Bridgeport, Alabama, 1898

Tommy Lee married Kathryn on February 8,1948, and the two of them moved from their “cute little bungalow” in Jackson, Mississippi, to an unpainted shack without electricity or running water at Route 4, Bogue Chitto. Tommy’s parents lived in that shack, his 72-year-old mother, Fannie, going blind and his 76-year-old father, Tom, becoming senile. The plan was for Kathryn to take care of  “the old folks” while running a little country store that Tommy built in the front yard, and for him to continue working 55-hour weeks as a carpenter.

On March 1, 1949, Dr. Bob Massengill delivered their first-born at daybreak while a light snow fell. He remained my doctor until he died of a heart-attack at an Ole Miss game some eighteen years later. He stands out as being one of the few people I grew up among who had more than a high school education if that (my father dropped out in the 8^th grade). Doctors were more approachable then, and my mother respected Dr. Bob in a way that she didn’t respect other men, so maybe that’s another reason I remember him.

Tommy’s younger sister, Annie Bel, lived within sight of our house, but she disliked Tommy and he prided himself upon his indifference to her, so her six children—who were the only kids I had to play with—disliked me. As alienation went, my mother did no better than I—with the area women, anyway—partly because she assumed that the short-pants she had worn in Jackson would be appropriate in Bogue Chitto. Since the neighboring women wore longish dresses, sometimes bonnets, and regarded skin as sin, it was a strange assumption that led to her being called “Tommy’s City Girl.” She always was exceptionally naive, which seems strange given that she was born to an unmarried fourteen rebel who moved her from pillow-to-post while working as a prostitute, a madam, a fortune teller, and a thief.

Kathryn had been married before to a man named Dustin who missed the birth of their second child because he was fifty miles distant in the bed of another woman. He died not long afterwards leaving Kathryn broke and with two children during the latter years of the Great Depression. She couldn’t support the children, so the boy went to live with Dustin’s sister in Texas and the girl with his brother in Mississippi while Kathryn strove for better times through her job at Sears. My father was supposed to insure those better times, but the caretakers of Kathryn’s children opposed the marriage because they considered Tommy scary if not insane. I don’t know the details of their complaints, so I can only provide a few possibilities, namely that he was bisexual, paranoid, morbidly shy, given to berating God loudly and with frightening profanity, prone to frequent bouts of irrational rage so intense as to threaten violence (which sometimes occurred before I was born), ran bootleg during the ‘30s, was married at least four times, and wore women’s clothes under his carpenter’s overalls. Given all this, the marriage looked like an act of desperation on my mother’s part, which seems likely given that she was a woman of 35 with little self-respect, two children, and no obvious affection for her husband.

When her children’s caretakers saw the shack that their niece and nephew were to live in, it was the final straw. The younger child, Jim Billy, was spirited away to Port Arthur, Texas, where he grew up, and his sister, Anne, was instructed by her aunt to say that she wanted to stay where she was. I’ve heard that a custody battle followed, and that the court agreed that the children were better off without Tommy in their lives, but I have no particulars. I never had a relationship with Jim Billy because he never wanted one. I did enjoy occasional visits with Anne, but the last one was in 1993 when I visited her at her home in Florida. We’ve since corresponded, but even that ended today when she wrote to say that I would not hear from her again. For decades, we had been bound primarily by our differences over religion, with her being a liberal Christian and me an atheist. Over those years, I perceived her as becoming more and more attacking. She consistently denied this, and I refused ever more vociferously to accept her denial, so it seems that she had had enough. She was the last blood relation with whom I had a connection. 

Carol Gay was born in 1954, and the five years between us constituted too big of an age difference for us to be playmates. Looking back, I wish I had found it in me to be her protector, which is my image of what a good brother should be, but it never occurred to me at the time. I just saw her as a shrill, sobbing, screaming, door-slamming, out-of-control hellion who left my shins black-and-blue with kicks that my mother expected me to ignore while she did her best to “get some food down the poor little thing.” Indeed, Gay looked like an anorexic long before most people had ever heard the word. Think Death Camp inmate, and that’s what Gay looked like except that Gay had hair—or at least she used to; I wouldn’t know anymore. I didn’t hate her, but I felt little affection for her either. The feeling persists, for we have not spoken in twenty years, and I have no thought that we ever will speak. The final blow to our relationship was caused by her disappointment with our father’s will, and the only way she will feel better about it is if I share the inheritance, the problem being that I had rather see the money burned than for a penny of it to go to her.

