Kenneth W Daniels
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Rebuilding one's social network outside the church

12/26/2011

 
The other day I received this from a reader: “I would be interested to know how you have rebuilt your social network outside of the church. Although I feel trapped inside my own mind currently, I fear the ‘aloneness’ that I may experience once I do eventually ‘come out.’”

I’m taking a stab and responding to this, not because I serve as a model of how to rebuild one’s social network after deconversion, but because it’s a crucial challenge we all face as former believers, one that we respond to in different ways and with varying degrees of success. I’m hoping this blog can play some small part in meeting that challenge, both for myself and for those who happen upon this site.

On the one hand, I have been pleasantly surprised by how little resistance I have received on the part of believers as I transitioned out of faith. To be sure, I did face pressure to reverse my views, some of it unpleasant, but a few of my Christian friends have continued to remain friends, and we still get together periodically to shoot the breeze, chatting about our daily lives and sometimes delving into mostly cordial theological discussions. I enjoy that very much, even if these friends might be partly motivated by a desire to help bring me back to the fold.

Having posted my story online in 2003 and then having published my book in 2009, I’ve had the privilege of hearing from a good number of individuals who are struggling with their faith or who have put it behind them. So in a sense, this has provided me an online social network to help make up for the rich social life I enjoyed in the church, but as much as I enjoy it, conversing online is not as satisfactory as meeting face-to-face and participating in a variety of activities.

In addition, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet up in person with a few individuals in the Dallas/Fort Worth area that have read my book and who share a similar evangelical background and a common deconversion experience.

It can be difficult to find others like this, however, and it’s not practical for all deconverts to write a book and wait for readers in the area to respond. There are freethought meetup groups in most metropolitan areas, two of which I’ve sporadically attended in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. For new deconverts who feel more comfortable socially among Christians than among hard-core life-long atheists, though, attending these groups can be awkward, and it can be difficult to connect with those who have no present or past connection to the evangelical Christian world. In addition, after the first few meetings, for me it tends to become repetitious to continue rehashing why we are no longer religious.

In a recent Point of Inquiry podcast interview (starting around minute 43), Daniel Dennett had this to say about how he responded when asked by freethought groups for advice on how to proceed: "I often shocked them by saying, 'Well, why don't you get together with all your members and see if you can figure out a cause that you would all tithe for.' And their eyes goggle and they realize, 'Oh my goodness....' I said, 'How about putting together a group and helping rebuild houses in the wake of Katrina under the banner of your group?’ There's lots of things you could do, local things, international things, and just put the lie to that "[one can't be] good without God" idea. To me there's nothing more boring that just sitting around with a bunch of atheists saying, 'Oh my gosh, God doesn't exist, and aren't those people stupid to believe in God?' 'Right, right, we got that a long time ago. Now, what are we going to do?'"

I’m with Dennett on this--I think having a cause greater than ourselves or our ideologies can be a key to a fulfilling social life. One danger of this approach is that our charitable deeds can turn into merely a vehicle for defending or propagating our ideology, not simply as a means of making our communities and our world a better place. In other words, in participating as a group in these causes, I don’t want to help others “in the name of atheism” so the recipients of our good deeds (or others who witness them) will become nonbelievers or think better of nonbelievers. That’s called giving with strings attached, and is already far too common (though not universal) in the religious world.

At the moment I don’t have any firm ideas on how to start up groups of former believers with shared deconversion experiences who are eager to make the world a better place, but I’m hoping to start by posting this blog article. Because those of us who fit this description are generally few and far between, or at least unknown to each other, it seems the place to start is to establish an online presence, a call to identify who we are, where we are, and how/when we can come together to do what. I don’t have any concrete details yet, but I’m looking for ideas. Perhaps you can share your thoughts on how to get started...
James Hutton
12/26/2011 04:50:11 am

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! I've had a similar experience in my transition to humanism. I'd love to find a group that primarily meets for fellowship, with positive community works on the side "just because", but they don't exist, they're all just "screw god" groups.

I'm thinking that perhaps any time you label a group as "humanist" or "freethought" and try and do something with it, the temptation to devolve back into a "screw god" group is just too great. Perhaps it needs to be called a "community help group" or whatever and move on from there. There'd probably be religious people who'd want to hijack it for proselytizing, but they can always be asked to leave. I think it's a matter of intention from the outset that keeps the group on track.

