Although I had followed him online for some time (especially through his involvement in the nontheist Friends community), I first met Zach face to face on my trip to Boston last fall.  He invited Jana and I to dine with him at his home in the Seed Pod Co-op.  Over homemade soup and bread, he enthralled us with tales from his personal religious history.  You can find him at zachalexander.com, but he will spend some time with us guest posting for the next few weeks.  Welcome, Zach!

The first garden I remember was by our country house in Ohio, near Steubenville, a little town nine miles from the Pennsylvania border. We were there because my father wanted to attend Franciscan University, as it was a hotbed of charismatic Catholicism at the time. But by the time I was six, we moved from Ohio for the same reason we had moved there from Phoenix: my father’s all-consuming passion for finding the truth about God.

It always took us to unexpected places. From Ohio we moved to Virginia, to be part of a charismatic church for the affluent near Virginia Beach, and soon thereafter moved to be part of an urban ministry in Foundation Park (torn down since then), perhaps the worst slum in greater Norfolk.

All because of what I take to be his defining paradox: limiting himself to the foreshortened scope of evangelical Christianity, yet thinking freely and independently within it. He kept asking questions, and boldly went wherever he believed Scripture led — from theology to theology, and hence from church to church, town to town.

The most dramatic example was the move from Virginia to Maine. In the late nineties, a church he founded in another Virginia city became interested in trying to decode biblical prophecy — the mysterious sayings in books like Daniel and Revelation. The narrative we ultimately arrived at was that the U.S. would soon be destroyed by a radicalized pan-Islamic superstate armed with nuclear weapons from Russia, and that we should therefore flee to an area that wouldn’t be hit, for our own safety and to be a refuge for others in need during the plagues and woes to come.

It may sound comical, but given our (dubious) assumptions about the Bible, it was entirely reasonable. So rather than shirk from this conclusion, with my father in the lead, much of the church banded together and moved to northern Maine to await the end of the world.

It’s too long a story to tell here, but suffice it to say that it ended badly about nine months later. (The community, that is.) Turns out that being reasonable isn’t the same as being true.

* * *

And so it was only at 18, away at college, that it became possible to think for myself.

Sharing my entire journey here from evangelicalism to humanism (or more simply, “nothing”) would be tedious, but fortunately it can be summed up. Almost all of it comes down to the lessons I learned from my father to think for myself, to ask hard questions, to follow inquiry wherever it leads you. You might say my religious upbringing contained the seeds of its own deconstruction.

But I will share one moment in particular from about five years ago, when the war was starting. A peace and justice group loosely connected to my college was reading The Politics of Love: The New Testament & Nonviolent Revolution by John Ferguson. Towards the end was a little avant-garde theology that made an impression on me.

To paraphrase, who can believe in an interventionist God after the Holocaust? The only God we can find plausible is one who works through people; as a saint put it, Christ has no hands but our own. Going still further, the author quoted a poem by Rilke that I found disquieting. Looking back, I think that moment was the beginning of the end of my faith.

What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your brother, broken, lie?
When I, your drink, go stale and dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
you lose your meaning, losing me.

Homeless without me, you will be
robbed of your welcome, warm and sweet.
I am your sandals; your tired feet
will wander bare for want of me.

Your mighty cloak will fall away.
Your glance that on my cheek was laid
and pillowed warm, will seek, dismayed,
the comfort that I offered once –
to lie, as sunset colours fade
in the cold lap of alien stones.

What will you do, God? I am afraid.

Rather dark, I know, but happier days were in store.