Losing My Religion (17 page)

“Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage, or neglect of a biblical worldview, the polling data point to widespread, blatant disobedience of clear biblical moral demands on the part of the people who allegedly are evangelical, born-again Christians,” Sider writes. “The statistics are devastating.”

George Barna doesn’t see the data as casting doubt upon faith. “The issue isn’t whether Jesus or Christianity is real,” Barna says. “The issue is, are Americans willing to put Christ first in their lives?”

But okay, I thought, let’s assume for a moment that the Body of Christ has fallen off the straight and narrow path because of man’s insatiable need for sin. After all, the Bible is filled with characters who receive clear directions from God and proceed to transgress them, starting with Adam and Eve. Every apostle, except perhaps Judas, expressed doubt at one time that Jesus was the Messiah. The most remarkable for me is Peter, who Jesus proclaims as the “rock” upon which His church will be built. Peter spent several years by the side of Jesus, witnessing His miracles and absorbing His teachings. No one could have been better prepared to defend Jesus against his enemies, proclaiming Him the Messiah. But on the night before His death, Jesus tells Peter that the disciple will deny that he knew Him three times before “the rooster crows” at sunrise. Peter looks at Jesus and says, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” (Mark 14:31)

After Jesus is arrested, the Roman authorities set out to find His accomplices. Three times Peter is asked if he knew Jesus, and three times he says no. As the rooster crows, Peter remembers his Lord’s prediction and weeps “bitterly.” If Peter—an eyewitness—couldn’t get it straight, how are we supposed to 2,000 years later?

And I already knew that the majority of Catholics ignored some of the church’s basic teachings. A recent poll co-sponsored by the
National Catholic Reporter
found that the majority American Catholics believed they did not have to obey church doctrine on abortion, birth control, divorce, remarriage or weekly attendance at Mass to be “good Catholics.” Catholic women have about the same rate of abortion as the rest of society, according to a 2002 study by Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. And 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used a modern method of contraception, according to a 2002 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I just couldn’t find any evidence within Protestantism or Catholicism that the actions of Christians, in general, showed that they took their faith seriously or that their religion made them morally or ethically better than even atheists.

But what about prayer, I thought? We Christians believe in the power of prayer. We pray in church, in the morning and at night, before our meals. We hold prayer meetings and prayer vigils. We pray 24 hours straight on the official Day of Prayer. Those of us who have a special knack for it are called “prayer warriors,” and given lists of people who need something from the Lord—a biopsy to come back negative, a teenager to get off drugs, a laid-off worker to find a job, a pregnant woman to have a healthy baby, a cancer patient to be cured. Every day, millions upon millions of believers utter prayers to the Lord. Surely I could find some scientific evidence that prayer works.

I couldn’t.

There aren’t many quality scientific studies on the efficacy of intercessory prayer. The best are double-blind studies where patients with medical conditions are unknowingly prayed for by others. A 2001 study by Columbia University did show that women undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatments benefited from the prayers of others, getting pregnant at twice the rate of those who weren’t prayed for. In the following months, however, skeptics found fatal flaws in the research methods and discovered that one of the researchers had been accused (and later convicted) of fraud. After an internal investigation, Columbia officials admitted to problems with the study and pulled it off their website. Of course, even today, Christians cite this study as proof that prayer works. As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.” Other double-blind studies failed to show any benefit to intercessory prayer.

In 2006, a few years after my investigation, Harvard researchers published a comprehensive study on 1) whether intercessory prayer works and 2) whether the knowledge of receiving it influences a patient’s recovery after heart bypass surgery. The study found that prayer didn’t have an effect on patients who were unaware of it. Patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had
more
complications than another group who received prayer unknowingly. Atheists trumpeted the news that not only didn’t prayer work, but in some cases it actually worsened the condition of patients. Those who believed in the power of prayer criticized various aspects of the study. The more sophisticated argument, I thought, was that it was nearly impossible, at least today, to conduct a valid study on the efficacy of prayer. For example, should the prayers be the same? Should the people saying the prayers and the people prayed for be of the same faith? The same denomination? And as Richard Dawkins in
The God Delusion
and Christian theologians argue, would God even consent to be a participant in a study about prayer?

“The Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne…objected to [a study on the effects of prayer] on the grounds that God answers prayers only if they are offered up for good reasons,” Dawkins writes. “Praying for somebody rather than somebody else, simply because of the fall of the dice in the design of a double-blind experiment, does not constitute a good reason. God would see through it.”

I did find one study that, because of its simplicity, seemed to answer the question. In the first scientific study of its kind, Sir Francis Galton in 1872 tested a very simple premise: Since every churchgoer in England prayed for good health for the royal family, shouldn’t British royalty live longer than other affluent classes in England?

It turned out that monarchs had the shortest life span of his sample, finishing just ahead of the clergy (who also had many people praying for them). Kings and queens and pastors, on average, died sooner than lawyers, doctors, aristocrats, officers in the Royal navy and artists.

“I show that the divines are not specially favoured in those worldly matters for which they naturally pray, but rather the contrary, a fact which I ascribe in part to their having, as a class, indifferent constitutional vigour,” wrote Galton, a half-cousin to Charles Darwin.

As for the clerics’ shorter life spans, Galton wrote, “Prayers of the clergy for protection against the perils and dangers of the night, for protection during the day, and for recovery from sickness, appear to be futile in result.”