My Grandpa died in Whitfield State Mental Hospital when I was four, and I have but two memories of him. One was when he and Dad accompanied me as I searched the weeds and outhouses for my Easter Basket (Easter being a major event in my childhood), and another when he scolded me for eating chicken feed alongside the chickens. The sunshine of my life was my Granny, and I was the sunshine of hers, but I wish she hadn’t made a point of telling people that she loved me more than she had ever loved anyone, including her children and her other grandchildren, because it made my situation with my aunt and cousins more difficult. Aside from Peggy, I love Granny above anyone, although she died when I was twelve. I didn’t realize she was ¾ American Indian until I grew up because no one told me, and because, as a child, I didn’t think to connect her features with her ancestry. In the Bridgeport, Alabama, photo from 1898 (note the beehives in the left of the picture), she is standing next to my future grandfather, Thomas, who is holding their first child, Pat. His parents, James and Caroline, are seated. People sometimes comment on how unfriendly Caroline looks, but I just want to crawl onto her white apron because all I see in her face is sweetness. She died unexpectedly in 1908, three days after her husband’s death and 41 years before my birth. I grieve that I never knew her.

My Grandpa and Great Grandpa were Church of Christ preachers, and I have long wondered how they would feel about my atheism. If they did what Church of Christ people are supposed to do, they would hate and shun me, yet if they were open enough to meet me at a heart level, they would understand that I live by the best light I can muster based upon decades of diligent thought and study. Still, I worry about this. Just leaving the Church of Christ was enough to cause some people to turn against me, becoming an atheist led still more to drop away. As to true intimacy, Peggy has been the one constant in my life, and I trust that, as she is, so would my Granny and Great Grandma have been. If only they might still exist, and I might someday meet them.

Why would a preacher become an atheist?

The usual scenario is that a Biblically naive young person goes away to seminary with an interest in religion and a devotion to God. For the first time, he (usually) studies the Bible from a critical perspective. Doubts are born, but he prays for faith and does his best to push them away. Two decades later, he has been a minister for 18 years, and his doubts have multiplied. At long last he is forced to admit, at least to himself, that he has become that vilest of filth, that most loathsome of vermin, that veritable dung of Satan: an atheist.

Unfortunately, his job requires him to worship a specific triune deity, and the same church that endorses his paycheck owns his house. His parents, his wife, and his children, are probably religious. He has no training in anything but religion, and his every friend is committed to religion. If you were that person, what would you do? I think I would leave, and/or shoot myself, and/or go crazy. I might even build a new and deeply rewarding life based on rationality. Some do.

The men in the 1967 photo are Church of Christ preachers who had come together for a county-wide revival in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Three of the six were from the area, and I knew them well. I was 18 at the time, and had been struggling to keep my faith since I was eleven, yet I still envisioned preachers as residing in that rarefied realm referred to as "Men of God." I was so enamored by the group shown that if someone at the revival had dropped dead, I was certain that the combined prayers of these six men could bring him back.

Buford Stewart is second from right. When his little country church offered him a raise, he turned it down because he wanted to embrace God's ideal of voluntary poverty. I slept with him--platonically--when he took me along on a revival to Kentucky. The man on the far right is Norman Miller who took me to Indiana on another revival. They loved me, but if they were still alive and ran into me today, their version of the "God of love" would command that they turn me over to him for the everlasting agony that, in their view, I would so richly deserve.*


*"And whoever shall not...hear your words, when you depart out of that house...shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment..." Matthew 10:14-15. 

An experiment in shame

When people praise me for my bravery in sharing so much about myself, I think it means they would be embarrassed to do the same. Ironically, I’m more like them than they know because I too withhold things that would embarrass me. And what sorts of things embarrass me? The ones I haven’t forgiven myself for. I’m going to experiment with sharing some of these things in the area of religion. I’ve chosen religion because I’ve long been bothered by the fact that I write about it a great deal, yet I’ve purposefully withheld some things that are important for a proper understanding of my journey. Such withholding constitutes lying, and I’m here to correct my error.

I’ve belonged to four churches. I was baptized into Central Church of Christ when I was twelve, which is about the customary age. What you do when you want to join the Church of Christ is to walk to the front when the invitational is sung and tell the preacher what you want. He then asks you in front of everyone if you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior; you say yes; and he baptizes you right then and there for fear you might go to hell if the ceremony is delayed and you die in the interim. The country church at which my best friend, Grady, and I spontaneously walked to the front one night during a revival didn’t have a baptistery, so we were taken to one in town.

