Slide Toward Agnosticism
Bryan
“I can’t compel myself to believe, and I can’t trick myself into it. There’s nothing left to do but hope for divine revelation.
"God, are you there?
"I asked it once, and I’ve never been able to take it back. The door stays open. And I’m standing in it.”
Written by Bryan and copyedited by Cliff Williams. "Bryan" is a pseudonym.
I Didn’t Believe in God Anymore
There was no single night when I stopped believing in God. It was a slide, years long, and I was most of the way down before I ever asked him whether he was there.
That was in September two years after I had graduated from college. My wife was away, employed in a different part of the country. We’d been married almost a year and had lived apart the whole time. Lately, in the moments we could steal, we daydreamed about how we would decorate my tiny subleased room for Christmas. She was transferring to the area and moving in for good that December. I had spent most of that year trying to get my theology straight so I could go back to church and be the husband I had been raised to be: the head of my household, the spiritual leader. I was running out of time to get it right.
The harder I ran toward God, the more distant he felt. I was getting desperate, and I was embarrassed. Why couldn’t I be content like my parents, siblings, and friends? My prayers that year fell into a pattern. I lay in bed and asked, “God, give me wisdom, give me discernment, draw nearer to me.” Silence. What was I doing wrong?
The apostle Paul and I had found ourselves on shaky ground over the years. There had been stretches when I felt that the only things worth reading were the Psalms, Gospels, and the Pauline canon. But doubt first crept into my heart when I was reading just those parts of the Bible. So I had spent the summer two years after graduating memorizing the Epistle of James, intentionally turning to the “Epistle of Straw,” as Martin Luther called it while dreaming of removing it from the canon.
“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” I journaled, prayed, read the Bible, and went to church dutifully. I even sang hymns to myself before bed. Silence. I waited. Lay still. Kept my breathing shallow, reaching into the silence like Elijah in the cave. “God, are you there?”
The question felt so natural, like calling out to a friend after you’ve knocked on his door and heard no footsteps. But I’d never once thought to ask it before. One of those omni-adjectives meant he was ever-present, right?
Nothing broke open. There was no answer, and no revelation either. What changed came afterward, slowly, and it’s harder to describe. The part of me I had refused to admit existed. The one that didn’t believe in God had unclenched. When I let myself look at it, what I felt wasn’t despair. It was closer to calm. Assurance, almost. That was the word for knowing you were saved.
That scared me more than the silence had, so I did what I’d always done. I read harder. I prayed harder. I got into the Word harder. I meant all of it. At least I felt I did. But I’ve never been able to unknow what I noticed that fall.
I didn’t believe in God anymore.
It took years of reading, and then years of trying, before I could write that sentence. I didn’t drift, not the way people usually mean it. I didn’t get hurt by a church and walk away. I didn’t stop believing because of a man in a red hat. I was raised all the way in, and I chose more of it on purpose, over and over. The belief went out of me like a tide, slowly, while I was sprinting toward Jesus, and by the time I noticed, the water was a long way out.
A Secure Faith
I was born into Christianity. Sunday school every weekend. I accepted Jesus into my heart when I was four or five, and my parents made a huge deal of it. It was treated as a decision I’d made. When I was twelve or thirteen I asked to be baptized, because now I was choosing of my own accord. Independently, completely, fully mine. That is how it felt, and I still think that is what it was.
From there it was youth group and small group and volunteering and church every Sunday. Our family friends were church friends, and that was how I identified. Super identified. I got a Facebook page in eighth or ninth grade, and for the first few years my banner was Bible verses. For a while I had a “Powered by Christ” emblem. My “About Me” was whatever verse I found most compelling, and I changed it every couple of weeks. I read my Bible in the morning, not every morning, but it was something I looked forward to rather than something I owed. I memorized Scripture well past what Awana (a church club for kids, built on memorizing verses) or the youth challenges asked for. I did it for myself. Both sets of my grandparents, missionaries and pastors, had spent their lives memorizing huge portions of the Bible and could pull out a piece of wisdom to fit any situation. That was who I wanted to be.
