake, necessitating the amputation of his legs before he eventually succumbed to the effects of electrocution. As a father, I can’t imagine anything worse happening than to lose my son in his prime like this. If this were to happen to me as an unbeliever, I would see it as purely and utterly bad, and I would not seek any silver lining in the incident; rather, I would investigate why a 14,000-volt power line was hanging so low over a lake where sailboats roam, and I would sue to the maximum extent of the law whoever was responsible for it--not to profit financially but to help prevent such an unmitigated tragedy from ever happening again. I would not be able to bring back my son from the grave, and I wouldn’t have the comfort of knowing I could see him again in glory, but the least I could do would be to take measures to see that this couldn’t happen to anyone else. I would not allow Christian meekness, forgiveness, or the desire to be a good Christian example to get in the way of my pursuing like a bulldog as much justice in this matter as the law permits.

Several years ago I was discussing with a Christian the issue of slavery in the Bible. Unlike some disingenuous apologists who deny that the Bible supports slavery (see, for example, Exodus 21:20, Leviticus 25:42-46), this individual acknowledged it but reasoned that this life is so short that, despite the hardships of slavery, it’s like a drop in the bucket compared to eternity, which is really what matters in the end. I can’t think of a better example than this of the downside of seeing a silver lining in everything: it dulls our sense of justice, potentially opening the door for us to accept as God’s will all manner of carelessness, inhumanity, or injustice, or at least to give us less incentive to fight for redress.

I can’t say for sure, but I wonder if this “all things work together for good in the end” outlook is at least partly responsible for the historical tendency of fundamentalists to be more concerned with doctrine and evangelism than with social justice. Note that I don’t have this view of all believers; moderate and liberal Christians (and, to be fair, some fundamentalists) have championed the rights of slaves, women, and racial and other minorities, but historically it was the fundamentalists who fought to keep slavery in the South, to prevent women from voting or from working outside the home, to fight environmental protections, and to maintain the status quo of racial segregation and economic inequality, all the while championing fundamentalist doctrine, evangelism, and the inerrancy of the Bible. But if this life is the only one we have, and if this earth is our only home, and there’s no supernatural being to make everything work out in the end, then we are responsible in this life for seeking justice, for redressing wrongs, and for preserving this planet for our posterity, knowing there is no “new heaven and new earth” coming to wipe our mess clean.

No, not  everything works together for our good--neither for believers not for unbelievers--but I hope we can all agree for the need to work together to improve the world we share, to reduce the things that don’t work for our good and to increase the things that do.

In Part 1 of my blog post entitled, “Is abortion wrong?”, I reviewed some reasons I opposed abortion when I was a believer and concluded that all but one of them were weak. Let me summarize the strongest argument that contributed to my pro-life stance:

1) It is wrong to kill an innocent human being (I include “innocent” here to sidestep the questions of capital punishment for criminals and the killing of enemy combatants in warfare.)
2) Unborn babies are innocent.
3) Unborn babies are human beings (i.e., there is no important difference between a baby one minute before it leaves the womb and the same baby one minute after it leaves the womb).
4) Therefore, it is wrong to kill an unborn baby (or, in other terms, abort a fetus).

During the process of my deconversion, I never really gave the issue of abortion a thought; it wasn’t something that related to the truth or falsehood of religion, which for me was the central question at hand. But once I had come to the conclusion that my former faith was without warrant, I began to think about the implications of having abandoned the dictates of the Bible and Christian tradition. I had to think through the three premises above leading to the conclusion that it’s wrong to abort a fetus. I instinctively wanted abortion to be wrong; it’s a conviction I had held all my life. But as a secular humanist, could I justify my desire for it to be wrong and to outlaw it in civil society?

The bottom line is: can the three premises above be grounded in a secular perspective? I don’t know of anyone who would maintain that unborn babies are guilty enough to deserve death for crimes they’ve committed, so premise #2 is safe. That leaves premises #1 and #3, which I’ll treat together since they hang on the definition of human being.

I’m a computer science engineer by training. One of my favorite classes in college was digital electronics. Maybe that’s because I like the concept of binary logic: everything is either on (“1”) or off (“0”). It’s much less messy than analog logic, where values can fall into an unlimited number of gradations. I suspect it’s our affinity for binary logic, for everything to be black or white, 1 or 0, that makes personhood and abortion such thorny issues. If we can point to a moment (usually the moment of conception), a discreet point in time marking the transition from non-person or non-human to person, then there’s no sliding scale, no shades of grey that make it tricky to determine when or whether it is or is not appropriate to end a life. As Dr. Suess would say, “A person’s a person (1, not 0), no matter how small.”

Though a microscopic fertilized egg at the moment of conception has a full complement of human DNA, it bears no resemblance to an adult or even to a newborn baby--not in its form, in its ability to think, in its ability to feel pain. There is no brain, no blood, no heart, no limbs, no head, nothing but a little microscopic blob. If we were not committed to the convenience of binary on/off, 1/0, black/white logic, we could readily acknowledge that this is a very different entity from a newborn baby, or even a twenty-five week old fetus, which by that time has taken on the form of a human and which can feel pain. We would realize that being human doesn’t lend itself to a convenient definition, that there are only degrees between a non-person and a person. If someone were to show me a fertilized egg under a microscope and tell me, “That’s a person,” my response would be, “Are you kidding me?”, and I would tend to think they were driven more by their ideology than by any concern to align their beliefs with reality. Now if they were to show me a twenty-eight week old fetus with a head, arms, and legs that can feel pain, and if they told me that was a person, I wouldn’t be nearly so skeptical. True, a fetus at that stage likely lacks many of the traits we associate with personhood, chief among them self-awareness (which begin in children at around 14-18 months; see page 725 of this link), but at least such a fetus bears a much greater resemblance to a prototypical human than does a microscopic egg. The point is that personhood, whether we like it or not, is more analog than digital, more a point along a sliding scale than an on/off, true/false, black/white proposition.

The problem is that, once we adopt a sliding scale definition of personhood, then the definition of person is only in the eye of the beholder, and each beholder could come to a different conclusion. But then even in raising this problem, we’ve slipped back into binary thinking. What if, instead of wringing our hands over what separates a person from a non-person, we were to admit degrees of personhood? I can acknowledge that a fertilized egg has elements of personhood while also maintaining that it’s not a person. And an embryo at two weeks exhibits a few more elements of personhood while still not being a full person. For that matter, a newborn baby, even though much more like a person than an embroyo, is not a prototypical person and lacks many of the congnitive abilities of an adult chimpanzee, including self-awareness, the ability to consider the future, and verbal communication. It’s not comfortable for us to think of personhood in terms of a sliding scale, but it seems a martian observer would have no problem studying us and coming to see us in this light.

But if personhood is a sliding scale, at what point along the scale does it become wrong to abort a proto-human? What if a father wants to kill his newborn baby or his two-year-old toddler out of convenience, arguing that these young ones have not reached the status of full personhood? The fear is that the sliding scale will become a slippery slope, and before you know it, we’ll have lost all reverence for the sanctity of human life and we as a society begin killing anyone with disabilities, with cognitive impairments, with limited prospects for a full and prosperous life, etc. For me the “slippery slope” argument is one of the strongest theoretical arguments against abortion from a secular perspective. I recall back in the 1980s during my high school and college years hearing Dr. Francis Schaeffer lament that European nations like the Netherlands were beginning to legalize euthanasia, and that before long this would lead them down the slippery slope of doctors killing their patients without the consent of the patients. The ensuing lack of reference for the sanctity of human life would lead to escalating rates of murder, infanticide, and all manner of violence and social decay. Yet several decades have passed since that time, and the rates of violence have only declined, and there is no mass abuse of euthanasia or infanticide or any such thing. So even if the “slippery slope” can be seen as a strong theoretical argument against abortion, in practice it has shown itself to have little to no merit.

