William Lobdell, a reporter who covered the “religion beat” for the LA Times, writes about how the stories he covered influenced his personal religious journey and how they eventually turned him away from Christianity (via Jill). The article’s well-written and I appreciate his candor in discussing what originally drew him to religion and the kind of theological questions that ultimately led him to reject it.
Lobdell briefly describes the wide-ranging topics the he covered on the beat.
First as a columnist and then as a reporter, I never had a shortage of topics. I wrote about an elderly church organist who became a spiritual mentor to the man who tried to rape, rob and kill her. About the Orthodox Jewish mother who developed a line of modest clothing for Barbie dolls. About the hardy group of Mormons who rode covered wagons 800 miles from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, replicating their ancestors’ journey to Southern California.
He discusses the difficulty he had in reporting the Catholic Church sex scandal and the reactions he encountered from other Catholics. Lobdell was, at the time, in the process of converting to Catholicism. He writes that he was comforted by friend who wisely counseled him to “[k]eep your eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the altar.” The reader is introduced to a fascinating man, Peter “Packy” Kobuk, a native of St. Michael Island in western Alaska. Packy was serving a prison sentence when Lobdell met him. He
had come from Southern California to report on a generation of Eskimo boys who had been molested by a Catholic missionary. All of the now-grown Eskimos I had interviewed over the past week had lost their faith. In fact, several of them confessed that they fantasized daily about burning down the village church, where the unspeakable acts took place.
It’s implied that Packy was also molested as a child. Yet, Packy hadn’t lost his faith. When Lobdell asked why, the answer left him envious.
“It’s not God’s work what happened to me,” he said softly, running his fingers along the beads. “They were breaking God’s commandments — even the people who didn’t help. They weren’t loving their neighbors as themselves.”
He said he regularly got down on his knees in his jail cell to pray.
“A lot of people make fun of me, asking if the Virgin Mary is going to rescue me,” Packy said. “Well, I’ve gotten helped more times from the Virgin Mary through intercession than from anyone else. I won’t stop. My children need my prayers.”
Tears spilled from his eyes. Packy’s faith, though severely tested, had survived.
Lobdell’s own faith wouldn’t survive and the article concludes with the writer calling his wife to tell her that he wants a new beat at the paper. His explanation, though, is not only not compelling but somewhat childish.
My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.
I was disappointed to see a paragraph like this in an otherwise well-written and interesting article. Skepticism is an equal-opportunity predator. Any sophomore philosophy major can tell you that our most fundamental and noncontroversial beliefs depend on assumptions that are very difficult, if not impossible, to prove. To say the belief in God requires “a leap of faith” implies that other beliefs don’t. Even the phrase “belief in God” is ambiguous, but that’s a subject for another time. If it’s true that “[e]ither you have the gift of faith or you don’t,” then all argumentation about religion is moot. Is that what Lobdell means? If “[i]t’s not a choice,” then the great debates over religion throughout history were a waste of time.
I remember a conversation I had with my father years ago. I think it was after I did poorly on a exam. I asked out loud whether I really had the ability to do well. Maybe I just wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. My dad quickly admonished me. He said that by questioning my ability I was trying to relieve myself of responsibility. If I’m not capable of doing well, then, obviously, I shouldn’t feel bad about it. Of course, he was right. Lobdell is doing the same thing and he should be called on it. It’s not that he’s missing some innate “gift of faith,” as comforting as that would be. He mistook religion’s practitioners for religion itself. He allowed the noble ideals that originally drew him to the Church to become drowned out by the scandals he covered, instead of using those noble ideas to lead and instill chance. He failed where Packy succeeded.