Dennis sent me this link to an interesting paper on non-believing clergy. It is great insight into several ministers who share their stories about how they came to doubt their belief in the God they were brought up with and in the stories that they had been taught as literal.
I knew a few ministers in Armstrongism that also held these similar beliefs, yet they continued on. There are a couple in UCG and a couple in LCG that I knew that felt this way. You can imagine the wrath of god that Meredith would reign down on them if he knew.
Some of the guys from UCG are so entrenched and wrapped up in the church that they see no logical way out. They know they will loose everything, houses, homes, families and most importantly friends. It's that intimate contact with friends and co-workers in the faith that keeps them in place.
It is truly a struggle that is obviously quit painful.
The loneliness of non-believing pastors is extreme. They have no trusted confidantes to reassure them, to reflect their own musings back to them, to provide reality checks. As their profiles reveal, even their spouses are often unaware of their turmoil. Why don’t they resign their posts and find a new life? They are caught in a trap, cunningly designed to harness both their best intentions and their basest fears to the task of immobilizing them in their predicament. Their salaries are modest and the economic incentive is to stay in place, to hang on by their fingernails and wait for retirement when they get their pension.
Confiding their difficulties to a superior is not an appealing option: although it would be unlikely to lead swiftly and directly to an involuntary unfrocking. No denomination has a surplus of qualified clergy, and the last thing an administrator wants to hear is that one of the front line preachers is teetering on the edge of default. More likely, such an acknowledgment of doubt would put them on the list of problematic clergy and secure for them the not very helpful advice to soldier on and work through their crises of faith. Speaking in confidence with fellow clergy is also a course fraught with danger, in spite of the fact that some of them are firmly convinced that many, and perhaps most, of their fellow clergy share their lack of belief.
What gives them this impression that they are far from alone, and how did this strange and sorrowful state of affairs arise? The answer seems to lie in the seminary experience shared by all our pastors, liberals and literals alike. Even some conservative seminaries staff their courses on the Bible with professors who are trained in textual criticism, the historical methods of biblical scholarship, and what is taught in those courses is not what the young seminarians learned in Sunday school, even in the more liberal churches. In seminary they were introduced to many of the details that have been gleaned by centuries of painstaking research about how various ancient texts came to be written, copied, translated, and, after considerable jockeying and logrolling, eventually assembled into the Bible we read today. It is hard if not impossible to square these new facts with the idea that the Bible is in all its particulars a true account of actual events, let alone the inerrant word of God. It is interesting that all our pastors report the same pattern of response among their fellow students: some were fascinated, but others angrily rejected what their professors tried to teach them. Whatever their initial response to these unsettling revelations, the cat was out of the bag and both liberals and literals discerned the need to conceal their knowledge about the history of Christianity from their congregations.
4 comments:
This ia a very insightful article. I'd like to think that my growth into total unbelief was due to my moral courage, but I have to realize that it was made far easier by the fact that I suddenly found myself unemployed and no easy route back in was available to me.
If a way back in had been readily available, would I have launched into to the studies and pursuits that have occupied my life since? I'd like to think they would just because of my innate moral compass. For all the trauma I went through, I'm glad things happened as they did.
Questions like this help me to be a whole lot less judgmental and condemnatory toward a lot of people I have known. I can't know their circumstances and the depths of their consciences.
"It's that intimate contact with friends and co-workers in the faith that keeps them in place."
Or the paycheck.
I have little sympathy for non-believing pastors "stuck" in the system (ie, paycheck concerns), because when they stay they perpetuate the lie. Even if they try to tone down their sermons and writings, the impression from the congregation is that the pastor still believes in (insert deity of choice); offerings and tithes still flow in. Even if they manage to get themselves out of direct interaction with the congregation, they are still pulling in a paycheck taken from offerings and tithes, which come from people who have been lied to, and believe a lie.
Paul Ray
Let's put in perspective. The senior pastor of the Church of the Magical Leprechaun, which grosses millions every year from loyal congregants, comes to the conclusion that leprechauns do not exist.
Should he leave, refusing the offerings given in the name of the Great Magical Leprechaun, or should he stay and continue to preach about the benefits of a personal relationship of the Great Magical Leprechaun and counsel congregants on how the Great Magical Leprechaun wants them to live their lives, all the while continuing to accept the hard earned money of people who believe that the Great Magical Leprechaun desires that they should give these offerings to His ministers, and for the spreading of the good news of the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow?
When you consider it in this light, the pity meter drops to zero.
Paul Ray
Incompetent ministers who have lost their faith, still accepting pay.
Anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
Those who have such a selective conditional conscience run the danger of being sociopaths who do wrong and want sympathy when they face the consequences.
There have been those who have had the integrity to stop being ministers when they found that they no longer had the faith.
I'm more than fine for exposing these frauds who continue to pretend to be ministers for all they are worth. Armstrongism, in particular, is nothing but an exercise in mental imbalance, leading to nothing but harm and no good at all.
There's no particular reason to hold anything but contempt for such as have compromised themselves. Sympathy is not an option, until they "repent" and admit their error -- and leave off harming people with their perceived "authority".
Life is too short and we all have better things to do with our lives to be at all wringing our hands over faithless ministers. Leave us alone: We have problems of our own and really don't have the time or inclination to fix problems for people like this who wallow in them.
Perhaps these men can start thinking about how they mitigate the harm they have done to others over the years. And yes, we appreciate folks like Allen and Dennis who at least have made a stab at changing their journey in life to embrace the concept of "do no harm". Others who have been in the ministry should follow their example of abandoning their preaching to finding a way to live the rest of their lives without being useless parasites.
My advice to those who have suffered under their administration: Fear them not. And, as appropriate, give them a piece of your mind. Send them the heaviest burdens of it. Collect. Make them pay....
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