I wrote this piece mostly as an open letter to the friends and family who knew me as a child and now watch aghast (presumably) as I practice what I recently began describing as a “Mystical Atheism”, which I plan on describing in a future essay.

The experience is so common, so universal that it’s become a trope of storytelling: the child leaves home for the first time (usually around the age of eighteen) and finds, with shock and confusion, that the Truths1 he was taught in his youth were merely social conventions or cultural norms and are not shared by the world at large. He learns too that the authority figures of his childhood hadn’t, in fact, cornered the market on this Truth. This was where I found myself in the fall of 1997.

I attended a small Christian college to study and prepare myself for entering the ministry and in one particular course the professor was lecturing on biblical authorship; topics included biblical inerrancy, inspiration, and canonicity.

Already doubtful I would receive a satisfactory answer, I knew I had to ask the question that had been gnawing at the back of my mind since I first began studying these topics a few years earlier.

“Excuse me, professor.” I said, raising my hand. “It seems to me like the reason we have sixty-six books in our Bible as opposed to any other number is because some guys sat in a room and decided it was so.” The bluntness of my question caught the youngish professor off guard.

“Well, Ben, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It wasn’t just one room, or one set of ‘guys’. But yes, that’s the gist I suppose.”

“How do we know if this count is correct?”

“Faith.”

This answer was wholly unsatisfying to me. The tiny evangelical church I had come from taught me, in no uncertain terms, that I had not only been fortunate enough to be born into one of two countries on Earth that God favored (the other being Israel), but I had also been taught the only right religion, the most biblically correct denomination, and even more than that the most right sect of that denomination. Other people were wrong, we were right. Full stop.

The answer this teacher gave was far too hand-wavy to me. I knew there had to be good, sound, logical reasons why these particular 66 books were the right ones, and all the others were the wrong ones. Of course, there were reasons. Lots of reasons. Reasons for 66 books, reasons for 73 books, and reasons for 80 books. To be fair, among the Protestant denominations most of the disagreements were about the Old Testament, the New Testament held steady at 27 books.

After this particular conversation with my professor I didn’t discuss the topic with anyone again for a very long time. “Just have faith” wasn’t the answer I was looking for; it was a cop-out in my mind. I saw the world in very black and white terms2. Everything was either right or wrong. Heaven or Hell. Good or evil. Democrat or Republican. Faith simply left too much gray area for me to be comfortable with. I wasn’t interested in faith, I was interested in Truth. I was attending this institution to sit under the tutelage of minds greater than mine so I might discover deeper Truths about God and the Bible. Paradoxically, the more I studied the less Truth I found, and the more faith I uncovered.

One thing that surprised me was that even within this tiny microcosm of biblical scholarship, the professors’ opinions on topics often differed greatly and they rarely agreed on much at all. In fact, most found a noticeable amount of joy in poking fun at one another’s theological “inadequacies.”

Naturally, as students we emulated these dialectical debates and frequently found ourselves debating biblical concepts in the same way. These conversations usually happened late at night while we were stuffing our faces with pizza and getting wired on Mountain Dew. I genuinely enjoy a good debate, and I regularly found myself flip-flopping on my views several times over the course of an evening, often while playing (and losing at) Command & Conquer LAN parties.

Debates commonly centered around topics such as: What does inerrancy of scripture mean? Is it OK to listen to “secular” music? And of course, how to debate using proof-texts from the Bible to defend any position we might want to hold at the time.

So what did I actually learn in Bible college? I learned that no one has the Truth, indeed there is no Truth at all. There are only smaller truths — individual and communal — that change, adapt, and morph as history marches on. I also learned that a person can use the Bible to defend almost any position they want, from slavery to segregation to totalitarian rule (cf. Nazi Germany).

In my view, Evangelicalism specifically has lost the ability to have dialectical discourse in American culture, becoming less concerned with loving their neighbor and more concerned with the theology of their neighbor. It is no longer 'by faith alone'; it is 'by theology alone' that a person is saved. How sad that the very things I learned in Bible college have become antithetical to the American “Christian-o-sphere.”

I learned that a video game voice saying “nuclear launch detected” can still cause my stomach to sink and my butt to clench.

But most of all I learned how to hold two (or more) opposing truths simultaneously without one negating the other. It’s time to leave the idea of Truth behind and rediscover the power and peace of faith alone.

