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A review by kevin_shepherd
Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church by Chrissy Stroop
5.0
“I truly felt that for some reason I’ve been spared to tell this story. Everybody I know is dead... I’m still here. Okay, thank you, God. I don’t believe in you, but thank you, anyway.” ~Larry Kramer, ACT UP
Before I get started, let me say that some bad things happened to me when I was a child, things that had nothing at all to do with religion. My father was a high functioning sociopath who ladled out beatings for the slightest transgressions. Even though my beatings (there were LOTS) were strictly “secular,” they were still things that impacted my feelings about religion, specifically about fundamentalist, evangelical, fire & brimstone, southern baptistery.
“...that is the model of the Christian God. Creating a heaven. Then an Eden. And when Eden failed, he opened the rest of the world. “This time it will be good,” he said to himself, before erasing humanity with a flood and starting over. And he will try again, or so Christians believe. The promise of Revelation is that God will set up a new heaven and a new earth. I can’t wait to see how those fail too.” (pg 94)
My parents weren’t church-goers. My mom might have been had she married someone in the faith, but my father was a skeptic. We children, my sister and my brother and I, attended church. In the beginning, mom would drive us there and drop us off, then pick us up when sunday school and church services were over. Later, when our attendance started to wane, someone from the church would come pick us up every sunday morning and return us back to the farm every sunday afternoon.
“Personally, I feel outrage regularly, not just at minor inconveniences, but also at things that seem unjust, that disrupt the way I think things should work: sexism, racism, homophobia, Republican tax plans that steal from the poor to give to the rich, the fact that Donald Trump was elected president. Of course, for many conservative Christians, the outrage runs the other way. The things that disrupt the natural order for them are gay marriage, abortion, a black man being elected president.” (pg 107)
As I became an adult and moved away from home, my faith ebbed and flowed. There were a few periods where being a baptist was the focal point of my existence, but more often my religious identity lingered ominously on the periphery of my existence. Eventually I let it go entirely. There is no single moment that I can point to and say ‘THAT was my Great Epiphany!’ It was a gradual process. It was a culmination of many, many weak, ethereal answers to many, many simple, earthly questions. You know the sort:
“Where did all the fossils come from?”
“They are the remnants of animals killed in the great flood” or “They are decorations God put in the earth” or “Satan put them there to trick us” or, my personal favorite, “God created them to test our faith in his word”
Try telling a moderately intelligent 15 year old kid that this intricate Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was magically put there to see if we would use our supposedly god-given intellect or if we would dismiss it as a “test.”
Another issue I had with fundamentalism
(there were LOTS of issues) were the seemingly arbitrary manifestations of Grace. If god was watching over me, why was he allowing my father to beat the shit out of me for some imagined or contrived impertinence? It had to be my fault, right? I was unworthy of grace, unworthy of protection, unworthy of my dad’s love.
“To survive, I lived in a world of pretend. I pretended that my life at home was normal. I pretended that my father loved me. I pretended that my father only hurt me because I had done something wrong. I told myself that I deserved it.” (pg 123)
I eventually figured out that it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me.
This obviously isn’t the whole story of how I came to terms with the universe and my place in it, but it’s enough to let you know that I found a little piece of myself in every essay of ‘Empty The Pews.’ Twenty-one deeply personal stories, each one unique, all describe one person’s exodus from a particular religion. Some of the stories are heartbreaking, some are enlightening, all are inspirational. A few of these authors are still believers, others are in a state of transition, a few (like me) have decided that every evangelical thing we were taught to believe is 100% bullshit.
“On most days, I am reasonably certain that Denmark is a country in Europe. But it’s one of those things I haven’t been able to test for myself, so I cannot be precisely sure about it. The same people who taught me that Denmark was a country taught me that black people are a different species from white people, and once I learned that black people were just humans like anybody else, I had to question the existence of Denmark.” (pg 219)
Before I get started, let me say that some bad things happened to me when I was a child, things that had nothing at all to do with religion. My father was a high functioning sociopath who ladled out beatings for the slightest transgressions. Even though my beatings (there were LOTS) were strictly “secular,” they were still things that impacted my feelings about religion, specifically about fundamentalist, evangelical, fire & brimstone, southern baptistery.
“...that is the model of the Christian God. Creating a heaven. Then an Eden. And when Eden failed, he opened the rest of the world. “This time it will be good,” he said to himself, before erasing humanity with a flood and starting over. And he will try again, or so Christians believe. The promise of Revelation is that God will set up a new heaven and a new earth. I can’t wait to see how those fail too.” (pg 94)
My parents weren’t church-goers. My mom might have been had she married someone in the faith, but my father was a skeptic. We children, my sister and my brother and I, attended church. In the beginning, mom would drive us there and drop us off, then pick us up when sunday school and church services were over. Later, when our attendance started to wane, someone from the church would come pick us up every sunday morning and return us back to the farm every sunday afternoon.
“Personally, I feel outrage regularly, not just at minor inconveniences, but also at things that seem unjust, that disrupt the way I think things should work: sexism, racism, homophobia, Republican tax plans that steal from the poor to give to the rich, the fact that Donald Trump was elected president. Of course, for many conservative Christians, the outrage runs the other way. The things that disrupt the natural order for them are gay marriage, abortion, a black man being elected president.” (pg 107)
As I became an adult and moved away from home, my faith ebbed and flowed. There were a few periods where being a baptist was the focal point of my existence, but more often my religious identity lingered ominously on the periphery of my existence. Eventually I let it go entirely. There is no single moment that I can point to and say ‘THAT was my Great Epiphany!’ It was a gradual process. It was a culmination of many, many weak, ethereal answers to many, many simple, earthly questions. You know the sort:
“Where did all the fossils come from?”
“They are the remnants of animals killed in the great flood” or “They are decorations God put in the earth” or “Satan put them there to trick us” or, my personal favorite, “God created them to test our faith in his word”
Try telling a moderately intelligent 15 year old kid that this intricate Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was magically put there to see if we would use our supposedly god-given intellect or if we would dismiss it as a “test.”
Another issue I had with fundamentalism
(there were LOTS of issues) were the seemingly arbitrary manifestations of Grace. If god was watching over me, why was he allowing my father to beat the shit out of me for some imagined or contrived impertinence? It had to be my fault, right? I was unworthy of grace, unworthy of protection, unworthy of my dad’s love.
“To survive, I lived in a world of pretend. I pretended that my life at home was normal. I pretended that my father loved me. I pretended that my father only hurt me because I had done something wrong. I told myself that I deserved it.” (pg 123)
I eventually figured out that it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me.
This obviously isn’t the whole story of how I came to terms with the universe and my place in it, but it’s enough to let you know that I found a little piece of myself in every essay of ‘Empty The Pews.’ Twenty-one deeply personal stories, each one unique, all describe one person’s exodus from a particular religion. Some of the stories are heartbreaking, some are enlightening, all are inspirational. A few of these authors are still believers, others are in a state of transition, a few (like me) have decided that every evangelical thing we were taught to believe is 100% bullshit.
“On most days, I am reasonably certain that Denmark is a country in Europe. But it’s one of those things I haven’t been able to test for myself, so I cannot be precisely sure about it. The same people who taught me that Denmark was a country taught me that black people are a different species from white people, and once I learned that black people were just humans like anybody else, I had to question the existence of Denmark.” (pg 219)