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Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace | 
 enlarge | Author: William Lobdell
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $17.15
You Save: $8.84 (34%)
Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 136476
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0061626813
Dewey Decimal Number: 277.3082092
EAN: 9780061626814
ASIN: 0061626813
Publication Date: March 1, 2009 (In 55 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Not yet published
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 A beautifully written account of personal discovery January 5, 2009
I've just finished reading three books on a common theme: losing one's (Christian) religion and becoming an atheist. All three are excellent, but each approaches the topic from a very different perspective. I thought I might review them all together, and post the combined review on each book at Amazon. I don't know if this is consistent with the Amazon review policy, but never mind.
The first book is Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists by Dan Barker. I was slightly put off by the subtitle: "How an evangelical preacher became one of America's leading atheists." After all, one of the key points about atheism - and one that we have to keep reminding theists about - is that atheism is not an organized body of belief, it's no more a religion than "bald" is a hair colour. So how can anyone be a "leading atheist"? Who's being led? However if one substitutes "prominent" or "influential" for "leading", we can let that pass. And Barker is certainly influential: he's co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is one of the most active groups working to uphold the Constitutional prohibition on church-state entanglement, and seeking to counteract the negative image of atheism in this country.
The second book that I considered was William Lobdell's Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace. Lobdell is an award-winning journalist who covered religion for the Los Angeles Times. After writing about many aspects of religion for many years, he finally decided to write about his own journey.
The last volume in this trilogy was Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity, by John Loftus. Like Barker, Loftus was also an evangelical preacher, but although the arc of his experience was similar to Barker's, the result is a very different kind of book.
Let me begin by saying that each of these books is really good, and deserves a place in the library of anyone who is interested in the contemporary debate between religion and atheism. I hesitate to rank them, or recommend one over another; nevertheless I find myself compelled to do so. Of the three, Lobdell's "Losing My Religion" is the most essential, for two reasons. First, he is an excellent writer, and his prose is simply a delight to read. Secondly, he concentrates on his personal experience in a way that I haven't encountered before in books by atheists. Both Loftus and Barker set out to tell their story and argue their case, albeit in different ways, and each draws on writers as diverse as Dennett, Wells, Price, Martin, Shermer, Carrier and Nielsen in setting forth their arguments. Lobdell just wants to recount his own story, and what he has learned from it. He's not interested in converting anyone, or scoring debating points. As he writes, "To borrow Buddha's analogy, I've just spent eight years crossing a river in a raft of my own construction, and now I'm standing on a new shore. My raft was made not of dharma, like Buddhism's, but of things I gathered along the way: knowledge, maturity, humility, critical thinking and the willingness to face the world as it is, and not how I wish it to be. I don't knopw what the future holds in this new land. I don't see myself crossing the river back to Christianity... [or] adopting a new religion. My disbelief in a personal God now seems cemented to my soul. Other kinds of spirituality seem equally improbable. Besides, I like my life on this unexplored shore."
For Lobdell, the thing which provoked his crisis of faith was people: the yawning gulf between the ideals of a religion and the lives of those who practice and - especially - lead it. The horrific abuse of young people by Catholic priests, and the way it was covered up, refutes the claims of religion in many different ways. In particular, it challenges believers to justify theodicy (the "problem of evil"), as well as the Dostoievskian idea of religion as a bastion against the chaos of amorality. In contrast, for Barker and Loftus, the unravelling of their fundamentalist faiths was due to ideas: to the incoherence of religious dogma, and its incompatibility with science and reason.
Both Loftus and Barker were preachers. There are many distinct aspects to being a preacher: the performance artist, leading a collective act of worship; the scribe and teacher, explaining and interpreting the texts and practices of the faith; and the counsellor and confessor. All of these roles have roots in the shamanic and magical. As a believer, Barker was a performance artist, and he remains so in his newly found unbelief. He encourages the closeted skeptic, and fights fiercely for the rights of the non-religious. Loftus is a scribe: the apologist, the teacher. He was the defender of faith against its critics, and with the detailed knowledge that he acquired in this role, he has become the sharpest critic of religious apology.. Each of their books reflects the way that they interpreted the role of preacher.