It’s not just pro-choice advocates that subscribe to the sliding scale view of personhood. In practice, pro-life advocates do too. How do I know this? It’s estimated that more than two-thirds of all fertilized eggs fail to come to term; in other words, they’re spontaneously aborted, usually unbeknownst to the mother. So if these eggs are fully human, then fully two-thirds of all humans perish in a dark, pre-natal holocaust. Spontaneous abortion It is by far the single leading cause of human death, eclipsing heart disease, cancer, accidents, warfare, homicide, human-induced abortion, and suicide--indeed, all forms of post-natal death combined. Where are the concerned pro-lifers soliciting funds for research to put to rest this horrendous scourge, this mother of all killers? If they really subscribed to on/off, black/white personhood, would they not display more compassion and more activism for the billions of victims of spontaneous abortion? As far as I can recall, I have not heard a single pro-life advocate express the slightest concern over this tragedy. I can only conclude that they couldn’t care less. Why couldn’t they care less? Either they’re unaware of this holocaust or they don’t really believe in the personhood of fertilized eggs, or a combination of the two. Surely there are some who know about it and fail to sound the alarm. In any case, I really don’t think they believe in the equality of all human life, or they would put their money where their mouth is.

So am I an eager pro-abortion advocate? Far from it! I regret any unnecessary loss of life. I lament the loss of some kinds of life than others; it’s only natural for us feel more acutely the death of family and friends closest to us than that of unknown individuals halfway around the world, the death of those in their prime more than that of the elderly, the accidental death of a teenager more than the early miscarriage of a baby, the death of a beloved pet dog more than the death of a fertilized human egg, the death of a mother cat than that of one of its many kittens, the death of a kitten than that of a butterfly, or the death of a butterfly than that of a dandelion.

From a naturalistic perspective, we live in an interconnected web of life, all with varying degrees of closeness to us and to our interests and affections, with varying degrees of sentience and intelligence and capacity for feeling pleasure and pain. Though we instinctively place our own species in a category of its own--qualitatively different from all other forms of life--the gulf is not as wide as many, particularly those in conservative religious traditions, often imagine. It’s common to hear a complaint, “Those liberals care more about beached whales than unborn human babies!” But is it really that difficult to understand why a secular humanist like me would be more concerned about the slow, painful, dehydration of an adult whale--a whale that’s part of a social network, perhaps the mother of a calf or two, the matriarch of a pod, an animal that has all the same nerve endings and capacity for pain that we have--than the harvesting of an unconscious, unfeeling human embryo to be used for medical research with the goal of developing a cure for diseases that have plagued us for as long as we can remember?

I thank Sam and Holly for their thoughtful responses to my first post on this topic. I too am only reluctantly pro-choice, as Sam so adeptly put it. I wish we lived in world where all the answers were easy, where death was not a reality, where we never had to make trade-offs between life and liberty, where populations of all species (including humans) could grow geometrically over thousands or millions or billions of years with no ill effects on the sustainability or quality of life on our planet. But we don’t live in such a world, and sometimes hard choices have to be made.

It’s interesting that both Sam and Holly raised the question of what we eat, because I’m a vegan wannabe myself. I deplore the inhumane treatment of animals so prevalent in the poultry, dairy, cattle, and fish farms that feed our society’s insatiable appetite for meat and dairy products. In the past couple of years I’ve significantly increased my consumption of beans and lentils, but I have not gone fully vegan as it wouldn’t be practical at this point in my family and social environment. I tell myself that by eating less meat, I’m doing my small part to reduce animal suffering just a little bit. The thing is, as a believer, I had no such concern for the welfare of these sentient beings; they were made for our benefit, and there was such a quantum dividing line between humans and animals that the welfare of animals, while not to be disregarded entirely, paled in significance to our responsibility to our own kind, even if packaged as an unfeeling microscopic cell. I’d like to think my perspective has become more reasonable, even if still not fully consistent. I would still not hesitate to shoot a starving wolf threatening a newborn human infant. I suppose we’ll never be able to shed what humanist ethicist Peter Singer calls specieism (as an analog to racism). For the record, as a human I do not advocate treating humans and animals equally in every context when the interests of both come into conflict, but we can certainly afford to give greater attention to their capacity for pain and the role we can play in minimizing it (or at least in not increasing it), just as we can recognize a common interest in reducing the number of abortions, particularly those after the 25th week of pregnancy when the fetus begins to feel pain.

It was surprising for me to learn recently that the rates of abortion (expressed as a ratio of abortions per 1000 women of childbearing age) has been on the decline around the world in the past several decades. The rate of decline has slowed since 2003, coinciding with a slowdown in the rate of birth control distribution. If our concern is to reduce the number of abortions, the most effective way to do so is to make contraception more widely available.

I’ll leave you with one other interesting morsel: abortion has effectively taken the place of infanticide, which was widespread in all cultures before the modern era (again, read Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined). The rates of abortion are essentially no higher than the rates of infanticide in previous generations, and abortion itself, along with violence of all kinds, is on the decline, as I’ve discussed in a couple of other recent blog posts. Those of us who are reluctant pro-choicers, along with pro-lifers, can look forward to the day when abortion becomes becomes rare.

Well, I could go on and on, but these are my thoughts as they currently stand, and I look forward to more good feedback from readers.

Is abortion wrong? It's not a question that was ever up for debate for me as a conservative evangelical believer, but after my deconversion, I had to wrestle with a host of moral questions from a new perspective: premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, war, government welfare, and many more. As I argue in my book, I think the feared (and real) loss of clarity on many of these issues is a significant factor preventing many believers from reconsidering their faith; it’s just a lot easier to take the word of God or of Dobson or of Colson on these matters than to do the hard work of weighing the variables and considering them in shades of grey rather than in black and white. And it’s scary to think of falling down the precipice of moral relativism.

I find it remarkable that no Christians have asked to know my opinion on abortion since my deconversion (well, perhaps once in the context of a small discussion group perhaps five years ago). Up until now, I haven’t publicly expressed my thoughts on this issue, partly because I hadn’t (and still haven’t fully) come to a firm conclusion on this question. Now that I’m maintaining a blog and abortion and birth control have been in the news again recently, it’s probably time for me bring my thoughts out into the open.

Secular humanists, though predominately pro-choice, are not unanimously so. For examples, listen to Robert Price’s Point of Inquiry podcast interview with Jen Roth entitled “Atheist Against Abortion,” or read Nat Hetonff’s entreaty to Obama. So if you’re a conservative Christian and you fear that leaving your faith will necessarily entail changing your views on abortion, you needn’t let that stand in the way of deconverting. But I won’t pretend that it’s likely for your outlook on abortion to remain unchanged.

As former believers, we can no longer call on the Bible or Christian tradition or the divinely established sanctity of human life to argue against the practice of abortion. The best we can do (if we remain pro-life) is to appeal to an agreed-upon commitment to treat all human life as deserving of preservation. But then on what basis can we agree on this apparently arbitrary commitment without also maintaining a similar commitment to other species?

