When You (Begin to) Realize it Was ALL a Lie

The start of my awakening to the lies and to the truth was at Pinebrook in the Poconos when I was about 21 years old. Pinebrook had inherited the mantle of an “old fashioned camp meeting” from Mispah Grove and, while there was no sawdust trail at Pinebrook, there was fiery preaching from the fundamentalist backbenchers who filled our churches in those years.

But that year, Pinebrook had a superstar: Henry Morris. Morris was an engineer who along with John Whitcomb had written the authoritative work on the young earth creation “theory.” Indeed, it was not a theory at all, but a mash-up of claims about how the world was only about 5,000 years old and evolution was a godless myth.

Not too many years before that Pinebrook awakening, I sat in the living room of our neighbors, the Kirkpatricks, and listened to my youth leader (curiously, a woman—she was at the limit of what SHE could do in that church), as she painstakingly chronicled the genealogies within the Hebrew Bible to come up with the c5,000 timeline that Morris and Whitcomb had proposed.

By the time I made my way to Pinebrook with my mom and dad and future spouse to spend a week basking in the mountain beauty and the stern reminders of why so many people were destined for hell, I was starting to doubt a whole bunch of stuff I had been raised to unquestioningly believe.

(Doubt was weaponized to question your “salvation” and place in heaven. Ergo: if you doubt “the faith”, you probably are not saved. You are damned.)

Sadly, I had no one with whom I could entrust my deepest doubts.

But a high school biology teacher, whose name I will never remember, was at Pinebrook that summer too.

And that was the beginning.

I latched onto him because he had an education outside the Bible colleges, which, we were taught were the only places committed to the truth. And one night that week when we all went bowling (an annual tradition), I sat next to him on the bus and, quite innocently, asked him what he thought of Morris’ teaching.

He lowered his voice and said something like: “I could get in trouble for this… but… it’s simply ridiculous.” He said little else except to note that none of Morris’ claims would hold up under any kind of scientific scrutiny.

But the damning thing he said, and what stuck with me forever after, was in response to a somewhat arcane argument Morris advanced about how light from starts that are millions of light years away could reach earth if the universe is only 5,000 years old. Morris claimed that God created the light to arrive at earth to make it seem like the universe was billions of years old (or something like that). My biology teacher’s response (stated in that same lowered voice) was that why would God do that? What kind of God would engage in that kind of bizarre trickery? To what end?

The teacher was profoundly offended by a God who would be so manipulative.

(Just another proof that these preachers had all created a god in their own image.)

And that was when I began to give myself permission to wake up. Permission to question. Permission to walk away. Permission to doubt the whole project. Permission to call BS on the entire package of lies meant to keep me in line.

But even though I gave myself permission, the actual escape, the actual liberation, the actual exit from that world took a long, long time. In some ways it is ongoing.

It’s hard for people who were not raised within a cult (take that term for what it typically means—a system that controls all aspects of one’s life and allows no questioning) to understand how hard it is to fully escape.

Believe it or not, Donald Trump has been a blessing in this regard. Imagine me saying that Donald Trump is a blessing—but he has been. As a truly apocalyptic figure (a figure who reveals), Trump has removed the veil from what the true project of Morris et al has always been.

Morris wanted control. He wanted control of a narrative. He wanted control of the explanation for how the world works. He wanted us to swallow the vision of a God who is unpredictable, punitive, and wholly lacking in grace. He wanted us to be afraid of that God because he wanted us to stay in line.

And though Morris is gone now, those who follow in his tradition want the same thing. That is why they attach themselves to a vile human being whom they believe will offer them the control they desire.

The biology teacher was, perhaps, the first truth teller I had ever engaged on questions of deep importance to me. And while he did not know it, he was granting me a key—a key to unlock the door to a world that transcended hate and control.

I wish I could thank him. I wish we could discuss the journey he set me on.