The Experience of Transitioning from Traditional Christianity to Agnosticism

Christianity to Agnosticism 4

The Experience of Transitioning from Traditional Christianity to Agnosticism

By

Kelly Jean Mahla

A THESIS

Submitted to

Center for Humanistic Studies

Graduate School

In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Humanistic and Clinical Psychology

2006

Christianity to Agnosticism 4

ABSTRACT

This study utilized the heuristic model of qualitative research to explore the question, “What is the experience of transitioning from traditional Christianity to Agnosticism?” The heuristic model was used so that the researcher could incorporate her own experience into the study. There were six phases of heuristic research that were used including: initial engagement, immersion into the topic and question, incubation, illumination, explication, and the creative synthesis. Six individuals who had transitioned from Christianity to Agnosticism were interviewed using the informal non-directed interview style. Included was the author’s own experience with this transition. The data that was obtained from these taped interviews were organized as required by the heuristic research model. Five themes were identified among the six interviews: required to be a part of an organized Christian dogma, questioned everything in regards to Christianity, multiple doubts about believing in the Holy Bible, the transition to become an Agnostic occurred over an extended period of time, and the personal beliefs that they were accepting and good people despite being an Agnostic. The findings of this study could be used by psychologists, theologians, other religious clergy, or lay people as a resource to further understand the experience of transitioning from Christianity to Agnosticism.

Christianity to Agnosticism 4

DEDICATION

To all the freethinkers in the world.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my co-researchers for sharing their experiences with me.

To Robert Shaw for believing in me and helping me believe in myself.

To my mother for putting up with me and giving me ideas.

To my dad – the Love of my life.

To Donna Rockwell – Thanks for the encouragement.

To Erin Zaleski – I could not have done it without you, thanks for putting this together.

To Renata – my bestest friend in the whole wide world – I love you.

To the entire class of 2006, you rock!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapters Page

I. Meaning of the Research Question 6

II. Review of Literature 20

III. Research Model 33

IV. Methods and Procedures 41

V. Presentation of Findings 49

VI. Discussion and Conclusions 71

References 77

Appendix A: Flyer for Volunteers 80

Appendix B: Instructions to Research Participants 82

Appendix C: Participation-Release Agreement 84

Christianity to Agnosticism 4

CHAPTER I

Meaning of the Research Question

It was a dark fall night as I pulled into my driveway after a day of shopping with my mother. She was sitting beside me in the car when I decided to tell her my secret. I am not sure why I decided to tell her; I just did. I put the car in park, twisted my body towards her and said, “I don’t think I believe in the Bible.” She turned and looked at me, and I will never forget her words. She said, “That disappoints me.” This was not the reaction that I wanted. I had put what I was feeling and thinking into words and said it out loud but I did not know what to say after she said that she was disappointed in me. I felt that she did not understand me and also that I could not bring this subject up again. My mother did not say another word to me about this conversation until many years later.

“What is the experience of transitioning from traditional Christianity to Agnosticism?” This was the question I researched in my thesis. While I knew what it felt like to transition from traditional Christianity to Agnosticism, I wondered what other people felt like during similar transitions. Since they believed in Christianity and were raised that way, did they feel lied to by the Christian community when they discovered that they no longer believed in that faith? During the process of discovering what they believed in, did they feel lost like I had? After the transition, were they confident that they no longer believed in Christianity, and did they feel like they could never find religious faith again? Was there a definitive moment that changed their beliefs and converted them to Agnosticism? Was there some kind of tragedy or life event that made them become Agnostic? What was the reason that they had converted? I knew how I felt when looking at most of these questions, and wondered what the experience was like for other people who decided that they no longer believed in the religion in which they were raised.

I was baptized in a Lutheran Church and was encouraged by my mother to go to services regularly. Other members of my immediate family did not go to church. I went to a Methodist church because it was close to home, and I could walk to it. I attended Sunday school when I was very young and then changed over to the adult church services when I got older.

When I was eleven years old, my parents sent me to a private school because they felt that the public school in the area in which we lived was too dangerous. They were able to afford the tuition at a local Baptist school, and I went there for five years before the school closed down due to low enrollment. At this school, the students where required to take Bible classes, as well as attend an assembly once a month. At these assemblies, the school brought in guest speakers to preach to the students about the Bible and to encourage us to be “saved” and to be “born again.”

During monthly assemblies, the student body was excused from their scheduled classes. They had us pray for long periods of time while bowing our heads. This was painful to our necks, and soon, a friend and I learned that if we bent at the waist instead of the neck, it minimized neck pain. During these long prayers, it was preached to us to come forward, to the front of the room and be “saved.” A friend and I were often bored and would kick each other’s legs. We would push the limits of inflicting pain on one another so that the other person had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming out in pain.

Although I believed in God with all my heart and soul at that time, I felt bored during these assemblies and was not learning anything from them. I felt no one was teaching me what it meant to be a Christian. I was frustrated that these assemblies only preached to be “saved” and no other message was conveyed. Since my friend and I were not of the Baptist faith and did not believe in the rituals that they performed, we dismissed the preaching.

Also during these assemblies, I remembered the preachers doing a lot of screaming for us to be “saved.” They screamed that if you do not get “saved” you will be “damned to hell for eternity.” The preacher would scream at the top of his voice to scare us into coming up to the front “to be saved.” Often, students would come up to the front just to quiet the preacher because the longer no one came forward, the longer the prayer continued.