Before I continue the discussion of abortion from a secular perspective, let me back up to my perspective as a believer. My opposition to abortion was rooted in the sanctity of human life, a sanctity that in my view derived from God’s having created humankind uniquely in his image (Genesis 1:26-27). As soon as the 23 chromosomes of the father’s sperm and the 23 chromosomes of the mother’s egg came together, a 46-chromosome human being is formed, worthy of the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enjoyed by all other members of our species, whether born or unborn, strong or frail, athletic or invalid, intelligent or mentally disturbed. Terminating a human life, no matter how small, is equivalent to murder, period. I was impatient with any line of reasoning about abortion that did not take this into account. I could not understand how certain politicians like George H. W. Bush could call themselves pro-life while allowing exceptions for rape or incest. Would these “pro-life” politicians think it’s fine to kill such offspring if they’re already born, or if they’re 10 years old? If not, then why is it any different if they’re still in the womb? They’re still human, for goodness’ sake! (I did reluctantly allow for one exception to abortion: when a mother’s life is at stake, when it comes down to one life versus another, but I considered this to be quite rare and more hypothetical than a daily reality.)

Though I bought into other pro-life arguments, it was this murder question that primarily drove my anti-abortion stance, exemplified by the bumper sticker, “It’s a baby, not a choice.” Some have argued that abortion leads to higher rates of cancer for the mother, but the research is not at all definitive on this, so it makes pro-lifers look disingenuous when they pretend it is more definitive than it really is. Another common pro-life argument is that there are many childless couples who would love to adopt if only mothers who don’t want to keep their babies would give them up for adoption, but that’s merely a pragmatic argument that doesn’t take into account the opposite pragmatic concerns of the mothers who do not wish carry their babies to term, or the health of our planet that one day will reach its practical population limit (whether in decades, centuries, or millennia). Once we wade into pragmatic arguments like these, we lose the force of the central ideological argument against abortion, namely, that it’s the taking of a human life, i.e., murder.

Another argument I considered but which didn’t have the same weight for me as it did for other pro-life proponents was the concept of potentiality. Mozart is the poster child for this argument. His father was crippled and his mother deaf and blind when he was brought into this world to join his 13 other siblings. Surely in a situation like that today, abortion would have been encouraged, but in his day, Mozart was allowed to live and grow into the genius who contributed so much to our culture. And yet, to be blunt, every time a teenage boy has a wet dream or masturbates instead of having sex with his girlfriend, or every time a wife declines sex because she’s “too tired tonight, honey,” it could be argued that the world may have lost a potential Mozart or an Einstein. Then too, by the same token, perhaps a potential Stalin or Hitler could have been lost to the world. I just never bought the peculiar “potentiality” argument for these reasons.

Then there were the scriptural arguments. As a Christian I was aware that I couldn’t simply appeal to the Bible to convince the wider secular world that abortion should be restricted or outlawed, but the Bible did help reinforce my personal pro-life stance, particularly the following verses from Psalm 139:

13 For you created my inmost being;
  you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
  your works are wonderful,
  I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
  when I was made in the secret place,
  when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
  all the days ordained for me were written in your book
  before one of them came to be.

However, even such passages didn’t have the weight of my primary argument against abortion as a Christian, namely that humans (no matter how small) are in some sense unique among all the species and that our common prohibition against murder extends to all members of our species.  The above passage could surely apply just as well to animals--if God is the author of life and knits humans in their mothers’ womb, does he not do the same for dogs in their mothers’ womb? And yet no Christian that I know if is as exercised about canine abortion as they are about human abortion.

On a more emotional level, I was moved as a Christian to hear descriptions of the violence of abortion and the pain it caused to sentient babies, particularly in the course of so-called “partial-birth abortions.” I learned that a baby can feel pain certainly by the 25th week of pregnancy and that abortion does cause intense pain to the baby. Yet I had to admit that I wasn’t as concerned about the pain experienced by a bull when slaughtered so I could have hamburger, and I also realized that the pain-to-the baby argument couldn’t be used against the practice of abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy, so again, this was in a sense another distraction from my central argument against abortion, namely that it constituted the taking of a human life.

It’s getting late, and I need to work in the morning, so I’ve just now decided to make this into (at least) a two-part blog. I intend to continue next time by explaining my current views as a secular humanist, even if I’m not fully settled on the matter. Perhaps this will lead to a dialogue that will help many of us consider a viable position that recognizes the legitimate arguments that can be made from different points of view.

This week I met at Starbucks for over two hours with an agnostic friend who, as the foreman of the jury, voted to convict a murderer, sending him to death row. To clarify: the jury found him guilty but didn’t explicitly sentence him to death, but the nature of the crime entailed a death sentence. The perpetrator killed two innocent men for apparently no good reason during a convenience store holdup in 2010. I asked my friend (whom I’ll call “Scott”) whether he was certain of the guy’s guilt, and he said, “100% certain.” Scott was understandably shaken and weary from the long, drawn-out trial and from the senselessness and monstrosity of the crime. “Where does evil like this come from? If God doesn’t exist, how can we even conclude such acts are evil? How did I end up being part of this trial? There are no winners in all of this, only losers.”

It’s interesting that I had been reading about violence, and particularly the motives that underpin violence, in the book I mentioned in last week’s blog post, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. On virtually every page of Pinker’s book, I gain new insights I had not considered or learned before. For example, on page 484:

“Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don’t like? In separate studies, the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss have posed this question to a demographic that is known to have exceptionally low rates of violence—university students—and were stunned at the outcome. Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year.“

Fortunately for society, we fantasize about murder far more often than we actually carry it out; there are consequences to murder that prevent most of us from committing it casually. Normally it’s only when the perceived benefits of murder (e.g., putting an end to a rivalry in an affair, financial gain, silencing a witness to a crime, bringing someone to justice for a offense committed against the muderer, etc.) outweigh the risks that murder is actually carried out. It was revealing to me to read this on page 488:

“I am now convinced that a denial of the human capacity for evil runs even deeper, and may itself be a feature of human nature, thanks to a brilliant analysis by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book Evil. Baumeister was moved to study the commonsense understanding of evil when he noticed that the people who perpetrate destructive acts, from everyday peccadilloes to serial murders and genocides, never think they are doing anything wrong. How can there be so much evil in the world with so few evil people doing it?”

I hadn’t really considered the fact that most evildoers think of themselves as good people and attempt to justify their actions. In fact, most murders are committed out of a sense of vigilante justice to set things right when the justice system has failed. This makes sense to me in retrospect as I consider the end of every episode of the TV shows I enjoy most (The Mentalist and NCIS), in which the murderers, once caught and confronted with their crime, always explain why they committed the murder, expecting the law to sympathize with their motives. (Of course, we as an audience do not sympathize with their reasons and are disgusted with the very attempt of the murderers to justify themselves.)

Pinker then goes on to expound on an important facet of human nature in relation to offenses both small and large: when we’re a perpetrator, we justify and downplay the severity of our actions, and when we’re a victim, we typically inflate the extent to which we have been victimized, attributing the worst possible motives to the perpetrator. And generally a neutral third party takes the side of the victim, unable or unwilling to understand what motivated the perpetrator. The long and the short of it is that we (usually without realizing it) tend to put ourselves in the best possible light, whether we’re the victim or the perpetrator in any situation. If we genuinely (especially without realizing it) believe ourselves to be better than we are, then when we make our case to the outside world, we can do so without consciously lying, and if we’re not consciously lying, we can be more believable to others in our self-deceived pronouncements.

