James McAllister, a 56-year-old Lutheran minister in the midwest, was working on his sunday sermon one Thursday afternoon last summer. It wasn't going well. The reverend wasn't suffering from writer's block—in fact, he was crafting quite an elegant parable about "the importance of making our whole lives a prayer." No, the problem was bigger than that. The sermon skated around a private truth that McAllister could no longer deny.
McAllister has learned that you can tell inspirational stories, grounded in social justice and tolerance and peace, without having to bring God into the picture—and this sermon was a masterful case in point. A woman in his congregation had recently dropped everything to care for her cancer-stricken daughter, and that selfless commitment was sacred in its way. "You can see how I cook the books a little bit to make it easier to look in the mirror," he says of his sermons. "But there are times when I get that sort of empty feeling in my stomach, like I'm a fraud."
Months ago, McAllister, who is presented pseudonymously here, took his crisis to the bishop. He'd lost the faith, he explained, and he wanted out.
"Oh you're not quitting," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "You haven't lost your faith."
"Um, yeah I have," McAllister said. "This is for real."
The bishop shook her head. For the church elders, McAllister's revelations simply did not compute.
"They're either in complete denial," he says, "or they're completely comfortable with the idea that they have a pastor who's a fraud, as long as he puts asses in the seats."
McAllister took the issue up with his psychiatrist. "It emerged that she was a devout Christian herself," he says. "To her credit, she tried to be professional." Where she had once begun and ended their sessions with prayer, she stopped when he asked her to. "But I could see she was squirming. You know, she was sitting with a man of the cloth who had lost it. She had problems with that."
To be a clergyman struggling with God in modern times is to reside at the center of a great battle. At a time when the tension between faith and doubt arguably defines the distance between people more than does gender or race or even politics, the Doubting Priest bears witness for the defense and the prosecution. (Mother Teresa's grave spiritual doubt, as revealed last fall in her letters, means one of two things: Either the closest thing to a modern saint was a phony, or her trials actually make her religious life more meaningful, a poignant example of faith not as a certainty but as a required test that leads to a more profound commitment.) The spiritual struggles of ministers and priests and rabbis remind us that, amid encroaching fundamentalism, atheism is also on the rise. The neo-atheist movement is fueled by outspoken academics and intellectuals including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others who bombard the airwaves and bestseller lists with their calls for deconversion. You can now send your kid to an atheist summer camp or get yourself certifiably "de-baptized." (Britain's national Secular Society offers the service: "Liberate yourself from the original mumbo jumbo that liberated you from the original sin you never had.") There are hundreds of college-campus groups devoted to secular humanism. The Atheist Alliance International reports "so many speaking requests that leaders of national atheist groups can't keep up."
Even amid the neo-atheist din, a clergy member's crisis of faith stands out. The natural order of things is upset when those entrusted with the protection of souls lose the plot. Because the clergy's livelihood and public identity are intimately bound up with their faith, practical considerations can be just as pressing as theological doubt. And the split between private beliefs and public sermons can leave religious leaders feeling deeply inauthentic, a source of psychic stress that most laypeople will never know.
Many soul-searching clergy never leave the church, making the ranks of ordained agnostics and atheists impossible to tally. But the raw numbers aren't much on the minds of clergy actually in the throes of deconversion. Their doubt is as real and immediate as a cloud over the sun. And somewhere in the nest of questions is a simple one: How did this happen?
McAllister had been raised Catholic, then drifted into a 25-year interregnum where he stopped going to church and called himself an atheist. A midlife spiritual restlessness nudged him into chaplaincy training years ago.
A second-career minister—for most of his life he was a graphic designer and a fine artist—McAllister approaches the Big Questions more in the manner of a scholar than of a monk. (Even as a Catholic grade-school kid, he recalls, he hungered for real evidence. "Why," he would ask the nuns, "did this stuff all happen so long ago before there were cameras and TVs? Why aren't there prophets and holy people and miracles now?") Frustrated with his denomination but by no means ready to bail out, he picked up Sam Harris's book The End of Faith. He found he "agreed with about 98 percent of it."
He picked up other books in the neo-atheist canon. He read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and then the one-two punch of Christopher Hitchens's mega-bestselling God Is Not Great and Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. He closed the latter book and found himself saying, aloud, "Amen." He had to face his misgivings. "I realized, it isn't just that I'm hurt by the way I was treated at synod, and it isn't just that the senior pastor that I work with was an asshole. It's that I don't believe in this anymore. And that was terrifying."
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