My second church was The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, which I started attending when I was eighteen. The Church of Christ was as plain as concrete, both in its looks and in the way the service was conducted. By contrast, the Episcopal Church was a veritable heaven of beauty and ritual. They still used the formal 1927 liturgy, and then there were all the decorative accouterments (the photo is of Redeemer Church the night Peggy and I were married in 1971).

I also adored the priest, Father Hale, although I didn’t realize how much I adored him until years later when I got a better handle on how rare good men are. He was so clumsy at conducting the ritual that I think he must have had a learning disability, but this failing seemed like nothing compared to his gentle, loving, unpretentious nature. He listened to me more intently than any man I had ever known.

When Father Hale moved away, the fact that I had no faith settled back upon me like an icy fog. It wasn’t long before I started attending American Atheist meetings 100 miles away in New Orleans, and I eventually became a non-resident editor for American Atheist Magazine. I knew several inspirational people in that organization, most notably Madalyn Murray O’Hair who was the most imposing person I’ve ever met. If she had possessed physical strength and ferocity to equal her mental strength and ferocity, she would have scared people off the sidewalk. She asked me to call her Grandma because she liked my writing. This was in the early or mid-eighties.

My next adventure in faith—or the lack thereof—started in 1988 at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis (you would be corrected if you called it a church). Its minister, Khoren Arisian, and most its large membership were atheistic, and I took to it like a duck to water. This was during my group marriage phase, so Vicki and I joined together in 1989 simply by walking into the business office one day and signing the registry. Peggy never had any interest in religion, atheism, or anything in-between, so she stayed home. If she and I hadn’t moved to Oregon when things with Vicki fell apart in 1990, who knows but what I would still be a Unitarian.

St. Jude’s Roman Catholic. This is the one that I most hate to tell you about. First, some background. Peggy and I went through years of hard times in the ‘90s, much of it due to me being in a state of deep anguish for reasons that I won’t go into. In my desperation, I attended an Episcopal Church for a few months, but I thought it seemed more like a social club than a place of worship. I then took a class called A Course in Miracles at a Unity Church (not to be confused with Unitarian). This was way out in woo-woo land, but I grabbed onto it like a life preserver for about six weeks, after which I realized that there was no way I could ever really force monistic idealism down my throat.

Then, I started thinking about all those Medieval Catholic statues, crucifixes, triptychs, and so forth at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I had been blown away by their antiquity, their beauty, the talent that went into them, and the deep reverence I felt in their presence; I grieved that they were now 2,000 miles away. And so it was that I came to long for the art, tradition, architecture, and liturgy of Catholicism, this despite the fact that I despise almost everything else about the church. I soon signed up for confirmation classes at St. Mary’s, the oldest and largest Catholic Church in town. Doing this was an instance of magical thinking (more accurately, magical hoping) on my part, my hope being that the very act of becoming a Catholic would cause me to feel deeply connected to many things, for instance, the sense of oneness of which the mystics write, and to the ancient carvers and painters who created all that wonderful art. I believed that such a connection would heal me of my anguish.

Unfortunately, St. Mary’s was a conservative parish, and the priest who interviewed me quickly concluded that I was a poor candidate for Catholicism. No problem, I just drove across town to St. Jude’s, the most liberal Catholic church in the area, and the priest there was fine with me joining. I’ve since wondered if I might have been a tad less forthcoming with him than I was with the priest at St. Mary’s, but that was too long ago for me to even remember what we talked about. The class lasted for several months and climaxed in a confirmation ceremony. At the class’s outset, everyone was assigned a sponsor to meet with him or her once or twice a week until confirmation, and then to vouch for his or her worthiness to join at the start of the confirmation ceremony.

My sponsor was a man named Gary who had devoted years to the study of church history and theology. As did the priest at St. Mary’s, Gary quickly concluded that I wasn’t fit to be a Catholic, but he said he would continue as my sponsor if I was hell-bent on joining. Then, he looked me dead in the eye and warned that I would never be forgiven if I should join another church after converting to Catholicism. Because he didn’t respect me, Gary gave as little of himself to our relationship as he could without violating his conscience, and this discouraged me from volunteering information or even asking very many questions. As for the class itself, I enjoyed that very much.

