Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America and Found Unexpected Peace
William Lobdell
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0061626813
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
William Lobdell's journey of faith—and doubt—may be the most compelling spiritual memoir of our time. Lobdell became a born-again Christian in his late 20s when personal problems—including a failed marriage—drove him to his knees in prayer. As a newly minted evangelical, Lobdell—a veteran journalist—noticed that religion wasn't covered well in the mainstream media, and he prayed for the Lord to put him on the religion beat at a major newspaper. In 1998, his prayers were answered when the Los Angeles Times asked him to write about faith.
Yet what happened over the next eight years was a roller-coaster of inspiration, confusion, doubt, and soul-searching as his reporting and experiences slowly chipped away at his faith. While reporting on hundreds of stories, he witnessed a disturbing gap between the tenets of various religions and the behaviors of the faithful and their leaders. He investigated religious institutions that acted less ethically than corrupt Wall St. firms. He found few differences between the morals of Christians and atheists. As this evidence piled up, he started to fear that God didn't exist. He explored every doubt, every question—until, finally, his faith collapsed. After the paper agreed to reassign him, he wrote a personal essay in the summer of 2007 that became an international sensation for its honest exploration of doubt.
Losing My Religion is a book about life's deepest questions that speaks to everyone: Lobdell understands the longings and satisfactions of the faithful, as well as the unrelenting power of doubt. How he faced that power, and wrestled with it, is must reading for people of faith and nonbelievers alike.
repeatedly fell short, but toward which I still kept striving. I started to find excuses for why God hadn’t given me the job at The Times yet. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it. I’d be on a national stage if I got the position, and perhaps this was my time in the des· 32 · A GOD THING ert to pray and fast and prepare. Yet four years into praying, I saw no progress. Finally, I decided to find another way to get my foot in the door. God helps those who help themselves, right? Maybe, I thought, my
wedding they otherwise couldn’t afford, along with a chance to get back in harmony with the Catholic Church. Unable to shoulder · 88 · MY TEN COMMANDMENTS the financial burden of an expensive church wedding, many of the working-class couples already had tied the knot in civil ceremonies. But those weddings aren’t recognized as valid church unions. Father Bill’s weddings offered them an easy way back. He gave a Mass wedding, picking up the bill for the photographer, decorations, three-tiered
didn’t threaten my faith. I knew about the sinfulness of man. It was the whole reason Christianity was necessary—to bridge the yawning gap between God and his perpetually misbehaving children. Every faith has its Monsignor Harrises, but that doesn’t disprove God, nor even necessarily taint organized religion. I saw exposing what Harris did as cleaning up, not hurting, Catholicism. Blind loyalty to a member of the clergy would be a recurring theme during my next five years as a religion writer.
on the church, which they believed was the sole possessor of the truth. I think that’s why the bishops and church’s attorneys attacked the victims who came forward in the past with disproportional viciousness. The victims threatened to bring scandal to the church, and therefore could diminish the holiness of Catholicism in the eyes of some. They weren’t just plaintiffs, but enemies who needed to be vanquished in such a way as to repel even the thought of future attacks. If a child fell down some
felt like an endorsement of the establishment. Worse, it felt like at least symbolically that I was turning against the people who were victimized by the church—horribly wounded people who said, to the person, that the church’s betrayal was worse than what their priest did to them. I had always imagined the rite of initiation to be a serious but · 158 · A GENTLE WHISPER SILENCED joyous ceremony—like a wedding, which it basically was. If I was going to be married to the Catholic Church, I