Holly
12/26/2011 09:39:40 am

This is really good! I still love my Christian friends and family and they have been good to me. I hope they aren't still hanging with me waiting for me to "come back" and I hope they don't abandon me once they realize I won't. But it would feel good to meet some like-minded people who understand the evangelical background but don't want to sit around and bash religion and religious people. I'm not interested in that. It is very difficult to find a group like you mentioned. I recently found a "youth group" for my son that is associated with the rotary club. It has both a community focus and an international focus without pushing the religion. I'm really excited to have found it and the opportunities it provides. I will say though, I was a little disheartened that right before Christmas my son volunteered to do the bell ringing for the Salvation Army at a grocery store. The Rotary president pulled my son aside and said, "make sure you say Merry Christmas" and not "Happy Holidays." I personally still say "Merry Christmas" but have told my son in a public place it is good to say "Happy Holidays" so that the people who celebrate other holidays can be included in the greeting. I mentioned this to the president and he told me the "others can just get over it"...in front of my son. Even in a group that isn't specifically religious oriented..it still seeps in. (I let the incident go, but my son and I had a discussion about it later). It would be awesome to be part of such a like-minded group who is not advertising Atheism, or Agnoticism, but focused on doing good in the community and world and doing things purposefully. I'm looking. I should create.

John
12/26/2011 03:31:34 pm

Thanks, Ken, for taking a go at this subject. I think it's an important question to answer. My wife, Karen, and I have not fully answered it satisfactorily. For a while we lived in East Texas and a unitarian universalist fellowship near us was a replacement for church we had lost. In the Dallas metroplex we've tried to connect with others through one of the groups you indicate, and have mostly enjoyed it. The people are good, and our kids have benefited from the steadily improving programs for kids coincidental with the main gathering.

In addition, chronic illness makes attending such meetings extra difficult for us. This situation was already beginning to impact us before we left Christian churches, and has compounded the difficulties with reestablishing friendships since then.

We wish there were more people around, nearby, and are glad to be living in a time when public disavowel of (modern) traditional religions and notions of the existence of God. It will be easier for our children, I think, as not being a Christian will be much more normal for them.

Finally, while I think it's good to do things for the good of others, there's also nothing wrong getting together for friendship. Surely there's no merit to continually rehashing why "we're not Christians anymore", but mutual fellowship is much of the draw of church in the first place. I think that overall the current move publicly away from religion in the US is still finding its voice and will take some time to mature. I'm grateful for every contribution that adds to the critical mass.

Tim Mathis link
12/27/2011 01:29:00 am

Hi Kenneth - I'm glad to have found your blog/this post. I found you browsing around on Amazon - sounds like we went through a similar process: I was a minister for about 10 years, lost faith, went through a deconversion process, posted my story online and put out a book on amazon about it. I'll have to pick up a copy of yours - the reviews make it sound great, and I'm sure there'll be a lot there that will be helpful for me!

Thanks for tackling this topic - the loss/shift of community that your reader mentioned has been the hardest piece to deal with for me as well. I'm still pretty fresh out - I left about a year and a half ago - so my old relationships with church friends are still somewhat painful, if amiable. I don't personally know any ex-ministers who've gone through a process similar to mine, so life can feel pretty isolated.

At this stage, I still get frustrated when I try to participate in religious conversations (including post-religious), because in that environment I find that my religious identity continues to define people's preconceptions about me in a way that I want to get away from for awhile. I'm guessing this will change with time, but I feel like I need a vacation from that for a bit after a year or so of hard conversations about religion with everyone I was close to.

I don't know if it's the answer for everyone, but (along with writing and online conversation) personally I've coped by finding communities of people that gather around issues unrelated to religion. It helps that I'm in nursing school, and I have a close cohort of classmates. Probably the most important thing for me though has been getting involved in my local running community - I was pretty sedentary when I was a minister, but took up running (actually, at almost the exact time that I decided to leave, and 6 months before actually doing so) as a way to get healthy and work off some of the stress of leaving. Now I do a long trail run with a group of people most Sunday mornings, and my local running store has become a bit of a spiritual home. I've even been able to integrate some of the community service elements of religious community through fundraising runs and so forth. I've found that this has been hugely freeing, and in addition to providing a community has filled in a lot of the other post-religious gaps - a sense of identity, a sense of purpose/meaning, regular 'spiritual' experiences, long term goals, 'pilgrimage' to races in pretty locations, etc.

Ken Daniels link
12/28/2011 01:42:42 pm

Thanks so much for your insightful comments and personal experiences, James, Holly, John & Tim! We have relatives visiting us this week so I'm running behind in responding, but I hope to follow up soon... stay tuned!

Ken


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    Author

    Kenneth W. Daniels (1968-), son of evangelical missionaries, is the author of Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary. He grew up in Africa and returned as an adult to serve with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Niger on the edge of the Sahara Desert. While studying the Bible on the mission field, he came to doubt the message he had traveled across the world to bring to a nomadic camel-herding ethnic group. Though he lost his faith and as a result left Africa in 2000, he remains part of a conservative Christian family. He currently resides with his wife and three children in suburban Dallas, TX, where he works as a software developer.

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