The Journey Home – Part 1: A-theist Conditioning

It’s public knowledge now that I’m undertaking my RCIA, The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults , or Ordo Initiationis Christianae Adultorum, the process for prospective converts to Catholicism to be confirmed and christened within the church. I’m not sure how long this series will be, but it aims to be an overview of my journey to Catholicism. I’m writing it both as a way to get my thoughts on this process onto ‘paper’, but also in the hope that others who are at the beginning or middle of their journey may find something to aid them on their way. One may ask, why is it that I have decided to write this prior to actually being confirmed and christened in the church, isn’t doing so a little assumptive of the outcome of the process? I would, in part, agree with such a criticism, and I do not take for granted my (God willing) confirmation and christening, however, as I understand it, such a process is a spiritual act of leaving one life behind, and beginning a new one. And so, much of what spiritually (or atheisticially) happened up until now I wish to leave in the past, and so I find now the best, and arguably only (whilst I still have an attachment) time to write of it in detail, for soon I shall not be the same person, and I shall hope to revisit this old life as little as possible. In part a beginning, in part a warning, in part a needed catharsis.

This first part will roughly detail my spiritual journey (or lack of) from birth until around the age of 15. For U.S. readers, of which I have many, the terms school, college etc. are of British usage.

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I guess I’ll begin right at the beginning, at the part where I wasn’t christened. I grew up in a fairly quaint little town, it’s a lot bigger now and much of its charm has been lost due to excessive growth and the invasion of various chain superstores, but it still has its churches. Quite a few, in fact. By my count there are six, which for a town of its size – back then – was quite a lot. One of them is Catholic, the others are all some variation of Protestantism, I don’t really know enough of their history to know the difference, and it only concerns me in terms of the way it affected my understanding of Christianity, which was much, much, to my detriment.

The first school I attended was a Church of England school, with direct ties to the Church just a few hundred metres from its gates. By all accounts it was, and still is, an idyllic, lovely school. The kind of place parents nowadays would stress about getting a place for their child. Now, one might find it surprising that being ‘educated’ in a Church of England school eventually resulted in me drifting away from God for roughly 25 years, that is if we’re to count the years when I was an infant and child, but even then I had no real understanding of what faith is, so I think it best to count them. It has been said that the Church of England produces more atheists than it does believers.

See, the problem with this school, at least the way it taught the lessons of Christianity, was that it had subsumed them into the state curriculum, and they appeared to me – even at a very young age – as merely identical to the didactic repetitive lessons which a child only understands as controlling, of use to poorly skilled and uninspiring teachers. The morals and lessons taught in the Bible and by Jesus Christ, were placed synonymously alongside the rules and laws of school – keep quiet, put your hand up to go to the toilet, no running in the hallways etc. – they had no roots; and as far as myself, and I imagine many others could see, they had been plucked from thin air as a means to pacify our excessive energy and youthful spirit. Such an understanding of Christianity, that it is simply there to ‘stop you having fun’, is one of the most common misunderstandings of the Church.

But the strange thing is, it wasn’t only didactic, authoritative usage of scripture which was undertaken within the school. We said the Lord’s Prayer every morning (not that anyone there ever told us what it actually meant, including the Priest from the adjacent church), we had harvest festivals and the like, but these were all furniture of school life, fancy china which was brought out every now and again as to project some message. The problem, in retrospect, was that this ‘message’ – whatever it may have been – was entirely confused, and entirely insincere. No one, not students, teachers, parishioners, or even the priests knew exactly why it was we were even doing this stuff, it wasn’t clear as to why we needed to use the Bible to make these points, as opposed to just creating another school-rule.

Perhaps I shouldn’t judge the school too harshly on their inability to truly convey the Christian message, for I should add in here that this was the beginning of the post-modern era of education. You know the one? The one everyone of every single generation bemoans, and the one which no one is able to take responsibility for. The one whereby every child must have an award, everyone is your friend – often including your teacher – and everyone is equal, there is no such thing really as being right or wrong, and most importantly, there is no longer any form of hierarchal superiority. Most definitely, there is not that which is superior. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes teaching Christianity practically impossible. The true message of Christ can never enter into relativism.

