Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why by Greta Christina

Author:Greta Christina [Christina, Greta]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Dirty Heathen Publishing
Published: 2014-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The Clergy

Step One: Contact The Clergy Project.

Step Two: Update your resume.

Step Three: Follow the rest of the guidelines in this book.

(Note on Step One: If you’ve only recently decided that you’re an atheist, you may also want to contact Recovering From Religion.)

I probably don’t have to tell you this—but you’re in an unusual position, and an unusually difficult one. Many atheists worry about letting down their family, their spouses or partners, their friends, when they come out as an atheist. As a clergyperson, you have to worry about letting down your entire community. At the same time that you’re completely re-thinking your career and your future, your livelihood and indeed your very survival, you have to worry about a whole community feeling betrayed.

There’s another factor that’s likely to make this harder for you. One of the main ways that religion perpetuates itself is through authority. Human beings have an innate, hard-wired tendency to trust people in authority. (Some of us less so, others more, but we all have it.) And people have a strong tendency to trust figures of religious authority. They assume that if their clergyperson—their priest, their rabbi, their pastor, their imam, their guru—is telling them things about their god or gods or the supernatural world, then they must know what they’re talking about. If people are having questions or doubts about their faith, they often assume that their clergyperson has the answers—and that therefore those answers exist, and they don’t have to worry about them. For many people, “understanding their religion and asking hard questions about it” is a job they’re perfectly willing to outsource. (And many clergypeople are all too willing to play into this: saying things like, “have faith,” “let go of doubt,” “trust in the Lord,” “mysterious ways,” and so on, when people come to them with difficult questions about their religion.)

So when you come out as atheist, you’re not just disappointing your membership in you, personally. You’re making them question their own faith. You’re weakening one of the main pillars that their faith is founded on. When their clergyperson takes on that outsourced job of understanding religion and asking hard questions about it—and the result of that job is, “Oh, wait a minute, none of this makes sense and there’s no good reason to think any of it is true”—most people aren’t going to like it.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Not in the slightest. That is a perfectly fine and reasonable thing to do, and you don’t have to feel guilty about it. The truth is that there are no gods, that religion doesn’t make sense, that there isn’t a good reason to believe that any of it is true. Once you’ve accepted that, it’s right and honest to be willing to say so. But most people aren’t going to like it.

Some people may even get ugly about it. When former local Methodist pastor Teresa MacBain came out as an atheist, she was shunned by her community; she got hateful

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.