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Caught in the Pulpit

Leaving Belief Behind Expanded and Updated Edition

Pitchstone Publishing

INTRODUCTION

Daniel C. Dennett

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Preachers Who Aren't Believers

This book is about men and women who entered the clergy with the best of motives and intentions and have come to recognize that they no longer hold the beliefs their parishioners think they do. Half of the people interviewed still have a congregation awaiting them each Sabbath, trusting them to speak the truth from the pulpit. They come from various backgrounds and have made different decisions about how to deal with their lack of belief in what they think somebody in their position ought to believe.

The present study, made in collaboration with the clinical social worker and qualitative researcher Linda LaScola, is a continuation of our 2010 pilot study of five male nonbelieving Protestant ministers. Our main objective: to explore, through in-depth interviews, the disconnect between what closeted nonbelieving clergy believe and what they preach, and the impact it has on their personal lives, their congregations, and society.

Most people who participated in the present study first learned about it through the media attention the pilot study received. This time there were thirty new participants, including women, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, a wider spectrum of liberal (mainline) and literal (fundamentalist) Protestant denominations, a few current or former theology students, and three mainline Protestant seminary professors. We included the seminary professors to learn how their students react to academic and historical perspectives on the Bible that may be quite different from what they learned in Sunday school. These professors teach Old and New Testament studies to beginning seminarians. Their personal religious beliefs were not known in advance and were not explored in the interviews. To get a better sense of liberal clergy beliefs and thought processes, we included two active, believing, Episcopal clergy. Follow-up interviews with all the clergy from the pilot study and many from the continued study are also included. As with the pilot study, the interviews were done in confidence, with names and identifying details changed.

The interviews — all of which were conducted by Linda — varied in number, length, and setting. Though most were conducted face-to-face, some were done by Skype or phone. Only a few people were interviewed once; most were interviewed two or three times over several days, in discussions lasting an hour to an hour and a half. All active clergy were interviewed three times, allowing Linda to follow up on important issues and giving the interviewees time to reflect more deeply on their experiences and emotions. All in all, 90 interviews were conducted in more than 120 hours of conversation. (For a complete list and categorization of the participants, see appendix A.)

We had planned to assemble a diverse group of participants; the reality turned out to be more diverse than we guessed. People didn't fit into the neat demographic boxes we had prepared for them. Some had changed denominations during their careers, moving from literal to liberal (never the other direction) before dropping their beliefs altogether. Some who were active clergy "came out" unexpectedly a few weeks or months after they were interviewed, prompting follow-up interviews. Two participating clergy were on leaves of absence when they were interviewed, so their futures were up in the air.

An intervening event that surely affected some participants' subsequent behavior was the establishment of The Clergy Project, in March of 2011. The Clergy Project, a confidential online community for active and former professional clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs, is separate from our study — although both of us were among its founders and there is considerable overlap of study participants (twenty-four) and project members. It was the culmination of years of discussions between Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and Dan Barker, copresident of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Dawkins had long wanted to provide assistance to nonbelieving clergy who wanted to leave the church. Barker, a former evangelical minister, often encountered other former clergy who urged him to "do something" for people who, like them, had made such a dramatic, life-altering decision. The first fifty-two members of The Clergy Project came from lists of people Barker had met over the years and people who had participated in our 2010 pilot study or contacted us about it. It's important to note that while Linda and I are among the cofounders, we are not members, because we have never been clergy. Like all nonmembers, we have no access to the private Web site and take no part in the discussions there.

All current and former clergy and seminary graduates were asked about their childhood religious experiences, their decision to become clergy (or seminarians), their experiences in the seminary (if applicable), and their changes in belief and its effect on them and the people around them. As the interviews were ending, Linda asked two specific questions of the nonbelievers: "What have you gained as a result of your changes in belief?" and "What have you lost?" Their responses to these two questions comprise a section toward the end of the book.