I had a burden for the people we called CEOs: Christmas-and-Easter-only. Cultural Christians. I wanted their hearts on fire, so that faith would soak through their words and their deeds and you’d know their Savior just by talking to them. What haunted me was the thought of someone who believed they had lived as a Christian arriving in hell. I did global missions and building projects in poor communities, work I felt called to, though some part of me was always turned toward the cultural Christian. In Revelation, Jesus tells the church at Laodicea he wishes it were hot or cold. Because it is lukewarm, he will spit it out of his mouth. Lukewarm was the worst thing a person could be. In or out. A few verses later, he stands at the door and knocks, waiting for someone to open it. I read the whole passage as a call to the people dipping their toes in to take the plunge. I preached it.
I was a Bible-thumper. Very Protestant, very text-centered. “What does the Bible say about this?” was my filter. I liked that my pastors knew Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. I had no interest in what anyone who came after Paul and Peter had to say about Jesus. I didn’t know the Nicene Creed. I didn’t know Augustine or Aquinas, Calvin or Arminius, or that there were such things as systematic theologies. My theology came from Romans. Romans laid it all out—everything I needed was right there. It never crossed my mind to ask where the Trinity came from given that the epistles never quite spelled it out. And what I was reading was love your neighbor, love your family, create good wherever you go, teach people about the love of Jesus Christ and watch it change their lives the way it changed mine.
Nothing threatened my faith, because there wasn’t a version of me that could imagine God not existing. My belief in God was so fundamentally true that I started with that reality and fit everything else into it. When I was taught evolution in school my reaction was: “Amazing! Science has allowed us a glimpse at the method God used to create humans.”
One of the reasons I was drawn to studying science was that it was a path to knowing God more intimately through the study of his handiwork. Hell, in my understanding, wasn’t fire and a devil. It was separation from God. If you knew the joy of having him in your heart, nothing could be more hellish than losing it. And my picture of who was in and who was out owed a lot to C. S. Lewis’s picture of Narnia in The Chronicles of Narnia: Emeth, the Calormene who thought he served Tash, whose good service Aslan accepted as service to himself. God could recognize someone reaching toward him under the wrong name. Of all God’s attributes, the one I revered most was always love.
For the first fifteen or sixteen years of my life it was a steady ramp upward. More involvement, faith more and more central. In my mind, my heart, my soul, I was content. I was thrilled. I knew Jesus Christ was my personal Lord and Savior. There was so much certainty.
The back half of high school was lonelier. I couldn’t find a group of Christian guys like me: guys who cared about school, played sports, and were also fired up about Jesus. The guys at church were into other things. Those on my football team were drinking and partying, and as a very Christian kid I didn’t want to be part of that or even around it. The kids in my advanced classes spent their weekends on video games when I wanted to go out and do something. I had friends I laughed with at school. But I wanted to be a part of a true brotherhood. That became something I prayed about: having friends like me.
The First Cracks
After high school, I got to a Christian college, and there they were. I was on the football team, and right away I was surrounded by guys who played sports and cared about school, a lot of them more than I did, many of them smarter than I was. Guys I could go to a restaurant with on a Friday night and talk to and do things with and just be around. It was everything I had wanted, and I dove in. Those first couple of months were some of the happiest of my life.
I prayed for those friends for years. God, if he was there, answered. Whatever else I say, that happened. And I don’t regret a second of it. The irony of going to that college is that I probably never would have sought out most of what I found there. I would have gone on reading Romans. But there I met people who had built entire theologies around the text I thought explained itself.
I remember the conversation. It was at the beginning of the second semester of my freshman year. I was in a friend’s dorm room with five or six guys, and somebody asked, “Are you guys Calvinists or Arminians?”
