On today's episode, I chat with Neil Carter of Godless in Dixie about being an atheist in the Bible Belt.



Transcript provided by Marvin:

Trav:                Hi everyone, this is Trav Mamone, host of the Bi Any Means podcast. With this podcast, I wish to explore the intersection between social justice and secular humanism. I have a small but growing audience, and I want to attract more listeners and also readers to the blog. There’s just one problem, podcasting can cost money. Most of the technology is free but I want to expand my services beyond what I can afford right now. For example, I hired a guy from Fivver.com to do transcripts of my podcast for the deaf and hearing impaired, and I’m also thinking about getting a proper camera to make YouTube videos because right now I’m basically just making videos with iPod Touch. Anyways, I know I have a small audience so I’m not expecting to rank in millions but if you all like what I’m doing, and you want to help out you can pitch in just a buck a month and that will go a long way. Back to the show.
                        Welcome to the Bi Any Means podcast, a place where social justice and humanism meet.
                        Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bi Any Means podcast, the podcast companion to BiAnyMeans.com. I’m Trav Mamone and today’s guest is Neil Carter who writes the Patheos blog Godless in Dixie. In his bio he describes himself as “a school teacher, a tutor, a personal trainer, a supplement pusher, a driving instructor and a father of five.†He also helps moderate a discussion group in Mississippi for atheist. Neil thanks for joining me today.
Neil:                Thanks, thanks for having me.
Trav:                First I want to ask you about your background, you were raised Baptist, right?
Neil:                That’s right, Southern Baptist.
Trav:                Okay, what was that like growing up?
Neil:                It was a positive experience. When I was young my family was marginally involved, I would say nominally involved. We attended regularly but it wasn’t a consuming occupation for us. Really the first one to get really deeply involved in church activities was me. I had a conversion experience when I was about 15, and I jumped in with both feet started teaching Sunday school, leading Bible studies, doing ministry trips, preaching tours, things like that.
                        I’m the first one that got involved in the church at that level, and ironically I’m now out of the church and my family is now very involved in ministry, and I have several family members who are either on staff or have leadership positions at the church that I grew up in which was megachurch in Jackson, Mississippi.
Trav:                You also say you to seminary, and you were a part of the House Church Movement, right?
Neil:                That’s right and those were two pretty things. My background was Southern Baptist but the seminary that was closed to me was Reformed Theological Seminary, which is more Calvinist and Presbyterian, and I heard they had a good academic reputation, and I had some semi-Calvinistic meanings myself from my own personal Bible study. I attended reform seminary, and got an A in biblical studies from them. I didn’t do the third year of ministry classes because I did not want to be a Presbyterian minister, and really, I was always geared towards a more informal kind of church, even while I was very involved in a Baptist church I always wanted something more spontaneous, more decentralized, more informal, and personal, and small group oriented.
                        Even while I was at seminary I had my eye on the home church kind of model because from my personal Bible study that was what it looked like the New Testament churches were like. They were more informal and more relationally oriented, and based in the home. I wanted to copy that, and I linked up with a House Church Movement that was based basically at the time. I move to Atlanta with my family, and stayed there for about 10 years, individually I took on some leadership roles from them as well and that’s where I was when I finally decided that I just didn’t buy the whole thing anymore.
Trav:                When … did you always have little doubts in the back of mind during all this time?
Neil:                I’ve always had an inner skeptic. When I was little, I was raised to believe in spiritual things, and to believe in God, and to believe in Jesus even though I didn’t really have a personal commitment that was very passionate when I was younger. Prior to my conversion experience as a teenager but even while, I was a believer in spiritual and super natural things I always had this inner nagging thought process that said, but how do you really know that this stuff is real? I mean how do you know it’s not all wrong, and made up?
