My Story Part 1: The Early Years

How did I come to have the faith that I eventually rejected? In short, it came from my mother.

Shortly after my mother and father married my mother began attending a local Baptist church in the small town in which I was born. This fact, even more than my father’s alcoholism, would be a constant point of tension in my youth. My father's entire extended family where I grew up were of the Catholic persuasion, my grandparents being very devout. Most of the town was Catholic (including nearly all of my school classmates) and I was even baptized as an infant at one of the local Catholic parishes.

Nevertheless as she took me to church every Sunday I quickly adopted the faith of my mother and the Second Baptist Church on Herman Avenue. I learned bible stories, sang songs, memorized bible verses by singing them, sang in the children’s choir, went to vacation bible school during the summer and even went to extra religious education during the school year.

When it came to doctrine and salvation Second Baptist spread the old time gospel. Ecumenicalism was not “in” at the time. You better have Jesus as your savior or hell was where you were headed when you died. Witnessing or “sharing my faith” took on a sense of urgency especially for me since most of my family, being Catholic, was headed straight for an eternity of eternal constant torment. Every time an extended family member passed away (and I have a lot of extended family members) I could not help but experience a brief moment of horror as I imagined how they must feel, thinking moments before they died that they would at least have some relief from the pains of this world only to wake up to a fiery torment.

I would have to say that the belief in hell was the first seed of doubt to be planted in my young brain. For my father who had no religious persuasion (as far as I could tell) he found the idea of hell particularly awful. “How could you believe in a God who would send someone to hell who never heard about your religion?” he would ask me. I had no answer except that my father’s life was so wrecked by alcoholism and “sin” that I had a hard time believing I could glean any meaningful metaphysical insights from him. Nevertheless I could not help but be disturbed at the thought—when I did think about it—that people that I loved, that loved me, cared for me, bought me birthday presents and came to my baseball games were on their way to an eternity of punishment. I believed it was true, because the Bible said so, but in so believing I had also planted the first seed of doubt about my faith.