I had no idea what they were talking about. I listened, used context clues, and pieced it together. Calvinists held that God chose before the world began exactly whom he would save, and nothing in them earned it. Arminians held that God’s grace goes out to everyone and leaves each person free to accept it or refuse it. So I made my contribution: “There is no way anyone is actually a Calvinist, right? How could you possibly square that with a loving God?” Blank stares.
Their faith looked a lot like mine, so I read everything I could get my hands on: Calvin and Arminius directly, and then the paired books, Why I Am Not an Arminian and Why I Am Not a Calvinist, so each side got a shot at the other. It wasn’t that Calvinism was pleasant. It was that if I was going to put that much weight on what the Bible says, I had to be a Calvinist.
Romans 9 says that God has mercy on whom he will and hardens whom he will. When the objection comes, “Why does he still find fault?,” the reply begins: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” Ephesians 1 says, “We are chosen before the foundation of the world, predestined according to the purpose of his will.” John 6 says, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and no one can come unless the Father draws him.” I looked for another way to read these passages, hard, and I couldn’t find one that seemed as clear as what Calvin put forward. Free will, the kind I had always assumed I had, did not exist. God elects some. He abandons billions.
The Arminian case was much closer to what I’d assumed before going to college. In a sermon called, “Free Grace,” John Wesley said unconditional reprobation made God out to be worse than the devil: a God who invites people to receive what he has already decided to withhold. The trouble for me was never God’s power. It was God’s love. How could a God who could save everyone choose not to? The Arminians had my heart, but Calvin had my Bible, and I had been raised to know which one wins that fight.
I hated it.
There was no way the God I knew, the Jesus I knew, would set up a system like that. I asked a professor about it, and his answer was something like, “I’m a Calvinist, but only begrudgingly.” Could I believe begrudgingly?
I tried to read my way out of Calvinist ideas. That only took me further in. The Westminster Confession says some are predestined to everlasting life and others foreordained to everlasting death, passed by and ordained to wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice. I thought: “God, I know you. That is not you.”
An Existential Crisis
The conversation during my freshman year of college had initiated what turned into an acute search. So when I came to a conclusion I desperately did not like, I entered into a full existential crisis mode in the middle of some of the happiest years of my life.
Calvinist theology was all I talked about, thought about, did. I read, then sat up with my roommates and talked it through. As the nights got later, we did what college kids in dorms across the country were doing: we moved past debating the nature of God and on to his existence (except that at the Christian college I was at this had to be done at 2:00 a.m., in hushed tones, dead sober). For me, the arguments about his existence stayed theoretical. What I had started to question was whether he was who I had thought he was.
Within weeks of those first doubts, my introductory biology class started a unit on evolution. The class taught what I had worked out for myself in middle school: God ordained and guided it all. But this time I thought it through, and what caught me wasn’t the fact of evolution. It was its process. I pictured a deer in the woods, her leg trapped beneath a fallen trunk, far from any human being. She would starve or freeze, slowly, with no way to make peace with her pain. Psalm 19 says the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Was this his handiwork too?
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, man. First things first.” I put the deer away and bounced back to Calvin. I told myself I was over-intellectualizing. I was thinking myself out of the great joy and peace I had. I needed to lock in and get back to the heart of the thing, the emotion, whatever had made me feel the way I used to.
Around the same time, I was going to a very Calvinist church near campus. The teaching was rigorous—thoughtful, meticulous study of the text, which is still how I like to read the Bible. I loved it. The pastor walked through the existential dread these Calvinist ideas brought up and got all the way to the love on the other side. It was something like: So what? You don’t have a choice. That doesn’t mean you aren’t called to respond. I sat there and felt convicted. It was a good place for me. The doctrine stayed. The panic went. That’s the best way I can put it.
I’ve thought since about why that worked for me and how I could get back there. Nothing in the argument had changed. What changed was that I let the thing I couldn’t reconcile sit inside the thing I couldn’t deny.
