Getting to know one of our listeners, and his very unique and thought-provoking path into and out of Evangelicalism.
We talked to Doug, one of our listeners, to learn a bit about his very unique story through Evangelicalism: from Fundamentalism, through progressively more liberal churches, eventually going back to Bible Seminary as an atheist to become the minister for a Unitarian Universalist church, and currently studying Zen Buddhism while also attending Sunday School at a Disciples of Christ church in small-town USA.
Our casual conversation meandered through a variety of touchpoints:
- his favorite podcasts, including a skeptic’s interest in the paranormal and UAPs (the new acronym for UFOs)
- born into a spiritually liberal home, but became a Fundamentalist Evangelical as a teen in order to escape hell
- inerrancy/infallibility of scripture was deeply engrained into his formation
- eternal conscious torment in hell
- Young Earth Creationism
- his career goal as a teen was to become a missionary, preaching the Gospel, so he went to Bible College
- Bible College was a Bob Jones wannabe institution
- all other faith traditions (esp. Catholicism) were seen to be heretical … “and even Southern Baptists barely made it”
- how the Evangelical movement at that time strayed into national politics
- his spirituality has always been much more intellectual than experiential/emotional
- joined the Air Force; trained in Logistics and Acquisitions
- attended an Orthodox Presbyterian Church
- began noticing more and more problems in his daily readings of the Bible; eventually, this pillar holding up his faith (inerrancy/infallibility) broke completely
- went through a progression of increasingly liberal churches; eventually stopped going at all [for a while]
- stopped believing in any of it, despite two “atheist-in-a-foxhole” experiences; learned to accept that he could die at any moment, and never felt a need to reach out to God; felt no concern about going to hell
- the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse”
- some noteworthy answers and non-answers to prayer
- started attending a Unitarian Universalist Church … as an atheist …. and began serving as their minister
- started training in Zen Buddhism
- then started attending a Sunday School class in a Disciples of Christ Church (still as an atheist)
- doesn’t like the label “scratching the itch” applied to him
- Christianity is noteworthy because of what it leaves behind in its wake: schools, hospitals, drug addiction centers, and Western liberal ideals (love your neighbour; help the weak; stand against racism)
- questions about having (or requiring one to have) a personal relationship with the Divine
- maybe the way Christianity was presented to Doug was faulty: it was “too rigid to the point of being brittle, and then when it broke, it didn’t have enough flexibility to be remolded into something different”
- God needing blood to overlook sin, and Jesus having to be tortured and killed, are abhorrent ideas
- can Evangelicalism still be recovered? … No, the term has become too tainted … now has too much baggage
One thing Doug said near the end of our conversation really struck me: “But if there’s an afterlife, and I stand before God, in some form of judgment, I can stand before that God intellectually honest that I did not think that God was a brute that tortured people; I wouldn’t do that, why would I expect God to do that?”
As always, tell us your thoughts on this conversation …
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like the sermon he gave at his home Unitarian Universalist Church (we referred to it a few times in the interview), or our own episode #41 (“Scratching the itch”).
Episode image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay.
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