The geography of religion

I have seen many sto­ries recent­ly about folks leav­ing orga­nized reli­gion and choos­ing a dif­fer­ent spir­i­tu­al path due to what I call “reli­gious trau­ma.” These sto­ries are impor­tant and need to be told, but I want­ed to add a slight­ly dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive to the mix.

I, too, left orga­nized reli­gion and chose a dif­fer­ent path many years ago. 

I was brought up in a fair­ly large Baptist church in Eastern Kentucky. While I have not con­sid­ered myself a Baptist (or a fol­low­er of any oth­er reli­gion) for decades, I don’t have a sin­gle neg­a­tive thing to say about my time attend­ing church. I nev­er suf­fered any trau­ma as a result of my par­tic­i­pa­tion. I hold no grudges or ill will towards the indi­vid­u­als I inter­act­ed with there. 

Church, for me, con­sist­ed of fun Sunday School lessons, trips to the local drug store for vanil­la Coke and hon­ey buns, vaca­tion Bible school arts and crafts, youth group meet­ings, hymns sung by a choir, lessons on kind­ness and char­i­ty, hol­i­day par­ties and games, potlucks with dozens of desserts, and all of the oth­er com­mon trap­pings of south­ern church life. Church was a safe space for me as a child. I had many friends there, along with adults I trust­ed who knew and cared about my well-being.

Church was a per­fect­ly hap­py place.

What changed? What caused me to turn my back on years of belief and choose to take anoth­er path through life?

I can’t actu­al­ly pin­point the moment when I knew orga­nized reli­gion was not for me, but the seeds of that change were plant­ed the year we lived abroad.

My sib­ling and I attend­ed school in the bustling city of Kobe, Japan. I attend­ed class­es and lived in a dor­mi­to­ry with chil­dren from all over the world. It didn’t take long to real­ize that many of the stu­dents in my school had very dif­fer­ent spir­i­tu­al views from those I had been raised with. Among my class­mates and dorm-mates were Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Buddhists, Catholics, Taoists, Jews, Bahais, athe­ists, and a host of oth­ers. They all saw the world dif­fer­ent­ly, and I found myself fas­ci­nat­ed by the dif­fer­ences in their views.

One aspect that fas­ci­nat­ed me the most was the fact that what the chil­dren believed was inti­mate­ly tied to where they had been born. The stu­dents from Central and Latin America were most­ly Catholic. Those from Southeast Asia were most­ly Buddhist or Muslim. Those from Western Europe were fre­quent­ly athe­ists. There were clear ties between where these kids were from and what they had been raised to believe.

That got me think­ing: Can truth be a func­tion of geog­ra­phy?

Universal truths?

Can some­thing be true in Cambodia, but not true in Rome? Can an idea be legit­i­mate in Lima, but not hold water in Timbuktu? Can the keys to liv­ing a “good” life in Atlanta be com­plete­ly dis­sim­i­lar to those in Beijing? If some­thing is true, shouldn’t it be true no mat­ter where you are on the planet?

Over many years of obser­va­tion and study, I found that some ideas seem to be glob­al­ly true. They are believed no mat­ter where you are on the planet:

Hurting oth­ers is bad.

Charity is good.

Kindness is awesome!

Lying to gain an advan­tage over some­one is wrong.

Cruelty is unacceptable.

Other ideas are deeply root­ed in reli­gious prac­tice and are only true if you were brought up in that par­tic­u­lar reli­gion and in that par­tic­u­lar part of the world:

Revering cows is good.

Women wear­ing pants is bad.

Loving some­one of the same gen­der is criminal.

Giving ten per­cent of your earn­ings to the church is awesome!

Eating pork is wrong.

Covering the head is an absolute must.

Working at your job on an arbi­trar­i­ly des­ig­nat­ed day of the week is unacceptable.

If these things are gen­uine­ly true, why doesn’t every­one know about them? Why, if I was not born in the part of the world in which these are stan­dard reli­gious teach­ings, do I have no clue about them? Surely if they are true enough to be piv­otal in how my exis­tence after dying looks, they would be true every­where, right?

But wait! Some will be quick to argue that this is the pur­pose of evangelizing. 

Why isn’t everyone in on the “truth”?

Those of some faiths are called upon to spread their beliefs to oth­ers around the world. The idea seems to be that the high­er pow­er in the uni­verse has giv­en top-secret, essen­tial knowl­edge to a small, select group of indi­vid­u­als who hap­pened to be born in the right place at the right time. The rest of the world will only get this crit­i­cal “truth” if those indi­vid­u­als share it.

This notion is hard for me to wrap my brain around, too. If this high­er pow­er wants every­one to share in the won­der­ful truth, why not have every­one be born into a place where that truth lives? Why not have it be present all over the world from the start? 

The sad real­i­ty of this ver­sion of “truth” is that peo­ple are very resis­tant to chang­ing their minds. If an indi­vid­ual has been raised to believe some­thing is true, they will reject efforts to con­vince them that it isn’t. I may be com­plete­ly con­vinced that what I believe is the only truth, but that per­son sit­ting next to me on a plane who was raised in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent part of the world will feel just as strong­ly that what they believe is the only truth.

Every sin­gle per­son out there who holds some form of staunch reli­gious belief is con­vinced that what they believe is true and what oth­ers believe is false. Can it real­ly be this com­pli­cat­ed? Can there real­ly be mul­ti­ple, per­fect­ly accu­rate ver­sions of true?

These ques­tions ulti­mate­ly led to my qui­et, peace­ful sep­a­ra­tion from the church. I didn’t leave because some­thing hor­ri­ble hap­pened to me. I didn’t leave because I was forced out due to my sins. I didn’t leave because I didn’t love and respect the peo­ple there. 

I left because I believe strong­ly in the search for truth and gen­uine­ly believe that if your truth is only true where you live, but not else­where, it isn’t truth at all.