I’ve tried to explain through the years how bright seminarians get entrapped in careers they know are fraudulent.
Just imagine a young man who is a couple of years in and suddenly realizes the storyline is crazy and he doesn’t believe it. BUT: His parents are bursting with pride at his choice of career, he has a child, and faculty with one eye on their retirement accounts are crooning that doubt is a commonplace; it’ll go away. Also, he is married to a woman reared from childhood to be a preacher’s wife, and she is never going to be a good sport about four more years in married student housing while he studies some bullshit atheist thing like physics.
So he stays, gets his degree and sets out, literally, to save the world — which laughs at him because, Hey!, that story is crazy and the cult-ish ethics harm people, and the people around them, if they’re foolish enough to take it seriously. Now he is in the net with, mostly, people too dumb to know that the Christian narrative is crazy and untrue — and they’re looking to him for guidance on how to live.
You can see the problem …
What do you know? Bruce Gerencser publishes today a letter from a kid in some Bible College or other who is beginning to suspect he’s made a terrible mistake.
I am a Biblical Studies major in pursuit of becoming a pastor. Growing up, faith was all I had and everything that I held onto. Over the past year, I have learned things about the faith and the church that have left me confused and hurt. I am going into student debt to pursue this “calling” I feel in my life. Yet, this calling has slowly faded away and I am sitting here writing this, confused on what to do or where to go. I am scared to let go of my faith, although I am not sure why. It is hard for me to ignore hard facts and scientific explanations. They just make sense.
If I were King of the World for a day I’d forbid religious instruction to anybody below the age of eighteen.