I grew up in the deep south, the buckle of the Bible Belt. My dad was a farmer and my mom was a schoolteacher. Everyone I knew was a Republican.
I was taught to pray so early that I don’t remember it happening. I just always said a prayer with my mom when I got in bed “Now I lay me down to sleep…” A terrifying nursery rhyme about the possibility of not waking up and hoping God would take my soul. I was four years old chanting this. It was one of the first things I ever memorized.
Prayer meant having someone to talk to in your head at all times. Big, important things like where do we go after we die? Silly, inconsequential things like, where did I leave my backpack? I remember praying for things as small as: “Dear Lord, if you help me find my notebook right now so I don’t miss the bus, I promise I’ll serve you for all eternity.” Constantly bartering. A one-sided conversation.
We went to Sunday school every week. And youth group after church. Part of youth group was church retreats, where we’d go serve food to the homeless, or ride a bus to a different state and help build homes after a natural disaster, or spend a week in the mountains at a rustic camp doing crafts, studying the Bible, and learning about Jesus and his works (and learning about the opposite sex once we got a little older).
A lot of kids have this upbringing, but we took it one step further. Once a year we spent ten days at the Pleasant Grove Campground living in a small cabin we called a “tent,” because that’s what they once were. These tents abut one another and form a huge square, probably six to ten football fields worth. In the middle was an open air arbor where we had church service every morning and evening. A good portion of the thousand-plus people there were cousins. We played on rope swings, congregated on the volleyball court, got in water balloon fights, and ate watermelons. My childhood was defined by this yearly event; my first time going I was just a few months old. I can’t remember a life without Pleasant Grove.
My father was one of the handful of people on the board of directors at Pleasant Grove. His grandfather or great-grandfather was a founder of the camp. The graveyard nearby was full of Howeys, signifying a long history here. I used to walk down the aisles with my dad taking up collection, a huge honor. We’d go into the church while hymns were sung and count out the money into stacks, tally the total, and put it all in locked money pouches. Church wasn’t a pastime for us, it was legacy, family, a critical part of our lives.
Part of growing up in the deep south was also learning that the north was evil. Cities were evil. We called them “yankees” and “carpetbaggers.” I learned before I was ten that people from the north liked to come down and steal things from us. It was in our DNA to think this. Passed down from reconstruction. In history class, we learned the basics of the Civil War, but from our parents and our friends, we learned that the war was all about States’ Rights (and what can be wrong with states having rights?!). It was also the “War of Northern Aggression,” and sure enough most of the battles took place in the South, so obviously the North was attacking us. It wasn’t ever about slavery. These were uncontested facts. You wouldn’t encounter anyone who disagreed with any of this.
God, The South, Family. In that order. I’m not kidding, and you really have to pause and wrap your mind around this. Being a Republican was part of your identity. Even today, you find people are more willing to walk away from their family than their political party. And forget walking away from God for any reason. The order above was seriously accurate, and more easily stated as: God, Politics, Family.
Politics eventually became religion, and that order would shift a little. I remember watching it happen like a frog in gradually boiling water. My father was my hero growing up. Of the three kids, I spent the most time with him. During the summer, I’d get up before dawn and spend all day on the farm with him. This started when I was three or four. My earliest memories of my dad are of me falling back asleep on the bathmat in my parent’s bathroom while he showered. I was like a puppy scared of being left behind. I’d sit on his lap and steer his pickup as we went from one plot of land to another, repaired the constantly-broken, checked in with his workers, ran errands, a neverending cycle of needing to weld something in the shop, run to the John Deere dealership, bounce our way across a rutted field, sit in a tractor that smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke while we took in wheat, stopped along the road in the middle of nowhere, get out, hop over a ditch, and peel back an ear of corn.
The radio was our constant companion. It started with daytime news and talk radio, local stuff from Matthews and Charlotte. My dad personally knew one of the top disk jockeys at the time, which was like him knowing Elvis. He could call him direct and request our favorite tune (Country Road), which we’d sing at the top of our lungs. He’d also call in to discuss politics, and I’d hear my dad’s voice through the truck radio, and now he was practically Elvis. Then Rush Limbaugh got on the air, and that’s all we listened to. Rush and whoever came before and after. All day long.
