I've gone through a couple of atheist phases in my life. Most of my closest current friends have known me through what I would now characterize as the most extended period of doubt in my life. And over the course of the last year and a half or so, they have been witnessing something that, to them, must be profoundly puzzling: the rebirth of my faith as a Latter-day Saint. I'm a gay man in a committed same-sex relationship, a pro-feminist, an anti-racist, an intellectual, a peace activist, and a liberal Democrat. Saying that I am all that and a believing Mormon has to sound more than a little counterintuitive. To the extent they think belief in God is for dummies, and knowing that I am not (nor ever have been) a dummy, they must certainly be left with a lot of inconvenient and embarrassing questions which they would never ask me because, to put a fine point on it, I am their friend and they are afraid it might be rude. But recently I shared an email exchange with a few friends about the movie Jesus Camp, which ranged over into discussion of the recent New York Times article, "Darwin's God" (March 4, 2007), and Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. Throughout the course of a lively, yet civil discussion, no one ever asked, and I never really volunteered, how it is exactly that I've crossed the line recently from skepticism to faith, though I've wondered at times if that wasn't the elephant in the chat room. Answering that question is the purpose of this essay.

I formally left the Mormon Church in 1986, after a long bout of suicidal depression. The depression had been brought on by my struggle to come to terms with being gay in a church that viewed homosexuality as the penultimate sin ("second only to murder"). The depression was also, in part, the by-product of a crisis of faith provoked by my growing awareness of inconvenient facts about LDS Church history that did not jive with the warm, fuzzy, faith-promoting version of church history I had been raised with. At the time that I left the Mormon Church, I was still a devout believer in God and a Christian. I was re-baptized by the Lutherans, who considered the Mormon baptism invalid. Then for some years I was active in the Lutheran Church until I could no longer ignore my sexuality, and eventually came out. The discrimination I experienced as an openly gay man in the Lutheran Church -- both subtle and unsubtle -- had a corrosive effect on my sense of faith. At first I was angry about the fact that I had a deep desire for service in the Church, only to find myself excluded from the kinds of service I aspired to. It did not help that much of the hate and misunderstanding I encountered was justified in the name of obedience to God, that the very scriptures that had always given me such hope and comfort were used against me as a cudgel. By about 1993, I had settled into a kind of religious cynicism. I still remained connected to the Liberal Church (my partner and I joined and still belong to a very liberal UCC congregation). But over time I came to see God as an allegory, not as a literal, personal being. I came to believe that the primary responsibility for fixing the world's ills lay with people -- ordinary people like me -- and I became convinced that traditional theism actually disempowered people, distracted us from the work we should be about. That is probably an accurate description of my faith, from about 1993 until late 2005.

I fully expected to live the rest of my life with this outlook. The fact that I no longer see things this way is as far as I can tell the work of God and the Holy Spirit, certainly not the result of any effort on my part. In fact, in my initial confrontation with God, I found myself angry and afraid. It was only after a period of personal struggle that I gradually came to embrace my current, new (yet old) understanding. I would describe my current outlook as including belief in the reality of God, in some objective, external, literal sense. I embrace the beliefs, scriptures, and values of the LDS Church as substantially true. It is within this framework or this context that I presently find my relationship with God most meaningful.

To say I have "come back" to faith would be an oversimplification. I believe that the faith I have now is much more mature than it ever was. I differentiate between belief, which connotes mere intellectual assent to a set of truth propositions, and faith, which implies a certain kind of commitment. If belief is, in the words of Pascal, like "making a bet," faith is betting your life. Life is all about learning faith, and faith, I have found, requires a certain quality of soul that is best compared to emptiness. This includes a willingness to acknowledge one's mistakes, change course, or even start over again from scratch if necessary. My new life is a life of holy emptiness or openness. That kind of life, I have found, is full of vibrant, blazing possibility.

Before explaining further what this means to me, and what this has to do with the kinds of epistemological debates we find in books like The God Delusion, I should clarify that I am not trained in philosophy, theology, or science. I have dabbled in all of the above, but don't pretend that anything I write on the subject of faith will necessarily speak comprehensively to the many arguments made by the many experts in any of these fields who have weighed in mightily on this subject over the centuries. I hope that I can at least explain how faith is both possible and meaningful to me, even if my explanations don't come across sounding quite as clever as I wish they would within the larger epistemological debates. Hopefully, once I have explained how I make sense of some of these things, it will at least alleviate my friends' worst fears that I've somehow gone off the deep end.