Stopped Liking Church
I am hesitant to bring this up, but it is important context. This part isn’t the story of how I lost my faith. It’s the story of how I stopped liking church, and anyone who hears both will want to make them one thing. They weren’t. But not liking church didn’t help keep my faith.
During the 2016 election, I watched God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians who had loved me, who had made room for outsiders and emulated Christ in a lot of real ways, line up behind a man whose life, as I saw it, ran against nearly everything Christ taught. I don’t want to say they abandoned their morals. Many of them were people I looked up to and still do, and maybe some of them voted the way they did because of their faith, not in spite of it. I heard the justifications. He’ll prevent a woman from becoming too powerful. He’ll get rid of undocumented immigrants. He’ll take the country back from gay people. But didn’t Jesus tell us to love these people? What was I missing?
I had grown up in a conservative household and had never thought about politics more deeply than: I’m a Christian and thus vote as a Christian ought to. Now it was coming from the pulpit. Hold your nose and vote. The lesser of two evils. But what I saw looked less like people holding their noses than like devotion, a fervor I hadn’t seen in church before. People were more on fire defending him than I’d ever seen them be about sharing Christ. More than one person told me that year, “You cannot be a Christian and vote for a Democrat.” And I thought, “Really? Is that true?”
I knew being part of a congregation mattered. I just didn’t want to be around some of these people while they talked about this man.
I found myself liking church less. That may sound small or petty in the grand scheme of my soul being lost, which is how my parents would put it. But that’s what happened. Senior year and into graduate school, I became an intermittent churchgoer. There were stretches when I went to church for months, and stretches when the sermons felt so regressive that I largely stopped. I couldn’t stand how church people were wielding the name of Christ. I had grown happy to live in the infinite unknown of it all, as long as I was surrounded by people who loved Christ and one another. Being with these people enabled me to hold a doctrine I hated. Without them, the panic came back, and so did the doubt. Were these the people God had elected? So back down the Calvinist rabbit hole I went.
I graduated from college still a Calvinist and still as Bible-affirming as ever, but much less sure about the character of God. I had hated the Calvinist doctrine for three years but still couldn’t read the biblical passages any other way. The God I had stopped liking and the God I still believed in were the same God, and I had made my peace with him on his terms. When my want and the text disagreed, the text won. That was the rule. I had learned it at fourteen and applied it at nineteen to a doctrine I hated. I would have told you it was the most Christian thing about me.
Non-Human Suffering
I started graduate school that fall. My wife and I were married a few months later. She’d been raised the way I was, deeply rooted in the Christian faith. She was employed elsewhere. The public ceremony would be a year later, to the day.
A year after I graduated from college I decided it was time to lock back in. New city, brutal schedule, a wife I wanted to be worthy of. Before she moved in with me, I needed to pin down what I actually believed. “I’m an adult now,” I thought. “I’m out in the world.” (Naive, maybe, at twenty-three.) So I went back to Scripture and theology for one more run at the question about God’s character that had followed me through college. What I didn’t see was that the defense I had built against it had also kept a harder question at arm’s length.
I had always known the problem of evil, and I had an answer for it since I was eight or nine: sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin. What I had never fully faced was suffering that had nothing to do with human sin, because it came before there were humans at all.
For anything that can feel, the natural world doesn’t just contain suffering. It runs on it. Predation, parasitism, starvation, disease—the engine that keeps everything humming—and it had been humming for hundreds of millions of years. Darwin put it to Asa Gray through the ichneumon wasp, whose larvae eat a caterpillar alive from the inside. How could a benevolent, all-powerful God have meant that? I don’t know what a caterpillar feels. But I remembered the trapped deer in the forest. And I could imagine what it would feel. I had found a way to live with judgment on a fallen human race. I couldn’t stretch it back to before there was a human race to fall.
