I grew up in several strong Mennonite communities in the Virginia and Pennsylvania areas. “Mennonite” is a word like “Christian” or “God” which can have vastly different meanings in different places. We were not the type of “Mennonite” that comes up in Google pictures, such as the ones my atheist wife discovered when trying to find out more about me. My home churches were part of the General Conference and, later, Mennonite Church USA and my generation is outwardly indistinguishable from alternative Christian denominations, embracing both technology and modern clothing. However, this condition is actually fairly recent. Many women in my grandmother’s generation continue to wear the Mennonite head coverings and plain dresses of our ancestors and my grandparents talk of far stricter rules regarding education, hairstyle and movies in their younger days. Perhaps my journey is somewhat predictable; the inevitable result of loosening the bonds which kept the community separate?
Growing up, my extended family was pure Mennonite. Every grandparent, uncle, aunt, and cousin was a dedicated member of the church. We included pastors, missionaries, Sunday school teachers, elders, and a bishop. Family gatherings were regular and joyous, and, in the Mennonite tradition, usually included the singing of hymns in multiple parts. I loved my childhood. As I get older, I realize more and more how lucky I was to experience the stability and support of a strong family and strong community focused on helping each other out and bringing up the next generation. These communities were also thoughtful and intentional places. I remember wide-ranging conversations and careful Bible study as the backbone of time spent together. We rejected the frantic, thoughtless pace and consumeristic lifestyle that often seemed to characterize the secular world. Instead, we nurtured a meditative existence focused on following Jesus’ teachings, building each other up and searching for ways to reach out to people struggling on the margins. There are many wonderful characteristics of my family, church and school communities that I remember with pride and hope to emulate, to the degree possible, with my own children. For this and other reasons I have decided not to reveal names on this website, including my own. I don’t want the inevitable scrutiny of flaws and missed opportunities of the people and organizations around me. I want to focus on the real issues leading to my change in beliefs.
During my youth and young adulthood I was careful to keep a healthy individual relationship with God. Growing up in the church, I made a public decision to “be saved” in my early teens and was baptized later after attending a church membership class. I set about establishing a regular prayer and Bible study routine. I would make prayer lists in notebooks and “pray through” friends and family members, thinking of each person’s difficulties and how they might be helped. I progressed through various Bible reading strategies, at first content with just reading the text but eventually graduating to working through Believers Church Bible Commentaries focused on the books that I found particularly interesting. For a period of time I read the passage of the “Proverbs 31 woman” every day, though it was eventually memorized, ingraining into my mind the type of wife I would be seeking. I still have a copy of a “rededication” that I wrote out, reminding myself of concrete goals for my life and ways in which I would honor God with my decisions. I kept a signed and dated copy of this in my Bible, reviewing it periodically to keep myself focused. Needless to say, some others my age may have viewed me as “a bit overly intense” or, at least, not the most exciting person. That was probably true, but it didn’t bother me much. I knew quite a few older people who were very intense about their relationship with God and these were also the people I respected the most. What could be more important?
My first real contact with alternative beliefs came at the local Christian high school. My close group of friends included people from 5 different denominational backgrounds and we frequently had “debates”. Each argued from their preset starting point and quickly discovered the strengths and weaknesses of their positions. I thoroughly enjoyed this and it sent me down the path of trying to understand what I believed and why. Although I began thinking about these differences between Christian groups, there were many, many beliefs that I took for granted. I didn’t know any atheists and imagined them as a small, strange group somewhere out in the world…. like wiccans or, maybe, psychopaths. It didn’t even cross my mind that there might be good reasons to be an atheist. We were also taught in school that evolution was a strategy that atheists concocted to avoid the evidence for God. Evolution stated that some animals just turned into other animals……pretty weak! At this point in my life I even imagined myself studying the evolutionists’ arguments as I grew older and setting out to take down this atheist invention. I was surprised and intrigued when I went to an Anabaptist college and found that my biology professors taught evolution in class.
Although my interest in exploring beliefs had been kick-started in high school, this was mainly a constant background activity throughout college. I focused a lot of effort on the activities that I knew were headed in the right direction. Bringing people to Christ was definitely important. I spent two summers as a camp counselor at a Christian camp. Another thing that seemed very important was aiding people living in poverty. Jesus had commanded this and how could I, blessed with so much undeserved wealth, fail to spend it on the unlucky people struggling to survive? I joined a club focused on providing appropriate water technology to rural Africans and took a month-long trip to the partner village. I went on several spring break trips focused on rebuilding after a disaster in the US and building for the homeless in a Mexican landfill. I spent another summer in rural Mexico working on development projects with Mennonite Central Committee. These eye-opening experiences permanently imprinted upon me the intensity of struggle faced by some people in our world. I also gained more respect for the complexity of the problems and difficulty in making progress against them. While I hope that I made a positive impact for some of the people I met on these trips, the impact on me was undeniable.
Towards the end of my college studies, I made a consequential decision. In my freshman year, I had opted to pursue an engineering route over biology. This decision had several positive points going for it: I loved math, could easily see how I would be using my career skills long-term, and the evolution questions became less urgent. However, by my final year I realized that the actual work of engineering design did not excite me. I loved the upper level classes for my biology minor and was spending my free time learning about animals. I had also discovered a connection between biology and the people struggling on the margins: diseases. It was time to forge a new path. With the decision to pursue biology, the evolution questions came roaring back into focus. They had never gone away. I had been reading up on evolution from a Christian perspective, I had attended evolution “debates” sponsored by my college, and I had been learning more about the scientific evidence through my biology classes. But now my remaining questions demanded attention.