Thinking for yourself can get you into trouble...

Just before I turned 9 my mother graduated from college and got offered a job in Florida. We moved to a small town outside of Tampa and started attending a new Church of Christ. Here we found people who knew our grandparents in Kentucky. (That was no surprise. Small churches in small towns have an amazing ability to keep in contact.) When they learned that my sisters and I were children of divorce we were immediately treated slightly different. We were to be pitied. We needed more guidance. We needed more help to grow in God because we were from a broken family and thus were partially broken ourselves. 

I was quickly deemed ‘weird’ by the other kids and mostly just stuck around my older sister. I asked the questions during Sunday school that the teachers didn't like to answer. I answered their questions logically but somehow they were the wrong answers. My Sunday school class was once asked that if we had lived 2,000 years ago, when Jesus was alive, would we had followed him. The entire class answered ‘Yes’ one-by-one. 

While they were automatically answering I was thinking. By the time the question was posed onto me I answered ‘No.’ You would have thought I had dropped a bomb in the class. No one moved. The teacher looked stunned. My sister had her head in her hand. (She was used to my antics) I knew what I was supposed to say. I knew that, to move on with the lesson I was to say ‘yes’, get a gold star, be right, and live forever blissfully ignorant and happy with the answers I had been fed my entire life. My reason for the ‘no’ was that if today a man came around and said that our religion was wrong and we needed to follow him and his way to receive everlasting salvation I would not follow him. That’s exactly what Jesus was doing to people 2,000 years ago. He was saying the religion that 90% of the current population was following was wrong, that he was a incarnation of God, and that he was the true path to salvation. It must have been a hard pill to swallow and if the people of 2,000 years ago had any of the trust in their religion as we did then I would expect them to say ‘no’ as well. So, that was my answer for this Sunday school teacher. It was the most logical answer I could come up with. It would be what I would expect any of my classmates to say had they not been so brainwashed to blindly answer the way they were taught to.

I, however, was immediately placed on the Elder watch list.

Hey Y'all!

I was born in Metairie, LA, grew up in Western Kentucky and Central Florida and finally returned to Hammond, LA to attend university. I call anywhere in the Gulf region home. Being female, I was expected to think, behave and believe a certain way. My mother taught me to speak softly, be clean, love the Lord and listen to the men and elders. My grandparents reinforced this idea of southern women as help-keeps of the men.

When I resisted this tradition I was met with condescension, confusion, and downright insulting behavior.

I do want to express that I had and still have a loving and caring relationship with my family. I came out as a nonbeliever to them years ago and have met with none of the horror stories that we have recently heard from other atheists. My family loves me- they wonder where they went wrong- but love me nonetheless.

While in my senior year of college I decided that I needed to get out of the south. I took a trip to Denver to visit friends and fell in love with the people, lifestyle and, of course, the mountains. I decided that I would move there after I graduate. A year ago I moved from southern Louisiana to the wilds of Denver Colorado. I found a new freedom of living in a progressive area as a nonbeliever. Being able to have open conversations about secularism without getting the 'evil stare' from random strangers, not being told the 'Jesus still loves' me for not being at church on a Sunday or Wednesday and being free to live outside my learned social constraints was amazing.

I recently went to a conference in Washington D.C. entitled 'Women in Secularism'. When I had first heard about the conference I knew I had to go and be a part of something so moving and progressive. I wanted to hear the stories of other women breaking free of their oppressive religions only to move into another community that was mostly dominated by men. The interesting thing I found at this conference wasn't how to be more of a leader in the atheist community but how little we see southern women being leaders in the atheist community. Of the entire speaker list there was one woman from Florida- who had been a pastor in her church for 20+ years before helping found The Clergy Project. She was a natural leader and I was fascinated listening to her but I wished that there had been more southern leadership represented at the conference. It made me think about what southern women are taught, not only just in the south as a community, but in the southern churches. We were taught to be listeners and followers- not leaders.

What I want to do with this blog is to contemplate the southern belle teachings of my youth in comparison to living as a now atheist in a 'northern' place (I'm aware that Coloradans do not consider themselves northern but...they kinda are...). I hope to give a southern woman's perspective of atheist life in the 21st century.

Enjoy!