And why so much? No one had shown me that a world with less such suffering would have been impossible. If God could have done it another way and chosen all this as the tuition, then I’m back at the question I couldn’t get past at nineteen, asked about everything that can feel: how could a God who could spare non-humans choose not to? The Westminster Confession at least sends the lost to wrath for their sin. But the caterpillar hasn’t sinned.
I know the replies: there may be no exact minimum God had to hit, and a stable world has costs. Those replies answer, “Why not a little less?” They don’t answer, “Why this much?”
I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, The Brothers Karamazov, figuring if anyone had answers for suffering, it would be Dostoevsky. Ivan’s case against God is built on suffering children, and I can see the novel’s answer to Ivan in Zosima and Alyosha, in a kiss and an onion, in the way it asks you to live. It’s a beautiful answer to a question about people. Zosima even tells you to love animals. But the book had nothing to say to the wasp.
Underneath every answer was the same move: you’re a finite creature, and not seeing the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It was the move that held through college. It was the one that wouldn’t hold after college. It still won’t.
The Bible told me death came into the world through sin. The wasps said the dying came first. So I had a way to reconcile God with human suffering but nothing to reconcile God with the non-human world. That was the trap. The God I knew had nowhere left to stand. For four years I had been asking whether he was who I had thought he was. I hadn’t yet asked whether he was there.
I had been in crisis mode for most of the year after I graduated. My grades in graduate school were slipping; my friends were asking whether everything was okay. My wife would be moving in soon, and I wanted solid ground under me before that happened. What I got was the question I started with.
I Know I Don’t Believe
That fall wasn’t the end of the effort. It was the beginning of the longest part, a part that is still ongoing. After my wife and I married, we tried being Christians, together, for years. We became members of a church. We tithed. We read the Bible as a couple, and on Sundays I stood beside her in the pew and sang. The whole shebang.
My understanding of the practical end of Pascal’s wager is that if you don’t actually believe, you go to church anyway. You sing the songs, pray the prayers, read the Word, and eventually it catches. When I later read Pascal himself (act as though you believed, take the holy water, have Masses said), I recognized our plan and felt hope.
William James says that when a choice is live, forced, and momentous, and the intellect can’t settle it, refusing to decide is itself a decision. I didn’t leave it open. I bet. I bet with my body and my Sundays and my money. The belief didn’t come. My wife and I stopped going to church. Søren Kierkegaard would call for a leap. I wanted to jump. I’ve been standing at the edge with my knees bent for years. But to where? To whom?
Some philosophers would say I’m keeping score wrong. Daniel Howard-Snyder argues that faith doesn’t require belief, and he reads Mark 9:24, in which a father cries, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” as showing a faith that looks less like certainty than resilience. By that account, those years might have been faith after all. Maybe. But the practice was never what went missing. The belief was, and that’s the thing I wanted back.
I was raised in belief. It had been the most influential thing in my life. I gave the practice every chance I knew how to give it. But I could not get to belief. I can fake it around my family. I know the prayers and the songs. A sermon can still move me. But in my heart of hearts, when I look at it, I know I don’t believe. Belief, it turns out, isn’t something I can do. It is something I find I have, or find I don’t.
I lost belief in God first. Disbelief in the divinity of Jesus followed. I’ve gone back through the Gospels since losing belief, looking for an inkling, a sign. The book I keep coming back to is Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God. His argument is that belief in the resurrection helps produce belief in Jesus’ divinity. Some of his followers had experiences they took to be seeing him alive after his death, and those experiences convinced them God had exalted him. What I can’t do is get from these reports to “God raised him,” because that step needs a God, and I had already lost him.
The resurrection has nowhere to land in me yet. If I ever found God again, I think I would find the tomb empty shortly after. So far, it hasn’t worked in the other order. Not for me.
I still think Jesus was a millennia-defining teacher. I know what C. S. Lewis says about stopping there. But I don’t believe he was God, fully God and fully human.
