My path out of traditional religion: A short deconstruction story (September 14, 2024)

I was "educated"/indoctrinated in Seventh-day Adventist parochial schools all the way through my first quarter in college (at Pacific Union College) in the Fall 1975.

Don Vollmer (famous within Adventism as a member of the Wedgewood Trio, a fundamentalist folk group) was my 8th-grade bible teacher for the 1970-71 school year at Redlands Junior Academy, and he had us reading a book by Adventist author Fernando Chaij titled Preparation for the Final Crisis. The book is basically an exegesis of Ellen G. White's quotes (EGW was the founding prophetess of the SDA church) from all her writings about "The End Times" and "The Time of Trouble." In his chapter titled, appropriately enough, "The Time of Trouble," he quotes this from a chapter in "The Great Controversy" (also titled by EGW, "The Time of Trouble"):

"The assaults of Satan are fierce and determined, his delusions are terrible; but the Lord’s eye is upon His people, and His ear listens to their cries. Their affliction is great, the flames of the furnace seem about to consume them; but the Refiner will bring them forth as gold tried in the fire. God’s love for His children during the period of their severest trial is as strong and tender as in the days of their sunniest prosperity; but it is needful for them to be placed in the furnace of fire; their earthliness must be consumed, that the image of Christ may be perfectly reflected."

After reading this passage, I immediately recognized that EGW had devised a way to persuade the gullible, herself included, that bad things can still happen to faithful believers, even though this allegedly all-powerful god could prevent them if "He" wanted.

Suppose there is no supernatural entity directing and controlling human and natural events. In that case, bad things will happen to good people, and good things will befall the cruel and undeserving wicked. This is exactly the world we see, now and throughout history. Based on the evidence, there is no supernatural God watching over and intervening in reality. To make belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving, all-controlling God plausible, the seeming randomness of fate that we see all around us must be explained. This is what EGW came up with. If your life is great, God is blessing you. But if your life is miserable and cruel, it is still God's loving plan for your life. You are just being subjected to the Refiner's fire of misery in order to get you ready for the end times and make you fit for heaven. The genius of this convenient bullshit* justification became immediately apparent, and the scales fell from my eyes. To quote the great Harry Chapin, it hit me “like a thunderbolt exploding in my mind”; I realized that Adventism was a false religion. (* I am using "bullshit" in its technical philosophical definition as developed by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt in On Bullshit (2005)).

Digging a bit deeper, I realized that Ellen White did not originate this idea. The Apostle Paul first deployed it in 1 Corinthians 10:13. So, this bogus argument was present from the very beginning of the religion that emerged out of the life of that itinerant Sage from Galilee. By extension, Christianity, in general, was also false, not just Adventism.

On the last day of Bible class in 8th grade, Don asked us all to write a one-page essay on what we learned that year. It wouldn't be graded as long as we did it. I remember starting the essay, "Dear Mr. Vollmer, I will always be grateful to you because I learned in this class that both Adventism in particular and Christianity in general are false." I wish I could recall now what else I said for the rest of that page.

Don Vollmer and I have reconnected. We had breakfast in August 2017, and he finally brought up the essay I had written back in 1971, and asked if I remembered writing it. I said, "I do remember that." Apparently, it stuck with him.

I found my way to pantheism via Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" a few months later, during my freshman year in high school, after my 8th-grade epiphany. I still regard "Walden" as my most important sacred scripture, though it is now supplemented by John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey.

*****

Now, it is one thing to realize as an intellectual matter that Christianity is false. It is another thing to undo the emotional indoctrination and brainwashing. The fundamentalist terrors still lurked in my psyche. It would take two more developments to truly undo the programming. First, I escaped the Adventist indoctrination centers after my one and only quarter at P.U.C. (fortunately, my parents could not afford to keep me there), which meant I was soon learning all about that evil idea of evolution in my state university biology classes, and this triggered my formal separation from Adventism. Finally receiving a proper and accurate education in evolutionary science, I was exposed for the first time to the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. That's when I marched into Elwood Staff's office (he was the senior minister at the Redlands Adventist Church back in '77) and demanded to be disfellowshipped. I informed him that I no longer wanted Adventism to be able to claim me as a member. I was surprised by his response. He said he understood my anger and realized that the way Adventists presented evolution in their schools was, to use his exact words, "intellectually dishonest." He went on to say that he knew that the basic approach in SDA schools was to present evolutionary science as an idea that was so ridiculous on its face that only someone desperate not to believe in God could even attempt to believe it. This was indeed how it was presented to me. When we got to the chapters on evolution in the textbook in 10th-grade biology, we just skipped them. Pastor Staff went on to say that he still didn't believe in evolution (how could he; his job was on the line) but that he understood that smart, intelligent people could reasonably find the evidence convincing and that to suggest otherwise was an act of dishonesty by Adventism as an institution. (I wish I had quizzed him about how he came to his knowledge of evolutionary science; he's long dead now).

About six months later (during my practical nursing training at an Adventist hospital in Portland), a classmate shared Ronald Numbers' The Prophetess of Health (1976). It proved that Ellen White was not only wrong; she was a fraud. The same classmate then shared Religion in Ancient History: Studies in Ideas, Men and Events (1969) by S.G.F. Brandon. The book was a fascinating introduction to secular biblical scholarship (a bit outdated now, but excellent for its time). Especially interesting was the chapter on the origins of the idea of dying and resurrecting god, who saves humanity from sin, and the disclosure that this is the story of Osiris, not Jesus, predating the Jesus stories by over 1,000 years. Ahh!! In its initial formulation by Paul, Christianity is just a retelling of far older pagan stories about Egyptian gods.

About a month later, in the fall of 1977, I found my way to Portland's Unitarian Universalist Church and haven't looked back since. Evolutionary science plus secular religion scholarship completed the project of digging down and ripping those last vestiges of fundamentalist terror, never to return. Now I am, among other things, one of those secular religion scholars, specifically, the political sociology of religion and religion's effect on environmental values and behaviors. In the fall of 2020, I designed and taught a special topics course, "The Sociology of Religion, the Environment, and Sustainability," at the University of California, Santa Cruz.