This is a real problem. If she divides the inheritance evenly then the daughter who needs nothing gets exactly the same amount as the daughter who could use it. Divide it by need and she’s ranked her kids in a document, in black and white. They’ll read it after she’s gone, with no chance to explain herself. Six feet of soil tends to muffle the voice quite a lot, you see. Most people with more than one child and more than one dollar in the bank arrive here eventually and then choose to handle it by not handling it at all. I wonder whether or not this is the first time she’s asked someone else for advice. Probably not, but one thing’s for sure, she’d been chewing on it long enough to call a stranger.

She never gets an answer. Not because the question is a difficult one (though it definitely is) but because seven minutes into the call the show becomes a different conversation, and she sounds relieved.

The shift happens when she mentions what she spent on college, over half a million dollars, and says her daughters have become socialists. There’s laughter all around. The host tells her she sent them to the wrong school and nobody mentions these incomes again.

Nobody asks what she means by the word, either — socialist. Nobody wonders if the daughters would actually use that term to describe themselves, what they really believe, or how the mother even knows their sociopolitical views. Nobody considers if this is a fight about tax policy or something that has already become broken in the relationship. Two people get convicted on one word from the only witness, who is also the plaintiff, and who has just said she’s been upset about them for years.

The easy version of this essay makes her the villain. I don’t want to write that essay because she’s not the villain here, actually she’s the only person in the segment who’s legitimately hurting.

She says she’s depressed about where she sees her children heading. She says she doesn’t want the money to go to them, and then, right away, that she feels terrible about that. It’s the only moment when somebody describes what’s happening inside them instead of stating a principle in judgement. This woman isn’t arguing. She’s telling a stranger that she’s lost something, and she recognizes that some part of her wants to punish her daughters over it. It makes her feel like a bad mother.

What she gets back is that she shouldn’t feel terrible, because her daughters aren’t entitled to the money. They didn’t hit the DNA lottery1.

That isn’t comfort. It isn’t disagreement either. It’s a way of taking the feeling off her, and it works, because she never raises it again. She called with grief and guilt about her own children and hung up with neither, and it must have felt like a weight coming off. But the guilt was holding something up. It was the part of her that still wanted them back.

Her guilt assumed she owed them something. That isn’t a strange thing for a mother to assume. They didn’t ask to be here, she decided they would be, and the whole shape of a parent’s obligation comes from that: you made a person who needed you, and their need is not a claim they have to earn. Nobody on the call asked whether she was right about that. It just got taken from her, in one line, by a man who had never met her daughters.

Then comes a moment that lasts maybe nine seconds and sounds, if you’re not listening for it, like the setup to a joke.

She asks whether she could put the money in a trust. Something they can’t touch until they’re seventy.

I spent years in ministry and I’ve sat across from people at that exact moment, and it isn’t what it sounds like. I don’t hear a woman working out how to cut her daughters off. I hear a woman looking for a way to not cut them off. She’s stalling. She wants a structure where they stay in the will, where the money is technically theirs, where she never has to make the call and can keep hoping something changes before she dies. Seventy isn’t a sentence. Seventy is a very long runway for somebody who hasn’t given up.

The host answers with a joke about a seventy-year-old socialist. She laughs and says she hopes they’ll have woken up by then. She doesn’t reach for it again.

I don’t think it was cruelty. I don’t think he saw it. A show built to give fast, clean answers about money isn’t built to catch the moment when the money question is standing in for a different one, and hers was standing in for a different one from her first sentence. But it was right there.

What happened on that call is that she came in with a distribution problem and left with a disinheritance framework, and those are not the same thing.

A distribution problem makes you decide. It makes you weigh need against fairness, think about what money does to somebody who already has plenty and what it does to somebody who doesn’t, and treat your two daughters as two particular people rather than a category. No rule solves this. You decide, and then you live with having decided.

A loyalty test asks none of that from you. One test, applied the same way to both, and the test is theological agreement. The incomes stop mattering, because under the new frame they’re beside the point. Both daughters fail on the same grounds and the problem this mother originally called about is gone. Not solved. Swapped, for something so much easier to answer. She took it without noticing the trade that was just made.

The part that really hacks me off here is that nobody gave her bad advice. A question was answered that was never asked, and the substitute question was answerable in a way hers never would,or even could be.