                        That was always there for me. I just kept putting it down. I learned how to quiet that but sometimes I would entertain the thoughts just enough to come up with good ways to dismiss them, and as long as I was satisfied with my own answers I could keep the inner skeptic quiet. He back out again during my college years because I was studying Bible formally, and when you do that you get engaged in a lot of more in-your-face questions about the reliability of the Bible, about whether or not the stories that are there really happened, and you have to try once again to find good justifications for why you believe these things are reliable.
                        Anyway, so I went through that process in college, and then I quieted the inner skeptic for another, whatever, 10, 15 years but it came back out again after a few years of ministry, and being involved in House Church leadership, and it just came out full force. And eventually I decided instead of squashing it I’m going to go on and just let this guy talk for a little bit, and start listening to the questions, and pursuing them as best as I could and eventually they led me out of the faith all together.
Trav:                That’s similar to my experience. I had … I’ve always had little doubts in the back of my mind but I always found a book, or a progressive Christian speak who would sort of say, yes. You are right about that but Christianity doesn’t have to be about believing in seven-day creationism, thousand year old creationism, or that the virgin birth really happened, or that this really happened or that really happened. Finally, I started deconstructing enough that number one, I started actually reading stuff like Richards Dawkins, or really hearing what the atheists had to day and applying that to my own theology like okay, well, there’s no supernatural forces in the world, so let’s cut that back down until finally I was like I ain’t got nothing left.
Neil:                It’s funny. In my case, I really didn’t find anybody to read that was helpful to me, and a friend of mine that I spoke with this weekend had a similar experience, and what she said was that she was of the mind that she was afraid to read anybody who would unduly sway her one way or the other. She never read of the Dawkins Stuff, or Dennett, or Harris or anybody else and I was in the same boat. I tried once or twice to open a couple of books by well-known atheist writers and they weren’t speaking to me where I was because they were answering different questions than what I was asking.Trav:                Right.Neil:                They were just so over the top anti-theistic and it’s not where I was at the time. You had a transitional time in there where you found what we call some of the gateway drugs like maybe Ryan Bell [sic, he meant Rob Bell] and Brian McLaren. I don’t know who else maybe Blue Light Jazz, or something. Anyway, I never went one of those phases. I one of those that just jumped from one end to the other. It’s really frustrated a while to people because they are like why didn’t you … it seems like you should have had more steps in between. And I don’t really know how to explain why I didn’t have those in between steps except that I had so much theological education that I feel like I learned how to deconstruct all that in between stuff.
Most of those progressive and more liberal leaning Christianity versions I had already dismissed because I had all my reasons why I didn’t really agree with them. For me it was sort of down to these options either I was going to go full board and accept that there was something magical with this book, and I have to believe what it says even if it appears to be contradictory. Or I need to really open all the questions and say, what if we were wrong about all of it? What is the whole God idea is an incorrect hypothesis? That’s where I ended.
Trav:                Being an atheist in the so-called Bible belt you are right it can be pretty hard. Tell us about that.
Neil:                In your daily life, you typically don’t run into anybody else like you. We have found each other online and that’s helpful but where we live in the heart of Mississippi is a very, very religious place. The people who wear their religious commitments on their sleeves do very well here. You can’t run for public office without very openly waving in your faith like a flag in front of people. Our current governor got elected by coming out on all of the hot button issues that the evangelical churches were pounding at the desk about.
                        There was even a personhood amendment that was being pushed that was to try to declare that from the moment a zygote exists it’s got full personhood rights, and the governor of our state came out, and said anybody who was against this initiative was working for the devil.
Trav:                Oh god.
Neil:                When your governor talks that way, there’s clearly no place for separation for church and state. In Mississippi, people don’t believe in separation of church and state. It’s a part of culture, and people who I’ve worked for, very professional businesses have been very open about their faith, and how much it matters to them as businesses that they demonstrate their faith as Christians and they open staff meetings with prayer, their emails all have Bible verses in their signatures. The school that I’m currently teaching at used to have Bible verses at the bottom of their weekly itineraries, the weekly agenda. Eventually they quit doing that. I’m not sure why.
