Monterrey

Quarter to eleven, Sunday morning, and I'm an atheist at a Baptist church service. I'm not here to ridicule or debate anyone, and I didn't come here as an anthropologist intent on studying some primitive species. I came here to learn. Let me explain.

I was born and grew up in a nonreligious family. My father is an atheist, but not the evangelical type, and my mother believes in a god, but doesn't seem to care what he thinks. Nevertheless, I spent most of my childhood taking it for granted that there was some kind of sentient being responsible for everything around me. Growing up, I was surrounded by people, friends and classmates, who believed in god and went to church every week. I thought they must have a pretty good reason to believe all of that, and I didn't know enough about the world to dispute it. So whenever they gasped and gave a wide-eyed stare while asking why I never went to church, all I could do was smile weakly and say, "we just don't do that".

Honestly, the idea of going to church scared me for quite a while. I understood the basic idea of heaven and hell, and which people go where. I figured that since I wasn't born into that sort of thing, that I was screwed from the very start. A passage I once read from the Book of Matthew didn't help at all, it read, "all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men."

Well great, I thought, whoever this Holy Ghost is, I must have pissed him off at some point or another. Not that I knew what the Holy Ghost was, I thought he must be the guy who keeps roll at every church on earth.

I remember a conversation I once had with my best friend on the bus to school. We were in the seventh grade and it was around Lent, I think. I could tell there was something off about him from the moment he sat down next to me. He started talking to me about sin and how so many of the things we do in our everyday lives are actually offensive to God. I had never seen him like this before, and I tried to lighten the mood with a joke, but that just upset him even more. He told me, "I just want you to be careful", before getting off at our school.

The whole conversation freaked me out. Not so much because of what he said, but because of the effect his faith had had on his personality. Looking back, that was the first time I regarded religion as something more than just foreign and vaguely frightening. For some time after that, I couldn't shake the thought that there was something distinctly wrong with all of it, but for years I couldn't quite put it into words.

That all changed when I was around sixteen and I found the book The End of Faith by Sam Harris. Not only did Harris articulate things that, up until that time, I had only felt about religion, it went a step further and asserted that religion was, in fact, a threat to the survival of the human species.

Yeah, I thought, after finishing the book, these people are ruining the world! Imagine what we could have done if there were no Dark Ages, we could have been exploring other galaxies by now! At that point, I became what some people regard as the stereotypical "angry atheist". I looked around and saw people who were ruled by superstitions that governed every aspect of their lives. These superstitions were held by everyone from our next-door neighbors to the highest-ranking members of our government. Throughout history, they'd been used to rationalize racism, sexism, genocides, conquests, crusades, and terrible music. So yes, I became a little angry. I think this sort of anger is something that every atheist has to deal with at some point, and it can be hard to get over it. Some people never get over it.

After a while, however I realized that there was no way I'd be able to change the world by aggressively challenging the beliefs of others in online message boards and school classrooms.  Worse yet, doing so made me no better than the door-to-door missionaries and street proselytizers I enjoyed mocking. Eventually, I concluded that if there was to be any change at all, it had to come from me first. This was when I decided that I had to learn everything I could about religion before I could even think about humanity giving it up in favor of science and reason. Considering the enormous impact the world's largest faiths have had on human history, I figured I owed it to my species to learn as much about them as possible. It was that realization that, at first, led me to the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

The ICF is a Christian organization at Texas Tech University whose mission is "to spread the love of Jesus and to reach our campus by being an authentic, highly committed, missional community". In the weeks leading up to the first meetings I attended, I had been bothered by the knowledge that despite its massive importance in American culture, I knew almost nothing about the Bible and the religion based around it. I approached the ICF kiosk on the Tech campus with this in mind, and was surprised (and somewhat relieved) that they were highly receptive to the idea of an atheist coming to them to learn about their beliefs. Maybe they suspected that I was secretly interested in becoming a Christian, and I wonder if they're even slightly disappointed that my beliefs haven't changed significantly in the time I've spent with them.

After dozens of group meetings and Bible study sessions, I felt like I was beginning to get the picture with regard to the Christian mindset, but I also understood that if I was going to expand my understanding any further, I would have to do more than just hang out with a Christian group from the safety of my university campus. I decided I needed to get outside of my comfort zone. That's what led me to the Monterrey Baptist Church. Before I attended a service there, I decided I would interview a member of the ICF, to answer a few lingering questions I had
about Christianity.

The person I choose to interview was a guy named Irvin, who had always been able to help me through whatever misunderstandings or misconceptions I had about the Christian faith. He was of a very modern breed of new Christian, he had hair down to the small of his back and  a Guy Fawkes mustache. He listened to Christian metal music and drove a pickup truck. The interview was about as informal as they come. It was at the last minute when I decided to interview Irvin, so although I had a general idea of the kind of questions I wanted to ask him, they weren't written down anywhere, and I eventually found myself coming up with my next question while listening to him answer the previous one.

I started by asking him how he came to be a Christian. He told me it was when he was eight years old, and he had just seen a film about a man who leaves the gang lifestyle in order to embrace Jesus.

"I remember being there," he said, "and that's the first time when I chose to walk up to the front, after praying, and make a conscious choice to follow Jesus."

I thought that sounded like a strange thing to do at eight years old. Later on, I asked if he ever struggled with any doubt in his faith. On this topic, he was very clear.

"I can honestly say," he told me "that there's never been a point in my life where I've doubted that a god exists." This surprised me. He went on to say that even though he never doubted the existence of God, he was frequently unsure of what direction God wants him to go in life, and whether he is deserving of the love of God. I couldn't help but wonder if that was any different from the way some people worry about whether they're living up to the expectations of their parents, or themselves. I thought, what's it like, living under that kind of idea?

