WORD-FAITH HERESY BREEDS ATHEISTISM
From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader
by ROBERT F. WORTH
New York Times
Published: August 22, 2012
Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was
lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and
heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and
parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five
years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and
he might not survive.
DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was
the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the
ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted
her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s
help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found
himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or
near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had
ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up
with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer
hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself
in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea
what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.
As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop.
After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he
discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown
up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network
called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in
God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.
DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and
eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion,
intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical
Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to
one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the
South and West, in the kinds of places DeWitt had spent much of his
career as a traveling preacher. After a few months he took to the road
again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist
convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard
Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary
borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you
always “come out” of the atheist closet).
DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his
reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of
disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the
Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose
in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to
fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in
small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt
told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of
momentum.”
Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric
gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn
her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past
decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In
March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle
at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for
the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four
horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel
Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed
organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and
college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad
campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”
The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear
that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious
zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved;
avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people
with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing
religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew
poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose
“none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those
people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which
technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher
being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The
godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks
and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks
of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason and the Secular
Student Alliance.
The movement has also begun cultivating a new breed of guru in men like
DeWitt and Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro
Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals and gay-pride events
with signs declaring “God Hates Fags.” Nate Phelps, a big,
barrel-chested man who delivers fierce rebuttals of his father’s
theology and narrates the agonies of his fundamentalist upbringing, has
become a star speaker at atheist rallies and gay-pride events around
the country. At the Reason Rally, crowds cheered as he declared that
the Sept. 11 attacks played a critical role in blasting away his
lingering belief in any sort of deity.
Because they started out as fervent Christians, unlike Dawkins and
Hitchens and company, Phelps and DeWitt are seen as heroes within the
movement. They tend to live and work in the country’s most Bible-soaked
places. “I think what’s happening is that nontheists are realizing we
can’t just leave this cause to Ivy Leaguers and intellectuals,” DeWitt
told me. “We’ve got to convey the secular worldview in a more emotional
way.”
At the same time, DeWitt is something of a reality check for many
atheists, whose principles rarely cost them more than the price of “The
God Delusion” in paperback. DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place
where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months
after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both,
he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus
relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late
June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving
into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment
where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that
could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part
of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started
emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago?
Or is it just a ticket out of town?
DeRidder is a four-hour drive northwest of New Orleans, near the Texas
border. It is a tiny place, surrounded by thick forests of long-leaf
pine, where many of the 10,000-odd residents have known one another all
their lives. There is one major commercial strip lined with fast-food
restaurants and chain stores, and in the rest of town it is difficult
to drive a block without passing a church. Many of them are Pentecostals, part of the revivalist Christian movement in which worshipers often speak in tongues — babbling in what is thought to be a sacred language — sometimes while writhing on the floor.
In the local Walmart, it’s easy to recognize the more conservative
Pentecostal women, who wear modest, long dresses in a high-waisted
style, their hair, which they do not cut, pulled neatly into buns.
When I first met Jerry DeWitt, I half expected a provincial contrarian
hungry for attention. Instead, he was mild and apologetic, a short,
baby-faced man with a gentle smile and a neatly trimmed dark beard. He
was earnest and warm, and I soon discovered that many of his fellow
townspeople cannot help liking him, no matter how much they dislike his
atheism. He appears to have reached his conclusions about God with
reluctance, and with remorse for the pain he has caused his friends and
family. He seems to bear no grudge toward them. “At every atheist event
I go to, there’s always someone who’s been hurt by religion (not by faith in Jesus Christ),
who wants me to tell him all preachers are charlatans,” DeWitt told me,
soon after we met. “I always have to disappoint them. The ones I know
are mostly very good people.”
DeWitt is a native son in every way, and this must make his apostasy
all the more difficult for others to make sense of and to accept. He is
descended from a long line of preachers on both sides of the family.
His paternal grandfather helped establish at least 16 different
churches in Louisiana, including one in DeRidder, he told me. (I found
69 churches in the town directory, though some may be inactive.) DeWitt
grew up in the church, but it was only at 17, after being “saved” during a weekend visit to Jimmy Swaggart’s church in Baton Rouge,
that he became a passionate Christian. Weeks later he spoke in tongues
for the first time. Soon after that, sitting in church, he heard his
pastor call on him to deliver a homily. Terrified, he asked if he could
have a few minutes to pray for guidance. He stepped to the pulpit with
his finger on a passage from the Gospel of Mark, and spoke for 15
minutes on the “seed of David.” The crowd loved it. “It was the biggest
high I’d ever had,” he told me. “I knew right then that preaching was
what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” He married a local girl
at age 20, and two weeks after the wedding, he received an invitation
to speak at a camp meeting in Lucedale, Miss. There he preached to
overflow crowds of whooping Pentecostals who were speaking in tongues.
He and his wife began touring the South, building a reputation for the
power of his sermons. It was a tremendous ego charge, especially for a
short, chubby young man with dyslexia. For the first time, he was treated with respect, even awe. “I had this whole prophet persona going on. I wouldn’t really mix with people before the sermon,” he told me. “All kinds of people were seeing miracles, and I believed it 100 percent.”
