Losing Faith
I was saddened and disturbed by an article I read in the L.A. Times called “Religion beat became a test of faith”. This story, written by the religious beat editor, William Lobdell, chronicles his loss of his Christian faith. I think that a look at his story might be helpful and instructive.
My first response is to express the deep sadness I feel over both Mr. Lobdell’s loss of faith and the failings of those who profess to be Christians which led to his downfall. I think that the appropriate response by all is to sincerely pray over these matters… to pray for those whose faith has been damaged and for those by whom offense has come. By clicking on the above link you can read Mr. Lobdell’s story for yourself, but I will briefly recount his story.
In 1989, he describes his own situation as “profoundly lost” with a nearly ruined second marriage when a friend introduced him to Mariners Church (now in Irvine, Ca) where he had an experience of God. His heart’s desire was to be a religion reporter so that he could counteract media portrayals of Christians as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command” people. He eventually attained a position with the L.A. Times and set about to correct the caricatures of Christians in the media. He eventually moved toward Roman Catholicism, attracted by their “low-key evangelism and deep ritual” as well as their “long history and loving embrace of liberals and conservatives.”
In 2001, he began coverage of the sex scandals of the Catholic Church. He renounces the handling of the affairs by the Catholic Church as well as by the members of those churches:
At the time, I never imagined Catholic leaders would engage in a widespread practice that protected alleged child molesters and belittled the victims… I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.
After Lobdell lamentingly recounts the broken and destroyed lives of those who suffered sexual abuse from the clergy, he tells the story of a conference of ex-Mormons which he attended later in 2001. These people found themselves to be outcasts among their former families and communities:
The people at the conference were an eclectic bunch: novelists and stay-at-home moms, entrepeneurs and cartoonists, sex addicts and alcoholics. Some were depressed, others angry, and a few had successfully moved on. But they shared a common thread: They wanted to be honest about their lack of faith and still be loved. In most pockets of Mormon culture, that wasn’t going to happen.
Lastly, he points to the world of tele-evangelism and finds much to fault there. Lobdell mentions Trinity Broadcasting Network and their reliance on the “prosperity gospel” to fuel their growth:
“If you have been healed or saved or blessed through TBN and have not contributed… you are robbing God and will lose your reward in heaven,” Paul Crouch, co-founder of the Orange County-based network, once told viewers. Meanwhile, Crouch and his wife, Jan live like tycoons.
Lobdell criticizes the extravagant lifestyles of the tele-evangelists while people deeply in debt were encouraged to put donations on their credit cards. He questions the activities of such faith healers as Benny Hinn.
Lobdell struggled to reconcile all that he saw around him with what he felt Christianity should be. He found this increasingly difficult. He emailed a former pastor who himself had lost a daughter to cancer, asking some very important questions:
1. Why do bad things happen to good people?
2. Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones?
3. Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when He’s never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal cord?
The pastor gave a reply based on God’s sovereignty and omniscience. Lobdell found this inadequate:
John is an excellent pastor, but he couldn’t reach me. For some time, I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and infinitely loving God with what I saw, but I was losing ground. I wondered if my born-again experience at the mountain retreat was more about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability than being touched by Jesus.
And I considered another possibility: Maybe, God didn’t exist.
I have taken considerable effort to provide many details of his story because it is poignant and deserves to be heard. I would like to address some of the issues raised in Mr. Lobdell’s loss of faith in future blogs. I will close this blog with Lobdell’s own conclusion:
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.