I grew up in a very conservative home, evangelical charismatic, my mother, father and sister. Growing up speaking in tongues was expected of me if I was a spiritually healthy practitioner of our faith. We were also very politically conservative - my parents taught me to not trust homosexuals. We voted Republican. I was in the pro-Life club in high school where we took a public stance against the Gay-Straight Alliance. That was me. I was Bible Boy.
I grew up in a very conservative home, evangelical charismatic, my mother, father and sister. Growing up speaking in tongues was expected of me if I was a spiritually healthy practitioner of our faith. We were also very politically conservative - my parents taught me to not trust homosexuals. We voted Republican. I was in the pro-Life club in high school where we took a public stance against the Gay-Straight Alliance. That was me. I was Bible Boy.
At the end of my sophomore year-beginning of my junior year of high school, I got affiliated with a youth group, which was not where my parents had been going to church. I had a Christian girlfriend at the time, and what Christian couples did was go to youth group together, so I went with her, and when we broke up, she quit going and I stayed. My parents and my sister eventually joined that church with me.
It was definitely a step down from the church I grew up in. Speaking in tongues, for instance, wasn't a common part of the religious service. I got super-involved, working for the church in what was called the "Sound Ministry,"
where I was mixing sound for religious performances and services four or five times a week, probably a thousand people per service. Life was good, I guess.
I had some disagreements with the main pastor there. He would make a lot of gay jokes. There was a student in our youth group who was "struggling with homosexuality," as we called it, which I find terribly offensive now, and we would pray for him so
he could get over his spiritual burden while at the same time
our pastor was making all these gay jokes. And I said, "You know, you're humiliating him." But most of my debates with church at
that time were largely trivial, theological issues.
So my parents forced me to take this course on the comprehensive study of religion taught by the completely incompetent wife of one of the church's main religious figures.
My parents were dead-set on it because they wanted me to have that education before I went off to college. The material was heinously ignorant. My dad was taking the class with me to be
supportive, and he was a little insulted by the quality of some of the material, but he thought some of it was good and said he wanted his son to get that sort of knowledge.
He eventually sat down with
the head pastor once we got through it and said, "You know, I think my son has gone through that class and decided that
Christianity does not compete on the global marketplace of ideas." And he was right. I had.
I was actually very against applying to schools like Liberty University, but Christian issues were important to me applying to college. I didn't choose Cornell University because I didn't find any Christians there. I went there and was looking for a youth group on campus and met up with this one kid who insisted that we pray in the middle of the coffee shop, and all these kids were just sneering and laughing at us, and I picked up this general hostility
toward religion. I had no idea I would be the person doing that in a few years. But I wanted to be an engineer, and Liberty didn't have an engineering school. I prayed a lot
for God to give me direction, and I didn't hear a lot back so
I picked Tech out of several big state schools.
I came to college. I smoked pot. I lost my virginity. If my parents knew that today, I would be crucified. They would never speak to me again. I got introduced to a lot of new ideas - that pre-marital sex isn't the worst thing in the world, that homosexuals aren't dangerous, that drugs aren't terrible. In high school I was reading volumes of books about religion. I was reading non-stop. I continued that in college, but the difference was I had access to books my parents would have grounded me for possessing. I was into a lot of liberal Christian literature, and the more I read it, the more I agreed with it. I was raised on the 700 Club.
It was a very narrow paradigm. I wasn't even supposed to watch CNN - I was supposed to watch Fox News or the 700 Club. I think anyone, if you really limit their access to information or ideas, you can get them to believe absolutely anything. I think that's exactly what happens within a lot of Evangelical churches in the South in general. You go to church on Sunday, you go to Tuesday morning prayer group, Thursday evening bible study and Friday youth group, and Monday, Wednesday and Saturday you're hanging out with your Christian friends, so you may interact with some atheists, say, in your classes, but you're not really having serious
exposure to new ideas. I see that with a lot of Christians that come to Tech their freshman year. A few of them will come in and
find their Christian group and disappear for four years.
I'm hitting a different church every week. I'm talking to the pastors and asking a ton of questions and reading tons of stuff. I've got shelves of religious literature back home in boxes from this time. So I went to the Unitarian church, and there was a guest speaker
talking about pluralism. He was really pushing this ecumenical Christianity, which I was very unfamiliar with. And he
bounced around all these
ideas, and they were rattling around in my head, and I thought, "This makes sense."
