Losing My Religion

William Lobdell, “Losing My Religion: How I lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace”, Harper Collins, 2009, 283 Pages
The author, has been a journalist for 25 years, winning many state and national awards. In 2008 he left the Los Angeles Times after a long tenure involving investigative reporting on religion. He is currently on the visiting faculty at the University of California, Irvine.

Lobdell began to see that religious institutions are more susceptible to corruption than their secular counterparts because of their reliance on God, and not human checks and balances, for governance (pg. 161). Lobdell recounts how he became a Protestant evangelical, nearly accepted Catholicism and, in the end, rejected faith altogether. His journey is a compelling story. At the end of the book he describes his new God as close to the God that Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein believed in—a deity that can be seen in the miracles of nature, the complexity of DNA or the wonder of physics; a God incompatible with the God of the Bible.

I found the facts involving the Catholic church’s cover-up involving pedophile priests (at least 4 percent of all priests were involved), to be the most shocking. Additionally, there is an investigative section about faith healer Benny Hinn and televangelists Jan and Paul Crouch. Lobdell is quite surprised that the corruption uncovered appears to make no difference on the reach of these televangelist ministries or the lives of their followers. A section on the Mormons shows similar results: although no corruption is shown, the viciousness of Mormons toward those that leave the faith is disturbing.

This book is not meant to be an expose. Rather it is a candid tale of one persons spiritual journey.

My Notes:

Pg. 32: St. Francis of Assisi put it best when commenting on people who proselytize: ‘Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary use words.’

Pg. 50: Several of God’s laws where the punishment does not quite fit the crime: the Book of Leviticus recommends the death penalty for cursing your mother or father, for being a medium,’ for committing adultery, incest, bestiality or acts of homosexuality and for blaspheming the name of the Lord. Or the killing of very firstborn in Egypt both man and animal because Pharaoh would not free the Hebrews. Then there is (Genesis 22:2) where Abraham is told to sacrifice his son Isaac. The book of Job is frightening as well.

Pg. 118: The bishop’s responses to the victims of sexual abuse were more like that you would expect from Mafia bosses than shepherds; this Mafia-Don type response was consistent throughout all dioceses that dealt with pedophile priests.

Pg. 136: Father John Geoghan was accused of molesting at least 130 boys, most of them in grammar school. The youngest was four years old. The Cardinal, Bernard Law, had known that Geoghan was a sexual predator in 1984, his first year as archbishop of Boston, but did nothing to stop him. In fact, Law moved him to new parishes where the priest sexually assaulted new crops of boys, their parent unaware of the serial child rapist in their midst. It took the cardinal 14 years and an untold number of victims before he sought to remove Geoghan from the priesthood. Law did as he was trained to do: deal with scandals in-house and keep them, at any cost, out of the public eye.
Pg. 139: In a report released by U.S. bishops in February 2004, they found that 4,392 priests—4 percent of all clerics—had allegedly abused as many as 10,000 minors since 1950. The numbers have to be even higher; how many were unreported?

Pg. 204: Christians, as a group, acted no differently than anyone else, including atheists. The most devastating information was collected by the Barnal Group, a respected research company run by an evangelical Christian worried about the health of Christianity in America. For years, George Barna has studied more than 0 moral behaviors of believers and nonbelievers. His conclusion: the faith of Christians has grown fat and flabby. He contends that statistically, the difference between behaviors of Christians and others has been erased. According to his data and other studies,

Pg. 205: Christians divorce at about the same rate as or even at a slightly higher rate than atheists. Non-Christians are more likely to give money to a homeless or poor person in any given year (34 percent) than are born-again Christians (24 percent). Only 5 percent give 10 percent to the Church as all are expected to do. The percentage of Christian youth infected with sexually transmitted diseases is virtually the same as the rate among their non-Christian counterparts. (See Ronald J. Sider’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience).

Pg. 206: A recent poll co-sponsored by the National Catholic Reporter found that the majority of American Catholics believed they did not have to obey church doctrine on abortion, birth control, divorce, remarriage or weekly attendance at Mass to be ‘good Catholics.’ Catholic women have about the same rate of abortion as the rest of society, according to a 2002 study by Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. And 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used a modern method of contraception.