I feel obligated to add that it is with no small sense of irony that I find myself explaining to my non-religious friends why I, a thinking man, am religious, when most of my time writing about faith is spent explaining to religious folks why I, an openly gay man, am religious. It seems everybody -- and I mean literally almost everybody except my parents and a handful of other people -- would be much happier and more comfortable if I could somehow manage to just dispense with this religion thing and be a good, atheistic homo. But, after all, there is no reason why my life should be about making everybody else comfortable. A life without integrity, however, is not what seems to me a life worth living.

Faith that requires the denial or suppression of any truth, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, is a counterfeit and deserves to be exposed as nothing more than the tawdry lie that it is. Faith that requires the suppression of human intellect and inquiry is in fact not faith, but tyranny, and also deserves to be exposed and denounced. Faith that does not allow human beings to honestly and forcefully encounter the world that they live in and come to terms with it as human beings should be discarded as unworthy of a moment's notice or a single wasted breath. Faith is an enterprise that should be engaged in with eyes and mind wide open, and with the humility that allows us to relinquish any untruth as soon as we discover it to be such, no matter how familiar and cherished it has become to us. To the extent that atheism unmasks all the pious frauds, damnable lies, unholy violence, all the oppression, hatred and insanity that has been foisted on humanity throughout the ages in the name of God and religion, it does true faith a service, for which truly devout people everywhere should be deeply and eternally thankful. Faith is central to my life, but I would take any day a world full of honest atheists over a single pious fraud.

My starting point with faith begins with God's call to me. It began with the voice of God speaking to me when I least expected it, calling me to go where I would not have gone on my own, inviting me to begin a new life work. I experienced this call dramatically in August 2005, and on subsequent occasions I have written about elsewhere.¹ I don't have much more to say about this, except that it is this immediate, personal, daily-renewed experience with God that is the foundation of my faith. Everything else flows from this. The pattern of God's relationship with me, a relationship whose fundamental nature is unconditional love, has set the pattern for my relationship with everyone else in my life, and for my approach to everything else I have to deal with. When I face adversity or rejection, frustration and set backs, when I must struggle, when I contemplate brokenness, injustice and evil in our world, I return to this foundational experience, and it teaches me how to respond. This ongoing experience of God is the heart and soul of faith. I find myself returning to it again and again.

Hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit is like turning on a light in a dark room. Before you turn on the light, everything is undifferentiated black. Once the light is on you see textures, colors, shadows, shapes, objects. You are able to differentiate between things. So it is with your understanding of the world, after the experience with God.

So what do I understand about the World (or the Cosmos) in the light of God? I understand that the World has its own patterns, its own cycles, its own logic, and its own laws. I like the Deist analogy of the clock, though I disagree with the Deist notion of how God relates to Creation. Scientists today suggest that they can explain how the Universe (or the World, or the Cosmos) came into being by itself, and how it could come to an end and back into being again quite on its own, without need for reference to anything outside of itself. This to me is an excellent definition of what the World is. It seems to me, based on what I understand about God, the kind of World it would serve God to set in motion.

I embrace the very ancient notion that God exists quite outside of Creation. God is not to be confused with Creation itself, as the Pantheists suggest. Creation exists as a result of God's will, just as, in some mysterious sense, when this Cosmos eventually comes to an end, it will also end as a result of God's volition. But though God stands outside of Creation, unlike what the Deists suggested God has a vested interest in Creation. One way I might try to describe God's relationship to Creation would be to say that Creation is in a very real sense an image of something vastly superior, whose purpose is to help us prepare for that vastly superior realm.

In this life it is possible -- desirable even -- for us to awaken in ourselves an awareness of God. I believe we best prepare ourselves for this awareness through compassion. God speaks to us, if we will listen, and we can speak with God. The goal of this ecstatic awareness and connection -- ecstatic because it takes us outside of ourselves -- is to help us align ourselves with God, to align ourselves with perfect, unconditional, transformative Love. Yet -- and this is of paramount importance -- God has set very clear limits on the extent to which God intervenes in Creation. God is quite concerned about and intimately involved with Creation, though I do not believe God intervenes in Creation in any way that does fundamental violence to what we observe as the laws of nature.

