Why Jesus Doesn’t Work for Ex-Evangelical Christian Atheists and Agnostics

Every time another testimony, praise song, or devotional book described intimacy with Jesus, I felt my lack of it so much that it hurt.  Listening to the hymn “I Come to the Garden Alone,” I ached for Jesus to walk with me and talk with me and tell me I was his own.  I believed he was real, but much to my chagrin, Jesus certainly wasn’t my best friend.

—ex-evangelical Christian evangelist, now humanist chaplain at USC, Bart Campolo , in Why I Left, Why I Stayed, chapter 8:  The Dark Side of Grace:  Why Jesus Doesn’t Work for Me, p. 89

 

Gary:  I grew up fundamentalist Baptist/evangelical Christian until my mid-twenties.  Although I experienced emotional highs during both of my born again experiences (the first at age nine, the second in my teens…just to make sure) I never seemed to feel Jesus as did other evangelical Christians around me.  While other evangelical Christians talked about how Jesus would speak to them in their heart, move them, lead them, etc.., I felt and heard nothing.

What was wrong?  Since Jesus is perfect, it couldn’t be him.  It must be me.  It must be due to sin.  What hidden sin was I unconsciously holding onto that prevented me from enjoying the presence of Jesus in my life? In my prayers, I begged Jesus, for years, to identify this hidden sin so that I might truly and completely repent and finally feel the peace and comfort of his presence.

Silence…

Bart Campolo continues:

Wasn’t it the Holy Spirit that I was supposed to be relating to on a daily basis?  Trust me, I’m not kidding here.  In all the time I was a Christian—including my four years as a religious studies major at Haverford College and Brown University—I never figured out the salient difference between the resurrected Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  Try as I might, the doctrine of the Trinity always eluded me, on both a theological and practical level.  Even during those transcendent moments when I felt certain I heard the voice of God, I was never quite sure which member of the Godhead was doing the talking.  

What I did know, however, was that my father and the rest of the evangelical community almost always describe their faith in terms of Jesus.  To them, Jesus is and always has been God’s ultimate expression, and his red-lettered words are the keys that unlock the true meaning of the Bible.  Jesus is Lord and Savior.  Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.  Jesus is the answer.  In a very real sense, when it comes to that kind of Christianity, knowing Jesus in a personal way is the whole ball of wax.

To me, however, Jesus is almost entirely inaccessible.  I’ve never seen his photograph, listened to a recording of his voice, or read a single sentence that can be surely ascribed to him, let alone met him in person or known someone else who did.  Like the rest of the world, all I have to go on are four brief, highly redacted, obviously biased accounts of his life and times, which even in their original form were written some decades after his death, and aren’t entirely consistent with one another.  I know plenty of folks who claim those accounts clearly reveal his personality, but as far as I’m concerned, the biblical record of Jesus is far too sketchy for anyone to claim they really know Jesus’s character.  …Seriously, I know way more about Abraham Lincoln—or Michael Jackson for that matter—than I do about Jesus.  In any case, the whole idea of having an intimate, personal relationship with a spiritual being strikes me as highly unrealistic.

Now I think what I experienced as a supernatural outside force was actually just the natural inner workings of my own brain.  …There’s a lot of evidence to support that conclusion, of course, but what originally led me to it wasn’t psychology and neuroscience, but rather this simple observation:

Despite the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit and more than two thousand years to work out the kinks, every Christian church and individual believer sees Jesus differently than all the rest, and each one of them is convinced that, thanks be to God, their vision is the fairest of them all.