The first fetter to fall

It’s not easy to give up conservative Christianity. For me, it happened in steps and took about 20 years. Here’s the story of the first step.

It was the early 90s, and I was walking around in the bound journal section of the UCONN library, as I often did. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but a scientific journal on the shelf caught my eye. There were only maybe four volumes, I think. They were all by themselves on the top shelf, or at least that’s how I remember it. It was called the Creation/Evolution Journal and it was published by the American Humanist Association. I grabbed a volume and started flipping through, and that moment in time stands out as one of the turning points in my life.

As a freshman in college, I had become a fundamentalist Christian. I got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ and found a little church in my hometown that was focused on a literal interpretation of the bible. This clashed a bit with all of the geology and biology courses I was taking, so I found myself drawn to the young Earth creationist movement — a bunch of engineers who were trying to make scientific arguments that the Earth was only 5,000 years old. It allowed me to keep my faith and science too, or so I hoped.

I devoured books about creationism, trying to convince myself that science could match what I thought the Bible taught. It couldn’t, of course, but I constantly read books and articles about the flaws in evolutionary and geological theory. They all focused on the so-called gaps or “weaknesses” in the existing science. There was one book I remember in particular that laid out all of the young Earth arguments very clearly and concisely. There were ten or so key arguments, I think. I don’t even remember what they were, but I clung to them for dear life.

I was desperately trying to soothe the cognitive dissonance that haunted my mind. I tried so hard those days to maintain my faith amidst what I saw as an onslaught of doubts and temptation. To a fundamentalist, the Bible is infallible, and the whole thing stands or falls on every verse being literally true, including the book of Genesis. So this was serious business for me. My whole worldview and identity hung on this issue, or so I thought.

In my science classes, I felt like I was hiding behind enemy lines. But what I think I didn’t realize at the time was that my mind was changing imperceptibly, and what I found that day up in the library tipped the scales.

As I flipped through the Creation/Evolution journal that day, I found a scientific article that debunked every one of those key creationist arguments that I clung to so dearly. It so clearly and decisively crushed each one that I was mesmerized. I don’t remember how long I stood there or if I sat down at a carrel. But when I walked out of the library that day, I was no longer a young Earth creationist. At least that’s how I remember it.

I did not give up on Christianity. That shift was far in the future, but the die was cast, though I didn’t know it yet. It’s not easy to give up your religion, and I still had lots of stopgap measures to put in place in order to temporarily plug new holes that sprung up in my faith. I found the “old Earth creationist” movement — a few scientists who were trying to fit billions of years into the book of Genesis. So I just started reading a new set of books, and I felt a little bit of freedom from the cognitive dissonance that I’d been struggling with.

My struggle wasn’t over, but I look back on that moment with a special fondness now, like it was the first link in the chain to weaken — the first fetter to fall. That place in the library — that shelf, is a sacred place in my mind.