A pastor built a whole reaction video around this call and I’ve left him until the end on purpose, because he isn’t the subject. He’s using disinheritance as the family’s version of excommunication, the household’s last sanction against a child in rebellion. He builds it carefully and he isn’t a fool, which is what people get wrong about this stuff. He knows the material. He knows it well enough that when the prodigal son comes up, and the father in that parable hands over the inheritance in advance of his son’s rebellion, knowing exactly what his son will do with it, he doesn’t use it as a carrot or a stick, the father sees the problem coming and yet he still gives it. Josh says it’s interesting. Then he keeps going.

He had the exit in his hand. He looked at it and kept driving. Most of the time what’s wrong with an argument like this isn’t confusion or ignorance. It’s somebody with real skill declining a turn he can plainly see, which is harder to catch than a more blatant mistake and much harder to argue with, because from the inside it feels like he’s just being thorough.

Later he mentions he’s written something similar into his own will, and that he wants his kids to feel a consequence in the back of their minds at the moments their faith could go either way. He calls it a failsafe. He wants a backup motive in place for the times the real one doesn’t hold.

A man who installs a failsafe has told you what he expects to fail. In this case, he expects his children’s faith to fail and hopes he can use money to somehow compel them to stay aligned with his version of Christianity. Sounds like a solid plan to alienate his children, but evidently he’s A-O-K with that.

The other daughter never even comes up.

She makes fifty thousand dollars, which is about the national median. She has a mother with some undisclosed amount of money and a sister in the one percent. Presumably the former has a job she drives to, rent she pays, and opinions she arrived at somehow. And now she has a mother who just called a national radio show to ask whether she should be written out of the will.

By the end of the segment she’s a parasite. Not for anything she did. Not for anything anybody on that call knew about her. But for a word her mother used one time, seven minutes in, that nobody bothered to define.

Nobody on that call knew her name.

The call is from this segment of The Ramsey Show. I watched it via Josh Howerton’s reaction episode. If you want to check my reading of it, these are the moments:

• [03:10] — her question, and the two daughters’ incomes

• [11:00] — “socialists,” and the laugh

• [24:10] — “they didn’t hit the DNA lottery”

• [47:14] — the failsafe

I wish I was paralyzed
So people would help me
When I can't get off the couch

I wish I was deaf
So people would understand
When I didn't hear what they said

I wish I was a dog
So people would comfort me  
When I feel scared of loud noises

I wish I was blind
So people would recognize
When I can't see the world the way they do

I wish I was a cat
So people would think it's cute
When I just lay around the house

I wish I was unintelligent
So people would get it
When I don't grasp a concept quickly

I wish I was a child
So people would hold me
When I cry for no obvious reason

I wish I was a tardigrade
So people wouldn't be surprised
When they learn they overlooked me

“Sir, sorry to wake you. I realize it’s a Saturday morning…” Beard glances at his watch “…and you’ve only been sleeping for eleven hours but I’m picking up some sort of a touch-based sensation that I thought you might want to be aware of. It’s neither a breeze nor a pillowcase sir, I know what those feel like.”

“Your trepidation is unwarranted my old, shaggy friend. Please continue.” I say calmly to my facial hair, Eyes still closed.

Beard isn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but since he lives in such close proximity to Brain, I don’t ignore him when he shares information with me. Unlike some of my other body parts, which I probably ignore too readily. I silently whisper an apology to Toes, before mentally returning to the conversation at hand.

Beard is frozen with fear. He just stares expectantly at me with a look of utter terror. “Wh… what’s wrong?” I squeak aloud.

“Thank you for understanding sir. I realize I’m just a bunch of wiry hair, but I know you trust the fear in my eyes. It’s just that, whatever it was that I felt, Ears are reporting that it’s also making a noise that’s kinda like when you blow through a straw into a glass of milk. This is something much bigger, fluffier and sharper that anything I have experienced so far.”

“Fluffier?”

“And sharper, sir.”

“SHARPER?” I say, now sharing Beard’s concern.

I nudge Eyes awake. Right Eye responds but Left Eye is still feeling crusty. Both slowly open to blearily see my cat, Aphrodite, sitting in front of me. She’s reaching again towards my face. Tenderly petting my beard one time with her kitty paw, she purrs and tries to gently wake me up so I can feed her.

Beard and I glance sideways at each other.

“See?” My hairy-godmother says in a told-you-so tone. “SEE?! Sharp and Fluffy” as he lowers his voice knowingly.

Eye rolls from both of us.

Except here’s the thing. I’m not wrong.

