I can remember few times that I’ve been more nervous.
This was my last Bible Bowl…and I had a reputation to keep. Everyone on my team was counting on me performing my end of the deal.
Context: I was homeschooled in the Quiverfull movement and never set foot in a school outside of the home until I began attending community college when 17. It’s hard to overemphasize how much religion was at the center of our lives. Other high school students at the churches we attended over the years were serious about football, soccer, basketball, editing the school paper, climbing to the top of the local school’s population chain, and so on. I did not have the opportunity nor, at the time, the strong desire to engage in such pursuits. My “sport” was the Bible Bowl — because, as people who wanted to be devout Christians, it was hard to think of something that would be a more important activity than reading, studying, and living the Word of God.
We had two hour long Bible studies with mom almost every day.
We memorized at least 115 verses a year. We studied and prayed fervently every day.
We looked forward every week to 6 am Saturday morning, when we would listen to Adventures in Odyssey and Focus on the Family broadcasts.
We went to week-long Bill Gothard Institute for Basic Life Training Seminars with family and friends in which we discussed arranged marriages, the evils of rock and roll music, and the importance of patriarchal authority.
We listened to Mennonite tapes as background on long car rides, and we frequently spent the half hour before church (which we attended at least four times a week, when you took all the Bible training into account) listening to what we thought was the highly insightful teaching of a Dallas preacher named Tony Evans.
We were a family of nine, because we fervently believed that children were a blessing from God — but we were still a bit of an embarrassment in the Quiverfull community, which frequently had families of twelve or more members because of its beliefs on contraception.
At our church, which was predominantly filled with children who were not part of the Quiverfull movement, we stood out like a sore thumb, the definition of a super-religious family. Dad frequently taught a class on Sunday morning called The Family Class that was frequently fairly well attended because of that reputation. People talked about us as a respectable family (if a little bit holier-than- thou, at times), and parents told their sons that they should be more like me; I was the definition, according to the talk of the church, of The Good Christian Kid.
And a major part of keeping that reputation up was in Bible Bowls. I prepared for them for about an hour and a half a day because, at first, of Mom’s rather strong encouragement. Every weekday, as part of my schoolwork, no matter what else was going on, including summer vacation, I would read for at least about 90 minutes. It was a chore at times, but as the results came in, the victories became my own. I began looking forward to it. What could be more valuable, I thought, than studying the word of God? What could be a better use of my time? What a blessing it was! And so her enthusiasm eventually was met and exceeded by my own.
Like an invested audience picking out the key players in a high school football team, people knew my name and discussed my reputation when I came into the Bible Bowl arena. Old rivalries trashtalked me in good fun. It was the time when I felt loved, wanted, and respected most at that age. I felt a joy in contributing what I thought was healthy competition in learning about something larger than myself, for at the time I sincerely believed that the Bible was the Word of God. And it went deeper than just reading; I really tried to get the words that I read in my heart and mind, too; I often had private prayer sessions with tears of joy and, at times, sorrow, and read the Bible every time I needed guidance or help in life — which was a lot.
Up to this point, I had been to 9 Bible Bowls at the high school level. I had gotten fifth place twice, second place once (to my sister) and first place six times — more than any other Bible Bowler in Bible Bowl history (not to brag but, to the best of my knowledge, that record still hasn’t been broken).
This was the last Bible Bowl of my life because I was 17 and about to graduate from high school, which would disqualify me.
There were 80 questions. They had begun to make the questions harder (which wasn’t difficult to do when the book of focus was 1 Kings — check out the temple details in chapters 6 and 7) because, according to the organizers, of how much our family was raising the bar, so I was nervous. I was interested in God’s word, true, but I also didn’t want to let all that hard work go to waste or disappoint anyone, including myself. And there were all the other kids trying hard to beat me — I knew I had to get all 80 questions right to win or miss no more than 1 question. There was absolutely no room for error. In previous Bible Bowls I had thought I’d studied the assigned book well, only to find that I missed the exact name of a minor character or something. All it took was one small detail that I missed, and it was over. I kept waiting for that question that would shatter my goal.
But this question…there was a technical element in it I couldn’t remember, and I got it wrong. I was devastated. Did one of my competitors get a perfect score? It would be two days until the results would be announced on Easter Sunday. So I waited, nervously, until the award ceremony that Sunday…
For the rest of my life I would be able to brag that I had that I had earned first place in seven out of ten Bible Bowl tournaments. It felt like validation and earned acceptance, at the time — a beautiful moment I’ll never forget that often challenging, difficult time of my life.
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I wanted to be a preacher in those early teenage years because I fervently wanted to save the world from hell and thought that was the best way to do it — but then I took my sophomore level Critical Thinking (English 201) class and found a passion for challenging non-Christian professors. That experience led me to decide to, instead be the Christian Force for God in the university, like the student challenging the “atheist” professor in the infamous movie God’s Not Dead (in ways that made me relate to that movie, even as an atheist). However, years after that decision I made as a college freshman, while 28 and in a doctoral program in literature (yes, I’m still in it at the time of this writing), my doubts on Christianity were increasingly became convictions, until I finally made a decision to leave the religion.