Rush Limbaugh and Fox News didn’t destroy my dad, they just finished what religion and the South had already started. Pushing him toward fear. My dad used to send me emails about how Muslims were having more babies and would take over the world. He thought Hillary Clinton was the most evil person who ever existed. The best Mexican restaurant in town became off-limits after Obama ate there once. My father had a good heart and was a decent man, but he began thinking and saying evil things. It was hard not to when that’s all you ever came in contact with.
It was a process that took place over decades, right alongside the general rot of political discourse in the United States. A good 30-40% of people still identify as Republicans, because they grew up that way. It’s an identity, not a belief system. The beliefs are handed to you, not arrived at through a process of reasoning. The North are the bad guys. Cities are disgusting. Democrats are evil. God is real.
I take no credit for the gradual transformation that I went through starting around age ten. But I’m proud of it nonetheless. I’m proud and I’m lucky. We are all born with a set of traits, personalities made of points on various spectrums. My friends with kids say they saw their personalities within the first year or two of being born. We are pretty set in our ways, which is why New Year’s resolutions are so difficult. Two of my luckiest traits are that peer pressure doesn’t work on me, not even a little. And I have an insatiable curiosity. I was the annoying “but why?” kid. And I felt no need to do whatever the cool kids were doing.
I drank too much alcohol twice, both on accident, and those were the two times I’ve been drunk in my life (one time I was 15 in London, and I threw back shots like I’d seen on TV. The other time I was 16 and in the Bahamas, and a bartender put me in a barber’s chair and poured alcohol right down my throat). I threw up both times and rarely drank afterwards. All through high school, I’d end up at parties where everyone was drinking beer and I’d sip on a Mountain Dew. Immunity to peer pressure helped me form a new identity, which I’d later learn is very difficult to do.
It started with religion. I asked a lot of questions when I was ten and eleven, both to my parents and my pastor. My dad and I would sit in the pickup in the middle of a field, having a honeybun and Dew for lunch, talking about heaven and what comes after death, the meaning of life, big topics like that. My notebooks in middle school were full of poetry about these topics, a stream-of-consciousness that captures the confusion of developing one’s own thoughts. We were Episcopalian, which meant going through the confirmation process. I was given a Bible with my name engraved on it, and so I started reading it from cover to cover.
I was twelve when I finished, and I was an atheist by the time I got to the end. I told my parents this, and they sent me off on a religious retreat where I’d spend the evenings on the porch of my preacher’s cabin. It was in conversations with him that I realized even he didn’t really believe in God, he just thought religion was important for people (he basically admitted as much). After that week, he told my parents it was probably okay that I stopped coming to church. But I didn’t stop going to youth group, or our volunteer trips, or Camp Meeting. I agreed with my preacher: religion was important. But the belief part wasn’t.
What’s wild is that I figured out God wasn’t real before I learned the South was the bad guys. Political party was more deeply rooted even than religion, a fact that is true today. The real order was and always has been: Party, God, Family. I was a voracious reader, and I got addicted to history books. I’d read a dozen books about a single war, or a narrow slice of time. What’s wild is how KNOWN it is that the Civil War was about slavery. It’s there in the articles of succession from several of the states. It’s in the letters they wrote to each other, their speeches and deliberations. The myth of the war being about anything else began only after the South lost and tried to save face. These are facts as measurable and clear as the fact that Earth is getting warmer. But the same crowd that doubts one doubts both. And here is the point of this blog post: facts don’t matter and never have. Belief and belonging are what’s critical to most people. Being like your parents. Like your friends. Like your spouse. Vilifying the other.
