I grew up in a liberal Congregationalist church. Officially, the church was part of two denominations, evidently denominations that didn’t care about the sort of thing. I like to tell people it was one step away from Unitarianism, which is funny, but basically true. I also like to tell people that it meant becoming an atheist wasn’t a big change, which is funny, and a blatant lie.

The truth is that there was a time when I took religion–my personal version of it–very seriously, and realizing that I didn’t actually believe in God was a big shock. Basically, my beliefs fit Bertrand Russell’s description of Christianity in “Why I Am Not a Christian”: There is a God, and Jesus was the wisest and best of men. Nowadays I’m inclined to agree with Russell that this is a very watered-down version of Christianity, but I took it very seriously at the time. Let me see if I can explain what that was like.

The becoming convinced that Jesus was super-wise started as I entered my teens, and was just starting to figure out the world. I realized, among other things, that people are good at convincing themselves that they’re always in the right and others are always in the wrong. Stuff like that. When this is a new discovery for you, all that stuff in the Gospels about first seeing the log in your own eye, and being careful to judge, seems like the height of wisdom. (Cut me some slack: lots of things sound mind-blowingly wise when you’re in your early teens.) It helped that he seemed to pretty clearly reject the worst of the Old Testament. I don’t know if I was aware of the verse about not having come to abolish the Law.

Then something weird happened. I reasoned as follows: some of the things attributed to Jesus in the gospels are wise, so he must have been a very wise guy, so all of the things attributed to him must be very wise. Since I knew that some of the things attributed to him included saying that staring at a woman’s chest was as bad as adultery, it got me a touch screwed up. I know this sounds like a very conservative thought, but please understand that I was never inclined to believe that the whole Bible was infallible. It’s just that this was Jesus saying that.

Occasionally, things would happen that would jar my view of Jesus’ wisdom. I read “Why I Am Not a Christian” for the first time, and thought Bertrand Russell was a very wicked man for questioning Jesus’ wisdom, and (because I was an aspiring fiction-writer at the time) thought I would write a short-story showing this. I don’t know how I thought that would work. Also, once, at church camp I made the mistake of reading the Gospel of Mark, which I found was very short on the Good Samaritan/Sermon on the Mount material of Matthew and Luke, and mostly consisted of Jesus walking around talking about how the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. This made me very sad, though I don’t remember having any particular response at an intellectual level.

At the time, it wasn’t obvious to me that I only had the opinion of Jesus I did because he was the central religious figure in my parents’ religion, but now it’s obvious that I wouldn’t have reasoned this way about anyone else. On the other hand, it wasn’t strictly a matter of having been taught to think that way. I hadn’t been. I now suspect part of it was a human desire to believe in saints who vastly exceed others in moral wisdom, perhaps because we like imagining the possibility that we might be such a person.

I also believed, for awhile, that God was necessary for morality. I think my reason went like this: there were what looked to me good reasons for thinking there was no such thing as objective value or morality, and I found this very depressing, but I could make the depressing thoughts go away by telling myself that maybe there was a God. Why that should be relevant, I don’t think I ever worked out, but it got me hoping there was a God.

At some point, I read someone on an online discussion forum saying had stopped believing in God in part because of asking himself the question, “If I don’t believe in Zeus or Thor, why do I believe in the Christian God?” Somehow, the post didn’t provoke an angry reaction from me, and I just filed it away and let it gnaw at me for awhile.

I eventually realized that hoping there was a God didn’t amount to believing there was a God, and stopped pretending. Logically, one might think this should have had the following effect on me: I’d go from expecting the world to work the way it would if it would if it were ruled by a benevolent power to not expecting it to work that way. In fact, I don’t think I ever had that expectation.

Instead, my deconversion had effects like this: I stopped feeling obligated to think everything attributed to Jesus was wise. I stopped feeling the need to like Evangelicals who said things that scared me. I could admit to myself that God did nothing at all to secure objective morality. And I stopped automatically assuming that non-believers were somehow morally suspicious. Now, looking at someone who thought this way, I would be tempted to say that I never believed in God and “God” was just code for a collection of commitments like those. That’s not what it felt like at the time, though.

There’s my story. Hopefully, telling it will help some of you reading this understand the apparently wish-washy liberal theists you encounter, and hopefully sorting it out in my head will help me do the same. There’s one thing, though, that I can’t much help with: while I got an early start thinking about these things, I still figured out I was an atheist at 16. So, while in a sense I know what it’s like to be a liberal Christian, I have no idea what it’s like to think about religion a great deal and remain any kind of believer. Seeing people do that still baffles me.