For the next few years, DeWitt preached across the South, doing
itinerant jobs to pay the bills. In 2004 he became a full-time preacher
at a church near DeRidder. By that time, though, he had drifted away
from the literal claims of Pentecostal doctrine and espoused a more
liberal Christianity. He had begun reading more widely (he never got a college degree),
starting with Carl Sagan’s books on science and moving on to Joseph
Campbell and others. But equally, he told me, he found it unbearable to
promote beliefs that only seemed to sow confusion and self-blame. He
recalled how one middle-aged woman in his church who was suffering from
heart disease asked him anxiously: “How am I going to believe for
salvation when I can’t believe enough to heal?”
Finally he began to feel that his rationalist impulses were alienating
and hurting his flock, and he resigned — reluctantly, he said, because
he loved the human side of being a pastor, “playing Mr. Fix-It for the
community.” He continued preaching part time for a while, invoking an
ever more misty and ethereal God. By now he had also read Dawkins and
Hitchens, and even weak-tea Christianity was becoming hard to swallow.
He preached his last sermon in April 2011, in the town of Cut and
Shoot, Tex. A month later, Natosha Davis called, and DeWitt found
himself unable to pray at all.
DeWitt never meant to go public with his unbelief. He figured he could
“stay under the radar,” he said, and continue working as a buildings
inspector in DeRidder, where, over the years, he had gained a
reputation as a community champion and was talked about as a future
mayor. But when he heard that Richard Dawkins would be attending a
Freethinkers gathering in Houston, he couldn’t resist. He took a day
off, without telling his boss where he was going. He got a picture
taken of himself and his son Paul (who was then 19 and who has never been religious)
with Dawkins. DeWitt posted the photograph on his Facebook page,
assuming that “nobody in DeRidder knew who Dawkins was.” He also,
perhaps unwisely, updated the “religious views” box on his Facebook
page to read “secular humanist.”
It was his grandmother’s cousin, an 84-year-old woman he knew as Aunt
Grace, who saw that page and outed him. Word spread quickly. On Dec. 1,
his boss asked to meet him at a diner in town. Sitting at the table,
the man took out two printouts from secular Web sites with DeWitt’s
name on it. “He told me: ‘The Pentecostals who run the parish are not
happy, and something’s got to be done,’ ”DeWitt recalled. “Half an hour
later I was out of a job.” (His former boss did not respond to phone
calls seeking comment.)
Almost at once, DeWitt became a pariah in DeRidder. His wife found
herself ostracized in turn, and the marriage suffered. She moved out in
June. He received a constant stream of hate messages — some threatening
— and still does, more than seven months later. He played me a recent
one he had saved on his cellphone as we ate lunch at a diner in town.
“It’s just sickening to hear you try to turn people atheist,” a
guttural voice intoned. It went on and on, telling DeWitt to go to hell
in various ways. “I’m not going to sit around while you turn people
against God,” the voice said at one point.
But DeWitt also hurled himself into his new role as a faith healer in
reverse. He became the first “graduate” of the Clergy Project,
discarding his anonymity and giving the clandestine preachers’ group
its first dash of publicity. It was formed in early 2011 with a few
dozen members, mostly recruited through Dan Barker, a former pastor who
is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and through
Linda LaScola, who in 2010 co-conducted a study of nonbelieving pastors
with Daniel Dennett, the atheist philosopher. The project now has more
than 300 members, with about 80 applicants awaiting clearance (the
group is very careful about admissions, to secure the members’ privacy).
DeWitt also became the executive director of Recovering From Religion,
formed in 2009 by Darrel Ray, a Kansas-based atheist proselytizer. The
group grew quickly under DeWitt’s leadership and now includes at least
100 local chapters scattered across the country, each one typically
with 10 to 12 participants. Like other public figures in the movement,
DeWitt also serves as a one-man clearinghouse for religious doubters
via Facebook and e-mail. During the four days I spent with him in
DeRidder, he was almost constantly checking his cellphone and tapping
out messages.
There is more involved in this work than sympathy. The transition away
from faith may start with an intellectual epiphany, but it runs through
a difficult reinterpretation of your own past. For believers, this
often involves what DeWitt calls a “hook,” or a miraculous story that
helps anchor your faith. He gave me an example: he was born again in
Jimmy Swaggart’s church thanks to his former elementary-school teacher,
who persuaded him to come along with her to Baton Rouge. He later
discovered that his teacher almost died while she was being born, and
that she had emerged safely from the womb only after a preacher from a
neighboring town was roused from sleep to offer a blessing in the
delivery room. That preacher was DeWitt’s paternal grandfather. This
coincidence had seemed providential to DeWitt, a sign that he was meant
to be a preacher himself.
“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,”
DeWitt said. “So now how do you reconcile that? How do you make sense
of your life? It’s not easy.”
I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in
post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making
decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who
organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also
helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on
‘What is God’s plan for me?’ They are still looking for something
miraculous to guide them.”
One former pastor named Teresa MacBain told me that when she began
doubting her faith last year, she ran through her list of friends and
acquaintances and realized that every single one of them was religious.