To me, belief in the absolute reality of God is utterly consistent with a model of the Cosmos as a self-contained, self-governed reality, artificially or temporarily independent of God in every way that it is possible for us as humans to observe and imagine, including how every aspect of our material being came into existence and functions and will -- eventually -- come to an end. I believe it is quite possible to have this understanding of reality, and also to believe in a kind of super-reality, in a level of being that is above and beyond and outside of this reality, that is separate from our reality and yet contains our reality, like the ocean contains a bubble. It is within this super-reality that God exists. It is from this super-reality that I believe our souls have come and to which our souls will return. This understanding is confirmed by my experience of God.

Can we explain the evolution of faith, of belief in God, of the soul, based on principles of biology, chemistry and physics that are observable in the physical world, that have no need of a God or any other external spiritual references to explain them? Certainly. But does that mean that all that we see, and all that we hear, and all that we touch, and all that we taste and smell and measure is all that there is? We are entitled to draw that conclusion if we so choose.

These aren't new ideas, though we ought to remind ourselves of this more expansive, more mystical, more ancient way of understanding the relationship between God and Creation, since we are surrounded in America by adherents of an insecure and immature faith, who insist on cradling a certain, literalistic, infantile interpretation of scripture to their breasts, and scream heresy at anyone who won't believe that God planted dinosaur bones in the earth in order to test our credulity. I treasure the Bible. I treasure all sacred texts. I am so moved by the power of scripture I am frequently brought to tears as I read it. I make a point of reading at least some sacred text every day of my life, and I find it a powerful spiritual and moral compass. But I can also say that I treasure scripture enough not to debase it with poppy-cock theories about Creation. Believers in God should value truth far more than that.

I would describe my approach to scripture as Literal-Allegorical. I read all scripture as if it were literally true, and take it as literally true until common sense and the guidance of the Holy Spirit point me toward a more allegorical understanding. But here's the thing about allegory. An allegory is something we essentially read by implicitly prefacing it with the phrase, "It is as if..." The value of allegory is found in seeing at least some element of the allegory as literally true. In the light of my experience with God, I am again and again astonished by the literal truth of scripture, even when my understanding of that literal truth comes by way of allegory. So when we read the Book of Genesis, if we read, "It is as if in the beginning, God said..." Even knowing that Creation did not come about literally in this way, if we live our lives as if God created the world exactly as is described in Genesis, we will find the mystical keys that guide is into a truer, more profound sense of the sacredness of all Creation and of Love as the ground for all human relationships.

Faith is not about credulity. It is not about believing anything and everything because God is supposedly testing us to see how unthinking we are. To the contrary, if this life is a test of anything, it is a test of our integrity, of our compassion, and of our passion for justice and decency. If we are caught in this artificial bubble of separateness from God, it is because we are being given this one chance to see just what we are made of. It will be a sad day indeed when the test ends, when we recognize the foolishness in failing to use the talent of intelligence, resourcefulness and love God gave us to create an increase, if we buried our talent in the sand, fearing to offend a wrathful and vain Tyrant. That is why, in my sense of faith, an honest Atheist will fare far better on judgment day than the most devout Christian who believed only because he or she was afraid of offending a wrathful God. Faith is about living boldly, taking risks, not being afraid of the truth, and learning to peel away all the petty limits on our love for our fellow beings during our sojourn in this Cosmos. If we are not challenged, we are not living.

I still hold an elevated notion of human agency and responsibility. The insight I achieved as a liberal, doubting-Thomas Christian I still see as fundamentally sound. We humans bear the primary responsibility for trying to make the world a better place. To ignore our responsibility I now see as faithlessness of the first order. But I no longer see faith as detracting from this awareness. If anything, my relationship with God grounds me in the peace and wholeness I need to sustain me in a struggle that at times can be painful and frustrating. More importantly, it allows me to relinquish the sense of ego that often places limits on what I am willing to do to achieve a greater good. It puts my personal struggles and our struggles as human beings in a much, much larger context.

Notes

1. See John D. Gustav-Wrathall, "The Tug of Home," Letter to the Editor, Sunstone, Issue 139 (November 2005): 2-4; Gustav-Wrathall, "A Gay Mormon's Testimony," Sunstone, Issue 141 (April 2006): 52-57; Gustav-Wrathall, "Trial of Faith," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Summer 2007): 78-107.