This tribalization is destroying the United States, just as it has destroyed other countries in the past (Ireland and the Middle East are familiar examples). The desire to shun the other has made for crazy bedfellows (Republicans and Russians) and insane mental gymnastics (divorce, cheating on wives, paying for sex, bribes, felonies, rape, are all okay when it’s our leader). Peer pressure and a lack of curiosity are the norms. Like I said, I was lucky to escape. I was born with a kind of mental teflon. But even with these advantages, it wasn’t easy.
I listened to Rush and Hannity even when I wasn’t with my father. I read Ann Coulter books. I thought Ayn Rand was a genius. I thought the South was better than the North and that cities were full of bad people. I would have voted for Bush Sr. had I been old enough. I distrusted the Clintons. The brainwashing is intense. I believed everything I was told to believe. Facts that contradicted these beliefs were not to be trusted.
In order to get out, I had to find several hidden escape hatches and crawl through each. One was stigma. I had the key to this hatch in my immunity to peer pressure. One night at Camp Meeting, I was up late in the kitchen with my step-sister Sarah. This was the first time I admitted to anyone that I didn’t believe in God anymore. It was a hazy, nebulous time in my move toward atheism. I was still talking to God in my head, a habit as difficult to kick as smoking cigarettes, but it was no longer prayer and blind obedience. It was outright challenges. My first taste of the courage that comes from thinking for yourself, consequences be damned.
What I found in Sarah was the same thing I found in my priest, about a year later: similar doubts. Hidden. Private. Never spoken. But there. It’s a pattern I would come to find over and over as I came out of the closet as an atheist. Most people didn’t really believe either. Which is why they still feared death. And acted immoral in private. And sinned in public. The belief was about belonging and the fear of being ostracized. It was ingrained habit. I would later find a similar pattern in politics. If I spoke to someone with their language and approached them from their value set, I would find that we agreed on basic things. But if you used any of the tribal language, conversations would derail. My father was always talking about how the weather was changing and what that meant for the crops. But mention global warming or climate change, and he’d get furious. There was a gospel, and you needed to learn the language.
Breaking free from these gospels was the beginning of my journey as a spiritual, happy, enlightened human being. Learning to use my brain and arrive at conclusions from first principles set me on a unique path, one where I find I can agree with AND disagree with almost anyone. None of us should have the exact same beliefs. It should be like a fingerprint. We should have our own identities. It’s not what society wants for us — it wants compliance and operates through coercion. But it’s what you should want for yourself. Even though it will be uncomfortable often and occasionally painful.
Letting go of God was the start of me becoming a more moral and ethical person. I got closer to Jesus when I stopped thinking he was the son of a god and more of a wise soul with something to teach us. Love our neighbors. Heal the sick. Don’t be obsessed with wealth. Kick over the money-changers’ tables. Revolt against the establishment. Sacrifice for what’s right. The most ethical people I know are atheists, because religion can’t convince them to do or think evil things. They have that dogma teflon. Always curious, looking for a better path.
The hardest part of this path is admitting you are wrong. Even worse, admitting you are the bad guy. Looking back, one of the greatest blessings in my life was being born in the South, thinking we were the good guys, and learning that we weren’t. Because what came next was transformative for me: I learned that it is OKAY that we were the bad guys. Most people back then were bad in a lot of ways. The North was full of racists, and not just to blacks. Italians were treated like a minority. Women were treated awfully. Kids were thrown into horrible work conditions. There were very few saints then, and there are very few saints now. Morally enlightened people today will be derided by future generations for eating meat, wearing leather, burning petrol, and a dozen things we aren’t even aware of.
Jesus tried to teach us this: we are all sinners. But forgiveness is possible. Most people live today with the opposite beliefs: Only the OTHER side are sinners, we are perfect and unquestionable. And I’ll never forgive those demon scum liberals. I wish they were all dead. That’s what we hear, what my dad absorbed through the radio and Fox news. The polar opposite of anything Jesus believed in.