But on to the next question Scott posed to me: Why do we consider acts like murder to be evil if there is no god to give us any reason to think they’re evil? My position is that we all live in and depend on society for our well-being. If society allows or smiles on murder, then eventually the chances that murder will touch me or my family or friends will increase. We have no choice but to denounce murder in the most uncertain of terms, to send a message that murder doesn’t pay, and to remove from free society those who don’t respect the right of the rest of us to live without the threat of murder. Millennia ago, societies consisted only of small families or clans of hunter-gatherers, and murder within these societies was always seen as evil (though not outside those societies). Over time the size of our societies has grown from clans to tribes to ethnic groups to nations and now leagues of nations. We still legitimatize homicide in warfare, but expanding the extent of our societies and putting in place laws and police and justice systems to keep the peace within our societies have played a large part in the significant reduction of violence over the centuries.

I don’t have all the answers to the problems of human nature that still plague us in the twenty-first century, but I am heartened to know that, despite the very real and upsetting examples of apparently wanton violence like the murders that Scott witnessed repeatedly on the surveillance tape during the recent trial, the rates of all kinds of violence are on the decline in our world. Whatever the reasons for the decline, we can be thankful we live in a safer world than ever before.

I ended my conversation with Scott by addressing his concern that nothing good could come of the murders or the trial he participated in, that it was wearying and tragic. I assured him that if there were no juries or a justice system to get murderers off our streets, we would certainly be living in far, far more murderous society. We are all capable of murder, but as long as the cost of committing murder (whether life in prison or the death penalty, even if I have reservations about the latter) outweighs its benefits, we can prevent its shadow from affecting all our lives. Thank you, Scott, for doing your duty so the rest of us can live in relative freedom from the daily fear of homicide!

Having read just over half of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I already have to recommend it as probably the second-best best book I have ever read. (The all time best would be The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, also by Pinker.) It’s not that these two books are perfect, but Pinker exemplifies hard work, responsible scholarship, and intellectual rigour to confront some of the reigning shibboleths of our day, both on the left and on the right. In my biased opinion, you will not find a meatier, more fact-filled, more evidence-based, or more intellectually stimulating treatise on human nature than The Blank Slate.

Whether on you agree with Pinker’s views, it cannot be said he hasn’t done his homework. Of the 20,316 Kindle segments (832 physical pages) that make up The Better Angels of our Nature, 5,418 (26%) are devoted to notes, references, and the index. Of course, citing lots of references doesn’t make the premise of a book true, but it does make it harder to dismiss it out of hand.

We’ve all heard business leaders, moralists, and pastors invoke the analogy of the boiling frog: if you throw a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out, but if you put a frog in a vat of warm water and gradually warm it up, the frog will not jump out, eventually boiling to death. Whenever you hear this analogy invoked, you can be sure you’re about to be told how we need to be more acutely aware of the dangerous trends around us that, left unchecked, will gradually but inexorably lead to our demise--economic, moral, cultural, or spiritual. I consider The Better Angels to be the flip side of boiling frog alarmism: over the centuries, violence of all kinds (including homicide, warfare, genocide, domestic violence, slavery, human and animal torture, rape, child abduction, and cruelty in general) has gradually but dramatically declined over the centuries. 

But you wouldn’t learn this by listening to the media or to fundamentalist religious leaders. In centuries past, there were no 24/7 cable news outlets spotlighting all the sensational and unthinkable acts of violence that we routinely observe today. Our brains do not naturally place in proportion to the 7 billion inhabitants of our planet the vivid and sensational but anecdotal images of violence we daily witness on the television. News reports don’t encourage us to think statistically as do criminologists, who analyze trends based on how many homicides are committed per one hundred thousand people per year. Yes, crime rates did rise between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, but the broader long-term trend, both before and after this relatively brief spike in violence, has been sustained, unmistakable, and significant. In fact, murder rates have declined by 50-to-100 fold since the Middle Ages. The homicide rate in North America is now 6 per 100,000 people per year, and even lower in western and central Europe, where it stands at 1.2. In 2007, four years before publishing his book on the subject, Pinker gave an 18-minute TED speech on the decline of violence. Particularly compelling is the graphical comparison of death rates in warfare for modern day hunter-gatherer societies (the closest we have to representatives of our primordial state) to those of Western countries in the twentieth century (see minute 3 of the talk). The blue bar representing Western deaths (including both world wars) barely registers on the graph compared to the longer red bars representing the death rates for all hunter-gather societies.

We know that the news media benefit from our fascination with televised violence; this helps explain how most of us have come to believe that the rates of violence are higher than they really are as a proportion of our population. But how do religions, particularly Christianity in the West, benefit from our mistaken thinking that things are getting worse rather than better? My two conclusions on this are my own rather than Pinker’s. I welcome your thoughts if you differ from me.

First, the notion that violence and cruelty have declined over time runs counter to the Christian (especially Calvinist) doctrine of total depravity. Human nature being totally depraved at is it is, we should not expect that society will improve substantially from one generation or era to the next, unless during that period the influence of the gospel has been on the rise. But at least in the West, we find the opposite: in the past few hundred years, secularism has waxed while violence of all kinds has waned (even it it has spiked at times, as during World War II, which was the ninth-most deadly war in recorded history as a percentage of world population; the deadliest was the relatively unknown An Lushan rebellion of 8th century China). Make no mistake: Pinker is not an idealist who thinks that human nature is inherently benign and immune from a penchant for evil; the bulk of his book The Blank Slate is devoted to putting any such pollyanaish notion to rest. But political systems and attitudes toward different kinds of violence can and do change over time, and these changes in attitudes lead to corresponding changes in practice.

Second, if things are truly getting better, then perhaps there’s not as much room for the fundamentalist outlook that says, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket; I’m so glad Jesus will be returning to set it all straight; in the meantime, we need to introduce Jesus to as many as people as possible to prevent things from getting worse than they otherwise would.” If we as humans, collectively (believers and unbelievers alike), through government initiatives, United Nations programs, secular or humanistic argumentation, novels, movies, and the modern evolution of attitudes toward violence--if we all can make the world a better place, then there is less incentive for the faithful to seek refuge in the church from the evils of the outside world.

On a lighter note, I’d like to include a somewhat tangential humorous excerpt from page 69 of The Better Angels of Our Nature (an excerpt I read to my family, to great guffawing). 

“In 1530 the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus, one of the founders of modernity, wrote an etiquette manual called On Civility in Boys which was a bestseller throughout Europe for two centuries. By laying down rules for what people ought not to do, these manuals give us a snapshot of what they must have been doing.

“The people of the Middle Ages were, in a word, gross. A number of the advisories in the etiquette books deal with eliminating bodily effluvia:

‘Don’t foul the staircases, corridors, closets, or wall hangings with urine or other filth. • Don’t relieve yourself in front of ladies, or before doors or windows of court chambers. • Don’t slide back and forth on your chair as if you’re trying to gas. • Don’t touch your private parts under your clothes with your bare hands. • Don’t greet someone while they are urinating or defecating. • Don’t make noise when you pass gas. • Don’t undo your clothes in front of other people in preparation for defecating, or do them up afterwards. • When you share a bed with someone in an inn, don’t lie so close to him that you touch him, and don’t put your legs between his. • If you come across something disgusting in the sheet, don’t turn to your companion and point it out to him, or hold up the stinking thing for the other to smell and say “I should like to know how much that stinks.”’

