By Kevin Horrigan
St. Louis Post-dispatch
April 19, 2009
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/columnists.nsf/kevinhorrigan/story/A9F8193174CD43538625759C0009FD9C?OpenDocument
The great Jim White, who used to go bump in the night as the overnight host on KMOX radio, regularly told his listeners that he had a couple of ground rules: "We don't talk about aches and pains, and we don't talk about religion."
Through long experience, the Big Bumper came to believe that while one's health and one's religion were of intense personal interest to oneself, odds were that nobody else wanted to hear about it. You wanted to talk about ham radio or boating, Jim White was your guy. You wanted to call in with a bad pun, he'd listen:
Caller: Hey, Jim. A guy just cut down the Gateway Arch and hauled it away.
White: Yeah?
Caller: Yeah, he was an arch-criminal.
Jim may have been right about religion as a talk-show topic, but for authors, religion has been a (you should pardon the expression) salvation. Driven by the rise of Christian evangelicals and the aging baby boom population (Me? Die?), sales of religious books in the United States blew past the $1.5 billion mark at mid-decade.
Sales have slowed considerably since then; in January, publishers reported only $46.5 million in religious book sales. Even so, $1.5 million a day isn't chicken feed.
On the other hand, if you broaden the definition of "religious books" to "belief system books," there's one category that's doing very well: Atheism.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself at lunch with a guy named William Lobdell, who used to make his living writing about religion for the Los Angeles Times. He got the job because he believed that religion was important to a lot of people and The Times was missing a lot of good stories.
He was very good at his job. He introduced most of the country to the phenomenon that was Pastor Rick Warren and the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. He wrote about the growth of the Lubavitcher Jews. He wrote about the growth of Mormonism and what happens in Mormon communities to "Jack Mormons" — those who abandon the church. He wrote about Catholic activists and Catholic traditionalists, charlatan preachers of the prosperity gospel ("Give to me and get rich") and pervert priests.
He was intensely religious himself, a budding evangelical Christian who found a home in a mainline Presbyterian congregation, but found himself drawn to the 2,000-year-old traditions of the Catholic Church. He was taking convert classes at the same he was covering horrific cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests who often were recycled back into ministry by their bishops. Doubt took hold.
The last straw, he writes, came on a trip to St. Michael Island, Alaska, "where a single Catholic missionary raped an entire generation of Alaska Native boys."
Lobdell decided, "What had happened to helpless boys at the edge of the world made a lot more sense if there were no God."
He came home to Los Angeles and told a friend, "I lost my faith on the religion beat."
Not just Catholic faith, not just his Christian faith, but his belief in God.
Lobdell's new book about his experience is called "Losing My Religion" (Collins, $24.99). It joins a burgeoning shelf of atheist apologias that have appeared in recent years. Books by authors Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins all have made the best seller list. Atheist groups — some of which can be every bit as obnoxious as some religious groups — point to them as proof that their non-beliefs are taking hold.
Not so much, according to a survey last year of 35,000 American adults done by the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life. Only 1.6 percent of them identified themselves as atheists. Another 2.4 percent called themselves agnostic. Another 12 percent answered "nothing in particular;" about half of them said religion was nonetheless important in their lives.
Strangely, the Pew Survey reported that about a third of those professing to be atheist say they pray regularly, though not necessarily to God, as he or she is commonly understood.
Count Bill Lobdell as one of the 1.6 percent of Americans who calls himself atheist. In July 2007, he wrote a major article for The Times describing how the religion beat took him there. He was stunned at the reaction: Having expected to be excoriated, most of his e-mail was positive. A lot of people shared his uncertainties. "I just wanted to tell them they weren't alone," he said.
So now, having taken a buyout from The Times and written his book, he travels a lot, talking about his book and speaking to atheist and skeptic groups and groups of survivors of clerical abuse. Oddly, he said, atheists and agnostics often hunger for the sort of comfort in community that churches offer. These questions are too hard to face alone.
I asked him the question that atheists get asked a lot: What if turns out you were wrong?
"I hope I am wrong," he shrugged. "I'll just tell God I looked as hard as I could."
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| Kevin Horrigan |
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