Bart Campolo’s De-conversion
We’re in a cultural moment when many people are leaving an overt religious commitment either for a looser spirituality or non-theism entirely. A high profile example of this has been Bart Campolo, the son of a famous evangelist. A few years ago Bart “came out” as a non-theistic humanist to his family explaining why he still strives for his version of the common good but no longer believes in God or the Christian story. This interview done by the Christian organization Youth Specialities will give you a sense of the conversation.
He became a “humanist chaplain” at USC and has been counseling people to appreciate how amazing life is and how to enjoy it to the fullest.
Good Without God
He reflects quite openly on his conversion and then his de-conversion. He understands both in terms of a social and psychological process. He became a Christian as a early teen he says because he was surrounded by a lot of other good people who wanted to make an impact for good in this world. After decades of trying to bring shalom to the poor of the inner city he decided he didn’t need the story of Jesus or the stuff of the Bible to do this work. He believed it would all go better without all the religious baggage.
He came to the conclusion that these religious beliefs were things that you pick up as a function of your upbringing. If you’re raised in an Islamic household you’ll probably become a Muslim and if you’re raised in a Christian household or get in with a bunch of good Christian people you’ll probably find their stories and ways of thinking to be compelling and you’ll be like them. So he decided that these religious categories were unnecessary attachments and that in fact he could be a better person and do more good in the world without all these things that sometimes create walls and barriers between people and organizations.
This is a common story and one that you’ll find many people telling and embracing. One of the things that is seldom noticed in the telling of the story is that the person who steps out of the group they were raised an or indoctrinated into implicitly portrays themselves as the exception to the norm. While HE was raised a Christian he changed his mind and has “broken out” of that confining or un-examined or mindlessly assumed tribe and through his own insight, clarity or overcoming moral effort transcended the tribes and now sort of lives above it all.
We might as a matter of fact tell the story in a different way that he has in fact simply become subject to yet another example of sociology-of-knowledge-tribal-group and has been indoctrinated by the new tribe, the non-theistic humanists that believe his way and joined them. In other words he hasn’t necessarily left the confines of limited information or a smaller world for a larger one (as the story implicitly imagines) but rather simply switched rooms from one set of beliefs to another. In other words if you imagine you became a Christian because good, winsome and influential people around you were Christians and connected their attractive community and behavior with their Christianity, might it not also be the case that you have become a non-theistic humanist because you met good, winsome and influential people around you who were non-theistic humanists and you wanted to migrate your identity towards them.
Most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as adult subjects of sociological forces. We like to imagine ourselves as elevated and enlightened choosers of identities that have the independence, wisdom and good judgement to choose the good, the right and the truth against the claims competing for our attention and allegiance. We are, however, comfortable imagining that those of other identities and belief systems are subject to those sociological forces and therefore, less than ourselves, bound to those systems and in some ways innocent of some of the wrongs that those systems have brought upon them.
God Judging Among the Victims of Sociology Continue reading