When I say that ‘there is no such thing really as being right or wrong’, which I imagine is quite literally true in some schools now, it wasn’t literally true then, but the abstractions of such an idea were on the rise. Of course, if you were to get a math problem wrong, 2+2=5, for instance, you would be corrected. However, the implications of being incorrect were never explained, we were always contained within the microcosm of individual efforts, no grander visions were allowed. So it was not that we could not be wrong, but it was that being incorrect meant absolutely nothing. You could be incorrect, wrong and mislead all day long, and nothing would come of it. We were not taught there would be repercussions for being wrong, only that – almost via osmosis – that it doesn’t matter anyway, because things just work out…

This first part is actually quite tough for me to write, not emotionally, but intellectually, because ultimately this early ‘education’ taught me that Christianity was quite literally that which it is not. As you’ll see in part two, this type of education, especially in relation to Christianity, carries through until college. The results of this ‘education’ in relation to belief and faith were sparse, transparent even. One received snippets of the Bible removed from their divine structure, the mystery of the trinity was mere justification for a festival, and prayer was only a part of the form of an assembly. From such an ‘education’ the results are what we commonly see from many current-day atheists in their rebuttals of those who believe – ‘Oh, you believe there’s a ‘big man’ in the sky!’ etc. And to a degree, these people can be forgiven for thinking this if they too were brought up in such a dire cultural atmosphere.

This is the reason why the title is ‘A-theist Conditioning’ and not ‘Atheist Conditioning’ (or even ‘New Atheist Conditioning’). Which leads to the question, what is the difference between ‘a-theism’ and ‘atheism’? Well, it’s a tricky subject. Because many contemporary atheists would state that all atheists are the same, much alike their old retort ‘Atheism is a religion like baldness is a hair style’, which is really quite nonsensical. Anyway, the difference – as I see it – is that the latter ‘atheism’ holds an inherent hostility against theism, that is to say, ‘atheism’ understands that from its position against theism it has to make efforts to replace the vacuum of ethics, morals, standards, metaphysics, epistemology, etiquette and possibly even worship which is left wide open once you remove a monotheistic religion. In short, atheists understand that from their claims, they have a responsibility to heal the rift of their position. Of course, being morally relativist, it is quite matter-of-factly impossible for them to take responsibility, because doing so no longer has any superior reasoning outside of individual subjective preference, but I’ll leave my atheist-bashing until part two. This leads me to ‘a-theism’. Now, as I understand it, a-theism is what atheism should be, but in practice, as I’ve stated, the latter becomes militant. And where the latter is militant, the former is placid, apathetic, nonchalant, complacent. Theism does not matter to a-theists. Whereas atheism, much like postmodernism, admits to that which it is tethered to and has to work against, a-theism is entirely dismissive, entirely ignorant, it cares not, its attitude towards theism is a complete absence, a ‘whatever’ in the face of beauty, order and tradition. Consider this controversial, but I actually consider a-theism far more destructive that atheism, though they are both equally poor, wretched, and most of all, heart wrenching.

But what exactly does this form of a-theistic teaching mean in terms of one’s upbringing? Spiritually, how does one grow? Well, quite simply, they don’t. In fact, they can’t, and that is the awful tyranny of much contemporary education. Whereas a devoutly atheistic or secular teaching would at least attempt to haphazardly construct a form of ethics and etiquette based around social teaching, education itself, and various values plucked from various places often termed ‘culturally Christian’, or ‘culturally X, Y or Z’. An a-theistic ‘teaching’ on the other hand simply doesn’t care, any theistic tradition which is assimilated into its mode of formative education is understood only as a historically material rule, which can be discouraged, ignored or mutated, and as we all know, once rules are ignored or altered to preference, they are no rules at all, and from that moment on, the task is only to find ways to justify overcoming our inhibitions and prohibitions. Such a teaching is not one of understanding why rules are good for you and your health, but of understanding how it may be possible to legitimize getting rid of them as a means to just ‘do what you want’. For once there is no transcendent Law – what C.S. Lewis calls Natural Law – there is no reason as to why one would simply not just seek pleasure, hedonism and to ‘do what thou wilt’. So when I state I was ‘brought up in a Christian school’, I should actually state ‘I grew up in a school which was Christian in name’, itself an utter tragedy.

