The Day I...:

left the church

Former clergyman Mark Vernon left the church an atheist. In an unusual ‘day I’, he recounts his story – not of finding faith, but of losing it.

I used to be a clergyman in the Church of England. I worked in a parish in the north east of England as a curate, a ‘trainee vicar’. It was a role with a clear sense of purpose, being situated in a working-class community where, if many other agencies and organisations had departed, the church remained to help.

But during my curacy something went wrong. I had a profound crisis of faith. I became lonely in the job and frustrated with the church. It depressed me that some clergy spent so much time policing their version of Christian truth. I was uncomfortable having to be an ambassador for a church that seemed backward in so many of its attitudes.

Also, I could not help but think that Christians are too often remarkably unreligious. I do not mean that they are badly behaved! Rather, it is that so much contemporary churchgoing seems uninterested in the great quest that powers the spiritual life. Is it too harsh to feel that very often worship is not an encounter with the unknown God but a feel-good experience, or that prayer is little more than a request for help finding a parking space at the supermarket?

So over a period of about three years, the threads of my faith thinned. And then snapped.

Now, there are some, maybe many, in the church who have a crisis of faith and bury it. They perhaps reason that faith can return in time. Or they might think that church leaders have a responsibility not to burden other people with their doubts. But when I confided in one parishioner who had taken me under her wing, she told me that if I felt I was living a lie, now was the time to act.

“The longer you stay in the church, the fewer your options will seem,” she said. She had seen many curates come and go in her time. I took what she said to heart and in retrospect think she was right.

So, I spoke to my bishop. He told me not to take myself so seriously, which was also good advice, and pointed out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but is certainty, which is also true. But I came to the conclusion that, in all honesty, I was not just having a periodic wobble. Mine was a refusal of God. I had to leave.

And so one autumnal Sunday, after the services of the day – and a kind sending-off from the church – I packed the contents of my small house into the car and drove away. If I’m honest, it did not actually feel sad. I felt liberated. For the first time in a long time I could be straightforwardly honest. I did not believe in God. That was that.

But then, something else unexpected happened. After a time, I came to feel that atheism entails a poverty of spirit. For example, it tends to ignore or ridicule the ‘big’ questions of life – those awesome issues about why there is something rather than nothing – that must be asked, even if never finding conclusive answers. Or I found myself turning my back on human experiences that many people have, simply because to take them seriously would mean engaging in matters that looked too religious.

Then there were all the arguments for and against the existence of God. I’d read them all, and came to think that there is no knockout blow one way or the other. Anyway, proofs never persuade anyone to change their mind, they just bolster the opinions of those whose minds are already made up.

To put it another way, I had become an agnostic. I realised that religions carry a wisdom that human beings cannot do without, though I was equally sure that I could not make the assertions of faith that modern churchgoing seems to require.

So now I am searching, and that feels authentically religious. For it is only when we are able to embrace our condition of being ‘between beasts and angels’, in Augustine’s lovely phrase, that we have a chance of becoming fully human.