I was horribly sick with a cold the night of Holy Saturday, 1999, when the class was to be confirmed, but the priest strongly encouraged me to attend, so I did, only to discover that a Catholic with a cold feels just as crummy as a non-Catholic with a cold. Aside from feeling a little disappointed (though not surprised) about that, I was so touched by the ceremony that I shed tears. This embarrassment occurred when the time came to baptize those who had never been baptized (my Church of Christ baptism was considered sufficient). One of the baptismal candidates was a fourteen-year-old girl whom I had known through the class. As she stood there in her new shoes and lovely white dress, I felt that I was looking upon the very essence of sweetness and innocence, and I wanted more than anything to protect it and was sick to the heart that I could not. I determinedly held myself together until the priest poured the Holy Water over her head, and then my tears flowed. After my confirmation, I attended mass no more than five times before I took my little crucifix off the wall and packed it away with my rosary. The first priest and Gary had been right.

Since then

I’ve gone to Sunday school from time to time at liberal churches, not because I had any thought of joining, but because I lack a permanent community in my life and because I enjoy studying at least parts of the Bible. Church is also the only place where anyone ever seems to discuss morality, and, aside from fraternities, it’s the only place a person can participate in a communal ritual. I might still attend an occasional Sunday School session if living with pain didn’t tire me so.

I remember desperately trying to sleep—in a recliner—on a particular night after the second of my three shoulder surgeries. I had been in significant pain for several years by then, and I had ice packs on both shoulders, a heating pad on my chest (to keep the ice packs from freezing me), and was loopy on narcotics. As I sat there, hour after weary hour, despondent and hurting too much to sleep (at least without taking so many drugs that I would have feared for my life), I began to wonder if it just might possibly make me feel even a little bit better to pray. I got to wondering this because I was becoming focused on suicide, and on that particular night, I had the urge to get out of my recliner and run head-long into the stone fireplace mantle. In my desperation, I finally started to pray, but I didn’t get far because I immediately felt completely asinine for betraying my intellectual and moral integrity yet again in a desperate attempt to attract the notice of a deity that I didn’t believe in and would have hated if I did.

Perhaps you’re wondering why, instead of joining churches, didn’t I join some other kind of religious group. Well, there was that Unitarian Society, but it’s true that I’ve put a lot of energy into Christianity. This was largely because it was almost certainly my forbearers’ faith (my white forbearers anyway—I’m ¼ Native American) for well over a thousand years, and some of them were even clergymen. I wanted to tap into feeling that I was a part of that history and community because I often feel crushed by the thought that I am but a dot in time and space, a dot that is completely cut off from every other dot, all of which are themselves cut off from one another. Sure, I checked out Baha’ism, Buddhism, Wiccanism, New Age Sufism, and lots more isms, but all I felt a familial connection to was Christianity and Native American spirituality, and I never could find much about the latter that interested me.

During those hard times of the ‘90s, I think I mostly wanted to believe that there exist these wonderful places where everyone really is loved and really is welcome. I knew that was hopelessly naïve, and I doubted that such an institution would welcome atheists if it did exist. But then what about John Spong, the atheist who became an Episcopal bishop? From the time I joined the Episcopal Church in the ‘70s, I had been astounded by its diversity of belief, and this was why, in the ‘90s, I considered returning. I thought it would be fairly easy to find a spot where I could sit comfortably under the Episcopal umbrella much as Jonah did under his vine.

However, there is one way in which I differ dramatically from every Christian in the world—even the atheistic ones—and it is that Christians respect the person and message of Jesus (not that they agree about who he was or what he meant to communicate), whereas I view Jesus as delusional, bigoted, hypocritical, conceited, contradictory, judgmental, bad-tempered, nasty to his family, a purveyor of bad ideas, quite possibly fictional, and so on. This means that I wouldn’t be fully accepted—or fully accepting, for that matter—in a church presided over by the most non-dogmatic atheistic Christian in the world. The Bible is simply too divisive even among those who don’t take it literally. In my relationship with religion, I spent a lot of time determinedly trying to ride a horse that was clearly dead. My attempts to be a Christian after any fashion were doomed by my twelfth year to be disheartening and self-destructive. I sought comfort at the cost of integrity and didn’t get it anyway.

You trash him now, but what would you do if God suddenly started talking to you from your monitor?