I’ll leave you with another of my favorite quotes to whet your appetite, this one from page 136:

Charles Napier, the British army’s commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee [the practice of burning widows], replied, “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

It’s a long book but well worth reading if you’re interested in a wide range of subjects showing how conditions have improved over time, along with Pinker’s analysis of why they have improved. The reasons he gives are admittedly more subjective than his documenting of the improvements themselves, but whether or not you accept his reasons, it’s well worth knowing that the world is a much better place for humans in general than it was centuries ago. If you’re at all interested, I recommend that you first get a taste for it by viewing the previously referenced video and by reading Peter Singer’s New York Times review of the book. Happy reading, and be of good cheer! The end is (probably) not near!

From “George,” a reader: “After two years of nagging doubts, 13 months of focused reading, and then six months of intense study and agony, I've finally come out the other side. As of a couple weeks ago, I've admitted to myself and my family and close friends that I'm no longer a Christian. 11 days ago was my last time at church. I've had a lot of hard conversations, and more are still to come, but I'm moving on with life.

"The problem is, the deconversion testimonies I've read about finding a new freedom in life or raw existential joy don't seem to ring true. Instead, I find myself almost entirely lacking in motivation to do anything. Life is overcast and gray, a film watched through foggy goggles. I feel like a robot following its programming. The Christian would say, ‘Congratulations! You're now experiencing the meaninglessness of life apart from God,’ but when I look at other non-believers who don't have this problem, it's clear I'm doing something wrong.

"I realize that I can't just expect to flip a switch and immediately be freed from my Christian frame of reference. I'd been a true believer for my entire life, and the mentality and habits of faith are extraordinarily hard to break: I still feel awkward not praying before meals; when I'm approaching something difficult or uncertain, my first instinct is still to pray; and I still recoil from things that Christianity (alone) says are immoral.”

I include this message from George because it is unguarded and compelling--and probably more common than he realizes. It’s true that the testimonials of former Christians posted on the Internet are typically positive, inviting stories of liberation from the suffocating grip of fundamentalism. But for every glowing invitation to follow in their footsteps, we have no idea how many tormented souls wish they had not ventured into the stormy, open seas in which they find themselves, without an anchor or bearing and with no land in sight. Why do I think George is not alone? It’s because his experience mirrors so closely my own turmoil that began over a decade ago, and those of others with whom I’ve privately corresponded. 

In fact, I would be surprised if George’s experience were not the norm, at least for those of us whose faith, whose relationship with Jesus, formerly constituted our very identity. It wasn’t that Jesus was just a part of our lives, or even the most important part of our lives; he was our life. Should it come as a surprise to experience the loss of Jesus as we would the death of the one we hold most dear or as a divorce from our beloved spouse? I recall all too well in the year 2000 the knot in my stomach, the nausea, the sweat, the grey fog, the depression, the uncertainty, and the dread that filled my heart as I crossed the threshold from the comforts of faith to the despair of doubt. George, you are not alone, not at all.

If you’ve lived your whole life with the understanding that the universe was created with you in mind, that your life matters infinitely to your creator, that you have a purpose to fulfill for the glory of your creator, that he considers you as the apple of his eye, that he gave up his son for you, that he watches out for you and protects you, and that he’s preparing a place of bliss for you for all eternity, and then if you come to doubt all that, of course you’re going to be depressed! For those that easily skip from belief to unbelief without missing a beat (if such a person exists), I wonder how much their former faith really meant to them in the first place. The loss is felt most acutely by those who had the most to lose. 

Those of us who’ve never used heroin don’t know how much of a struggle it is to give it up; only those who savored a regular high struggle to withdraw. Incidentally, perhaps this is why I (and other former believers) tend to seek out fellow apostates. Though we share a common worldview with lifelong unbelievers, we don’t share the same pre-deconversion or deconversion experiences. And, as George mentioned, we carry into our new life many of the views on morality we grew up with; for example, we may remain uncomfortable with drunkenness, profanity, loose sexual mores, homosexuality, abortion, or liberal political views--things that longtime atheists often don’t have a problem with. I’m not going to delve into these matters here, other than to note that these questions constitute one more source of angst for those of us who’ve grown up as conservative Christians and have left the faith for intellectual rather than moral reasons.

A number of surveys have shown that religious people are on average happier than unbelievers. I have been confronted by Christians who’ve used these statistics to question my new worldview. Likewise, they’ve also confronted me with assertions that, without God, there’s no good reason to be moral, nor does life have any meaning. What these well-meaning Christians don’t understand is that I did not abandon my faith because I wanted to, but because I came to see it as untrue. And if you don’t think something its true, you cannot simply make yourself believe it to be true. It doesn’t matter whether I might be less happy or less inclined to be moral or to find meaning in life; I cannot believe what I cannot believe. I suspect George is in the same boat, wanting in some sense to go back to the familiarity and security of faith but finding himself unable to do so.

But is there hope for those of us who give up our religion out of intellectual integrity, with no benefit to ourselves or to society? Are we just to grit our teeth stoically, tell the world we don’t believe, and forgo the benefits of religious meaning, morality, and community? I have written at greater length on the questions of morality (chapter 8; see also this blog post) and meaning (chapter 9) of my book. It’s my conviction that unbelievers have no fewer legitimate reasons or any reduced capacity to be moral compared to their religious counterparts, and there’s no reason we cannot lead fulfilling, meaningful lives. However, the loud insistence of the church that this is not so can actually make us believe it has a monopoly on the true source of morality, meaning, and joy, even as we make our exit from the church. Our long-term dependence on religion for these benefits is real and does make it difficult to envision a fulfilling life outside the church. In the months and sometimes years following our deconversion, we suffer this loss acutely. But over time, we adapt to the “new normal”; we “come out” to everyone, we keep many of our old friends and make some new ones, we find activities that give life meaning, we adjust to the idea that the universe was not made with us in mind--and eventually the turmoil we experienced in the beginning fades away into a bad memory. In other words--and this is the main point I want any struggling readers to take home--it gets better with time. Not only to we adjust to loss, but we eventually our situation improves as we begin to see the world closer to how it really is; as we shed our egocentric notions of cosmic importance, as we let go of the congitive dissonance we experienced when we tried to fit square pegs into round holes; and as we no longer have to see others as targets of conversion lest they suffer for all eternity separated from God. For some the benefits come sooner than for others, and I can only hope that your deconversion blues will soon begin to fade, though there may always be a social price to pay, as there continues to be for me.

Finally, though it’s conventional wisdom that believers are happier than unbelievers, the truth is more nuanced than that. According to this study, firmly convinced and engaged believers are happier than lukewarm or uninvolved believers. The interesting thing is that the same phenomenon holds true for unbelievers: those that are just lapsed churchgoers (those who might have left the church for interpersonal or financial reasons, for example, or those who simply lost interest without intense study, or those who are unsure whether they believe or don’t believe) are less happy than those who are confident and open in their unbelief. In other words, whether you’re a believer or an unbeliever, if you’re uncertain or half-hearted about what you believe, you’re less likely to be happy than if you’re a confident and/or committed believer or unbeliever. So it’s natural that as you’re going through the uncertainty surrounding deconversion, even if you suspect that Christianity is untrue, if you have natural lingering doubts about your doubts, you can expect to live with the blues until your pressing doubts are resolved in one direction or another. But again, it gets better with time, since generally over the years you come to terms with your doubts and become more settled in what you believe.