That moment, a week before leading a Bible Study in Christian Apologetics that was based on Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project (a follow up to an earlier study I had initiated based on Tim Keller’s The Reason For God video series), I saw clearly that all the fighting I had done to be the Force for God in the university couldn’t be honestly kept up. I had been wrong about religion the whole time. Extremely wrong. I had wanted so desperately to cling to Christianity that by the time I left there was no choice, really, BUT to leave — there was nothing of substance in the religion that I valued enough to remotely respect it. I had explored alternatives to the Christianity that I had grown up with and found they usually still didn’t solve my basic problems with the text; I had tried exploring a more postmodern Christian approach and found the metaphors it strenuously applied to the secular world unnecessary and cumbersome — in addition, interpreting the Bible through such an extremely non-literal lens seemed somehow dishonest to me.
So I left. Angrily, loudly left. And all the scriptures that I had lived for for so long, all the status I had cultivated as the “good kid” that was now attached to a late-twenties body, instantly was turned against me by the very people who had rubber stamped my reputation before. I began to fight back hesitantly at first, because I thought doing so was selfish and gratuitously narcissistic…
But then I read the thousands of stories like mine in places like NoLongerQuivering, Dawkins’ Convert’s Corner, and ExChristian.net., and found that the when people expressed their stories they were often being very helpful to me, and that anger at Christianity is a strong in-person response that is somewhat healthy and needs to be articulated. The more I saw the need, the more compelled I become about expressing that history and its results,
Those years were not a waste of life. I loved others, and they loved me, and they understood me and I understood them in profound, valuable ways that I’ll carry with me until the day I die.
Maybe this will illustrate the point — the other day, my mom and I were talking. Now, there are a lot of trophies at home from all those Bible Bowls I won back in the day. They all occupy a shelf over at my parents’ place, and, as I’m 31 now, they’ve been there for awhile, collecting dust. She asked me if it was OK if she threw them away.
My answer? “No Way! That was my high school.”
There was no way I was going to forget all those years and experiences that have made me who I am today. There was no way I was not going to recognize the effort it took for me to know the Bible well enough to leave Christianity and to communicate with Christians today, no way I was going to forget what those experiences taught me about what it was like to be a devout Christian — the sense of bliss one feels, along with the sense of angst. I know what it feels like, to a major extent, to be embarrassed at James Dobson, to hang my head in shame at ever following Bill Gothard, to experience the joy of being deeply devoted to what I know is a fantasy. And all those experiences, though they sadden me, also have given me an experience that connects and helps the experience of others; they also teach me to listen to myself and to avoid making unimpeachable heroes, valuable lessons that I carry with me today.
So…I said all that to say this:
I can’t say that the time I spent in religion was a waste of time. It is what I make it. Yesterday’s memory teaches you things about the way the world works, and that makes it valuable.
When I first left Christianity, I did, actually, get the sense that I wasted my life for 28 years. But then again, I would have missed out on a lot of understanding. I may wish the world were different than what it is, but the world IS what it is, and through my history I can communicate with, help, and bond with people who have had similar experiences. And I can bond with other people who, also, understand my story.
I think I am not the only ex-Christian who felt he wasted his life, which indicates that there are many Christians out there who may be terrified that leaving religion is admitting your entire life was worthless. But you’re the one, ultimately, who gives value to your life. There’s no omnipotent, authoritative God, so far as I can see, giving anyone value. It may sound restricting, but it’s also deeply freeing — any struggle you may have with religion is your struggle. You don’t have to give it to God. You can totally own that shit. You can direct it. You can claim the title of CEO of the value your experience holds to you. It’s up to you how you decide to value your life, but my experience is that past experience — especially interpreted with improved knowledge — can teach us about ourselves and our experiences that may help others tremendously who are going through similar issues.
And you can also sit here and remember the beautiful times you experienced in your religion were real — you really had them. Admittedly, I may be an extreme case in the United States, but I can still look back on some times fondly. It wasn’t perfect, but I do see lessons I learn in reinterpreting my past that are valuable in my present and seem as though they will be valuable in my future — in addition to teaching me the discipline that needed to be connected to the seeking of a certain goal, there were other valuable things like the sense of camaraderie I felt, and in how good it felt to be accepted and loved and seen as someone who made a difference in people’s lives. And the drive and joy one feels in feeling that you are making a positive impact on others. And that does, indeed, make me smile and want to pass that on to others, which makes it something that I very well may use for the remainder of my thinking life.
So when someone tells me that their time as a religious person was a waste of their lives, I wince. The study of life that you engaged in during your religious past may have had flawed premises, but the raw data of what happen is always available for you to use.
You have a treasure chest of experiences, regardless of your past. It may have been hard, and you may have been told lies, and you may wish it was different. OK. But do you really want to throw that away when there is so much for you to learn about the way the world works from those experiences? You know more than you knew yesterday, but you know it because yesterday happened. You suffered, but understanding that suffering and perhaps even the nuggets of joy within it can help you lessen the suffering of others. You may think now that that past is a waste, but in using it to further the way you see your own journey and the way you help others, you might find uses even for the parts of your past — or especially for the parts of your past — that seem most flawed. You don’t have to dwell on it and be stuck in the past — that’s not what I’m saying. But you don’t have to throw all that raw data away, either — we can reinterpret it with new premises, using it to help others and ourselves.
So that’s why, for me, when someone says that my religious years were a meaningless waste of my life, I disagree.
Hopefully that makes sense.