The remaining questions were more or less about aspects of the Christian faith that I found confusing. He gave what is probably the most simple and straightforward explanation of the Holy Trinity I have ever heard, describing it as different manifestations of a singular god. In the end, the interview was shorter than I would have liked, owing mostly to my lack of preparation, but I could at least say I walked away from it knowing a little bit more about Christianity than I did before. It was with this knowledge that I came to the Monterrey Baptist Church the next Sunday.

The first thing I noticed about the church was that the fellowship hall was huge, or at least much larger than one would expect looking from the outside. It was roughly circular in shape, with the walls about twenty meters outward from the center of the room, and the ceiling rising to fifteen meters at its highest point.  The place had something of a hybrid aesthetic that juxtaposed the traditional with the modern, it was as if they were trying to tell us something like, "we're not the Baptist church your Grandfather attended, we're a little bit more progressive than that". The next two things I noticed were the somber organ music floating through the halls of the church, and the high-tech audio/visual control center in the very back of the fellowship hall.

I sat down in a pew midway between the front and back of the congregation and took some time to observe some of my fellow churchgoers. What immediately struck me was that as a whole, they skewed quite heavily toward the older demographic. There were a good number of families with young children scattered about, but at last half of the people seated around me were over sixty years of age. Another thing that surprised me was the wide variety of dress styles among the congregants. They ranged from the older men in dress shirts, ties, and blazers to the two young boys seated directly in front of me who wore jeans and t-shirts and spent most of the service playing games on their mother's iPhone, which is something that irritated me just slightly more than I think it should have. I thought, well I got dressed up and I'm paying attention, and I don't even believe in this stuff, what's your excuse, kiddo?

Suddenly the organ music began to wind down, and the service proper began with a small, but reasonably talented choir and orchestra filing into the front of the hall and singing what I assumed to be a traditional Baptist hymn. I must say this was probably my favorite part of the whole experience. This song was fairly catchy compared to the mind-numbing Christian contemporary pieces the Inter-Varsity group sings at all of their meetings. And throughout the song, the projector screen behind the choir displayed images of stars, galaxies, and nebulae, which I thought formed an interesting and oddly appropriate backdrop to the music. For some reason, I thought that if anything, they'd be showing images of majestic mountains, cloud formations, and waves crashing on rocky shores, but the high-resolution photos of the Andromeda galaxy and Pillars of Creation were a pleasant surprise.

As the song ended, the pastor approached the podium. He was a round-faced, bespectacled man with a receding hairline. He looked like he could have been a high-school biology teacher. He thanked us for coming to worship with them, and asked the congregation to stand up and greet one another. After shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with a few complete strangers, it occurred to me that there was a very important reason that the church, as a vital institution, has endured for so long in American culture. It's not just a place of worship, it serves as the centerpiece of communities. Entire social lives are built around what goes on in places like this. People gather here every Sunday to talk, socialize, and gossip. Their children make friends at Sunday school and vacation Bible camp. One might just as well say that this is the true function of the church in America, and the promise of eternal salvation is just frosting on the cake.

After the congregation finished wishing each other a good morning, an assistant pastor
took to the podium and began the sermon proper. The topic was "Bold Proclamations of our Faith", and the pastor spent most of the sermon telling the congregation how to demonstrate their faith in God in their everyday lives. Occasionally, he would make a very pointed statement, and one or two of the congregants would respond with an amen, and I wondered if it was always the same people who did that every Sunday.

When the sermon ended, a teenage girl walked up to the podium and, with a voice like a pop country artist, sang another hymn before being replaced by another teenage girl who tearfully gave a closing prayer. I looked around, and some of the people near me were fighting back tears as well. As I witnessed this, I remembered what Irvin told me about his doubts over whether he was good enough for God. This is one of the things I dislike the most about Christianity and religion in general.  I feel bad when someone whom I'm fairly sure is a genuinely good person has to live in fear that they're not measuring up to the expectations of their creator. It seems unfair that their internal monologue should be mistaken for an external entity that is constantly asking more of them. This is a guy who, after hearing me mention that I wouldn't be eating dinner with him and the rest of the Inter-Varsity group due to a lack of funds, offered to pay for my meal like it was nothing. I felt terrible afterward, but he just seemed happy to be doing something nice for a fellow human being. A healthy amount of self-awareness is fine, but when someone like Irvin is constantly going out of his way to please a being that is, by his own admission, beyond his comprehension, I can't help but feel that that's not exactly a healthy relationship.

The rest of the service consisted of several hymns sung one after the other by the choir and the rest of the congregation, as well as the pastor and all of the assistant pastors. During the hymns, some of the older congregants lifted their heads and spread their arms apart, looking much like a child wanting to be picked up by their parent. I wondered what that felt like, believing yourself to be bathed in a love that is too perfect for your comprehension. I thought about my experimentation with psychedelic drugs earlier in my life and wondered if it was anything like that.

After the session of marathon hymn-singing, the service closed with a few announcements from the head pastor, and I walked out of the fellowship hall feeling a little bit like the only sober person in a car full of drunk people. That's not to say that I'm smart and they're all idiots. It's more like I was surrounded by a group of people who were experiencing something that was simply beyond my understanding. In my quest to become more knowledgeable about the idea of religious faith, I'd come out even more bewildered than I'd been going in. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it only meant that I had much more to learn about these people and their beliefs. But at the same time, I couldn't help but feel like I was missing something. Like there was something that I should have easily figured out while I was in there that would have made their songs and their words of praise make perfect sense all at once.