From blog reader Holly: “What do you think the world would be like if every person was an Atheist? Would it be better or worse? As much as religion can cause harm, would it be worse if there were no religion? Would there be more suicides, attempts and support to eliminate the ‘burdens’ in society such as the mentally or physically handicapped, less charity and acts of good-will towards the less fortunate? Would there be more murder, crime, lying and deception (is that possible?). I of course would not be inclined to behave that way, but given my recognition of our very selfish nature and propensity to fall into despair and need hope, I wonder how many people would behave in such ways given a lack of belief in god. I like to think that we would still realize that it's best to respect life and that we would band together in attempts to make society a good place for everybody, but maybe I'm just kidding myself.”

Thanks for your topic suggestion, Holly. It’s a major subject about which many books have been written, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it justice in a single blog post. The best I can do is to provide some high-level thoughts and point you to some resources for further exploration.

Before delving into your question, I’ll start with the obvious: believers typically would like us to think that the world would be a disaster if everyone were an atheist, while atheists typically assert that the world would be a better place without religion or superstition. It’s like the results of the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election: if you’re a Democrat, Al Gore got the most votes in Florida, but if you’re a Republican, George W. Bush edged out Gore. The take-away lesson: don’t listen just to the side you prefer; the truth is probably more complex than either side would like you to believe, perhaps even too complex to answer using the tools and information we have available.

It’s not difficult to find examples of atheists (think Stalin or Mao) or believers (think the Ku Klux Klan, the Inquisitors, the Crusaders, or the Taliban) who’ve made the world a worse place. Nor is it difficult to think of skeptics (e.g., Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Thomas Jefferson) or believers (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., William Wilberforce, St. Francis of Assisi) who’ve made the world a better place. Nor do we have to look far for dysfunctional religious (e.g., Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistan) or nonreligious (e.g., Cambodia under Pol Pot, the Soviet Union, North Korea) nations or for healthy and prosperous religious (e.g., the U.S.A.) or nonreligious (e.g., Sweden, Denmark, Japan) ones.

We should be suspicious of those who make blanket pronouncements about the merits of religion or irreligion based on a selective mining of examples that support one perspective or the other. For example, in The Book That Transforms Nations: The Power of the Bible to Change Any Country, YWAM missionary Loren Cunningham seeks to link every case of a prosperous nonreligious country to some point of Christian influence, past or present, small or great. Even the success of modern Japan is attributed to the work of a Christian industrialist in the early twentieth century. But using this approach, a Muslim apologist could cite Muslim influence as the explanation for the prosperity of any nation. It was, after all, Muslims who reintroduced to medieval Europe classical Greek science and writings, along with important contributions to algebra, medicine, and other disciplines. It serves Cunningham’s agenda to attribute Japan’s success to a Christian industrialist, but not the success of Europe to Muslim or pagan Greek thinkers. The same selectivity pervades many apologists’ explanations for the holocaust: it was all Darwin’s fault, and the antisemtism that had reigned in Germany since the time of the consummate antisemite Martin Luther had nothing to do with it. 

Likewise, atheists are quick to trumpet the shining examples of relatively nonreligious countries like those in northern and western Europe and Japan as proof that atheism is good for society, while finding ways to explain away counter-examples like the former Sovient Union, Camboia, Maoist China, and Cambodia (they were due to quasi-religious devotion to a Leader or a political ideology, not to atheism per se, or the atheism was externally imposed, not organic). Though perhaps plausible, this strikes me as a form of special pleading in the service a conclusion reached beforehand (i.e., that atheism is good for society), similar to that of Christian apologists like Cunningham.

I recently received an e-mail message with a call to prayer for Liberia, a country in turmoil that “needs God.” Having spent 15 months as a missionary kid in that country, I was curious to know its current religious situation, so looked it up on Wikipedia:

Christianity: 85.5%
Islam: 12.2%
Unaffiliated: 1.5%
Indigenous: .5%
Other: .1%

As a whole, Africa is the continent with the smallest proportion of the nonreligious and unaffiliated; in other words, it is the most religious continent on earth, yet the least prosperous. Perhaps these are not “true” Christians--i.e., the type of Christians who construct a healthy, prosperous society. But then this definition of Christian is too convenient; if “true Christians” are defined as only those who construct a healthy society, then of course all “true Christian” countries are healthy! In any case, it seems we should all be able to agree that religion is not a sufficient condition for a prosperous society. 

But even if it’s not a sufficient condition, might it still be a necessary condition? The short answer is No (unless you’re intent on using special pleading to attribute the prosperity of all relatively secular nations to the presence of a mustard seed of Christian influence, past or present, while ignoring the fact that an even greater degree of Christian observance in Liberia has not led to prosperity there). After sociologist Phil Zuckerman lived in irreligious Denmark (where only 18% believe in heaven, compared to 88% of Americans) for a year to study a nonreligious society, he wrote the book Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, from which I’ll include an excerpt here:

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I'd like to end this chapter with a bus ride. 

It was a very simple, uneventful bus ride through Aarhus [Denmark], on a relatively unremarkable autumn afternoon. But it was during this particular excursion that I had several personal thoughts and reflections that eventually morphed into the urge and impetus to write this very chapter. 

What happened during that bus ride was this: I felt a real sense of goodness. It was a sense of goodness that stemmed not from some internal endorphin rush, but rather, simply from taking in and observing the pleasant social world around me. There I was, heading to an appointment downtown, and I felt it deeply: everything was fine. Calm. Good. The bus was clean - not dirty and grimy, like many buses in large cities can be. The bus was also on time, stopping at each stop right on schedule. And all the people on the bus were sitting peacefully. Teenagers were placidly punching the keypads of their cell phones, old ladies were holding their handbags. A young schoolgirl was absent-mindedly flicking the neon-green strap of her backpack. The bus driver was doing his thing. Outside, through the bus windows, I could see a park full of trees with leaves turning yellow and red. And people jogging. And there was not a honk to be heard, for the flow of traffic was moving right along, smoothly. As we got closer to the city center we passed ice cream stores, book shops, law offices, flower shops, banks, and bakeries. Men and women of all ages buzzed safely alongside the bus on their bikes. The city buildings were largely devoid of graffiti. Litter in the streets was minimal. Every few minutes a pre-recorded voice would announce the name of the upcoming stop. People got off, people got on. Everything was fine. Remarkably fine. 

And then, amidst that goodness, I thought about the words of Pat Robertson, particularly his words concerning "Gods wrath," and how when people disobey God, He gets angry, and unleashes His wrath on disobedient nations. Robertson surely isn't the only religious leader who espouses such rhetoric; nearly all religious leaders since time immemorial have warned that when God is disobeyed--or simply ignored--He gets mad, and we all suffer the consequences. Many millions of people, especially in America, sincerely believe this. And yet, on that smooth and uneventful bus ride, there were simply no signs of God's wrath. Just the opposite: all was good. Uneventfully good. Peacefully good. If ever a society could be described as "safe and sound," relatively secular Denmark would be it (pp. 30, 31).

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In today’s world, there is a statistically significant correlation between a nation’s lack of religiosity and its societal health, including economic prosperity, longevity, and lowered rates of homicide and other violent crimes, incarceration, and teen pregnancy. Even the abortion rate in secular western and northern Europe is lower than that in the U.S. The suicide rate of the Scandanavian countries is slightly higher than that of the U.S. though interestingly it's lower in the Netherlands, also a notably secular society, so it's difficult to draw any conclusions about suicide rates as they relate to religiosity. I encourage you to read Zuckerman’s book, Society without God, to gain a fuller appreciation of just how well a secular society can function. (He has a new book Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion that I intend to read soon; based on the Kindle preview, I would also heartily recommend it.)

