An Atheist in the Pulpit

Public identity and private belief are never more at odds than when a preacher loses his faith.

By Bruce Grierson, published on January 01, 2008 - last reviewed on April 11, 2008

It sounds like a coolly rational process, a Jesuitical internal debate tipping forward into certainty. It wasn't. "It was scary as hell," Reed says. "I realized, 'I'm not going to see my mother and father again.' " The sense of cold finality, the impression that one's prayers are just so many tennis balls served into the ocean: Such existential issues are a big part of anybody's crisis of faith. But for religious leaders, the stakes are raised even further, for faith is no longer a private matter.

"As a clergyman your livelihood is not just a job—it's a whole theological system that you'd better be on board with," says Dick Hewetson, a former Episcopal minister from Minnesota who left the church to do secular work and soon called himself an atheist.

"It hit me during those last couple of years in the pulpit that everything coming out of my mouth was being taken as gospel," he says. "I began to think, This is crazy. If I tell these people something, they believe me. Remember Jonestown? People asked, How could that happen? Well, I know how. I wasn't the Jim Jones type, and my people weren't the Jonestown type. But I was the shepherd and they were the sheep, for sure."

Charles Templeton, the late Canadian evangelist-turned-journalist, argued that a disjunction between what clergymen say publicly and what they believe privately is so common that serious cognitive dissonance comes with the territory. "Most intelligent clergymen preach to the right of their theology," Templeton wrote in his memoir Farewell to God. "They are more conservative in the pulpit than they are in private conversation or when counseling a parishioner."

What eventually happens, as it did for James McAllister, is that sermons become cooler and less dogmatic. The clergyman, stated Templeton, "is likely to settle for what might best be described as an altruistic, do-goodest Christian philosophy."

Krista Wren [name changed], who never became a minister only because doors were quietly closed in front of her, tells a tale of spiritual disaffection with an ironic twist. A minister's wife from Atlanta and "a flailing Christian for 23 years," Wren worked with her husband on Pat Robertson's ministry before leaving to do missionary work in Africa. She thought of herself as a missionary; unfortunately for her, no one else did. At one fund-raising meeting prior to the couple's African departure, three dozen people gathered around her husband, Tom [name changed], and one said a prayer: "God, anoint Tom to bring forth your word with power! Let him see miracles as he prays for the people of Africa. May he lead many to Christ as you empower his words... " Then the crowd gathered around her. She held her breath in anticipation. "And Dear God," a woman's voice said, "please give Krista creative ways to do laundry." It was a decisive moment and in a way a portent of the end. "Maybe I've not gotten past it because it sums up the mind of many churches and even so many scriptures," Wren wrote in a recent e-mail to Dan Barker, with whom she had been corresponding. "Men do great things for God—and women wash their shorts."

Wren is currently a hairsbreadth away from throwing it all over the side and coming out as an atheist.

But here is the twist: Her husband became a pastor only because, many years ago, she converted him. ("And with a great deal of effort.") Now she's heading back across the bridge the other way. She is virtually certain he won't make the trip with her. What is certain is that their marriage will be tested. Her disaffection is a subject so delicate she handles it with tongs.

"I'm hesitant to say too much, but the things that I have said have caused him to look as though his dog just died. When he learned I was corresponding with Dan—he looked over my shoulder in the middle of an e-mail—the color drained from his face. He shook his head and said, as he walked out of the room, 'This is just sad.' Well, part of me thinks it's sad, and part of me thinks it's about damn time."

Barker's own marriage did not survive his spiritual U-turn. (His wife, who remains faithful, remarried a Baptist minister.) And their four children?

"We both agreed that the children should never have to be in a position where they had to choose sides." One son has announced that he doesn't believe in God. One daughter "was going to a Unitarian church for a while, and I think she might be a nominal believer." A second daughter "has been a New Agey believer for a while." The third daughter is patently, traditionally religious. Barker seems pleased by the way the kids landed all across the spectrum of belief/disbelief, pixels in a snapshot of free will. Religious conversion is often explained in part as an effort to relieve the tension of uncertainty ("If the decision could be made conscious," psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wrote, "I think it would be as if that person said to himself or herself, 'I am willing to do anything—anything—in order to liberate myself from this chaos.'") But letting faith go, in the end, can bring relief, too.

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."