Some Cautions

What is it like to be a practicing pastor or rabbi while not believing most — or any — of the doctrines of your faith? You may think you know quite well if you have read some of the many good autobiographical books and articles written by former clergy or nuns (e.g., in alphabetical order, the work of Armstrong, Barker, Compere, DeWitt, Ehrman, Hurlin, ... Johnson, Loftus, ... Semple, ... Uhl, . ...). Or perhaps you have read In the Beauty of the Lilies, the heartbreaking novel by John Updike about the (fictional) Reverend Clarence Wilmot, a Lutheran minister who after years of struggling with religious doubt announces his disbelief and thereupon is plunged into a terrible downward spiral, losing his job, his respectable position in the community, and even his family's love.

Linda and I knew some of this literature quite well when we embarked on our research project. But, as usual, reality outstrips imagination. We didn't know the half of it.

There are very different ways of becoming a nonbelieving preacher, and very different ways of coping with the discovery that that is what you are. Our interviewees are not saints, anymore than you are, but they are in general good people: more conscientious and honest, we would hazard, than the average citizen, all trying hard to help their neighbors and not hurt a soul, trying not to lie or dissemble, but caught up in a web of tact, tradition, and subtly imposed expectations — a web trapping them in patterns of deceit that accumulate and threaten to immobilize them. Some respond more gracefully — which does not necessarily mean more honestly — than others. Some are bitter, feeling seduced and abandoned by their creed or angry at themselves for allowing their eagerness to go along with the program to trump their honesty. Some are wistful about what they will miss if ever they find a way out of their predicament. What they will miss is in some cases the wholehearted community spirit of their congregation; in others, the inflated respect and deference their position commands; in yet others, the limelight in which they exercise their considerable talents as preachers. These are people like the rest of us, succumbing to some temptations and stalwartly resisting others, with often unrealistic hopes and ambitions, sometimes self-deceived, sometimes depressed, sometimes aching with love of what they fear they will lose forever. And, yes, sometimes terrified of the financial calamity that will likely befall them if they lose their modest living. None of these people went into the ministry for money, that's for sure. If many of them now have a family to support, children to send to college, no equity in a home, who can blame them for considering money an important part of their problem?

I must stress these points from the outset, for our informants have already been subjected to ferocious criticism by religious leaders who read the article on our pilot project in Evolutionary Psychology. I find it a telling irony that out of the several dozen who posted commentary on the Washington Post's On Faith Web site, where our piece first appeared, only Max Carter, a Quaker (whose tradition has no ordained clergy) and Rebecca Goldstein, a Jewish atheist, saw the torment of these clergy for what it is. The others seem to have forgotten Jesus' message about casting the first stone (John 8:7), responding for all the world like stage magicians infuriated by another magician's revelation of their trade secrets.

They were right to feel threatened. One of the moral quandaries Linda and I have faced in preparing this account is whether our revelations about the methods used by our informants to conceal their disbelief from their congregations will make the job of being a pastor much harder for all, believers and nonbelievers alike. We concluded that the membrane of deceit so often separating clergy from their congregations is on its way out in any event, and if we can hasten its extinction that's a good thing, even if in the short run it makes life more difficult for those intent on maintaining their positions with a careful self-presentation. They will just have to be more careful.

Stage magic has handsomely survived the rude subversion of Penn and Teller, whose amusing exposure of magicians' tricks has earned them accolades even from their fellow magicians, and it is quite likely, in our view, that after the initial shock wears off, churches that can put the stage magic behind them — or keep it on as explicit stagecraft, if they like — are likely to be healthier competitors in the Information Age of the 21st century.

Some are already there, such as the ceremonially "high" ("smells and bells") but doctrinally "low" (believe whatever you want) Episcopal churches that hold their own in some parts of the country. Other, more "creedal" denominations have a harder road ahead, as their leaders well know. Evangelicals repeatedly warn that "if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be 'Bible-believing Christians' as adults." In 2009, one "postevangelical" spokesman declared, "We are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity," a prediction echoed and expanded more recently.

