Me And My Religions

[poliphilo]

My parents weren't particularly religious. As a kid- and member of the cub scouts- I attended a Presbyterian church. After we moved- from Croydon to rural Kent- I attended the local Anglican church. At 14 I was sent away to a boarding school with a strong Anglo-Catholic tradition. I resented the compulsory chapel services and gave up on Christianity (for the first time) in my mid teens.

I was always intensely curious about what I suppose I'm going to have to call "spirituality". From an early age I devoured books about mythology, ghosts, reincarnation, psychical research and magic- not systematically, but as they came my way. 

When I was about 20 it suddenly occured to me that it was inconsistent to believe in the paranormal yet dismiss the Biblical miracle stories as nonsense. That laid the groundwork for my subsequent re-conversion.

I wanted to lead the good life. I thought I could do that by becoming a priest. So that's what I did.

Theological college taught me to think critically. I was shocked to discover that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not necessarily written by the Biblical characters with those names. I came out of the system as a mixed up liberal protestant.

A week or two after my ordination I realised I had made a terrible mistake.

The next ten years were pressure cooker years.  I became a charismatic, but found the culture stifling and infantile. I became an Anglo-catholic and found that didn't really fit me either. I was gradually drawn, under the influence of the radical theologian Don Cupitt, towards Christian atheism.

When it all got too much to bear- and I could no longer toe the party line- I left the church. Over the next five years I scrabbled around for something to believe in. I read Jung and Nietzsche and Krishnamurti and all sorts. I wrote articles about my search- some of which were published in the Guardian and elsewhere.

I'd always been a feminist of sorts. One day I read a pagan book and discovered it was possible to think of the Divine as female. This was wonderfully liberating.  For the first time I stepped completely outside the mental world of Christianity and became a pagan, a member of the Fellowship of Isis and then a witch.  Ailz and I ran a coven and were, briefly, pagan celebrities. We appeared on TV and got our pictures in the papers. Finally we wrote a book- The Illustrated Guide to Wicca. 

After which  I found I'd said everything I needed to say on the subject- and it was time to move on.

Since then I haven't identified as anything in particular. A year ago I started going to church again- for the company- but had to bail out before it gave me a nervous breakdown.

I believe that we're spiritual beings and that- to adapt Tennyson a little- we come from the great deep and return to the great deep.  The world is a role-playing game- or- as Shakespeare kept saying- a stage. This intuition satisfies me- and I feel no further need for putting on funny clothes or preachifying or getting into arguments.

Comments

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

It was actually called 'The Illustrated Guide to Wicca'

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Whoops- I'll change it.

[jenny_evergreen]

I think it's interesting that I came to the same conclusion, started out similarly, but skipped all the middle part, lucky for me.

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

These days I'm inclined to think that going into the clergy is the best possible way to ruin one's faith, regardless of what denomination one may be. Leaving aside the temptations of clerical culture and giving up service in favor of maintaining the institution and one's place in it, I wonder if it's really possible to *believe* the way people used to now that biblical criticism and archaeology and so forth have debunked (for lack of a better word) all the traditional underpinnings.

[ex-redrain.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing your journey.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It was a long, circuitous journey. Interesting, though. :)

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

Fascinating and far more succinct than I probably could have written a similar history. :-)

I have never heard the phrase "Christian atheist". How on earth does one define it?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Exactly. You're taught to question all the texts on which your faith is based (most of which turn out to be fictions and forgeries) then sent into the world to preach them as the "word of God". It requires all sorts of complicated mental gymnastics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's been a long and winding road :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Christian atheism is when you keep the ethical content of Christianity and throw out everything supernatural. I think it's an untenable position. If God is a fiction, why would you feel the need to keep showing up at church week after week? I was interested to see that Don Cupitt- the guy who was preaching it as a viable path back in the 70s and 80s- has finally quit the church and is no longer functioning as a priest. I'm only surprised it took him so long.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

That's a fascinating story - but you don't have to be a liberal protestant or a Christian atheist to "discover that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not necessarily written by the Biblical characters with those names".
I was brought up Anglo Catholic (father a priest) and became Roman Catholic when I was 40 plus.
I can't remember any time when I didn't know that the authorship is a mystery. It got me into terrible trouble, aged around 10, with the RE schoolmistress. She said that she would (SHOCK HORROR) write to my father, so I had to explain that it was he who had talked to me about it. We never heard any more about it, but i wasn't allowed to do Scripture at A level.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like that story.