Once, I decided to go up. They told us we would remember this moment for the rest of our lives. After this particular assembly they took the students who went up to the front of the room into the back room, sat us down and pointed to a passage in the Bible. They treated it like a secret. The passage was John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whomsoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (King James Version, 1977). I remembered thinking, “Is that it?” I had heard this quote before. I thought that “being saved” would feel like a revelation and I would be happier after the meeting in the back of the room. I definitely did not remember the exact moment that I was saved, although there were several times during my five years at the school that I was supposedly saved.

During the time I spent at this Baptist school some events were said to have happened in the “name of the Lord.” I would often question why this was so and was told by my mother, “It’s the religion.” The students at this school were preached to very loudly and were often told to fear God. This was told to me over and over again in classes and assemblies. Even then, I just did not understand why I should fear God when, on the other hand, they would tell us that God was a loving God. I was confused since their teachings seemingly contradicted one another. I never feared God and instead, thought he was a loving God.

Coming from a family whose members never raised their voices, it scared me to hear the preachers yelling. In this Christian school, to keep the students in line, they had a paddle that they called “the board of the Lord.” Although I never experienced the board of the Lord, plenty of my classmates did. They were taken out into the hallway and that is where they were given their punishment: a certain number of spanks on the buttocks with the paddle. I was terrified of getting the board of the Lord. You could hear the smacks on student’s buttocks when they received them from inside the classroom, and see their tear-stained faces when they re-entered the room.

The school was passionate about its beliefs. Some of those beliefs included: no abortion, no drinking of alcohol, and no dancing. Because of the no dancing rule, the school did not host a prom. However, every year students held a prom independently without the school’s permission. Because of the no dancing rules I felt cheated out of such dances as homecoming. It was confusing because every other school in the area had dances. I just did not understand how it could be bad when the Bible stated in Ecclesiastes 3:4 “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (p. 400). The Bible said there was a time to dance, so why could a person not dance? Why was it bad to dance? I was confused; again, I thought, this school was interpreting the Bible incorrectly.

One memorable event was when a fellow student stole a specimen from the school’s science lab. This specimen contained a fetus. When the Principal’s assistant found out about it, he was extremely angry with my class, yelling at us harshly. He pulled us from our classroom, put us into another room, and literally screamed at us to return the specimen. He lectured that this “is a living human being,” and then he took the board of the Lord and banged it so hard on a desk that he broke both the desk and the paddle. Also, in the middle of his tirade, he picked up a desk and threw it across the room. His screaming was effective; the specimen was later returned. I remembered being in that room, scared for my life, and wondering how someone could be considered an adult and act that way over a specimen. I thought that the fetus was no longer living; it was up in Heaven anyway so what did it matter? Although I had no knowledge of who took the specimen, I did not think that it warranted frightening all of us to the point that I remember it so vividly, as if it just happened yesterday.

The students at my school had Bible class everyday. We had an interesting Bible teacher whose name, in fact, rhymed with “Bible.” To this day, I wonder if that was his real name. This Bible teacher was a person everyone liked. Recently though, this Bible teacher had been in a bad mood. On one occasion he called the whole high school into the auditorium for a lecture and told the teachers and school administrators not to attend. As we sat in the auditorium he told us during his lecture that he thought we were horrible for not asking him why he had been in a bad mood lately. After this poignant lecture, most of the girls were crying. I too was crying, through I was not sure why. I felt embarrassed for crying over this teacher, and I was not sure why I felt so bad. Why did the other teachers not see through him, and see that there was something wrong with this man?

Not long after this event two of my classmates were counting down days on the chalk board. We all asked them why they were writing days on the chalk-board and they answered, “You will see.” Then it happened. I got a call on a Saturday morning from my school. I thought, “Its Saturday. Why are you calling me? School is closed today.” It was the Assistant Principal asking if I had any information on two of my classmates who had come up missing, as well as the Bible teacher that everyone liked. I told him about the countdown on the chalk board, but that I knew nothing else. Our whole class could not believe it. The Bible teacher had run off with two female classmates. Sometime later, they were all found out West. They never returned to our school, and there was much speculation about what had happened between the students and the teacher. I was in denial. After all, he was the Bible teacher. Therefore, he had to be a good person. There were rumors that he had sex with the girls: I could not accept that these rumors were true. He was supposed to be trusted. How could I ever trust someone who preached for the Lord again?

Soon after this event, another Bible teacher came to the school. We knew him because he was one of the frequent guest speakers. He was up front and stated that he realized that he had to be careful because of all that we had recently gone through. He was “cool” like the other teacher, but he backed off when it appeared that he was getting too close to the students, not wanting us to think he was like the other teacher who had run off with our classmates. I did learn to trust him, and so did a lot of my other classmates.

The school was closed after my sophomore year. My parents still did not want to send me to the local public school and thus, found a private Catholic school that was reasonably priced. This school was a transition for me. No one yelled. The student body was still required to meet once a month in the church, but now for “Mass” rather than “assembly.” As with most Catholic schools, there was a brief whispered mention of a Priest molesting young boys. Despite all that I went through in the Baptist school and the rumors at the Catholic school, at the time, I was still a devoted Christian. I believed in Jesus with all my heart and soul, and even felt it in my heart when I prayed. Though, when we went to the Church, I would sit in the back so as not to disturb the Catholics; I did not believe in what they worshiped. I did not want to kneel. I felt that it was against my belief to kneel in a church that was not my religion. While I did not consider myself Catholic, I did not consider myself Baptist either. I considered myself Lutheran even though I did not go to a Lutheran church or school.