This leads me back to the very first line of this piece, to the fact I simply wasn’t christened. I state ‘simply’ because it was just that, a simple oversight, I didn’t get ‘booked in’, and so it never happened. Such an attitude is a-theism in minutiae. It didn’t matter either way, because it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have been a sincere decision in the first place, so the fact it didn’t happen was no big deal, and the fact it was no big deal, was itself, no big deal…and on and on. This of course begs the question, why would I, then, have been christened at all? The answer to this is very clear – because it is the ‘done thing’. Drawing on the theory of René Girard, we can consider the majority of contemporary Western christenings examples of mimetic desire. They are done because they are ‘the thing that is socially done’, our neighbours christened their children, and so we christen ours. And yet, there is equally something quite nefarious in this form of – as I understand it – Protestant (specifically Church of England) christening, it is an exemplary case of what is known as the ‘once-saved-forever-saved’ dynamic. Whereby many are christened in the belief that once they are christened they have ticked the box needed to enter heaven. I dare not say my feelings on such an idea, and they needn’t matter. What matters is the social implications, especially within a morally relative culture. For once that box has been ticked, it is thereby understood that whatever actions are undertaken by that christened person need not matter, for they are saved, and so for good or bad, nothing matters, the material world within such a process loses its connection to the divine, for nothing you do in the material world effects the outcome of your soul, the world becomes a playground for rampant, individualistic relativism.

But what comes of someone – of which there are many – who learns of Christ solely via an a-theistic education? In them there develops an inevitable scorn for these lessons, for why would one care at all for them if it has been silently made clear that no one truly believes them, and they are merely socio-cultural relics the purpose of which is to keep us in place, keep us down, and control us? And so very swiftly, in those who enjoy to question – as I very much did as a young man – there is born a divide, between the silent admittance of authority figures that none of this is true, and the fact that it is still used as a form of control. The entire a-theistic teaching leads the critically minded to understand Christianity as a merely a situation akin to The Emperor’s New Clothes, where the entire charade is upheld only as a means of telling us what we CAN’T do. Of course, to the Enlightened Western liberal materialist there is nothing worse that a prohibition unbroken, and so begins the process of justifying why this is all baloney. Or, in Truth, so begins the process of following Satan, and justifying why it is ok to sin.

For herein is found the deep sadness of such a-theism. In their apathy, in their modus operandi of ‘just getting by’, the importance of moral Christian teaching loses its divine zeal and transcendent truth. In connection to God, the transcendent divine and the afterlife, such lessons not only have consequences on this material world in terms of one’s wellbeing, but have greater effects upon one’s soul. But once such an understanding has been strewn to the wind there is no reason left as to why one shouldn’t be a glutton, be lustful, be adulterous, be hateful, be greedy, be self-centered; for within the material world what greater way to get ahead that to adhere to all these acts as if they were guides, and why not? And yet, a-theistic teaching loosely holds to what it has named a ‘culturally Christian’ teaching, whereby in abstract, it strips all lessons of their divine truth, and utilizes their material affects as a means to roughly guide ‘good behaviour’. But as I have made clear, without the transcendent structure of the divine, without their connection to God, Christ and heaven, these lessons are laws without repercussions, which in truth are no laws at all. For what could we say of a law against murder if in breaking it there was no punishment? What could we say of any law which upon being broken one finds only empty air?

And so, as a young man, what was I left with? A mass of rules, laws and guidance with I understood as only hindrances to a greater material experience of this earthly world, the only world I believed existed at that moment. And from this, as one can now hopefully reason as to why, is born a scorn towards religion in all forms. For once the a-theistic teaching has taken root, all religious traditions and customs are seen only as dated prohibitions from a superstitious time, they are quite frankly in the way. Towards those who held steadfast to them I directed my condescension, to the institutions which upheld them I directed my hatred, and towards those who attempted to guide me by them I directed my sarcasm. From that moment on, around the age of 13-15, religion, in its entirety, was for me nothing but an archaic control mechanism, seeking only to upset lives, control freedoms and prohibit fun.

And so what was I at this moment in time? In the eyes of atheists I have achieved a great feat of reason and rational at a young age; in the eyes of the a-theists I was living but a normal life; in the eyes of God I was completely lost; in the eyes of Satan I was doing very well. But also, in material terms, where was I, for there is correlation between this world and the transcendent. And as I was alienated from the divine, I was equally beginning to find alcohol, drugs, nihilism, violent media, resentment, greed, self-pity, whining, and depression as agreeable and understandable modes of existence. I was, quite sadly, the average Western young man. Everything was absolutely how it was meant to be, everything was fine, everything was normal, and yet, I was completely lost.