Is it wrong that I picked to be a Christian (as a teenager/14-year-old) even with knowing all of the information about other religions/atheism?
07.06.2025 04:20
Well, God, or Theover, or whoever was in charge, had other plans. One day, after a particularly vivid hell-and-damnation sermon, I decided I’d had enough of the Baptist religion. This was such atrocious stuff, an insult to my intelligence, that I was going to walk right out of the building and never come back. The pastor was giving an invitation to come forward and receive Jesus as savior, the choir was singing, and I was going to walk right out.
I decided that I was a Christian, not just because I was a practicing member of that tradition but because of all the world religions it was the one that seemed the most based in fact. Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who could be shown to have lived in a certain place and time. His teachings were well-known and well-defined. Without disparaging the religious experiences of anyone else, I could now say with certainty that I was a Christian.
I tried constructing my own religion, thinking that I could learn about God from pure reason and inadequate information. I decided that the universe had to have come from somewhere; there was an uncreated creator, an unmoved mover, and its name was God. Or “Theover” as I called it, from “theo” meaning God and “ver” meaning “true.” Mixing Greek and Latin. How shocking.
But I was curious about religion. I went to an elementary school with a lot of Catholics, and I wondered what made someone a Catholic as opposed to a Baptist or a Presbyterian or anything else. I would stand on the sidewalk of Our Lady of Grace, the Catholic church in our neighborhood, afraid to even step on God’s grass, and wonder what went on inside there.
When I was 15 my dad became very interested in religion. I don’t know what triggered his curiosity, but he started watching Billy Graham and Oral Roberts on TV. He was reading magazines with titles like “The Plain Truth” and books like the Book of Mormon and “Good News for Modern Man,” which I thought was a religious novel until he explained that it was a Bible written in modern language. And he wanted to visit churches, and asked if I wanted to tag along. Well, I was just as curious about religion as he was so I said yes.
Just go with the light that God gives you today.
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“We limit not the truth of God To our poor reach of mind,
And I lost interest. Somewhere between Leviticus and Deuteronomy I just quit reading, thinking that the Bible had a lot of wars, and really kinky sex, and way too much about sacrificing bullocks. But I was more interested in the basic questions. Like, Is there a God? And if so, what is God like? And what should I do about it?
Except I didn’t. I may have gotten saved in a Southern Baptist church, but that didn’t mean that I accepted everything the Southern Baptists were teaching. Some of it still sounded weird to me. I found books about religion in the library and at bookstores, and read them, and a lot of the time my pastor tried to talk me out of what I was reading (sometimes with good reason.) But I simply wouldn’t take any idea or doctrine as the truth just because my pastor or any man said so. I wanted to find out for myself.
Now let a new and better hope Within our hearts be stirred -
It was exciting stuff, but then we got into the law. I’d heard of the Ten Commandments but there were a whole lot more than ten here. There were laws about who could have sex with whom, and where you could poop, but most of the laws were what to do if someone had leprosy and how to offer sacrifices for every occasion. I wondered if that’s what went on in Our Lady of Grace church, but somehow I doubted it.
I was ordained in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and led a 100-member youth group in the Vineyard Christian Fellowships. I pastored two little house churches, led some people to Christ, baptized my daughters and have performed a dozen or more weddings.
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My dad had a large library and there were a couple of Bibles in it. I picked up one of them — a King James Bible, a gift from the Fifth Baptist Church of Washington DC on the occasion of Dad’s baptism in June of 1943 (so the inscription inside read) and I started to read. I read secretly, in my room with the door shut. I don’t know why I didn’t want anyone to know I was reading the Bible or why I was embarrassed about it. It was exactly as if I was sneaking peeks at my dad’s Playboy magazines, and I can’t explain myself.
I read books that I loved and came to regard as scripture. The New Testament, the Book of Mormon, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
I came to realize that “sin” means being out of harmony and fellowship with God, and with God’s creation, and very often “sin” means “religion.” I took New Testament Greek and learned that the word for sin is “hamartia” which is a term used in sport when an archer misses the target. Well to miss the target you have to be shooting at it; and to commit sin you have to be trying to hit the target. You have to be trying to please God. But you can also be out of harmony with God and creation by greed and selfishness and ignorance.
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I found out that each of these traditions has a multitude of sub-traditions just as Christianity has Catholicism, a zillion kinds of Protestantisms, Orthodoxy, Mormonism, and so on. Islam has Sunni Islam and Shia Islam and lots of smaller traditions most people haven’t even heard of. That’s true of all of the great religions and most of the smaller ones as well.
Not long after this I met a Mormon girl and started asking questions about her religion. They were very happy to give me answers, but just like the Baptists if you joined their church you had to accept 100% of what they taught or be considered weak in the faith. I didn’t understand why being born again made me believe in the Baptist system any more than reading the Book of Mormon made me believe in Mormonism. I drove a lot of people to utter distraction in those days, including my pastor and my adorable new Mormon girlfriend.
No it is not wrong. Because in this world you are never going to know all of the information about other religions. There’s just too much to know.