Agnostic Yet Wanting Belief
I call myself agnostic, though a lot of my arguments are ones an atheist would use. The engine is Darwin’s. The visions are Ehrman’s. Hiddenness is the philosopher J. L. Schellenberg’s.
Part of why I won’t say atheist is the sour taste the New Atheists left in my mouth, the four horsemen and their disciples on Reddit. Mostly, though, you don’t shut the door on the thing your whole life was built around. Someone can call themselves an atheist and stay open to being wrong. The word just doesn’t feel like where I live.
And I’m answering two different questions. About the God I left college with, the one who ordains the decree and the engine both, I lean hard toward no. About whether there is anything eternal at all, anything that made the wasp and grieves it, anything that explains why there is a universe here to argue about, I don’t know. I would be lying to claim more.
The people who read what I have read and stayed in faith aren’t stupider than I am, or less honest, or less serious. Some of them are my heroes, and I can’t explain the difference between us. I am not going to pretend it’s because I looked harder. Their disagreement doesn’t make every answer equally likely. It does make me hold mine more loosely. There’s still an “I don’t know” in it.
If God loved me, designed me, elected me, and I spent the first two decades of my life trying to walk with him, maybe my unbelief is just a phase. Tides come back in. But then why can’t I believe in him now, when I want to so badly? That’s the hidden God, as I’ve experienced him. It feels as though he has turned his face from me. When I was a kid, that separation was what I meant by hell.
On the outside, life hasn’t changed much. I love my family, I treat people the way I would want to be treated, and I work every day at being a better husband and father. But I still feel the pull toward belief. What am I supposed to make of that pull without the belief?
The tradition has answers for a person like me. The Calvinist tells people who long for faith not to conclude that they are rejected—keep seeking, keep using the means of keeping faith. I did, for years. Pascal imagines Christ telling seekers they would not be searching if they had not already found him. The Psalms are full of the complaint that God has hidden his face. John of the Cross describes a dark night in which losing the consolation can be part of faith’s purification. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, writes of a door slammed and bolted from the inside, then later wonders whether his own frantic need had shut it. Maybe the person in bed who asks, “Are you there?”, was still doing something believers have always done: talking to God in the dark.
I take these seriously. Some of them may even be true of me. And my unbelief may be just a stage. But I have been in the stage for years, and a stage that hasn’t ended looks exactly like one that never will. Nor do I think I’m resisting. I simply don’t believe.
There’s a version of the Calvinist answer I can’t get out from under. Calvin says that some who aren’t elect can experience, for a while, something so like the elect’s faith that even their own judgment mistakes it. It’s the fear I used to carry for the Christmas-and-Easter people turned around to face me. What if, “Are you there?”, is what non-election sounds like from the inside? I’ve considered it. The idea makes me shudder. Is my wanting faith genuine or does it simply feel genuine?
Are You There, God?
I still pray with people when they ask me to. I always will. And I’m hopeful I’ll reclaim the faith I knew. The assurance. The belief. I expect I will chase it for the rest of my life, because I’ve seen what it can do and what it can be. There’s nothing like the peace I remember from believing in God with my whole heart. No questions. All the answers right there. I had questions then too, but they sat inside the thing I couldn’t deny.
What would it mean to get my faith back? Unironically believing in something eternal. Lower blood pressure. A built-in community everywhere my family and I go, people to help us raise our kids, other adults who more or less share our values and our stage of life, accessible in a way work friends never quite are. What a dream that would be. My wife wants to believe too, and she isn’t sure yet where she stands. So we’re in it together, which is its own kind of grace, if that word still means anything.
I can’t compel myself to believe, and I can’t trick myself into it. There’s nothing left to do but hope for divine revelation.
God, are you there?
I asked it once, and I’ve never been able to take it back. The door stays open. And I’m standing in it.
Turning Points: Faith Journeys of Twenty-Five People