                        It’s everywhere and it’s not just about little things like that. It’s more important things like not accepting people into your family, not allowing your children to be around friends who don’t openly identify as Christian. It’s just a very central part of our culture. It’s hard to have much of a social network at all here if you aren’t connected to a church or at least you are willing to identify with that brand.
Trav:                Right and I’m pretty sure being in the south when your neighbors talk about you they always start by saying “Bless his heart.â€
Neil:                Of course, that’s one of the things we say, and God bless you as a way of saying good bye and there’s an expectation that you say something back, which I usually say same to you or something. It’s not like I’m going to say, there is no God. That’s not really the way I talk in regular conversation but it is the way they talk on the other end so it’s kind of ironic.
Trav:                Right. Now, did your de-conversion lead to any family tension?
Neil:                Yes. My family is very devote. They are … my family of origin is way more devote now than they were when I was younger as best as I can tell, and my marriage and my family were based on a common faith, and when I didn’t share that faith anymore that introduced a lot of tension between the two of us. My wife and I had some issues that we had to deal with, and when it came time to work through those issues the biggest problem was we couldn’t really find common ground for how to work through them. When you encounter problems like most marriages do there has to be some kind of common ground. There has to be some place where you can compromise and we were unable to find that.
I think that’s my biggest regret is that weren’t able to find a place of common ground were we could meet and talk about these things, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the culture wars that have been going on for the last 20 or 30 years have polarized people and it’s made it hard to find those places of common ground. Yeah, it introduced a lot of tension, and there’s a talk that gets circulated especially in evangelical churches that we are at a war. We are at a spiritual, a struggle for the hearts and mind of America, and for your children. Let’s not forget the children y’all.Everybody uses children in service of their tribe. I’m very self-conscious about doing that myself because everybody does it but it came time to work through our differences, and really the talk that’s around us has always made it look like people like me are the enemy. It works how making the … we are taking away the foundation of the country which may of them believe has to be a religious foundation. Even growing up in the south, my education taught me that that’s not technically correct. The United States was based on a concept of pluralism where we have to make room for people of different ideologies but a lot of people haven’t gotten that message yet.It was Christians who taught me that. I know that they should know better but they don’t. There’s been effort to go back in … we tell the story differently, and make it sound like if we are not exclusively Christian with the way we run our government, then God is not going to bless our country. That’s the kind of rhetoric that’s been thrown around and it doesn’t help.
Trav:                On the flip side have you had many readers email you and say thank you?
Neil:                Quite a lot. I spend a lot of time actually answering email and corresponding, which actually is my favorite way to communicate because it gives me time to type on a keyboard, and you would be amazed at how many there are or maybe not, who are all over the place. They are not from the south but they are spread all out all over the country. It’s less common outside of the United States but in the United States even evangelical cultures are just so pervasive that there are pockets f communities where the stuff that I’ve gone through is just like what they are going through.
                        You’ve got families, and social groups that are built around common religion, common faith and when one person finds himself or herself out of that it brings a lot of tension, and people don’t really know how to handle it. It’s so hard to find that common ground. I probably get a dozen emails at least a week from people who say, I’m in a marriage, and my wife and I are in separate places and what do you suggest we do? Or I’m no longer a Christian but our children are Christians, and now they think I’m being used by the devil, or my wife and I de-converted and now my parents don’t want anything to do with us.
                        There’s just a whole gambit of things. I have a couple of ladies who are living together and one of them doesn’t want her father to find out that they are together. They think they are just friends but they are not just friends. She says, should I let my father know I’m in a lesbian relationship and ask me my advice. My advice for her was your father is 80, let’s just let not find out about this. I mean there gets to be a point at which some people much as I want openness and honesty in relationships some people pass a point where they can handle a certain amount of change, and I would prefer people maintain good relationships with each other.
                        If they know that coming out about certain things is going to ruin the relationship, and their parents are really not going to be around much longer, I would hate to lose the few years to a lot of tension. Everybody’s situation is different and my advice is not always the same for everybody.
