Mark Moore

When I was a kid I loved to play with a kaleidoscope. While looking through it and turning the barrel, the colorful forms would constantly change which was mesmerizing. Religion can be like this. It is a huge and varied subject after all, and especially for people like me, it can be confusing and even bewildering as much as it is alluring. This is because it takes so many different forms. Some, let’s face it, like the main line church that my family went to when I was growing up, are simply dull. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but I often felt faint and a little nauseous in church and always bored. At other times, religion can be scary, like the fundamentalist preachers we used to see on television who were always asking form money and telling us we’re bound for hell if we refuse. Now we have the so called prosperity gospel preachers who tell us God wants us to be rich and successful or the Christian Nationalists who say America has always been Christian in their own image of what that means. Or the Pentecostals babbling in a strange language and claiming to heal people with terrible illnesses. Or the Evangelicals who say to accept Jesus and be saved or be damned.

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It is all so strange and, after all, so alienating. We just want to run away from it all and say we are atheists since we cannot embrace any of it. On top of it all, many of us, me included, have been hurt or disillusioned by religious people and religious organizations. Or we crave a wider religious world that we cannot find. That was me. And that may be you too. But what a terrible mistake it is to run away, because it condemns us to emptiness and cynicism. I couldn’t live like that and, if you are honest, you can’t either. Like it or not, we must not give up but continue to search for God in a way that is authentic. Where, in the messiness, the hypocrisy, the boring, the offensive, the crazy, the stupid, can we still find something embedded in it all, a real sense of God that we can accept and believe in? When we do, we will /nd things that are alluring, mysterious, intriguing, scary, and inspiring even when we cannot swallow everything whole cloth. It can still be a window through which we can see something holy.

 

Traditional religion is in a state of collapse in this country and new religious movements are constantly appearing and disappearing. Let us step out on this adventure of exploration. Perhaps we will /nd something compelling. Hope, as they always say , springs eternal. We might also /nd an experience of community. Religion, after all, is communal in nature. There is an epidemic of loneliness now according to the Surgeon General. One reason is the disappearance or the diminishment of most of the places where we used to gather. Most prominent among them are the religious institutions. This was my journey. I am an Episcopal Priest and poverty attorney who spent many years working among the poor in one of America’s most destitute cities. I am also a former atheist who rejected the faith of my family. How did this happen? It was quite a journey which I wrote about in a memoir I have just finished.

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I started this website because I wanted to help people like me who were cynical about religion or so confused that we didn’t know where to start. Most of all, I wanted you to know that you are not alone, and to encourage you not to give up.