Freethought Today
Vol. 17 No. 5 - Published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. -
June - July 2000
From Christian To Human Being
The following is a speech given at the Foundation's San Francisco mini-convention in the summer of 1999.
By Dick Hewetson
These were the stages of my life: kid, Christian, priest, non-attendance at church, ex-priest, atheist, human being. I'd like to briefly fill in the blanks of what I mean by all of those things.
I grew up in a very poor family in a time referred to as the Depression. I grew up in the ghetto. We moved from place to place so I had no roots. I didn't have a lot of friends because I was always changing schools. I had an inferiority complex and I knew I was different from everybody else.
When I was a teenager my mother started singing in a choir at the Episcopal church. She decided that as a good Christian she should get us there, so we all started going to church. It was a wonderful experience for me because every Sunday I got to dress up in nice clothes and be in a beautiful building with flowers and stained glass windows and wonderful songs and everybody told me I was a child of god. I really belonged. For the first time in my life I belonged.
We sometimes don't realize one of the ways churches really do provide for people. Some of the largest churches are in very poor neighborhoods, because it is a place for people to go and feel important.
So that takes me from kid to Christian.
Then, because this was all so wonderful--I was going to be able to help people and be able to serve god and all these wonderful things--I decided to be an Episcopal priest. I decided that the lord was speaking to me (how, I don't know). So I went and talked to my parish priest and found out that in order to become a priest I had to go to four years of college and three years of seminary. (I had not gone to college because we did not have any money.) I worked my way, literally, through seven years of higher education and ended up with this wonderful doctorate of divinity degree, which is not very useful out in the secular world. (Unless you work in a candy factory.) I'm the first college-graduated member of my family except for my grandfather way back when, who also happened to be an Episcopal priest.
All the way through this experience I didn't really believe any of this Christian stuff. It was all so bizarre to me. I was this person with very low self esteem and I thought: all these people believe this and I don't, so obviously the problem is me. The church has comments about that--everybody doubts, but you should pray, and the more you pray, the more faith you're going to have. So I tried all of these things but nothing worked. Nothing fails like prayer.
Here I was. I'd spent seven years preparing for a profession and my livelihood was going to depend on it, so I found myself out in the ministry. The hardest time I had every week was preparing a sermon because what are you going to say to people when you don't really believe it? In the Episcopal church they have this liturgy--there's two bible readings for every week. They taught us in seminary that you should base your sermon on those. Well, I would sit there and go through those things and try and figure out something in there that was relevant to talk about. It's interesting, too, that when I was going to seminary they used to say our job was to make the gospel relevant. That kind of says it's not relevant, doesn't it?
In 1972, I finally had reached a new stage. I'd taken a secular job and stopped going to church. I remember the last Sunday I was in church--I could not wait for that service to end. I literally ran down the aisle out of church and have never been in one since, except for funerals.
There I was. I didn't believe any of it. But, on the other hand, I would not have said I was an atheist. I would not have said I'm not a Christian. I would not have said that I don't believe in god. I fell into that category where everybody says "I don't believe in organized religion." The longer I was out of the church, the more objectively I began to see it.
Just about this same time, I was reading in the paper about the gay liberation movement and I thought, that's really interesting 'cause I've always thought that's what I was. It was one reason I felt different. I tentatively went to some meetings of gay liberation groups. Everybody there was in their 20s and they were counterculture people. I was in my 40s and I'm this middle-class Episcopal priest.
I've thought about this a lot. Somehow from way back in my life, I always really wanted to face things honestly. I came to terms with my sexuality a lot faster than some other people did. I burst out of the closet and began to feel very good about myself as a gay person. That is what made me start looking at everything else in my life very objectively. I was getting more and more comfortable about the fact that I was not part of the church anymore.
I had met a wonderful man by now. In 1978 he was watching a Donahue show and there was a woman on there named Anne Gaylor from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (This is really important because this organization changed my life.) David was fascinated. He has an interesting background parallel to mine. He got on the mailing list and got some literature.
David said: They're having a convention in Madison (which was not very far from where we lived in St. Paul). He said: I want to go, let's go. And I said: I don't want to have anything to do with those crazy people. But being a good partner, I went just to please him.
That weekend was one of the most wonderful weekends I've ever spent in my whole life. It was the only time I had ever been in a whole roomful of people with my gay partner and everybody totally accepted that that's who we were. I remember at the dinner tables, all the people talked with us and said: we've never had a chance to talk to gay people. They asked us all kinds of intelligent questions. They didn't say, "Which one is the girl?"
The other thing that was fascinating to me is that there was a woman that sang that night and after the second song she looked out at all of us and said, I have never entertained on Saturday night where everybody's sober. Then I realized, wow, it wasn't like that at church; they all got drunk. They don't call 'em Whiskeypalians for nothing.
I spent a whole lot of time living as "He's the ex-priest." And I got over it. I went from ex-priest to atheist to human being. I really sort of hate it when people introduce me as "ex-priest" 'cause, my gosh, I left the church in 1972. That's a quarter of a century ago.
But I really want to talk about the question of separation of church and state, fact or fiction? Most people don't know that the tax code of the United States says that if you are a "minister of the gospel"--those are the exact words--that what you're paid can be divided into two parts: your salary, and your housing and utility allowance. Your housing and utility allowance is not taxable. Don't you wish your salary came out that way?
Then, the rest of the story is that if you're buying a home, you can still, from that taxable part which is not your housing allowance, deduct your property taxes and your mortgage interest. One of our clergy in town wrote a letter to the editor not too long ago about how happy he was to pay his taxes because of all the good it did. I wrote back and agreed with him, but I pointed out that I'd be happier if I paid his taxes instead of my taxes.
I do want to mention one more thing. The other day I heard about the Atlanta slayings. They were talking about how this man who killed his family plus other people and possibly killed his former wife and former mother-in-law, was a regular churchgoer. Every time we hear about these terrible things, we always hear the neighbors are so surprised because he went to church every Sunday. My fantasy is that at least one paper in the United States would run a headline that says "Another Churchgoer Kills His Family."
Dick Hewetson is a Life Member of the Foundation from California.