Once I realized it was okay to admit we were the bad guys, it became okay to let go of my ego and rethink other things. The Vietnam war? Nothing noble about that at all. (Ever think about the fact that we lost that war, slinked home, and Vietnam turned out to be an amazing place today? We didn’t save them, because they didn’t need saving). Accepting this about the South had me look at religion and my old God from a different angle. If the version of that God was the one I’d been presented from my parents and community, then he was also the bad guy. He was against immigrants. He helped us murder the enemy when we went to war. The things people were praying for were evil. Admitting this and realizing it was better to stand up to that God and go to hell than fall in line was the first major leap of courage I made as a young man.
When I saw Braveheart for the first time, the final scene of the movie really hit me hard and brought me back to that struggle with God and the South. William Wallace is being tortured in public for not bowing down to an evil king. His intestines were literally being ripped out of him, and he was being asked to profess his devotion to that terrible king. Profess devotion and the suffering will end. Instead, he screams FREEDOM. Free to be on the side of righteousness and goodness. That was true courage. It was a courage I began to find when I told my step-sister I no longer blindly believed. It was a courage I found when I voted Democrat for the first time. It’s a courage I have today what will allow me to switch parties in an instant if the tides turn and a better option presents itself.
It’s okay that I had wrong beliefs. It’s okay that I was the bad guy. That doesn’t make me a bad person now, but only if I’m able to admit it and change. If I can’t, then I’ll remain a bad guy until I can.
Releasing this ego is the first step toward becoming your best self. It’s hard. Being born with a little peer-pressure teflon certainly helps, but anyone can do it. Change is okay. In fact, it’s a lot better than the alternative.
My father was capable of change, but he never quite escaped his upbringing and the toxic influence of Fox News and daytime talk radio. When he sailed across the Atlantic with me, he had a month away from those influences, a month in nature, in quiet, mostly just the two of us playing Gin Rummy and talking about life, topics big and small. By the end of the trip he told me he’d never felt happier. He admitted that not watching the news had cleared his mind. He told me before flying out of Antigua that he wasn’t going to go back to watching the news all day.
But he did. And the emails came flowing back about all the horrible things Muslims were doing. And Hillary came up every time we talked on the phone. My father died of cancer a few years later, but he had already died of a different cancer years prior. Most of his friends and much of our family thought of him as a good man. He could’ve been a good man, but it would’ve started with him realizing that we are the bad guys.
Today, the United States is a net negative on the world stage. We are siding with Russia over Ukraine. We are waging economic wars with longtime allies. We are withholding universal healthcare from our people and allowing guns to kill Americans needlessly. We aren’t allowing science to guide our use of vaccines, and we aren’t pivoting toward much more lucrative and sane forms of energy generation. We are breaking promises and accords just because of who wrote them, not because of what’s in them. Our President is a felon (34 times over), a rapist (found to be so in court and admitted by himself on a hot mic, not to mention over 30 accusers who all should be believed). He’s a pedophile, not just by being best friends with the most notorious pedo in modern times, but by fighting the release of files in which he’s mentioned more than anyone other than Epstein, and his threats to Republican colleagues over their release, but also his bizarre ownership of teen beauty pageants and comments he’s made over the years in interviews about seeing young girls naked. The guy is clearly a pedophile. The fact that we debate this as bizarre as debating what the Civil War was about and whether the Earth is warming.
But alas, that’s our struggle and perhaps our downfall. A lot of bad people are not interested in becoming better people, or seeing what it feels like when they allow themselves to change. What’s interesting to me is that the fear of even trying on a new set of thoughts is much like the fear of allowing Vietnam to try Communism on for a while. It’s not the fear that it will fail: it’s the fear that it will succeed. That the new thoughts will become a part of ourselves, and we may lose a connection to our current tribe. Or admit that we were wrong. Admit that we were, for a while there, not our best selves. And so we dig deep and double down and remain the worst version of ourselves to prevent any change from happening.
That’s most humans. That’s our biggest problem. And there’s no easy escape hatch, I’m afraid. Besides, I’ve got lots more to crawl through myself. Future generations will know a dozen ways that I’m being evil today, things we haven’t thought of or aren’t willing to admit. I’d rather explore those and try to change some more than convince myself that being right here, right now, is all I was ever meant to be.
Good luck. I’m rooting for all of us.
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