My name is Ben. I’m 47. I was diagnosed autistic at 43, then ADHD shortly after. For four decades I played by every rule I was handed — faith, career, marriage, hustle. Bible college. Youth pastor. Software engineer. I taught myself to code, got sucked into the industry in the early 2010s, made real money, built a life.

Then in less than 24 hours in 2024, I lost all of it. Divorce papers one day, fired the next. Savings gone. House sold. Truck sold. Everything gone. A man who’d been masking his entire life with no idea that’s what he was doing, finally out of runway.

This is Serial Pessimist.

It’s for anyone who’s peeked behind the curtain and seen that the Wizard is actually an old man frantically pushing buttons, twisting knobs and pulling levers. It’s for anyone who suspects the world was never quite built for them and is starting to understand why.

I’m not here to sell you optimism. I’m just a guy dealt a less-than-ideal hand, playing it as best he can at a rigged table. If that sounds familiar, pull up a chair.

Several men, each one with a bit more belly and a tad less hair than the one before him, file into the too small room where the Senior Pastor of Podunk Baptist Church and I sit. It’s 2009, I’m the Youth Pastor and he’s my “boss” if such a term can be used to describe our workplace relationship. Even though I technically report to him we both know who we really wor1k for: the church. It is to her that we owe our allegiance and our fealty. It is she that puts food on our tables and a roof over our heads. Still, she needs us just as much as we need her. You see, we are Professional Pessimists by trade and like other tradesmen we have a customer base that deeply, longingly needs what we’re selling.

The uninitiated and the optimists among us would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but a church is exactly like any other business or organization in most ways. Every way that matters really. However, in spite of all the similarities one stands out more than most: if you want to talk to the person in charge you only need to find whoever it is that controls the purse (title may vary).

My particular “purse controller” is the head of the finance committee at Podunk Baptist Church and is also walking into the room now, last in line. For a brief moment I wonder why he’s entering last. Maybe it’s a show of faux humility? Wouldn’t fuckin’ surprise me. He closes the door authoritatively. Nope, not humility. He wants to show us that he’s got the biggest dick. No one enters or leaves this room unless he allows it. All find their seats on the vinyl-covered metal church chairs set in a row opposite me, perhaps five or six feet between them and myself.

A painting of Jesus looks down on me from the wall. Our Lord and Savior, evidently, is a white man with blonde hair and blue eyes. Fuck you, white Caucasian Jesus! You’re a goddamn insult to my intelligence. An inner part of me screams silently. Bemused, I let it continue. Your middle-eastern ass never looked like that and I know it! While I hadn’t yet fully deconstructed my faith I had definitely grown out of many of my former evangelical beliefs. Truth be told, I was relieved this was happening. I hated my job. But I sure as hell didn’t have the balls to quit.

“Your youth group isn’t growing, Ben.” Jim, the head of the finance committee says, mercifully breaking the silence. While my brain registers the noises his mouth just made, my attention has already started to wander. I didn’t yet know of my autism and ADHD but it was both of these disabilities which were now dragging my mind somewhere else. Maybe I was dissociating, maybe I was fawning. I force my mind to rejoin my body through sheer willpower.

Is anyone else going to talk? I wonder silently. I can’t tell if Jim’s asking a question or making a statement. Maybe it’s my turn to talk now. I glance around the room desperate for someone to toss me a social cue. It’s in this instant that I understand the purpose these other men in this meeting serve. They are here, packed into this room which, thanks to our collective bigness, is growing alarmingly humid, to serve as witnesses to “the event”. They’re like those groups of people that get brought in to witness an execution. They’re simultaneously repulsed and entranced by the spectacle unfolding in front of them.

Suddenly, I became aware of one of the younger men. He’s been here the whole time, why hadn’t it registered to me that he’s here? What the fuck is Bill doing here? I ask myself. He’s only a year older than me. I used to see him as a friend. Used to. One thing’s for sure, I never saw him as a part of whatever (gestures vaguely around the room) this is. It’s humiliating being assessed like this, by someone my own age no less. The gall.

He’s being groomed by these old men. They’re showing him how a church removes a pastor like a surgeon amputates a rotted limb. After all, these ol’ boys won’t be around forever. They’ll need replacements when they die – hallelujah by and by.