And he was certainly making a lot more sense than the Ravi Zacharias (an international evangelical Christian minister) shit that I had been reading when I was back at home.
I went home, and I was having a meal with my pastor, and I started bouncing all these words with him, and he was finishing up his theology Ph.D., and he had never heard of these concepts. He was working with this basic, basic assumption that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, but he couldn't tell me the scholarly debates behind who wrote it and how it came to be as it is today.
I was already thinking that Christians couldn't keep up with the intellectual order set by academia, and when he couldn't handle a basic conversation that I picked up in a
30 minute sermon from a liberal church, I thought, "This is it. This is over."
At that point I started calling myself a liberal Christian. I didn't want to leave it mostly because of my parents. I was bouncing all these new ideas off my parents, and we were constantly, constantly fighting about theological issues until things really came to a head when my dad came down to Blacksburg to pick me up before an academic break during my sophomore year. We were in the car heading back to Northern Virginia, and we're arguing over the inerrancy of the Bible, and I said, "I have no reason to believe this is true," and he said, "How often are you reading the Bible?" and I said, "I'm not. I don't."
I was reading little excerpts of the Quran at the time, and I told him that. He pulled over on the side of 81 and started screaming at me that if I wouldn't even try to be Christian, why should he pay for me to leave home just to lose my faith. I realize now he was
panicking. But ever since then, it has been a point of significant contention. That's partially my fault because I make snide comments from time to time. My mom thinks
Yoga is evil, that it's something that people in cults do, and so one time
I came home and found out she had been getting acupuncture. And I looked her right in the eye and said, "Isn't that against your religion? You think Yoga is evil. How are you getting acupuncture?" And we were in the middle of this nice Italian restaurant, and my parents just lost it.
After my dad backed off on the issue of tuition, I very slowly got them into the idea that their son wasn't going to be a Christian. I was dating a non-Christian girl during
freshman year, and I didn't tell my parents about it for nearly two months, and then I told them that I was dating her but trying to convert her. Then I had my sister back at home who was listening to the dinner conversation and knew what was going on, and she was
advising me about whether it was safe or not to bring things up with my parents, and she would tell me things like, "Cool off a little, wait a week or two before you tell them anything else."
I was constructing these horrendous lies that I still, to some extent, live in. I was lying to them for three solid years about what I was doing on a daily basis. But they've gotten to the point
where they don't ask questions so a lot of those have abated. The problem is that religion is really the only thing that I've ever disagreed with my parents on, but
it's so encompassing that it touches everything. I justified my agreeing with them as a child because I didn't have access to other material. But they are full-grown adults, and I don't know how they can still hold that the Bible should be taken 100 percent literally.
I'm deeply cynical of Christians. I wouldn't say that this is justified all the time, but if someone says they are a Christian, I roll my eyes. I don't trust Christians. I'm not skeptical in the same way of Buddhists or Muslims, for
example, in the same way that I am of Christians because I haven't been hurt by them in the same way. I don't agree with them. All religions can take really good forms and really
hideous forms. When someone says they are religious, I try to find out where they are on the spectrum, but there is a strong prejudice in my mind about what it means to be a Christian and the attitudes that Christians
have that is seared into me from my upbringing. I have a natural aversion toward
Christians that I realize is unjustified. I should really figure out what type of Christian they are first.
I guess I always forget that evangelical Christianity is one small sliver of
Christianity that is a phenomenon of the last 80 years, on the east coast of the United States. I wrongly connect evangelical Christianity to all Christianity. I was in Munich, and all the beer gardens are run by monks, and I couldn't believe it because in my Pentecostal background this was impossible.
One denomination that I have a lot of respect for is the Catholic Church. There are certainly hardliners, but the majority of Catholics I have met and a lot of Catholic literature I've read feel the need to justify their faith on an intellectual and spiritual basis, and I think that keeps them in check. It's not just, "God spoke to me and told me to do this." This justification keeps you from acting on the complex prejudices that we learn from growing up wherever we grow up.
Over Christmas break, I thought about going to church on Christmas Eve, and if I had been at home and not in a big city where I didn't know the churches, I probably would have. So I wouldn't say I'm Christian, but I'm certainly not an atheist. I don't think atheism has logical grounds - you can't disprove the existence of God. All you can prove is that he has no influence. By definition, I'm an agnostic.
The student interviewed for this article , a senior engineering major from Northern Virginia, was granted anonymity in order to speak freely about his faith background.