Neil Carter is a 44
year-old high school teacher in Jackson, Mississippi, and author of Godless in Dixie, a blog about living as an atheist in the deep south of the U.S.
In November, following a presentation to the Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics
of Manitoba, he answered some questions about being an atheist in America
today.
What is your religious background?
I was raised Southern
Baptist and was saved at the age of 15. I graduated from Reformed Theological
Seminary in 1998 with a Master's degree in Biblical Studies and relocated to
Atlanta in 2000 to be a part of a small but international network of home
churches. I was there for ten years.
I started helping with new church plants
in 2004, and wrote a book about Christian community in 2007.
I left it all in 2009.
Was there any one specific thing that pushed you from belief to
unbelief?
It was a death by a
thousand cuts. I feel like I always lived with an inner skeptic. But toward the
end there were a couple of primary factors, such as getting around more and
seeing just how diverse Christian belief really is, and yet seeing how
convinced everyone always is that their theology is the only right theology.
That inspired me to ask myself harder questions about why I believe what I
believe.
Also, my evangelical tradition
stressed having an intimate, personal relationship with God. Yet after two
decades I realized that I had to supply both sides of the relationship. The
moment I quit "making" God real, he disappeared entirely.
One day it dawned on
me that if I can't really point to anything objective, anything outside my own
head that could validate the existence of this invisible person, then maybe I
needed to think some more about why I believed what I believed.
The rest just
kind of added up from a dozen unanswered questions that made a whole lot more
sense the moment I considered the non-existence of God as a better explanation
than the previous religious answers I was given for everything.
What happened after you told others you were no longer a
believer?
At first, I kept it very private. But in 2012 one of
my students discovered I had liked a Facebook page about atheism and asked if I
was an atheist. I said it wasn’t relevant to the class, and she said “why
didn’t you say no?”
Soon after, the principal pulled me aside to ask me
about it and later transferred me to another class. When
the year ended, my contract was not renewed for the next year—no reason was
given, but I knew why.
It also affected my family, driving an emotional wedge
between me and my wife. A year later we decided our differences were
irreconcilable, and we filed for divorce.
Coming
out as an atheist also fractured relationships with friends. They believed I
was going to hell for rejecting Jesus. Some of them saw me as a project to
bring back to faith. Some friends even staged an intervention.
Do you think that was because of where you live, in the U.S.
south?
Yes, it is largely
because of the central place religion plays in the life of people in the Deep
South.
Granted, rural areas all over the country have the same quality to them,
the same culture, but down here it's even prevalent in our big cities. The
first thing people do when they move to a new place in Mississippi is join a
church.
People around here
take religion very seriously. It's the most important thing about you in their
minds. So coming out of the closet as an atheist is a problem.
You use the terms "come out.” Is that terminology common
for atheists?
Quite
common, especially among people who de-convert from evangelical and
fundamentalist Christian families.
Our
families don't take this news
very well at all. They all believe we are going to hell for rejecting Jesus,
and they also are quite shamed by our departure. It hurts their reputation
among other church members, and most of them feel very strongly that we are
supposed to "come back."
Keeping
this to ourselves saves us a ton of grief from our families, and in many cases
it may also be necessary for protecting our jobs and the cohesion of our
families.
Has the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of the Christian
right, made things more challenging for you?
Significantly. It
would take a long time to flesh out just how badly his ascension has polarized
public discourse in my country, but it's been like a giant toxic wedge that has
emboldened the most racially intolerant, bigoted elements of our country to
come out of the woodwork, as we say.
Do you know atheists who have left other religions?
Yes. I have a number
of ex-Muslim friends. I know fewer who have left Judaism. Most Jewish folks I
know were always pretty secular to begin with.
What advice would you give to atheists about interacting with
people from the evangelical community? And what advice would you give believers
for dealing with an atheist?
I
always advise atheists who have very religious family to keep it to themselves
until they are so financially and socially independent from their families that
they could weather even the worst treatment as a response.
The nicest, kindest
people will turn mean overnight (or
at least passive-aggressive)when they learn their family has "turned from
the Lord." It's a scandalous, painful thing for them and it brings out a
side of them that you can only see after you've "left the fold."
I advise people to
build up a strong enough social support network that they have people to turn
to for help when they need it. Only then will they be ready for the worst.
And
if their families surprise them by being consistently gracious, then it still
didn't hurt to be prepared for the worst. Take your time and become more secure
in your beliefs before you make yourself transparent to your family.
As for Christians, take
time to listen to us and don't assume you already understand what makes us tick
or why we stopped believing.
Don't assume you know better than we do what we
are thinking, and please believe us when we say we truly don't believe in
spirits or ghosts or gods or afterlives anymore.
They have the hardest time
accepting that. They think we are lying to them or else to ourselves.
I wish most that they
could understand that changing our minds about God is usually an intellectual
response to questions or realizations of things that make us see things
differently.
It’s not a moral failing.
We aren't "rebelling against God" even though they are certain that's
how it should be seen.
We cannot help the
fact that we've stopped believing and as far as we are concerned it wasn't a
choice we made at all. It just kind of happened whether we wanted it to or not.
I wish they would stop reframing it as a choice on our part. We cannot choose
to believe something that no longer makes sense to us.
Click here to read what it's like to be an atheist in Manitoba; it isn't easy for some here, either.
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