I’m about to respond to Jim’s statement, or was it a question, about my youth group when I look hopefully to the Senior Pastor for some measure of guidance, a glimmer of camaraderie shared. But in his eyes I see only the helplessness he feels for us both. I wonder if he’s thinking quietly to himself about how his job used to be so different, all those years ago when he was a young youth pastor himself. Or maybe he’s simply trying to figure out how I had become such a Liberal (intended as a pejorative). He abandons me with a sad, cautious glance, eyes moving downward, finding solace from the moment in his shoes.

“Okay…” I reply, stomach a knot of agony. Fuck. This is gonna hurt.

My response is really as much a question as it is a statement. I’m not actually trying to be a jerk answering like this, but I’m honestly confused. I’ve never had much natural talent when it comes to being able to tell when it’s my turn to talk. It would be years after this when I would craft the necessary social scripts to have conversations like these.

I realize that I actually do have the option of genially accepting my fate, bowing to kiss the ring before the ax falls on my neck; I defend myself instead. It’s a bold move, Cotton, let’s see how it plays out.

”I’m sorry,” I fire back sardonically. In addition to not knowing when it’s my turn to talk, I also didn’t know when sardonic humor is an appropriate conversational technique when you’re in the middle of being fired from a job. Hint: it never is. I plow on, “I must have been operating under a different set of expectations than you for the past four years and just haven’t heard about it until now.”

What I’m saying to this room of dyed-in-the-wool Southern Baptists is entirely true from my perspective. I hadn’t knowingly participated in any performance review, formal or otherwise. I’ve been under review this whole time, the test never stopped. And even though I understand how futile it is, I lean in even harder. “I THOUGHT I was hired here to join alongside brothers and sisters in Christ on their spiritual journey and help bring them closer in relationship to God! Have I not been doing exactly that!?”

Upon hearing this, Jim doesn’t waste a beat. He cuts to the chase. “You’re not doing a good job, Ben. And if you’re not doing a good job for this church then some generous tithers might not be happy. Then who’s going to pay your salary? We’ve read your online blog… erm … website… thing… ” he looks at his notes. I can tell he’s trying to work out how to say the name he’s written down “... openswitch dot org.” You probably had to look up the word “blog” didn’t you. In retrospect I wish I had actually said this last part out loud but alas, I didn’t. I’m daring, not crazy.

Bill, the young guy I recognized earlier, can’t hold back any longer. “Ben, we all know how you write online about how you think mission trips are a waste of money and tithing 10% isn’t a biblical mandate.” He looks around the room, finding nods and mumbled agreement from all present. “We can’t have a person who questions these kinds of things stay in a position of authority here. You understand that, right?” His eyes beg me to agree with him on this. He thinks he’s showing me the safe path, the one that lets me keep my job. So naive, he thinks I have a say in the matter.

Almost imperceptibly, Jim leans forward. The vinyl-covered chair he’s sitting on makes a farting noise. “Listen, you have two choices, Ben.” He says unapologetically. “If you resign from your position today we’ll allow you to stay on for two weeks to say your goodbyes, you’ll also get paid for it. Or, you can get fired right now, after which you’ll be escorted out of the building. It’s your choice. Remember Ben, it won’t look very good on your resume if you’re fired.”

Choice. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Inigo Montoya implores me to say his overused catch phrase out loud. But it doesn’t matter to me that it’s a false choice he’s given me. My mind is already with my family. Tonight I’ll have to look them in the eye and admit defeat. No, not defeat, failure. I’d lost another job. That’s right kids, your dad’s unemployed again!

Years from now I’d be able to look at myself with kinder, more gentle eyes. But for now I reek with the self-loathing which comes so easily for me. You merely adopted self-loathing, I was born in it. Molded by it.

“Fine.” I mutter. Shoulders slumping, heartbeat slowing, body growing numb. Classic fawn response. I take half a breath, it’s all I can manage. “I’ll resign today, we’ll need the extra paycheck. And I actually do want to say some goodbyes.” A pause. A breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. Someone shifts uncomfortably. Another farting noise. This one might not have come from a chair.

“These chairs really are the worst.” I say in attempted humor, barely stifling the tears.

And those were the last words I remember speaking as a pastor, youth or otherwise. My time at Podunk Baptist Church in the rural town of Anywhere, Georgia had lasted just a bit over four years. After this experience I wouldn’t darken the doorway of another church for just over a decade. The self-loathing I experienced that day has faded a bit with age, but never really vanished entirely. And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit of a win for a serial pessimist.