Our decision to include the tricks of the trade in our account was not taken lightly. We realize that doing so may cause serious harm, making some benign effects of current religious practices harder to achieve. This is not the first time I have faced this issue. Many years ago, when I was researching the practice of anesthesia for an essay on pain, I learned of the widespread use of amnestics by anesthesiologists. These drugs aren't painkillers at all; they are memory erasers, and anesthesiologists use them to wipe out any awful memories of pain that may have leaked onto the scene in insufficiently anesthetized patients. The use of amnestics makes their job easier and safer, since they don't have to anesthetize their patients as deeply (which is dangerous) to ensure an untroubled postsurgical result. But telling patients in advance that they might be receiving an amnestic only makes them more anxious and hence harder to tranquilize and anesthetize. (Now are you sorry you began reading this? There is more to come, so caveat lector!) I was importuned by several of my anesthesiologist informants not to reveal this awkward fact about benign subterfuge to the world at large, but I didn't take their advice, and now, forty years later, anesthesia is safer than ever. Perhaps this just goes to show how few people read my essay on pain, but in fact I have found that people who know all about amnestics are blithely unconcerned both pre- and postsurgically — certainly it hasn't bothered me in my surgical encounters. I suspect that anesthesiologists and church leaders alike are more fearful of candor than they need to be, and we will show you some evidence of that in due course.

Another worry of mine is that readers of this book may inadvertently render themselves immune to certain sorts of helpful intervention. When I was an undergraduate, I had a classmate, whom I will call Rob, who was both depressed (or had some other mental disorder) and obsessed with the literature of psychotherapy — especially the techniques. The obsession made him all but untreatable by the college psychotherapist. Rob would return from his weekly visit both morose and strangely triumphant: "He started by chatting me up about my coursework, and I responded with 'Gain your patient's confidence by engaging with him about a subject he knows well,' Jones and Smidlap, How to Treat an Undergraduate,p. 5,'" or words to that effect. He was just too self-conscious and savvy to let the therapist gain a foothold. I'm happy to say he survived his youthful funk and has had a productive research career as a psychologist. Will churchgoers who could use some spiritual counseling be similarly immunized and unable to respond to the best efforts of their pastors? Perhaps, but if that is the price to pay for saving some young aspirants to the clergy from falling into the traps our informants landed in, it will be worth it, in our view.

What We Did and Why We Did It

When I called for the scientific study of religion in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, I drew attention to many of the obstacles to such study but urged readers to press ahead because of the importance of the phenomena and the urgency of learning more about them in an age when so many policies hinge in one way or another on getting religion right. I was soon approached by Linda, a professional qualitative researcher, who proposed to help me study closeted nonbelieving clergy — if we could find some. It turns out that we could, and the reaction to our pilot study encouraged us to expand our research and made it possible by inducing many other clergy to volunteer as confidential informants.

My collaboration with Linda has been my attempt to follow my own advice. Are the results "scientific"? Yes, in the important sense that we pursued our work with careful attention to the established methodological principles of research with human subjects, which always raises special problems. Chemists, geologists, and botanists can conduct their research without having to tiptoe around or whisper in the presence of their phenomena. They may even talk to the trees — or the rocks or the molecules — without worrying that in doing so they will subvert the objectivity of their experiments by provoking uncontrolled reactions in their materials. Research on animals needs more attention to these possible confounds, since animals are perceivers and perception is a gatherer and amplifier of environmental effects that are hard to keep track of. In the field, if you can't avoid detection altogether, you strive to avoid doing things that might perturb the normal behavior of your subjects, and if you absolutely must catch, tag, and release your study animals, you attempt to minimize both the trauma and the chances of creating dependencies between experimenter and subjects. (If they need it, nurse them back to vigor before releasing them, but don't provision them and don't warn them of approaching predators, for instance.) Moreover, there are standards of ethical treatment of animals that must be scrupulously followed.

Research on human subjects raises the bar much higher and introduces the need for special restrictions on experimenters, as well as care both in the choice of subjects (avoiding self-selection and other biases) and in how subjects are briefed and debriefed (if they're not simply observed "in the wild"). Institutional review boards must approve all research involving human subjects in advance, and issues of privacy and risk must be carefully assessed. With all these difficulties, it is still possible to do objective, controlled research on human subjects — even research on that most private phenomenon, human consciousness. What is it like to be a human being confronted with various stimuli, challenges, experiences, problems? We have a wealth of partial answers derived from more than a century of empirical research.

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Excerpted from Caught in the Pulpit by Daniel C. Dennett, Linda LaScola. Copyright © 2015 Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola. Excerpted by permission of Pitchstone Publishing.
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