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The pastor told me that I was now a born-again Christian and that I should be baptized the next Sunday, and I was, and the church gave me a Bible the same way a different church had given my dad a Bible for his baptism. The pastor told me I had to attend church every week and read my Bible, I was now an official member of the Southern Baptist Convention and this is a list of the things that I now believed.
By the way, I later found out that that was NOT the way most people “got saved” in the Baptist church. Most of the time it was a matter of someone repeating the prayer after the pastor and that was that. No spiritual force showed up to knock them off their feet. The pastor had never seen it either and was genuinely alarmed. I had been reasoning that “God” was just an abstract concept, and this was God’s way of showing me that he was not an abstract concept!
There’s a 19th century hymn I love:
Perhaps I was similar to you: this is my story. I was raised in the western United States by a family that didn’t go to church. They told me that we were Christians, because both my parents had gone to church when they were younger; but I can’t remember even setting foot inside a church building until I was in junior high school
We visited the Lutheran church where I’d been to a wedding once. We visited a Methodist church that I’d been to with my friends’ family. We visited a Presbyterian church and an Episcopal church. I don’t know what Dad was looking for but he wasn’t finding it and he was getting exasperated. With what sounded like a resigned air, an attitute of “this is the last resort,” he said he was going to the Baptist church the next week. He’d grown up in a Baptist church, I knew this from the inscription in his Bible I’d found. I wondered why it was a “last resort.”
Do I know all of the information about other religions and atheism? Not even close. It’s a larger subject than any one person can ever master.
By notions of our day and sect, Crude, partial, and confined,
But Theover was not a personal God. It did not have a personality or an interest in us human beings. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that Theover was just my name for the basic building blocks of the universe: the matter and energy, the laws of physics and of mathematics itself. Not the kind of God that would be responsive to prayer or that one could have a relationship with, more of an abstract concept. And I lost interest.
I started at the beginning, with the creation of the world and the story of Adam and Eve. Even then I don’t think I took the Bible uncritically; I’d heard other creation stories from other people groups, and this was just one more I thought. I kept reading. There were interesting stories, about people going naked and God was OK with it until the serpent came along and messed things up; about floods and wars and sex. Then everyone ended up in slavery and God sent Moses to punish the Egyptians. I’d seen a movie about this.
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That’s when something happened that I simply cannot explain rationally. I got up to walk out and got lost. In a church with eighty people in it, I got to the aisle and instead of turning right to leave, I turned left and found myself at the altar standing before the pastor. He asked me what I wanted to do. I told him, honestly, that I had no idea. I couldn’t give a rational reason for standing there; it was still a mystery to me how I got there.
I studied the Anabaptist movement because my mother’s family had been German Anabaptists. Because of them I became a pacifist.
The Lord hath yet more light and truth To break forth from his word.”
But there were a lot more religions out there beside Baptist and Mormon and I wanted to study them all. So I enrolled as a religious studies minor in college, where I could make a structured study of the great religions of the world: Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. I learned about Australian indigenous religions and from the great Native activist Vine Deloria jr I learned about Native American religions.
But I was picking up other ideas as well, especially from my great friend and mentor Vine Deloria. He used to ask questions like “Suppose Jesus wasn’t a Jew?” meaning, God could have incarnated in any tribe or culture on earth, and then that culture’s religion would have become our Old Testament. For a long time I wondered what it would be like to have a Chinese Jesus, an African Jesus, a Native American Jesus.
So the pastor asked me if I wanted to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. This suddenly sounded like a very good idea, and I said “Yes.” So the pastor said, “All right, repeat after me. ‘Lord Jesus,’” he began.
I repeated, “Lord Jesus,” and that’s when things got really weird. I remember a feeling like something, some force, had suddenly come upon me. I felt like I couldn’t stand up anymore and that I would surely crash to the ground, but the pastor, alarmed, put an arm around my shoulder to support me. What I was feeling was very real to me, even though I’d never seen anything like it before. I do feel like I blacked out, because when I was again aware of my surroundings I had finished the “sinners prayer” and was sobbing uncontrollably, and the pastor was inviting the church to come forward and give me “the right hand of fellowship” which meant that the adults were shaking my hand and even the pretty Southern girls were giving me a big hug, despite the fact that I was covered with snot.
I liked the Baptist church. It wasn’t full of old people. There were kids my age, many of them were female and had cute Southern accents. And the pastor was always talking about “getting saved.” I didn’t feel an urgent need to get saved; I was there to observe the Baptists largely as an anthropologist might observe a tribal ritual. I certainly didn’t have any intention of joining this or any church until I had checked out everything. Like you, I wanted to know all the information about religions before choosing the best one.
In seventh grade I went to a new school, and my new best friend was the son of a Methodist minister, a professor at the seminary in town. His dad would be asked to preach at Methodist churches around the city, and I tagged along; I’d sit in the front pew with Dr. Snelling’s wife, two sons and a daughter, and we’d pass notes back and forth and giggle until Dr. Snelling gave us a death stare from the pulpit. I can’t say Methodism made a big impact on my life back then.