Both Barker and Loftus seek to encourage those who seek affirmation of their skepticism or unbelief. Barker concentrates on the emotional, the social: "you are not alone", "you are not a bad person". Loftus focuses on the ideas, the dogma: the Bible is riddled with inconsistencies, the supposedly biographical accounts in the New Testament are demonstrably fictitious, the attempts by contemporary theologians to construct a coherent interpretation of the contradictory mess are failures, and so forth. If you have read some of the authorities that Loftus cites - Mackie, Martin, et al - I would still recommend his book, because he pulls all of the threads together in a compact and accessible manner. If you are unfamiliar with the literature, Loftus may be all you need. (Add Hitchens for spice, of course!)
I recommend all three books.
A Rare Glimpse December 31, 2008
This is the story of William Lobdell's descent (or ascent depending on your stance)from fervent believer in God to nonbeliever. I found it to be a very honest book although I'm not sure his faith journey is over. Just like Lobdell states in his summary, his job as a religion editor for a major paper led him to stories where the church leaders covered up and lied about horrendous instances of child sexual abuse and where televangelists convinced the elderly, poor, and desperate to give up what they had to live on to procure "God's blessings" while they lived in multimillion dollar mansions and had sexual trysts while living it up. Lobdell describes how he tried to separate human sin from God's goodness. He describes his struggles with how God seems to be okay with human suffering. Unlike the Atheist evangelists such as the outspoken Richard Dawkins, Lobdell doesn't try to convert you to his belief. He just takes you along for the ride and lets you decide. He even points out those who have through more than he has and still clung to their faith. This book is a insightful and intelligent read and I recommend it highly but be prepared to be horrified at what has been allowed under the guise of Christianity. It could keep you awake at night.
A Well Written Honest Account of Losing Faith December 30, 2008
I enjoyed reading Lobdell's account of his spiritual journey, even though I think it is unfortunate and sad. As a seminarian on the path to Anglican/Episcopal priesthood, I found this book enlightening and challenging to me as a Christian and in relation to ministry. Lobdell's account of his experience as an investigative journalist covering religion has several insights that every serious Christian needs to read. Especially revealing is what ultimately leads to Lobdell's rejection of Christianity: "It is hard to believe in God when it is impossible to tell the difference between His people and atheists." Although, I don't totally agree with this conclusion; the difference is much too difficult to discern than it should be.
The first 100 pages of this book offer what appears to be a series of strong testimonies of God's presence in the author's life and in the lives of several other people he encounters. He later rationalizes away what I think are much more than coincidences or people acting according to some natural urge to be altruistic or forgiving. This a contradiction that I think is revealed through the author's journey: he grasps what he sees as proof against God but dismisses what could easily be seen as proof for God. He later refers to his Christian faith as "blind faith" despite describing himself as earnestly studying the Bible and reading Christian authors. After seeming to describe himself as a committed Christian for several years, he later claims that he never believed many of the stories in the Bible and could not bring himself to have the faith of those around him. I am not sure if he had faith and lost it or if he never had faith. The author may not be sure either.
His Christian faith faces a shock and then is catapulted backwards by his coming face to face with the most heinous kind of evil in the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal, the cover ups and attacks on victims. As he investigated this abuse by the church that purports the be "the church" led by God's representatives to humans, he naturally became disillusioned with God. The actions of the Roman Catholic Church documented in this book are terrible and scandalous to the entire Christian community.
Besides the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandals, Lobdell investigates the equally predatory tactics of televangelists who have become millionaires by manipulating their audiences. This further devastates the author's faith as he wonders where the "real" Christians are.
Both of these targets of his journalism are stains upon the Christian community and need to be brought into the light by journalists and condemned by all Christians. Both grops qualify as "wolves in sheep's clothing" that attempt to destroy God's flock. I sympathize with the author in his struggles to maintain faith in light of such horrible facades of Christianity.
Ironically and I think spiritually self-destructively, the author was pursuing confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church while investigating the horrors the church had perpetrated against innocent children. This portion of his spiritual journey was doomed.