Trav:                Right, right. Now since Bi Any Means focuses on the intersection of social justice and secular humanism. I want to comment on something you wrote in December, which might have been the first blog post I read of yours. It’s the one called Evangelicals have a hard time seeing racism. You talk about how a lot of evangelical pastors think the deaths of Michael Brown an Eric Garner have less to do with systematic racism and more with sin. That’s something I’ve noticed a lot when I was evangelical. Issues like racism, and poverty were never discussed as like systems of oppression but more symptoms of original.   
                        If everyone got right with God we’d all live in Utopia. Jesus is the answer for everything. The funny part is as you mentioned most white, southern evangelicals were against Civil Rights in the sixties.
Neil:                Yes and many of them still are honestly. If they’ve grown up in a world where the law has made over discrimination illegal then they accept that the government can tell you whether or not you can discriminate against people of a different race. They are basically accepting that. They are not happy, and there are men in government right now that are still trying to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they felt it was not the government’s business to tell people what they could, and how they can and can’t reject but ironically the exact same conversations have come up around marriage equality.
                        The exact same rhetoric is being used, and just like before the identity of the church, and the integrity of the gospel is being invoked, and it’s being cast as if this is a battle of good versus evil, and the Christian identity is on the line. They talked exactly the same way in the sixties, and it’s exactly the same parallel problems. You’ve got the government stepping in and saying, no you don’t have the right to discriminate based on this category, or this class of person.
                        Yes, as the government we do have the right to step in and tell you can’t do that even though you think this is a matter of your person rights you are choosing to do something that is against the way the constitution has set up our government. Even though it’s a private business you are still not allowed to discriminate. It’s a matter of basic human rights not a matter of you being free to hurt your neighbor and treat them unfairly but what happens is I’ve said before religion has a culture freezing quality to it where every tribe has problems changing.
                        Every tribe has problems accepting new ideas but religion has a way of making it go even slower so that a religious group is slower to adopt a new way of thinking. Like maybe 50 to 100 years behind the rest of the world, and change will eventually happen. It’s a retardant. It slows it down significantly. They are just now finally starting to talk about letting priests marry in the Catholic Church. That’s an issue that got dealt with hundreds of years ago but in the Catholic Church they are just cryogenically frozen in the five hundreds and so they are still working through these questions that the rest of went past a long time ago.
                        What’s happening in white evangelical churches is that they are so slow to accept people who are very different from them. In theory, they can say they believe that the gospel is open to all people, and people of all races are welcome in our church but in reality there’s a culture that’s not going to feel familiar to people who are very diverse. So what Dr. King said years ago is still true that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week and it’s still true like now and because white people me have been in a position of privilege for so many years, any change in that privilege looks like oppression to us.
                        It’s very difficult to get them to see that, and so because that’s the way they’ve talked in those churches even the black evangelicals who like to … who defer a lot to the high profile white evangelicals they are coming out and they are defending the same perspectives. Voddie Baucham for example, came out, and I think I may have mentioned him in that article. Voddie Baucham is a black pastor who says that those guys who got in trouble in the law if you’ll just act, and just do right then you’ll never get in trouble. That’s overly simplistic. That’s not the way it works.
                        That lives in utter denial of the way there are inequities in our society and to vindicate my position and so many others over the last weeks these reports have been coming from … was it the FBI? That said they looked into the practices of the Ferguson Police Department and they are undeniably racially bigoted in their department, and they have been for decades and the evidence is all over the place but people can’t see that. They look at that and say, no, it’s really just a matter if you follow the law you’ll be fine. No, it’s not that simple.   
Trav:                Right. You had a series on your blog called Letters to my daughters, and one letter you say that we all need to spend more time promoting social causes, and fair treatment. How do you see social justice and secular humanism intersect?
