Charles Templeton - Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith

Copyright 1996 by Charles Templeton

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Templeton, Charles, 1915
Farewell to God: my reasons for rejecting the Christian faith

eISBN: 978-1-55199-449-9

1. Christianity Controversial literature. I. Title.

BL 2747.2. T 44 1999 230 C 96-930669-5

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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ALSO BY CHARLES TEMPLETON

Life Looks Up (1955)
Evangelism for Tomorrow (1957)
Jesus: His Life (1973)
The Kidnapping of the President (1975)
Act of God (1977)
The Third Temptation (1980)
An Anecdotal Memoir (1983)
The Queens Secret (1986)
World of One (1988)
Succeeding (1989)
End Back Attacks (1992)

Permit me to make it clear that this book is not the product of any bias or nurtured grievance against the Christian church, its clergy, or its members. Almost without exception they have been kind and charitable to me and this despite my public renunciation of my Christian faith and my rejection of the beliefs on which the Christian religion is based.

Am I critical of the church because it did not give me a hearing or deal with me in kindness and charity? The opposite has been so. I oppose the Christian church because, for all the good it sometimes does, it presumes to speak in the name of God and to propound and advocate beliefs that are outdated, demonstrably untrue, and often, in their various manifestations, deleterious to individuals and to society.

NOTE: For the most part, quotations from the New Testament are from the New Revised Standard version of the Holy Bible; quotations from the Old Testament are from the King James version.

For Madeleine

I n 1936 my life took a sudden, unexpected, and profound change in direction a change that radically altered the next twenty-one years of my life. I became what is commonly called a born-again Christian.

Our family consisted of five children and our mother. Father had left us some three years earlier to take a temporary job in Montreal at Henry Morgan & Company. That having not worked out, he had moved sequentially to Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver. We heard from him through an occasional letter, but otherwise, in effect, he was gone.

With little or no money coming into the household, we had no choice but to go on relief, as it was then called, and supplement that social assistance by renting out the bedrooms in the house in which we lived. The next few years were spent with strangers in the hall and on the stairs, seething resentment and aching kidneys over their extended occupancy of the one bathroom, and the worrisome sight of Mother growing increasingly wan and dispirited from work and worry.

As winter descended, I sifted through the furnace ashes each morning for any unconsumed nuggets of coal, and scoured the neighbourhood for blocks around looking for broken tree branches or discarded wood of any kind. Stews were made substantial with flour and barley and we filled up on two-day-old bread (it was cheaper) and one of two standard desserts: bread pudding or fish-eye (tapioca) pudding.

It seemed the cheque from the government was always late, sometimes by as much as a week. There was one unforgettable twenty-four-hour period when there was nothing not a morsel of food in the house to eat. How often the six of us poised hushed and motionless, like animals freezing when a predator is near, until the bill-collector had gone from the front door. I can still see Mother at the kitchen table counting the coins kept in a china teapot, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief

AND THEN, THE FAMILY got religion.

I had just found a job as sports cartoonist for the Toronto Globe. I had made a drawing of the Toronto Maple Leafs Kid Line Primeau, Jackson, and Conacher and had taken the drawing to Mike Rodden, the sports editor. Without any comment, he assigned me to do a sketch of the famed Australian sculler, Bobby Pearce, who was scheduled to race the following day at the Canadian National Exhibition. He liked it and hired me. My weekly salary in dollars matched my age in years eighteen.

ONE NIGHT SOME WEEKS later, I returned home at 3:00 a.m. heavy with depression. Having completed my duties at the newspaper, I had gone with a colleague in the sports department to a private strip show in a house in the east end of the city. It was a sleazy affair. The women lacked grace and assumed an air of boredom. As they stripped in the unflattering light, some revealed stretch marks, surgical scars, and marbled cellulite.

There was a mirror in the entrance hall to our home, and I stopped before it, remaining for perhaps a minute. I didnt like the man I saw there. I went softly down the hall to my bedroom, not wanting to disturb Mother, but she was awake, waiting for me, her so-called man of the house. I sat on the side of her bed. She began to talk to me about God, and about how she longed to see me with the other children in church.

I heard little of what she was saying; my mind was doing an inventory of my life. I felt shoddy, unclean. I am at a loss to understand what I did next. A number of facile explanations present themselves: that I yearned for a satisfactory father figure; that I wanted somehow to repay my mother for her years of loneliness and struggle by accepting her new-found faith; that my early adolescent experiments at sex, innocent enough in retrospect, filled me with guilt. Whatever the reasons, I said, Mom, Im going to my room.

As I went down the hall, I was forming the first fumbling words of a prayer in my mind. I knelt by my bed in the darkness. Suddenly, it was as though a black blanket had been draped over me. A sense of guilt pervaded my entire mind and body. The only words that would come were, Lord, come down. Come down

I found myself I dont know how much later my head in my hands, crouched small on the floor at the centre of a vast, dark emptiness. Slowly, a weight began to lift, a weight as heavy as I. It passed through my thighs, my torso, my arms and shoulders, and lifted off. An ineffable warmth began to suffuse my body. It seemed that a light had turned on in my chest and that it had cleansed me. I felt, in the biblical phrase, that I could have leaped over a wall.

I hardly dared breathe, fearing that I might alter or end the moment. And I heard myself whispering softly over and over again, Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.