Timothy Michael Short - Preacher Boy: A Liberty University Graduate Bids Farewell to Falwell and Hello to Atheism

PREACHER BOY

PREACHER
BOY

A Liberty University Graduate Bids
Farewell to Falwell and Hello to Atheism

TIMOTHY MICHAEL SHORT

First Published in Great Britain 2011 by Dangerous Little Books

Copyright Timothy Michael Short

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is dedicated to
Dr. Sam Harris and Dr. Richard Dawkins

Sam
Thank you for the letter

Richard
Thanks for turning my mirrors into windows

PART ONE

TO RAISE UP A CHILD: THE ORIGIN OF PREACHER BOY

ATHEIST IN THE CLOSET

All religions take care to silence or to execute those who question them and I choose to regard this recurrent tendency as a sign of their weakness rather than their strength.

Christopher Hitchens

I can close my eyes when I sit in my car sometimes and reminisce for an hour. I feel more like myself sitting in this little 91 Ford Tempo than in my North Carolina apartment. I used to be so busy I would eat my meals in the car, sleep in the car and even cram for exams in the car. Particularly, I remember January of 2010, a moment in time when I realized my life was beginning to unravel. I go there in my mind once againlet me take you back to that day, gentle reader. We wont stay there long, I promise.

My windshield is collecting an impressive amount of the largest snowflakes I have ever seen. The weather shouldnt surprise me after six years in Lynchburg. This Virginia town alone has shown me more amazing sunsets, devastating rain, treacherous ice and scathing summer heat than I could have ever expected. Summers have redefined my idea of humidity. I am parked outside Jerry Falwells massive Thomas Road Baptist Church. The heater in my car does not work but the charger plugged into the cigarette lighter does. I am idling in the parking lot thinking about the snow and the memories of the last six winters here. I am strangely lucid as I sit with my cracked phone in my hand. I hit the five button and the word Dad pops up on the screen. I always call him for the most trivial things as well as major decisions but this time I cannot hit the button and it fades back into a picture of a martini glass with a red background. Questionable choice of cell phone wallpaper for a future pastorI want to call him but I cannot. My ADD brain steels itself for a painful experience.

He is a decent and hard working Baptist pastor himself, ministering less than two hours awaymy biggest fan and an eager supporter of my pastoral training. He teased me about how my car was always filled with Taco Bell cups and various Bibles. My car is weighed down with books on theology and Bible lessons. My pencils are worn to the nubs from writing and rewriting hundreds of Greek sentences and phrases. I have written the declensions of more nouns than you may encounter in an actual visit to Greece. No less than seven different translations of the Bible are strewn in my backseat mingling with scratched David Crowder Band albums and unused Fire sauce packets from Taco Bell. They might come in handy for an omelet later. My mind is so much more cluttered than the car on this day. I had just finished The End of Faith by Sam Harris. In an effort to disprove the entire message of the book as well as the philosophical underpinnings of atheism in generalI had failed and turned to the side of its persuasive author. Somewhere in my malnourished brain came the soft but firm words, Playtime is over. Time to come with me. I would go on a little journey of discovery and my fundamentalist grasp of Christianity was not needed or welcome. All I would need to take was my newfound grasp of reality. Even though I often sat on the ground and ate a lot, life was no picnic for me. The Harris experiment had turned me into something of an agnostic Christian with two incompatible worldviews. My thoughts sprang out of eachoften at the same time. I was a spiritual schizophrenic. I feared I didnt know which side of the argument most represented my true beliefs.

The ugly doubt I had been shrouding so well had become a large elephant in the room. This elephant was starved for attention like the middle child in a homeschooled family. I should know, trust me. The surrender to this elephant seemed so spiritual, so elemental I just didnt know how to fight it. Turning to atheism should have felt like checking out of the land of the livingI should be depressed and fatter. Whatever was happening to me felt right. I imagined it would be the cold nihilistic acceptance I had always heard about. I remember how casual I was with respect to the possibility of burning in hell. I would take my chances on eternal damnation, no problem. An imaginary version of myself burning forever in an imaginary place for imaginary crimesI didnt feel scared. What really scared me was life before the chance encounter with St. Peter. This life.

I wished I were a character on a late night sitcom on Bravo! A multi-pierced and likely lesbian clich of a Starbucks barista might congratulate me on making a highly personal change in my life. Maybe if I were in Portland or London or Sydney I would be cheered on for disowning Jerry Falwell and his crew. If I were somewhere outside of the Bible Belt I could probably find a friend to congratulate me or at least talk to me without slinging holy water at my face.

The blood of Christ compels you! he might say. Youve seen the movies.

I could surround myself with some loving and accepting rebels who would tell me that I did the right thing to call my family. Perhaps I would just call my dad and tell him that I threw out baby Jesus with the bathwater and when I hang up, someone would hug me or nod some approval. Fat chance! Not in Lynchburg, Virginia. Even the most pierced and inked baristas in Lynchburg have Sarah Palin stickers on their cars and wear purity rings.

My ADD brain served up millions of distractions to my dismay. Focus, dammit! That made me think of Focus on the Family and James Dobson. Ugh. It made me think about my family again, namely, my dad. If I called my dad, he would either die of a broken heart or of his raging cancer. His nod of approval was the only nod I really wanted in the first place. What the hell was I to do? There were no easy answers. So there I sat in the car, having a dashboard confession. I remember the perspiration on my palms. Moisture damage, I learned the hard way, is seldom covered by cell phone insurance plans so I probably wiped my hands on my pants, which were the perfect pair for it. They were the kind of pants you might want to wipe your hands on after having hot wings, and I would have let you on that particular day. I remember thinking I had to go to work. Existential meltdowns were not grounds for excused absences. I would have to get out of my car, my portable fortress of solitude and make my way into the foreboding Liberty University compound.

Maybe I would be dismissed from work early because of the weather. Seriously, people were building snowmen by the dorms. I drove around the corner of the overwhelmingly huge church to the school portion of the compoundthe Mecca of the Religious Right and the container into which its future is placed so carefully every semester. Birds at Liberty, of course, can fly with two right wings. They come from very right-winged families and churches. The means by which spiritual and political conformity took place at Liberty bothered me. For students from a more liberal background, it looked like a rehab center for secular people overcoming critical thinking addictions.