Neil:                That’s a really big topic but it matters a great deal to me. I think that humanism is about applying rationality to our relationships and our social structures. It’s a matter of working our rationalism in every area of life including the way we govern ourselves, and the way that we structure the world, and it seems to me that it’s rationally consistent to seek for equal opportunity for diverse groups of people. Unless you actively take part in making those pathways straight, unless you actively work on trying to make the playing field level then you are going to be missing out on the contributions of whole classes of people and these are contributions that could be helping advance the human race.                                   How many things have we learned from people of diverse gender and race that we wouldn’t have learned if they never were given the resources to learn all the same things that the privileged folks have. Just from a pragmatic standpoint, one of the things that I’ve been trying to argue but probably need to argue more explicitly is if you are one of those who wants to pare down secular humanism to only a very small, narrow cluster of topics related to maybe separation of church and state, or something. You are dooming your movement to failure because rather than increasing the numbers of supporters you are limiting how many people are going to care.                        Because while many secularists like myself want to see the separation of church and state and honored the way it’s supposed to be … there’s a lot of folks that that’s not just the number one thing on their priority list. If you are worried while walking through your neighborhood you are going to get shot at because you are wearing a hoody, the separation of church and state is not the highest thing on priority list. Until secular humanists movement adopts those concerns as well getting nativities off of government lawns then it’s going to remain a very narrow group of people. I think that’s actually hurting us even from the cold, pragmatic way of analyzing what secular humanism is about.
Trav:                Definitely, yes. By the way, I should apologize to my listeners if you hear my dog in the background, so sorry about that folks. Okay, back to the interview. You recently wrote a post Criticizing religion without being a jerk. I shared it on Reedit atheism form, and well needless to say it didn’t go over so well.
Neil:                You are kidding.
Trav:                I know, shock, right.
Neil:                Totally.
Trav:                Now, some people did point out that merely saying you don’t believe in God makes some religious people automatically assume you are a jerk. What are some ways atheists can end this stigma besides not being a jerk?
Neil:                Well, I don’t know what would motivate the ones that are a jerk because honestly, I’ve tried, and part of being a jerk is you don’t care that other people think you are a jerk. It usually involves a certain blindness to everyone else. You can’t tell someone that they are not sensitive to other people’s feelings because they don’t care, and it doesn’t really make any difference for them.                                I do think that as much as possible we should emulate, and highlight, and boost the signal of the those people that we think do a good job of raising the level of discourse, of moving the discussion forward in a constructive discussion and I know a lot of people that do that. When they see someone that’s hitting the important notes, and they are doing it in a respectful way they intentionally help share those things, and they don’t share the others. I think there’s more and more people who are doing that because they tired of the constant bickering back and forth of the least mature atheist arguing with the least mature Christians.
                        Nobody benefits from that. It might be cathodic for the people that do it and I’ve interacted a lot with the Reedit atheist community, and I know what their shortcoming are but I think that it’s true that I will be perceived as a jerk for saying anything negative about religion at all, I realize that. When I talk about people being a jerk I’m not talking about that because I think a lot of Christians can recognize the difference between respectful versus disrespectful dialogue.
                        A good example who be Rachel Held Evans just retweeted one of my posts yesterday and the reason she does that is because I’m not disrespectful when I talk about things, when I analyze religious hang ups I do it in a way that it’s obvious that I used to be one of those. And that’s the thing is there’s enough of us now that have been formally [inaudible 00:28:39] ourselves and we talk about those religious beliefs we are not going to stereotype them because we were that ourselves. We are going to be speaking from experience and as a result we are probably going to be a lot more respectful with the way we talk about it.
                        I think the more people like that come out and share, and like, and talk about their experience the more people are going to see this is a little bit more constructive way to do this so that it engenders real discussion instead of just a lot of nye, nye, nye back and forth which like I said just gets really old really fast.
