Secular Global Institute

After Three Decades as an Ordained Minister, Syndicated Columnist Bob Ripley Comes Out as an Atheist

Another member of the Clergy Project has outed himself. While a pastor leaving religion is becoming old hat (every reliable poll confirms that the rate of people leaving religion has become higher than the rate of people entering it). Ex-reverend Robert Ripley former pastor of Metropolitan United Church in London, Ontario, says . . "In over 25 years of writing a column every week, this one may be the most challenging. For you and for me."

As with my years of preaching, my writing has tried to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Whether you agree or disagree with something in this column, the goal is always to provoke thought.

That said, I need to tell you that I've changed my mind. Where once I proclaimed the doctrines of Christianity with passion and sincerity, I am now convinced that religion, all religion, is man-made. As with the long line of deities dotting the history of our species, the idea of one God, Yahweh, made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, is our means to an end - to explain how we got here, for instance, or to avoid looking fate in the face or to gain an edge over our enemies.

Deep breath. This was not an overnight decision. I didn't go to bed one night this week a believer and wake up an unbeliever. I wasn't blinded on Tuesday by the light of reason that led to a deconversion. I began this journey more than seven years ago. It led initially to me taking early retirement from ministry and has continued over the ensuing five years.

There is not the space here to detail each signpost along my sojourn from faith. They are meticulously chronicled in my latest book, Life Beyond Belief: A Preacher's Deconversion, being released this week.

In short, after pondering the age and span of the cosmos, the elegant simplicity of evolution by natural selection, the ruthlessness of the God of the Bible, the enigma of expiation for sin by blood sacrifice, the discrepancies in Scripture, the antagonisms and animosities derived from religious fervor and the violence and corruption in church history, adherence to my former beliefs was no longer possible.

Why not keep my doubts to myself? Part of me would like to keep silent out of the fear that people may think less of me or get angry with me and tell me so. After all, I have been writing this column for some time without revealing my growing unbelief. I could take this secret to my grave.

But I also know how crippling secrets are and that it is important every once in a while to tell the secret of who we are. If we don't, we risk coming to believe the edited version of ourselves we hope others will find acceptable.

All of us, religious or not, should value authenticity. If we do, then we should encourage not only critical thinking but also intellectual honesty without fear of rejection or reprisal. My disclosure carries the risks of losing friends and facing disappointment and disapproval from those who once admired my spirituality. Belief, however, is not something you can fake, or should fake.

Let's return to my two overriding motives in preaching and writing: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

If you are wrestling with the tenets of your religion and/or the increasing insights of science to explain reality, if you have elected to eschew religious creeds quietly so as not to offend or feel isolated, then you may be comforted to know that you're not the only one.

If you are a committed believer, my testimony of deconversion may challenge you to take your convictions more seriously than ever before and examine evidence you may never have encountered before. My goal is not to disabuse you of your faith but to share my personal testimony of deconversion and with it a call for all of us to constantly test and examine our assumptions.

As a dear friend who leads a church in Brooklyn writes in the forward to "Life Beyond Belief", "if you're a Christian, you should take this book seriously, and if you're not . . . you'll find companionship."

If all this makes you sad, I'm sorry. Please remember that I have not changed. The heart that was once surrendered to Jesus Christ, that gave itself to others and infused a vocation with kindness, still beats in me. If you have ever met me, know that the person I was then, I am now, still striving for integrity and capable of profound love.

I'm not lost. I began this journey by asking questions. It continued by not being content with trite clichés or lazy affirmations. Curiosity is an amazing accelerant. I am a passionate advocate for unremitting intellectual honesty, for reason and reality, for love and learning. My advocacy simply no longer assumes a deity.

I still believe. I believe no person or group of persons is inferior to any other. I believe that what matters is not so much what we believe, but how we conduct ourselves for these few short, fragile years of being alive. I believe that being aware of the beauty and wonder of the universe, including this pale blue dot in the remote corner of one of billions of galaxies, is an indescribably wonderful privilege.

On that, at least, I hope we can all agree.

By JT Eberhard and Rev. Bob Ripley (A retired United Church minister).