My baggage. Or at least some of my story.

What determines what goes into the suitcase?  A short version of where some of my baggage came from.

Everyone’s journey is different. This is mine, as I understand it today, from a religious point of view.

I grew up going to church.  It was a part of life just like school and family.  At times, the lines blurred between those things and “church” was like the invisible hand inside everything, working everything in life like a puppet.

Church and preachers were always right.  The elders or leaders of the church were always right. They spoke for God and you had to listen or face the fear of displeasing God and potentially being destined for hell.

When church leaders spoke, they usually admonished us all away from sin and just about everything was sin, or so it seemed.

You needed to renounce all the big sins like sex, drugs, or listening to rock and roll music.  Even if you didn’t know what those things were, you learned to feel extremely uncomfortable around them as discussion topics. Movies, some “bad” TV shows, or anything else that the preacher or elders talked about negatively were to be things you also talked about negatively.

And if you had people in your life who were affiliated with any of those negative things, you needed to keep your distance from them and, when possible, lead them to the church so they too could learn the right way, just like you.

It was a nice, neat package.  No need to think about or consider morality, scripture, or how to make decisions – just let the church leaders do it all for you.

On top of the everyday life things, church leaders were also very focused on purity inside the church – not just avoiding common sin, but also avoiding wrong beliefs, ideas, and practices inside the activities of church – especially with what happened “in church” on Sundays.

I remember hearing sermons and reading “brotherhood publications” warning believers away from “liberal” people who were coming into the church trying to steer us away from the truth in God’s word and toward “strange fire” that would lead us straight to Hell.

As a young person, the people who said or wrote these things were seen as being of the highest authority. After all, they were standing in front of all of us and speaking boldly.  

Or they were people who wrote something that was in print and distributed widely – and of course, anyone who had the means to have something printed was to be trusted and believed.

Several years into this religious environment, I explored, on purpose, what the details were – what these “liberals” were teaching and how wrong it was.  I wanted to be ready and proficient in my ability to counter such wrong – even from fellow believers who sat in the same church building week after week, because they were just as suspicious as any of those people “out there”.

What I essentially found were rules for how to conduct a worship service and how to baptize someone correctly.  There’s a lot more to it than that, but that was the gist of how my religious tribe spoke of truth and the right and God pleasing way to do things SO THAT you didn’t anger God and have your name removed from the lamb’s book of life.

 

Fast forward through years of this teaching, learning new problems to beware of – the New International Version of the Bible, brotherhood events or preachers to be marked and avoid, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, etc…

I finished high school and, at the suggestion of the current youth minister we had, went to a small, Christian, liberal arts college to major in Bible.

While in college I learned a lot more about Bible truth versus error, but also learned about other things that you learn in college.  Art, music, different kinds of science, literature, economics, business, physical education, and other courses that have disappeared from memory.  

I took a couple of summers with my college to do a few weeks of "mission trip" work in Europe, Germany and Switzerland primarily.  I'll possibly come back to that later, but essentially was blown away by the cultural and social differences in general and very specifically in the churches we worked with.

In short, there was one set of behavioral/morality rules for us American Christian college students and a whole other set of rules the people in the European church that were followed.

And our American Christian college/trip guides took great pains to explain why it was alright for the Europeans to have a different set of practices/attitudes towards things that we were forbidden to do or even consider.

Also in college, I learned a great deal more outside the classrooms – how different I was socially and economically than many of my fellow students.  I was coming from a relatively poor, rural area/small town environment to join a much more diverse population of students - people with lots more money and from lots of different places around the country.

I always had to work to pay for school, even on top of the loans I took out.  Usually it was just one job, but sometimes, especially toward the end, it was as many as three different jobs at the same time.  I drove a forklift and picked auto parts orders at a supply house, worked at Walmart as a checker and "the food area" stocker, and preached/led singing at a small church.

I didn’t mind working, but I knew that my experience was certainly different from those whose school was paid for AND they received spending money throughout school.  

We all socialized in similar circles and enjoyed one another’s company most of the time, but there were felt differences between the insides of groups.  For example, you could see who knew how “to be” at a formal event without needing to be told which fork was for each course of a meal.  Or who had traveled extensively already in life.  Or who hadn’t left the state yet.

Upon completion of college, I took a job as a youth minister at a church in a metropolitan area, not far away.  It wasn’t a huge church, but it was doing alright, and the people were welcoming and friendly.

Not long after taking the job, I enrolled in seminary or theological graduate school in another city and commuted for class once a week.  

I didn’t last long.  It wasn’t that the work was hard, but it was getting boring.  I had "grown up in church", went to college “for church”, and now was in graduate school “for church”.  

I spent most of my time in the library reading things that were not part of the courses I was taking.  I wanted to understand people – psychology, sociology, counseling.  

• I wanted to understand why people who didn’t “do church” like I grew up with did church.  Why are these other “Christians” who don’t believe like I do so gullible and so bought into the wrong way of interpreting scripture?

• And why do people who don’t believe in God think like they do?  Why are atheists so evil and such jerks?  

I had a course called Contemporary Religious Thinking and it blew my mind.  Though it was called “contemporary”, it was really an unpacking of church and theology for the past two thousand years with an emphasis on the last 300 or so years. 

I eventually dropped more classes than I completed and, after three years, moved on to a different graduate school.  This time my focus was on sociology – to understand why people, groups and individuals, do what they do.

After some catching up on undergraduate courses and finishing up all the graduate class work, I got to spend a year doing research on religious switching across and between religious groups.

  

Specifically looking for an answer to the question – why do people switch from one religion to another?  Or, as the research grew, why do people make any move in their faith or non-faith?

After dozens of interviews with different pastors, priests, imams, etc and after compiling hundreds of surveys taken from their groups, what I discovered wasn’t remarkable.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a good study and was very thorough and well done – it just didn’t show me anything I didn’t already know.

What I found was pretty basic – a person “is” who they are, religiously speaking, based on who raised them and where they were raised.  

The only specific thing that was robust was the connection between mother and child – that if a mother took her child to church or religious gatherings, that person was more likely to “stay faithful” and not switch religions.

Somewhat humorously, I found that many parishioners and their religious leaders had very different views about a great many things.  Also, how a person defined “religious switching” was different from person to person.  

For example, a person who grew up Catholic and then “converted” to a non-denominational church might say, “Well, you know, it’s all basically Christianity – I wouldn’t say I changed or switched religions, I’m still just a Christian.”  

At the same time, a person who used to attend an Assembly of God church but then discovered another Assembly of God church across town and “changed” would say, “Oh yes, I changed for sure.  I was lost before in that other church.  They definitely were not doing it all right, but now I’m the in the right place and am saved.  I was lost and now I’m found”.

All this research was done while I was still working as the youth minister at the local church and it took a while for me to digest all I’d seen, experienced, and was still experiencing.

After finishing grad school, one of my professors saw to it that I would teach all his intro to sociology courses, which I did for sixteen year before giving it up because of scheduling issues with my kids growing up and going off to college.

And in those sixteen years of part-time/adjunct teaching, I was able to continue doing research into the field, but more importantly, was able to hear a lot of stories about faith and non-faith from a wide range of students – stories that took apart a lot of narratives I’d grown up with.

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So that's a bird-eye view of some of the things I packed for my journey.  Coming soon, a little deeper dive into those things and some slightly more personal experiences.