Trav:                Right, I definitely know what you mean. Talking about these things I’m in the same position where like when you mentioned earlier when you were talking about social justice there are definitely times to point out, go through he atheism 101 thing but a lot of us have graduated from that kind of like, what now? That’s why a lot of my blogging and also with this podcast I try to move the conversation forward. It’s like okay, we’ve read the God Delusion. We’ve read Origin of Species. We know all the arguments against God now what do we do? Well how about this?
                        And also when you said that a lot of us used to be Christians, we know where the other people come from that’s basically been my position as well because not only have I gone through evangelical Christianity but I went through the whole progressive Christian scene as well. I know that not all Christians are against marriage equality. Not all Christians believe in young earth creationism. To me I think if you hear with the other side are saying then you can kind of better respond to it instead of ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments.
Neil:                Yeah, you are lot less likely to do that because you can only look down so much on people who believe the same things that you passionately believed yourself just a few short years ago. I think the ability to empathize is the main thing that’s missing from the ones who are acting like a jerk. The reason why they are acting that way is because they really honestly can’t imagine thinking the way these other people are thinking. It comes easy to depersonalize them, and dehumanize them and talk about them like they are not working out of full deck.
                        The fact of the matter is I know a lot of very intelligent people who believe some of the things they believe. The problem is intelligence is compartmental. You can be brilliant about a handful of things and be almost infantile about others and actually just a normal human condition. I hate it. It doesn’t seem like it should be that way but that’s the way it is. The best illustration I know about that is that the last Sunday school that I attended was led by a world-class oncologist. He’s like a leading researcher … he’s the chairman of the research protocols committee for Oncology Research worldwide, very intelligent man, and as a hobby he believes in and studies creation science.
                        This is a world-class oncologist, and he’s a really bright guy, and he believes in creation science, and most Christians would even say that’s kind of shady stuff, you know. I mean even the ones who think that they are not sure how to reconcile Genesis, creations science itself really gets into some weird stuff and that’s just a great example of how somebody that is really, really bright in a lot of ways is stuck on something that isn’t very logical.
                        When you are entertaining an entire discipline that is rejected by the scientific community entirely and you are a world-class oncologist, those two things don’t seem like they should be reconcilable but they are because it’s the way the human mind works. We can sometimes be incredibly self-contradictory and it doesn’t mean we are not smart. It just means it’s a quark about the way the human mind works.
Trav:                Right. That’s about it for me today. Anything else you’d like to add like any upcoming projects?
Neil:                Sure, there’s a lot going on. I’m starting to work more and more with recovering from religion, which is a group of people that were very good to reach out to me early on when I came out as an atheist, and they have begun a hotline project. I don’t know if you’ve heard about.
Trav:                Yes.
Neil:                It’s been circulated a while and they found this cute number. It’s 184-I-doubt it and they are training dozens and dozens of listeners to answer phone calls, and to just have people call in, and talk about what their questions are. They are being very good about not making this about proselytizing or trying to convince people one-way or the other. It’s just that these people who are calling in don’t have anybody else to talk to. They can listen in a none judgmental way, and so every night of every week, and then all weekend long there are people who are answering calls, and some of this stuff is heartbreaking.
                        It’s a lot of high school students who don’t have anybody else to talk to. A lot of grownups as well and some of them will wait two or three weeks before they get up the nerve to call and then when they do they just pour their heart out, and people just listen, and cry with them, and then it’s very emotional. They just have to have somebody to talk to and then if possible they might point them in the direction of resources that might help them but I’m crazy about that project.
                        I think it’s a great idea and I wish that people like me had something like that when we were going through our questioning times.
Trav:                All right. Thanks again for joining me today Neil.
Neil:                Sure, glad to be on.
Trav:                Thanks for listening to the Bi Any Means podcast. The theme music is “Endurance†by Dream Youth. You can find more of their music at dreamyouth.bandcamp.com. The Bi Any Means logo was design by Asher Silberman. If you like what you have heard please subscribe via iTunes and go to www.bianymeans.com for more musings of a queer humanist.
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