I’m currently 31,000 feet in the air experiencing some mild turbulence and trying to write a blog that can adequately explain why after 30 years I’m no longer sure I believe in the existence of God. To be fair, if I had to make a choice at this very moment, I would say I believe there is a God. An atheist friend of mine and I were having a discussion about this very topic recently and his assertion was that the burden of proof falls on the believer to make the case for God. I opened my mouth to start making that case, but nothing came out. What happened to me?
From 1997 to 2004 David Bazan fronted a band called Pedro the Lion. Bazan has long been associated with the Christain faith, having released his first record on Christian label Tooth & Nail, and done extensive touring of churches and Christian festivals before transitioning into playing bars and clubs as he began to release records for Jade Tree and, most recently, Barsuk.
Upon the release of Pedro the Lion’s Whole EP in 97, I was just finishing high school. I was raised in the Christian church and my parents were pastors the majority of my life. I was your average teenage believer, meaning I believed what I did because I had very few reasons to question it. Sure I had a girlfriend break up with me because “God told her to” and I had a very close friend die in a car accident, but because I was rooted in the same belief system I had been in all my life, these circumstances seemed more like annoyances to my faith rather than deal-breakers. I remember thinking about them and not being able to come to a viable conclusion, so instead of forcing the issue, I just stopped thinking about them.
I started listening to Pedro the Lion that fall during my freshman year of college. I immediately identified with songs like “Nothing” and “Almost There” because of their fresh narrative structure. Bazan had a way of using irony and metaphor that I had never heard before from a “Christian” arstist. To say the songs challenged me to start thinking differently would be to ascribe a fictional importance to them; my questioning was coming from a different source. By the time I saw Pedro the Lion for the first time in 1998, being outside my belief structure, specifically the church I grew up in, already had me exploring the heretic nature of modern philosophy and trying to figure out why I no longer felt anything when I went to church.
It’s then that I heard Pedro the Lion’s It’s Hard To Find A Friend LP and a song called “The Secret of the Easy Yoke.” This song, whose lyrics are quite literally about the narrator's struggle to experience God within the structure of the corporate mega-church, rang true to me. I interpreted the song as a comforting lullaby for the disenfranchised church go-er who still believed in God--and that’s precisely who I was at that time. I felt encouraged, reasoning that I might be able to think critically about the world around me and the religion I grew up in while still holding fast to my belief in God.
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Posts like this are among the many reasons I enjoy your writing. In the different social and musical circles people like us seem to run in, there does seem to be this unspoken taboo about faith of any type. Like many people I was raised catholic for the majority of my life. My parents never went out of their way to really force attendance on me or any other such thing. I did a lot of it because of a feeling of obligation without question. In the time since, my relationship with faith of any kind has been tenuous. Faith or lack of it is a very personal thing. There are times when I am sure there is some sort of greater force at work in existence by whatever name you choose to call it. Other times I feel like perhaps we truly are alone in this universe. The implications of either are staggering. To me it feels very much parallel to the struggle of being a musician in a time when there is a glut of good and bad music trying to get anyones attention. It is a struggle we put on ourselves because of our belief in that which we will into creation with sound like some sort of band of aural wizardry. I don't think I'll ever have an answer for myself but it is always a something worth thinking and reflecting on. I am no more versed in faith than anyone else. Thank You for a thought provoking piece like this. I can't think of too many people that I know playing music that would take this kind of personal leap in public. For this and many other things I'll keep reading your blog. - Rufo
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