I found one other simple argument that trumped the double-blind studies. I discovered it on a website called “Why Does God Hate Amputees?” In a straightforward manner, the website’s authors pose some uncomfortable questions for those who believe in the healing power of prayer. They set up their argument by showing that those who believe in the Bible should expect their prayers to be answered. They click off many passages where Jesus promises this.

“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” (Matthew 21:21)

 

“If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:14)

 

“Ask, and it will be given you.” (Matthew 7:7)

 

“Nothing will be impossible to you.” (Matthew 17:20)

 

“Believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:24)

 

The website shows how “miracle” cures for cancer and other terrible diseases are often used by Christians as proof of God’s all-powerful and all-loving nature. But, it then asks, what about amputees? Why doesn’t God regenerate the limbs of amputees—including the heroic young men and women in the armed forces who sacrificed a body part for their country?

“No matter how many people pray, no matter how often they pray, no matter how sincere they are, no matter how much they believe, no matter how deserving the amputee, what we know is that prayers do not inspire God to regenerate amputated legs,” the website states. “It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.”

Of course, there is a simpler explanation, more elegant, though it’s deeply dispiriting. The most logical answer to why God won’t heal amputees is that either God doesn’t care or doesn’t exist. This would also explain the lack of miraculous healings for people with Lou Gehrig’s disease, long-term quadriplegics, untreated AIDS patients and those with Parkinson’s disease, mental retardation, Down syndrome and a host of other maladies. Christian apologists offer different explanations to try to make sense of why bad things happen to good people. Among their explanations for why people who have lost limbs are never made whole by God (also detailed on the “Why Does God Hate Amputees?” website): healings for amputees aren’t part of God’s plan; the Lord sometimes answers prayers by saying “No”; God needs to remain hidden, and regenerating a limb would display the Lord’s miraculous powers too openly; God has a special purpose for amputees—just the way they are; and God answers the prayers of amputees by having scientists develop artificial limbs.

These explanations remind me of my parents’ answers when I started to question whether Santa Claus was real. How does he get down our chimney when he’s so fat? He can squeeze himself down to fit. How can he deliver presents to every child in the whole entire world in one night? He moves faster than we can imagine. How big does his bag need to get to carry all the presents? It’s a magic, bottomless bag. How can he eat cookies and milk in so many homes? He just does. My parents’ valiant but ultimately weak explanations held off the truth for a year, but eventually, like all children, I had to face the truth.

I was starting to feel the same way about Christianity and God. And now that my eyes were opening to a different reality, the evidence against the likelihood of God seemed to be found at every turn. Even suppressed doubts started to surface. I began to realize that God may not be that perfect father I longed to believe in—and be loved by. In fact, He may not even exist. Sigmund Freud put it this way, writing in 1910:

The roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather, as revivals and restorations of the young child’s idea of them…when at a later date he perceives how truly forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life, he feels his condition as he did in childhood, and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy.

 

The flaws in my belief system started to overwhelm me. I obsessed about why God received praise no matter what He did—or did not do. If a young girl is cured of cancer, “Praise God for answering our prayers!” If a young girl dies of cancer, “Praise God. Our prayers got answered, but not in the way we expected or even wanted. We don’t know His plans, but we will someday and this will all make sense. It looks like He needed her in heaven more than on Earth. She’s with Him now.”

This kind of reasoning was always on display during natural disasters. When a tsunami wiped out more than 225,000 people in Indonesia in 2004, the media featured several survivors who claimed God had miraculously answered their prayers and saved them. It made me want to scream. If He answered their prayers, why did He sit by and allow the killing of nearly a quarter-million people—many who were praying, too, as they were being washed away? It made no sense. Where were the people crying out, “Why would God let this happen? What kind of God would allow so many people to die, and create so much heartbreak and so much misery?” Why save a random person or two? Why not everyone? Or everyone
but
a random person or two—preferably atheists?

I had flashbacks to the Benny Hinn Miracle Crusade, and those scores of people who sat in the wheelchairs at the back of the arena floor. I knew they wouldn’t be cured that night; so did Benny Hinn. Only the afflicted themselves believed that they would walk home that night healthy and whole. They didn’t. But why wouldn’t God heal them, if He so willingly healed others afflicted with apparently more convenient maladies?

Could it be that a God who took a personal interest in me and the rest of humanity simply didn’t exist? I felt I was quickly approaching a turning point in my life. Admitting mistakes hadn’t been a problem for me. I have screwed up my relationship with my wife several times over 20 years. I consider myself a good father, but I have messed up many times in raising my kids. I could list each friend I betrayed or failed to stand up for. I could probably tell you every big mistake I’ve made in my journalism career—if you had enough time. James Joyce believed that “mistakes are the portals of discovery.” That’s how I’ve come to see them. My mistakes, though plentiful and painful, have made me a better person, wiser and more mature.

But I couldn’t yet admit I had made a mistake about the truth of Christianity. I was hoping for some sort of miracle that would restore my faith. Being an atheist in America—or even within my own family—was appalling to me. About 98 percent of Americans say they believe in God. I wasn’t anxious to be part of a 2 percent minority, especially knowing the passions of the majority. Besides, what if I were wrong? It wasn’t the most positive incentive, but the specter of hell did keep me clinging to religion; facing an eternity in Hades was a big price to pay if I were wrong. And if I admitted to my disbelief, what would I tell my kids? It was one thing to send myself to hell; it would be unthinkable to guide my children along that path.