How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America

The Christian Century has a review of a book written by William Lobdell, a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, the full title of which is "Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace." I suspect that Lobdell's spiritual journey to unbelief resonates with many, particularly with the LGBT community which has been the target of some many lies and so much viciousness from allegedly "godly Christians." I also suspect that many in the younger generations who view Christianity negatively may identify as well. It seems that the behavior of Christians - and in Lobdell's case the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal - is one of the strongest arguments against Christianity. Indeed, it is proof, at least in the opinion of some, that institutional Christianity is an utter sham, peopled with hopelessly unloving practitioners such as the leaders of "professional Christian" organizations like The Family Foundation here in Virginia. Here are some review highlights:

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Former religion reporter William Lobdell's deconversion narrative, Losing My Religion, refrains from both bombast and suggestions of dopiness. By his very choice of genre—memoir rather than apologia—Lobdell enters a different territory of the new atheism, one already inhabited by several other counter conversion narrators, including John Loftus, who wrote Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity (Prometheus, 2008), and Dan Barker, author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists (Ulysses, 2008).

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He calls himself a "reluctant atheist" and a "skeptical deist." "With all that has happened to me," Lobdell says, "I don't feel qualified to judge anyone else.""All that has happened" includes, most notably, Lobdell's eight-year tenure on the religion beat of the Los Angeles Times during the breaking of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal.

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Then a colleague of Lobdell's passed him some documents about a priest named Michael Harris who was named in a clergy sex abuse lawsuit. . . . It was the first of more than $1 billion worth of settlements with victims of clergy sex abuse across the nation. Lobdell became convinced that as chilling as the pedophile priests' actions were, the real story lay in the bishops' cover-ups of the felonies, their quiet transfers of accused clergy to new and unsuspecting parishes, and the Catholic Church's revictimization of the victims.

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The Harris case dealt Lobdell's personal faith what he calls a "spiritual body blow." . . . But the deeper he got into the story, the more difficult it became to square the sins of the church with his image of a loving and powerful God. "I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies—many of them written on their own stationery, undeniable and permanent—out of my head," he writes. "Like a homicide detective, I had seen too much."

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Lobdell depicts the ebbing of his faith as inevitable, something that he could not control or choose to fight. Many people assume that Christians-turned-agnostics make a conscious decision to leave the faith, but he insists that in his case that's simply not true. "As deeply as I missed my faith, as hard as I tried to keep it, my head could not command my gut.

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While the review goes on to critique Lobdell for not retaining his faith, personally, I he is very much on point. As a former Catholic I find it difficult to even walk into a Catholic Church given the hypocrisy and evilness of the Church hierarchy. While I still consider myself Christian, it is in spite of not because institutional Christianity.