With no one to confide in, she began recording her thoughts into her
iPhone when she was alone in the car. “It was a huge encouragement when
I finally found other people to talk to online,” she told me. Like
DeWitt, MacBain joined the Clergy Project. Then, earlier this year, she
resigned from her pastor’s position in Tallahassee and went public as
an atheist. She was promptly defriended (in the literal and Facebook
sense) by almost everyone she knew. But like DeWitt, she has begun
receiving frequent messages from doubting pastors and churchgoers,
seeking her help in making the leap away from God. “It’s all new
friends now,” she said.
That kind of abrupt excommunication is a fairly common experience, and
many atheist networks — including hundreds on college campuses — become
replacement communities and de facto dating services for many people
involved. “Community is a huge problem for people wanting to leave
religion,” DeWitt told me as we drove through DeRidder. He pointed to a
church as we passed, then another, and another, and another. “How do
you escape it?” he said. “It’s not like you can avoid driving past the
church every day.”
In late June, Jerry DeWitt allowed me to accompany him to church in
DeRidder. It was the first time he had attended since his apostasy
became public, and he half-jokingly predicted that we would be
attacked, or that the service would turn into a prayer session for our
wayward souls. But he also made clear that he had no desire to hold
religious doctrine up for ridicule. He wanted me to witness the
emotional power of the ceremony and the music. He wanted me to
understand why people are drawn to church, not just why they leave it.
The church we attended — known as Grace — was one of the most liberal
in town, multiracial and less orthodox than hard-line Pentecostals. He
had delivered sermons there himself, and he was known by many, perhaps
most of the parishioners.
As we arrived outside the church’s white porticos on a hot June
morning, I could tell DeWitt’s fears were unfounded. “I’m praying for
him” is the refrain when his name comes up, his mother had told me.
Love the sinner, hate the sin. Sure enough, everyone we met was
gracious, though there was often an undercurrent of unease. The
service, by my own etiolated WASP standards, was an orgy of religious
passion: people of all ages praised themselves hoarse as a high-decibel
gospel band and choir shook the walls with heartfelt rhythm and blues.
The preacher then delivered a homily about the risks of being a
“catch-and-release Christian,” and I couldn’t help wondering if this
was aimed at DeWitt.
Afterward, we met with the church’s founding pastor in an elegantly
appointed office adjoining the main auditorium. He was a 79-year-old
man named George Glass, with a wrinkled face and a magnificent deep
voice full of warmth and gravitas. He hugged us both as we came in,
chiding DeWitt for having stayed away for so long. We sat down, and
over the course of an hour, he spoke movingly about his own struggles
as a younger man, when he lost his first ministry and had to start from
scratch. He reassured DeWitt that he understood his doubts and did not
think any less of him. As we said our goodbyes at the door, Glass spoke
again in his slow, Southern cadence, fixing DeWitt with his gaze. “The
thing of it is,” he said, and we all waited as he allowed a weighty
pause to fill the air — “you’ve just got to keep your mouth shut.”
Everyone laughed. But I did later wonder if all the public atheism had
done DeWitt more harm than good. Couldn’t he have remained a nominal
Christian, as so many others have? Even the old pastor, George Glass,
acknowledged that others in the church had had problems with literalist
claims about the Bible, and prefer not to talk about it. It is easy to
see why. Open confrontation with faith, some would say, just provokes
angry gestures from the faithful. In DeWitt’s case, those gestures had
taken a wrecking ball to the life he spent 42 years building. He was
once seen as a potential mayor of DeRidder. He helped clean up some of
the town’s uglier spots when he worked at City Hall, and he knew the
insides of almost every building in town; he knew and cared about most
of the residents. Now many of them, he was told, believed he was a
Satanist. During my short stay in DeRidder, I heard him take a call
from the lawyer handling the foreclosure of his house, and I saw his
wife’s moving boxes on their living-room floor. She’d had enough.
Was it possible, I wondered, that he was doing this deliberately? DeWitt is an intensely curious man, a homegrown intellectual who seems a little stifled in DeRidder (Hey N.Y. Times, he is dyslexic and uneducated). Was this a way of moving on? Would he really still want to be mayor of DeRidder someday, if it were possible?
“I’m so entrenched in this community, I feel like I’d be lost if I went
anywhere else,” he said. “As for being mayor, who knows, stranger
things have happened. I’d like to stay.” The town had changed a lot
since his childhood, he explained. The old Pentecostalism had mostly
softened into a more open, tolerant Christianity. He said he’d been
amazed by the number of quiet atheists he discovered in towns
throughout the South, looking for congenial voices online. Perhaps his
community would one day welcome atheists, too.
DeWitt stood thinking as we waited in a stone garden outside the church
(he said he wanted to make sure Glass and his wife got off safely in
their car before he left). He said he admired the Glasses, and the
congregation, and many aspects of the church itself: its good works,
the beauty of the music, the community it fostered. “Religion does a
lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church,” he
said. “I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity
and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process
involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like
Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and
it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all
religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the
progress of the human race.”
Webmaster note: Atheistism offers no hope during this lifetime or the life to come.