I became a Christian because I saw looked at the people I considered to be moral heroes, people who embodied the kinds of values I wanted to live by, such as Martin Luther King; Mother Theresa; Deitrich Bonhoeffer; Norman Morrison, the Quaker who burned himself to death near the White House to protest the Vietnam War; my friend Lance, who runs a homeless shelter; and Guy Theodore, who founded a charity hospital in Pignon, Haiti, I found that the majority of them were not only Christians, but claimed that their Christianity informed their values and gave them the moral courage to live out those values faithfully.
I had experiences that gave the impression of originating outside my mind and of being divine. I made the decision to respond to them not by asking whether they in fact did originate outside me or were merely psychological phenomena, but by seeking to use them as an inspiration and a motivation for living morally, in the hope that I might become more like those people I admired.
Those people, and others I came to know, said that they found moral guidance and inspiration in Scripture, so I sought to do the same. It didn’t matter to me whether any particular part of it, or in fact any of it at all, was historically true or divinely inspired. What mattered was that people I knew and admired or read about and admired claimed that reading it had made them better. I never found much inspiration in reading the Bible, though I did find much in prayer and in Communion and in common worship. But the Bible nevertheless gave me a history of other people who had felt inspired to live in certain ways, and was a sort of constitution for the community in which I worshipped and which continued to give me inspiration.
Some passages of Scripture didn’t seem to have a clear moral lesson, and some passages seemed to imply lessons that were repugnant. But my friends and earlier Christians had found ways of interpreting these stories that inspired positive values in them, and I learned to do the same. When the interpretation was unclear, I sought whatever interpretation would inspire me to be better. That meant I had to bring my own morals and values to the game; I didn’t derive my morals from Scripture, but that was ok. None of my friends and none of the people I admired suggested that I should derive my morals purely from Scripture or that I shouldn’t start from my own moral reasoning, which after all had led me to Christianity and Scripture to begin with.
I was perfectly aware that someone who wanted to justify racism, hatred, violence or other bad values could use the Bible to do so, but that wasn’t important, any more than the fact that philosophy or literature or science could be used to promote badness. What mattered was whether I could use the Bible to become a better person, more loving, more accepting, more generous, more courageous, more giving. And to be perfectly honest, I found that I could.
Eventually, I decided that I couldn’t forever bracket aside the question of factuality, either about some of the stories or about my own spiritual experiences. And I knew before I even asked myself the question that none of it was factual in my opinion. Once I admitted that to myself, the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.
After all of that was over and I began identifying myself as an atheist, I even began to have doubts about whether those people I’d admired were in fact worthy of admiration. (My opinion on Mother Theresa, for example, has changed.) But I still think the values I tried to inspire in myself were mostly good ones, and religion did help me live those values. It’s harder, for me at least, to be good when I don’t feel loved all the time, when I don’t tell myself that there is a higher purpose to it all, when I don’t see the person who cut me off as a beloved child of God. I think I do pretty well, anyway, but it is a bit harder.