Incidentally, the U.S. stands as somewhat of an anomaly among developed nations in that it is both economically prosperous and relatively religious. Author Greg Paul posits an interesting thesis for this anomaly in his essay, “The Big Religion Questions Finally Solved” (available here; it might take some time to load). He posits that there’s a direct correlation between religiosity and the degree of income inequality of a nation; in other words, the more religious a country is, the greater the disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots,” as in America. The less religious a country is, the fewer very poor and very rich there are. I’m not sure that this correlation Paul has identified is a causal correlation between secularism and relative equality, but it’s an interesting twist worth considering.

I would never claim that freethought (atheism, agnosticism, deism, etc.) is a necessary or sufficient condition for a well-functioning society; there are too many examples to the contrary. But neither would I say the same about religion. There is benign atheism and toxic atheism, benign religion and toxic religion. Neither atheists nor humans are exempt from the foibles of human nature. The worst atrocities in human history have been committed by those most convinced of the rightness of their ideological, utopian causes (whether for this life or the next)--for example, the Crusades, the Catholic-Protestant wars of the 17th century, and the bloodbaths committed by Communists, Nazis, Maoists, and radical Islamists.

I’m sorry I can’t provide a more definitive answer to your question, Holly, but it seems to me that we can’t know for sure whether society would be better or worse if everyone were to become an atheist. Yet the examples of northern Europe and Japan and other secular nations at least assure me that society wouldn’t necessarily go down the toilet, and there’s probably a better than even chance that it would improve, provided that the move toward atheism were voluntary, not externally imposed by tyrants like Stalin or Mao.

"I still haven't even told my wife the whole truth yet. I'd love to hear more in your blog about your process of 'coming out' with your wife, and how you two have coped with everything over the last decade."

Thanks to this reader (I’ll call him John) for giving me fodder for this week’s blog post. His predicament is fairly common for those leaving the faith; it seems that only rarely do both spouses in a marriage leave the faith together. Over the years I’ve received a number of messages from married doubters, usually men. Typically the wife remains a believer, though sometimes she eventually joins him in leaving the faith. Otherwise, the couple either remains in a mixed marriage or ends up parting ways.

I’ll share some of my story in this post, but with a couple of caveats. First, since every couple and every situation is different, our experience can’t be used as a template for all couples in which one of the partners is going through a deconversion process. Second, ours is a long, personal story, so I can only share a few salient highlights in this context. My only goal in writing this is to provide a little inspiration to those struggling in a mixed marriage.

Shortly after we began dating in 1991 after my year of seminary, I intimated to Charlene that I had experienced two crises of faith during college but that I had recovered and was aiming to become a missionary Bible translator. She was thus aware of my potential vulnerability to doubt, but little did either of us suspect that I would, nearly ten years later, experience a relapse that would end our missionary career and lead me away from the pastures of faith.

I did experience a brief period of doubt for maybe three or four weeks during our yearlong furlough in Texas in 1999, but I kept it secret from Charlene, since I felt confused and unsure of which direction to take, and I didn’t want to upset her until I was more settled in what I believed. As it turned out, after confiding my struggles to a respected Christian professor, I regained enough confidence in my faith to return to the mission field in the summer of 1999.

As I recounted in my book, it was less than a year later, in the spring of 2000, that I was again struggling while reading through the Old Testament with Charlene in Africa. I didn’t initially let on to her the extent to which some of the passages troubled me. I sought answers to my questions on the Internet and instead happened upon Robert Price’s online critiqued of fundamentalism, Beyond Born Again. Even before I finished the book, I felt my world coming down around me, and I couldn’t continue holding onto an evangelical faith I knew in my heart to be unfounded. Before that point, in struggling with doubt I wondered if I was just off my rocker, but when I read Price, I realized there were good reasons for my doubts and that I was certainly far from alone. I’ve never been one to be able to hide a secret, so with fear and trembling, I confessed to Charlene that I was again experiencing doubts. Having recently read Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, I could honestly say I did not doubt God’s existence at that point, but I did doubt the inspiration of the Bible and the claim of Christianity to be the only way to God. The details of how I “came out” to her are like a misty fog to me now nearly 11 years later, but I think I started off with something like, “Charlene, I have something difficult I need to share with you.” Then I proceeded to spill the beans as gently but as truthfully as I could. She was of course taken off guard and disappointed, but I don’t think it was as much of a shock as if I hadn’t informed her of my prior struggles before we married. 

I am grateful to Charlene for not reacting more negatively than she did, and I consider myself fortunate to be married to her. Based on the correspondence I’ve received from others, it does not work out so well for everyone. Some spouses react with surprising bitterness and even vindictiveness. I heard from a guy who had a two-and-a-half hour “coming out” conversation, after which his wife accused him of abandoning her. She explicitly compared his act to adultery. Another friend of mine was told by his wife that she will never have children with him until and unless he returns to the fold as a Bible-believing Christian. Yet others end more happily. Within a several months of one man’s deconversion, I heard back from him with the news that his wife had followed suit. Others are more like Charlene and me, where the two remain committed to each other in love despite their differences.

Given the uncertainty over how the believing spouse will react to the doubter’s coming out, it’s no wonder that John (the reader I mentioned at the beginning of this post) has been reluctant to tell the whole truth to his wife, and I can’t say I blame him. Yet at some point it will become more uncomfortable for him to continue hiding his secret than to face the prospect of her reaction to his new views. And when that time comes, he’ll no doubt find his own way to reveal to her where he stands. For my part, I felt that hiding a secret of this nature for any significant length of time could lead to a breach of trust, so I determined to let her know as soon as it was settled in my mind that I could not longer subscribe to the evangelical party line.

To make a long story short (the longer version is available in my book), we returned from Africa to the mission headquarters here in Texas, where I received counseling and experienced a renewal of my faith for a few months, after which it all fell apart again in late 2000, and I faced the dreaded task of revealing this to Charlene again. It was a terrifying roller coaster ride for both of us, and Charlene was understandably unhappy with my new relapse, perhaps sensing correctly this was going to become my long-term position. Perhaps a year later I started doubting God’s existence (I had held to deism during that transitional year), but I didn’t ever come out and tell her explicitly I didn’t believe in God, perhaps because I never came to the point where I was certain God does not exist. Instead, I stated my agnostic position and later agnostic/atheist/secular humanist position to friends, both verbally and through e-mails that she read, so she became aware of my evolving position naturally over time.

Incidentally, I should confess that I do not hide my e-mails correspondence from my wife, nor does she hide any from me, so she’s aware of a lot of what I write and read from others and vice versa. I think this helps us understand each other’s world better without having to preach to each other. It’s a decision we simply made early on when we shared a common e-mail account, and then we never grew out of it when we set up separate accounts on the same computer. (If you’d like to contact me without Charlene reading your message, please indicate, “For Ken only” at the top of the message.)

My inclination at the beginning of the “coming out” process was to try to justify my position to Charlene and to take every opportunity to explain what I now believed and why. I didn’t want her to think I was just randomly going off the deep end for no good reason, and I wanted her to appreciate and maybe even accept my reasons for not believing. It would even be fair to say I wanted to convert her to my point of view, and I know she wanted me to return to Jesus, praying much toward that end. We had some pretty tense exchanges, but eventually we both realized there was little to be gained in sparring over our respective positions. I don’t recall that we’ve engaged in a single discussion, let alone argument, over religion in the past six or seven years.

In a nutshell, my advice to those in a mixed marriage is 1) treat your spouse with respect, 2) love your spouse, 3) don't go off and sow your wild oats, and 4) did I say respect your spouse? (Not that I'm a model on any of these points, but it's what I strive toward.)

