“Jill and her sister have been taken into care”, said my sister. My mum stopped eating, fork halfway to her mouth. I could see the disbelief and the rage boiling up into her face. A refusal to believe what she had just heard combined with an ice-cold fury. “What!? What do you mean?, How do you know? WHAT!?”

(This is a follow-up to a previous post, and will make most sense if you read that first.)

All names used in this post are fake, but the people are very real.

Anne

It was only a few months prior that she got to hear of the death of her close friend, Anne. Everyone knew it was coming — bone cancer if I remember correctly. It took over a year, but she was a devout woman; an absolute pillar of the church, to rehash a cliché, who prayed passionately every day for the Lord to take care of her two girls and her husband after she passed. Towards the end my mum would spend a lot of time at Anne’s bedside in the hospital, chatting about this and that, and joining in with her prayers for her family.

My sister was a few years younger than me, and had no way of knowing the answers to my mum’s questions, so my mum crossed the kitchen to the phone to call someone who could. There was a quietly mumbled conversation before my mum hung up and turned around to stare at us. Her face was white with rage, and her hands were shaking.

He was abusing them. All three of them.

Yeah.

While Anne was still alive, her husband — as well respected in the church as she was — beat her. After she passed, their daughters became his targets. A few months after her funeral, the two girls were taken from him and put into the system.

Her icy rage filled the room.

“Anne prayed every day for those girls. Every bloody day. And this is what they get?!”

Divorcing the church

I think my mum had already been drifting away from the church for a few months at this stage. We’d been taken to a few other churches for recent Sunday services, and I get the impression she was becoming disillusioned with the church that had been hers for so long. Perhaps she was becoming disillusioned with Christianity as a whole, but hadn’t realised it? Anyway, she had finally reached her breaking point.

It was a visceral punch by “the problem of evil”. How could Anne, an amazing woman, an awesome mother, a saintly person, and one of the most devout and devoted members of the congregation, be tortured like this? Even worse, as my mum saw it, how could her prayers have been ignored in such a shocking way?

For my mum, there was only one answer.

There is no God.

And that was that. My church career was over. No more Sunday school or bible discussions. No more prayers before bed. Nothing. It all disappeared, seemingly overnight.

Breaking free

You would think that I would have found that somewhat traumatic given how deeply I had thrown my young self into it, but you have to remember that my whole mission in life, even if I wasn’t aware of it, was to earn my mum’s praise. Where she went, I wholeheartedly followed. And if that meant atheism, then so be it.

But then again, the thought that it was all so easy — “I just followed my mum from dogmatic literalist Christianity into Dawkins-esque atheism” — just doesn’t ring true. It is certainly how I have explained it to myself for all these years, but writing this post makes me doubt the veracity of this as my origin story.

Rather, I wonder if I was already doubting. I wonder if the slowly escalating collision between the faith I developed as a child seeking parental praise and the scientific concepts and facts that I loved was becoming too much. It may well have been the case that, unbeknownst to me, my unconscious was on the lookout for an exit

Whatever it was, my loss of faith in God was complete. With all the self-confidence of a young teenage boy, I flipped to the polar opposite of my publicly declared beliefs and became the very stereotype of the obnoxiously self-confident atheist. In my own imaginings, I was a terror to the Christians in my school — an outspoken atheist who knew the bible better than them.

But most importantly, for the first time in my life, I could make sense of the world.