CS: You attended an Assemblies of God college; now you identify as an atheist. How did you get where you are today?
JM: I was homeschooled on a farm by my parents. They were really involved in our local Assemblies of God church. That was my entire upbringing: There was homeschooling and there was church. So church was my social outlet. As a kid, virtually everybody I knew was religious.
I ended up going to an Assemblies of God school””their most notable alumni include Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. It wasn’t until the very tail end of my college career that I started actually questioning my faith.
It was actually based on an assignment that I had to do for a Bible class that I was taking. I had to write a paper on 1 Corinthians 11 and I just thought, “Okay, this will be easy.” So I started researching it and found out that nobody really has any idea what that passage means. Whatever the reason, that really bothered me. I thought that the Bible was 100 percent the inerrant word of God.
Really – that passage caused him to stumble? Well, bless his heart.
One can only wonder how deep his ‘faith’ was to begin with to allow a passage like this to trip him up. It looks like he is reacting against his fundamentalist upbringing as much as anything.
Ross, “fundamentalist” (how I hate that world) or Pentecostal? I would like to think that we are all fundamentalist in that we believe in the fundamentals of the faith.