If he didn’t resort to the cheap trick he played on Job (scaring him half out of his wits) I would say, “Hello, God.” Then, I would ask which God he was unless, of course, he had his name on his shirt above the little alligator. If he said, “I am Jehovah, the God of the Bible,” I would say: [After much thought, I’m going to delete what I wrote here because leaving it would offend people for no good reason that I can see.] Afterwards, I would stop smoking pot and consult a psychiatrist.


So, how did my experiment with sharing something shameful go? Writing helped me to better understand why I behaved as I did, and, although I still consider it regrettable, I’m less ashamed of it. I doubt that there are many who, if under sufficient stress, wouldn’t violate their integrity, but it’s not useful to hold onto mortification, and it’s probably not even justified. In my case, a scary religion got me early and held me tight, so given the kind of person I am, it’s unreasonable to expect that my escape would be a straight path. I think it might even represent the biggest battle of my life.

Baptists, Atheists and Christers

The Southern Baptist Church is the second largest Protestant denomination in America, and by far the largest in Mississippi. Like a few other churches, it got its start during the American Civil War (1861-65) when Northern Christians used their Bibles to prove that God thoroughly loathes slavery while Southern Christians used their Bibles (effectively, I thought) to prove that God simply adores slavery, and that, as an added bonus, slavery gives white people a convenient opportunity to preach Jesus to all them poor benighted niggers who would otherwise go to hell, and who don’t have brains enough to be anything but slaves anyway.

My church, the Church of Christ (henceforth Christer), was a distant second in size to the Southern Baptist in Mississippi. The two churches were so much alike that you would be pressed to tell one from the other except that the Baptists had pianos and Sunday School literature. The Christers shunned musical instruments because “Jesus and the apostles didn’t use them,” and they shunned books other than the Bible because “Jesus and the apostles didn’t use them.” You might not consider such differences important, but the way the Christers saw it, “any deviation from the clear and concise Word of God” was intentional and would land you in hell.

Did you have Baptist friends, and did you worry about them going to hell?

Yes, I had Baptist friends, and, no, I didn’t worry about them going to hell because I was taught that they defied God by choice. Such a condemnatory attitude toward other beliefs shouldn’t be taken to imply that Christers spoke with one voice. The far left Christers allowed women to teach Sunday School; the middle-of-the-road churches (which I was in) wouldn’t let them talk at all; and the far right churches were the same way, but they also limited themselves to one “cup” for the weekly communion (that’s how many Jesus used), while the other Christers used stackable trays that contained enough tiny glasses for everyone. I thought these were way cool, and I loved the smell of Mogen David, so I always made myself available to “serve The Lord’s Supper.” I also said prayers, led the singing (badly), and delivered sermons. I think it was assumed that I would go into the ministry, but when I stopped attending church after my teenage efforts to liberalize it failed, nobody came looking for me.

I considered the Baptist Church hypocritical and insufferably plebeian, but my main objections were that, as I was told, Jesus didn’t get himself crucified so his church could be named after John the Baptist; and I added to this my own observation that my Baptist friends didn’t know much about the Bible. Christer preachers said this was because they didn’t read it; they just read Sunday School books that contained “man’s interpretations.” What more proof could anyone want that Baptists deserved eternal hell for “living in open defiance of God’s Holy Word”? Of course, Methodists and Presbyterians were even worse because they sprinkled babies; Catholics were worse yet because they worshipped the pope; and Jews were worse than all of them because they hated Jesus. There were people worse than Jews though—atheists, godless professors, secular humanists, and Communists. You will note that the common thread (the “underlying evil” as the Christers called it) in all these groups was atheism. As they saw it, the only thing worse than an atheist was a Christer who became an atheist because God wouldn’t forgive him even if he changed his mind.

I have found it indescribably strange and hurtful to become the very person whom I was told, week in and week out for eighteen years, is the most foul piece of Satanic excrement in the whole universe, and then to look at the institution that told me this and to think the very same thing about its approach to truth: namely that of basing it upon sketchy stories in an ancient, contradictory, and historically inaccurate book by unknown authors, a book which presents a “fully human yet fully divine” being named Jesus who was likewise fully God yet one-third God. The mischief that has come from accepting such an authority as the starting place for ethics—and even science—is too great for me to wrap my mind around. And yet some Christians say that this authority is really very good—perfect even—and, properly understood, couldn’t possibly inspire the violence, oppression, and other evil acts that other Christians perform everyday. When I hear such statements, I wonder where the line is between religious faith and delusion, the two appearing indistinguishable to me.