For many in a mixed marriage, the greatest source of tension is in how to teach the children. Since I’ve blogged about this previously, I won’t say more here. Our story is still in progress, but once the kids are grown and more of the outcome has unfolded, it’s possible that Charlene and I could write a book together on our shared experiences--how we learned to compromise, feel each other out, develop patterns in relating to each other and to our children, etc. Perhaps there’s a niche for a book like that, though I’m not sure how big the market would be. Whatever the case, if it can be help to others struggling through a mixed marriage, it may be worth the effort. Both Charlene and I are in favor of preserving marriage whenever possible, especially when children are involved, though I recognize there are times when the relationship is so poisoned due to rigidity on the part of one or both parties that a decision sometimes has to be made to move on. Thankfully that has not been the case for us, and we’d like to do what I can to help make it as rare as possible for others. Charlene has corresponded with a few Christian women whose husbands have left the faith to offer encouragement and support, so if you come out to your wife and she’s struggling with your deconversion, feel free to reach out and let me know; I know Charlene would be glad to help.


Thanks to all who’ve read and/or responded. Please keep the good questions coming in as fodder for my future blog posts!

Thanks to those of you who weighed in on the problem of rebuilding social networks after deconversion. Rather than launching into a new subject this week, I’ll take this opportunity to interact with your comments from last week’s installment. 

James lamented the tendency of freethought communities to devolve into “screw god” groups and suggested the need for more or less religiously neutral “community help groups.” James, I share your ambivalence toward those who get together primarily to bash those “silly believers” and their religious faith. And I think it’s healthy to be part of a community with a common goal to make the neighborhood and the wider world a world a better place, without bringing religion or non-religion into the mix.

So Holly, when you wrote about your son’s involvement in the Rotary Club, that gave me cause for optimism that there might already be an opportunity to plug into a preexisting infrastructure without an overt religious or sectarian identity. However, the pressure imposed on your son to align himself on the religious side of the Christmas clash (rather than giving him the freedom to use whichever phrase he’s most comfortable with)  is a little unsettling. (By the way--a little off topic--I recently noticed a bumper sticker that said, “Keep Christ in Christmas” and wondered how the owner of the bumper sticker, probably a Protestant who doesn’t celebrate Catholic mass, would take to a Catholic bumper sticker saying, “Keep the Mass in Christ-Mass.” But I digress.) I’m heartened to learn from Wikipedia that they’re a secular organization, though their membership is by invitation only for business and professional “leaders,” so I’m not sure whether the Rotary Club (or other similar groups like the Lion’s Club) is a perfect fit for the growing number of everyday individuals needing social interaction after leaving the church. In any case, I’m considering contacting one of this clubs in our local area to explore the possibility of joining. Thanks for the tip, Holly!

Thank you for your thoughts, too, John (by the way, I know John in person; we live in the same metropolitain area). I’ve considered visiting the freethought group you’ve attended and enjoyed, and I think I’ll give it a try next month. I understand this group is involved in community service projects, so it sounds promising. I tend to agree with you that we former believers could benefit not only from acts of service but also from “fellowship” with those of like mind. It would be ideal to be part of a group that splits its time between acts of service and social gatherings with unbelievers who aren’t overly bitter or antagonistic toward the believing world.

Tim, I like your idea of joining special interest groups unrelated to religion. It just seems for me that religion, philosophy, and counter-apologetics have defined my existence for so long that I’ve had difficulty moving beyond these matters and just taking up a healthy hobby with others. I have a bad back, so running is probably not for me, but bicycling is something I might consider. I’ve seen cyclists rolling down the road in packs on a Sunday morning; sounds like a good alternative to letting my muscles atrophy at home!

All in all, I think I have more to learn from you all in maintaining this blog than you have to learn from me! Thanks so much to all of you for chipping in and sharing your thoughts on this most important topic!

The other day I received this from a reader: “I would be interested to know how you have rebuilt your social network outside of the church. Although I feel trapped inside my own mind currently, I fear the ‘aloneness’ that I may experience once I do eventually ‘come out.’”

I’m taking a stab and responding to this, not because I serve as a model of how to rebuild one’s social network after deconversion, but because it’s a crucial challenge we all face as former believers, one that we respond to in different ways and with varying degrees of success. I’m hoping this blog can play some small part in meeting that challenge, both for myself and for those who happen upon this site.

On the one hand, I have been pleasantly surprised by how little resistance I have received on the part of believers as I transitioned out of faith. To be sure, I did face pressure to reverse my views, some of it unpleasant, but a few of my Christian friends have continued to remain friends, and we still get together periodically to shoot the breeze, chatting about our daily lives and sometimes delving into mostly cordial theological discussions. I enjoy that very much, even if these friends might be partly motivated by a desire to help bring me back to the fold.

Having posted my story online in 2003 and then having published my book in 2009, I’ve had the privilege of hearing from a good number of individuals who are struggling with their faith or who have put it behind them. So in a sense, this has provided me an online social network to help make up for the rich social life I enjoyed in the church, but as much as I enjoy it, conversing online is not as satisfactory as meeting face-to-face and participating in a variety of activities.

In addition, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet up in person with a few individuals in the Dallas/Fort Worth area that have read my book and who share a similar evangelical background and a common deconversion experience.

It can be difficult to find others like this, however, and it’s not practical for all deconverts to write a book and wait for readers in the area to respond. There are freethought meetup groups in most metropolitan areas, two of which I’ve sporadically attended in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. For new deconverts who feel more comfortable socially among Christians than among hard-core life-long atheists, though, attending these groups can be awkward, and it can be difficult to connect with those who have no present or past connection to the evangelical Christian world. In addition, after the first few meetings, for me it tends to become repetitious to continue rehashing why we are no longer religious.

In a recent Point of Inquiry podcast interview (starting around minute 43), Daniel Dennett had this to say about how he responded when asked by freethought groups for advice on how to proceed: "I often shocked them by saying, 'Well, why don't you get together with all your members and see if you can figure out a cause that you would all tithe for.' And their eyes goggle and they realize, 'Oh my goodness....' I said, 'How about putting together a group and helping rebuild houses in the wake of Katrina under the banner of your group?’ There's lots of things you could do, local things, international things, and just put the lie to that "[one can't be] good without God" idea. To me there's nothing more boring that just sitting around with a bunch of atheists saying, 'Oh my gosh, God doesn't exist, and aren't those people stupid to believe in God?' 'Right, right, we got that a long time ago. Now, what are we going to do?'"

I’m with Dennett on this--I think having a cause greater than ourselves or our ideologies can be a key to a fulfilling social life. One danger of this approach is that our charitable deeds can turn into merely a vehicle for defending or propagating our ideology, not simply as a means of making our communities and our world a better place. In other words, in participating as a group in these causes, I don’t want to help others “in the name of atheism” so the recipients of our good deeds (or others who witness them) will become nonbelievers or think better of nonbelievers. That’s called giving with strings attached, and is already far too common (though not universal) in the religious world.

At the moment I don’t have any firm ideas on how to start up groups of former believers with shared deconversion experiences who are eager to make the world a better place, but I’m hoping to start by posting this blog article. Because those of us who fit this description are generally few and far between, or at least unknown to each other, it seems the place to start is to establish an online presence, a call to identify who we are, where we are, and how/when we can come together to do what. I don’t have any concrete details yet, but I’m looking for ideas. Perhaps you can share your thoughts on how to get started...