I really appreciated the author's apparent honesty and openness about his journey. I think his story speaks for itself and readers can draw their own conclusions and the "why's" and "how's" of what happened. This is an interesting book that I would recommend to Christians or atheists and people in between. I especially recommend it to Roman Catholics and any fans of televangelists, but the truths of it challenge Christians to live a life that matches their proclamations of faith.
The Epilogue of the book seems like a rushed after-thought that attempts to make conclusions about faith and life. Unfortunately, it is confused and has several contradictions that detract from the strong writing of the body of the book. His concluding pages made me question the sincerity of his spiritual journey as described earlier in the book. Did he have faith or was it just an journalistic interest?
Since this is a book about the author's faith, I think more disclosure would have helped the personal story. It is as much a story about abuse of Christians by the Roman Catholic Church and televangelists as it is a personal story.
Won't make my review as long as others December 24, 2008
After looking at all of the reviews on this book, it seems that everyone was compelled to write an entire essay as a review so I won't burden you with it. This is an honest bio of one mans journey in and then out of religion by experiencing the inside of religion 1st hand. Its a good book. Enjoy.
"The body of Christ was sick." December 20, 2008
Joining the plethora of atheist books are stories by believers who've "deconverted" from religion. As one who recently lost his faith and left the Church, I identified with much of "Losing My Religion." William Lobdell has written one of the best and most personal books on the topic that I've read.
Mr. Lobdell's life was a mess when he accepted salvation in Jesus Christ. His newfound faith helped him deal with a messy divorce and gave him newfound purpose. For years his devotion to Christ grew, and then two crucial events occurred. First, he was awarded a regular religion column for the LA Times, and second, he began the process of converting to Catholicism. Initially these choices affirmed and deepened his commitment to God. But over time they began to drive a wedge of doubt through his heart. He felt that his own human weakness was the real problem, so he held fast to his faith and took comfort from close Christian friends and his growing family.
However, the author's journey through negative religious experiences and theological conundrums did not have a peaceful resolution. Shady televangelists and adulterous pastors made him wonder how such men could claim to know God's will and hold multitudes in thrall. Indeed, he discovered that churches in general seemed to be more corrupt than secular enterprises. Even positive examples of faith and the explanations of Christian apologists couldn't alleviate his issues with the problem of suffering, the infernal doctrine of hell, and the "lack of Christian unity" between the various denominations competing for converts. Still, he persevered, convinced that fallible men and women were simply acting on their sinful natures.
But the author's foundation was finally demolished by the exposure of the Catholic Church's massive sexual abuse scandal. He began investigating the allegations against priests for his newspaper column, convinced that the cases were isolated incidents and confident that the Church would redeem itself by disciplining the offenders and showing compassion to the abused. Such hopes were dashed when it came to light that Catholic leaders often protected the priests and browbeat the abused persons into silence. He was even more horrified when pious parishioners also favored molester over victim. As more and more cases surfaced, Mr. Lobdell's doubts morphed into anger. How could people who represented God's will on earth act with such evil? And how could God allow them to harm His people in the first place?
In the end, Mr. Lobdell could not find reasonable answers to these and other difficult questions. Despite the encouragement of Christian friends and his Catholic mentor, he abandoned the Catholic conversion process and left Christianity entirely. His family stuck with him, but only one believing friend remained - the rest withdrew. He took comfort in the experiences of personalities such as Howard Stern, who he found to be "far more honest than the average Catholic bishop," and comedian Julia Sweeney's one-woman play "Letting Go of God" (which I saw on cable and found to be thought-provoking and encouraging as well).
Yes, there will be the Christian critics who'll say that Mr. Lobdell was never "saved" in the first place, or Satan led him astray, or that he's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But the relevant issues and skeptical questions he raises in "Losing My Religion" require contemplation, and cannot (or should not) be ignored by anyone who professes faith in God. Similar books I recommend are, "Crazy for God" by Frank Schaeffer, "Farewell to God" by Charles Templeton, "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God" by Guy P. Harrison, "Reasons to Believe" by John Marks, and "God's Problem," by Bart D. Ehrman.
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