I must have led a sheltered life, but I hadn't encountered Biblical criticism before entering theological college- and it hit me like a brick.

The other thing that hit me like a brick was 20th century German theology. Sooooo dull!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Some folks I know find Unitarianism a useful outlet if they want the social aspects of church-going without so much of the crazy-making stuff. Dunno how available or equivalent the Unitarians are in the UK tho.

Me, I sometimes style myself a Radical Protestant. The radical idea behind Protestantism was supposed to have been dispensing with the clergy as an intermediary between believers and the Bible. I figure why not go whole hog and dispense with the Bible as well? If there really is a conscious Creator that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and benevolent, then that Creator made me and presumably knows me well enough to know what would convince me of Her Existence and Divinity. Consequently, I figure that if God really cares whether I believe in Her or not, She can find a way to convince me. So far, it hasn't happened. I conclude that either God does not care what I believe, or She doesn't exist. Either way, I feel quite absolved of the need to carry on in Church on a Sunday morning.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

The comical thing about that referenc is that the "sheletered lives" used to be applied to clergy children. It wasn't true, of course, even socially. I wonder how many of my school cronies were makig sandwiches for gentlemen of the road at the age of 8 or 9?

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

There are Unitarians in the UK! I once got into trouble with the Unitarians for including trinitarian hymns in an ecumenical church service.

[amritarosa.livejournal.com]

After going through that awful disillusionment, I realized that the power, sanctity and human dignity came back into the lore and rituals if I regarded the creations for what they were- beautiful works of art/literature/drama made to contain and express a deep longing, and to try to tackle the questions "what is good?" and/or "how ought a person live?"

I didn't feel like I was lying anymore, or following frauds down a fool's path.

Unfortunately those wonderful works have been and are still used to dominate and enslave. And still leave a bad taste in my mouth. I guess the bitter taste is there to remind me where not to go, and what to fight against when I can.

[amritarosa.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna buy a copy of your book for my library :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It annoyed me when I was a vicar that people thought I would be easily offended- and that they had to tiptoe round me and watch their language.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I have thought about becoming a Unitarian- but not recently. Like you I'm through with pews and hymnbooks and all that stuff. I don't think the Creator of the Universe cares a fig whether we believe in Her or not.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I have a deep love for Christian art- especially the art of the middle ages. There's nowhere I'm happier than in a ruined abbey.

But I have to keep a certain distance. Michelangelo's Last Judgement is a towering work of the human imagination- and I detest almost everything it's trying to say.

[amritarosa.livejournal.com]

It's an odd feeling to be deeply moved by a work of art, yet detest its message isn't it?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It is. I have a particularly difficult relationship with Michelangelo.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

That varies hugely between places and generations.
In one parish we found that people tiptoed round us, in another that they set out to be unpleasant to see what the reaction would be

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

But isn't that because people were badly taught to begin with? It wouldn't be a shock in theological college if you'd been properly taught in the parish
i knew by the time that I was ten years old that the true Word of God for Christians was a person, not a book, and that the Bible was only secondarily the word of God. "You aren't a Jew or a Muslim. so your faith doesn't depend on a book."
That was three decades before John Barton wrote People of the Book? (NB question mark.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was rarely greeted with open hostility- but there was a lot of the undeclared kind.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

I didn't so much mean direct personal hostility but "testing" behaviour

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

Perhaps a Christian atheist likes the sense of community they get from participating in church.

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

I did not encounter Biblical criticism until I began exploring Christianity from an LGBT perspective. The Pentecostal churches I grew up in were Bible literalists, and so was Evangelical church I attended in my 30s. It never occurred to me that critical study is responsible scholarship; it was always vehemently preached against in those churches, and even now I feel guilty for entertaining the thought.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think that must be what it is.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Biblical scholarship is hushed up even in those churches that ought to know better- the Episcopal church for instance. The deeply patronising- if unspoken- assumption is that it's all right for the religious professionals to know these things, but they shouldn't be passed on to the congregation. Of course the congregation often doesn't want to know. I'm old enough to remember the terrific storm there was in the '60s when the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich published a book- called Honest to God- in which biblical scholarship and liberal theology were presented in popular and accessible terms.