Losing Religion

David Sessions grapples with how it happened to him:

Several years and some graduate school after my “deconversion,” I began to realize the story I had told myself of a systematic changing of my beliefs through argument was about as accurate as most movies that claim to be “based on true events.” In one sense, that theoretical story was true: intellectual advances I made during high school and college and after continually forced me to rethink my faith, and factual information and rational arguments played a significant role in undermining it. But my experience of the world also dramatically expanded during that time (through moves and travel), and my milieu changed significantly several times on the path from a tiny, homogenous conservative Christian town to an enormous, multicultural secular-progressive city. I experienced more places, people, art and information in a period of a few years than in my previous life combined, which shattered many of the stereotypes, prejudices and preconceived notions that made up the environment where my faith had once made sense. My “world”—in the Heideggerian sense of our “lived experience,” the non-theoretical background way things make sense to us—shifted to the extent that things I previously believed would eventually come to seem unimaginable.

But this did not happen primarily on an explicit, theoretically-engaged level; it happened “in the background,” in routines of daily life. Religious critics suggested as much—that I was sliding away from “the truth” only because of my environment, because I wanted to be “cool.” I strenuously objected that all this was, on the contrary, the product of Serious Reading and Good, Solid Intellectual Arguments. Most of us like to believe we have well-grounded, dispassionate reasons for our behavior and beliefs. But Taylor, following Heidegger, says this doesn’t really get at why we slide around the belief scale; rational explanations “give too much place to changes in belief, as against those in experience and sensibility.” My critics were correct that something else besides just theories and arguments was driving the shift. The intellectual dimension was a real, but it was pulled along by massive changes in experience, and my changing sense of what kind of person I wanted to become.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/05/losing-religion/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29