Synopsis:  This is my serious attempt to answer the question, "Well, Harry, if you no longer believe that, what do you believe? and on the basis of what?" "That" was a conservative kind of Protestant Christianity from childhood, modulated by serious study at college and seminary forty and more years ago, further tested by eight years as Spanish-speaking missionary in New Mexico, and decades of political anti-war and anti-nuclear activism and serious additional study since then. As I wrote it, I was not thinking of publication. Instead I was trying to find out really what it was that I believed. I have come to the commitment that I will believe only what I have personally tested. Therefore much of the account is an autobiographical study. The awakening of what I regard as a dangerous monster, namely politically active fundamentalism, makes these insights relevant to recent events.

My seminary training included a frank and thorough study of what was called "church history." It fascinated me, and provided me with a remarkably complete picture of the history of Europe since about 100 A.D., and of North America since 1600 A.D. However, that study did not fortify any personal loyalty to the institutional church. Before it was over I was saying things like, "One of the best antidotes to an infection of Christianity is a strong dose of the study of the history of Christianity."

The beginnings in the ancient Roman Empire were nothing to be proud of. Slaves, seeking cosmic solace, and thoughtful persons seeking some overarching meaning in a culture built on violence and injustice -- these made up the followers of the new mystery religion called Christianity. The divine being, son of God, born of a virgin, who died to save his followers, was a common figure in all those mystery religions. Gilbert Murray was a scholar of Greek thought in the ancient period, when the Greeks did the thinking and the Romans did the practical execution, like war and road-building. In his book, THE FIVE STAGES OF GREEK RELIGION, he summarized the fascination with mystery religions on the part of thoughtful people as, "The Failure of Nerve."

For three centuries, it was unclear which of several of these mystery religions was going to win out. Constantine cleared that up. The details of the story are quite revealing. Christianity didn't win because it was true, but because the winner of the battle to control the Empire was a man who believed that Christ and his symbol, the Cross, fought and conquered beside him. Christ was a war god, like YHWH in the early sections of the Old Testament, for example, in the time of Joshua and the Conquest of Canaan.

It was war, not truth, that enabled Christianity to win. It was killing, not loving and serving, that put Christianity in the position to run that huge collapsing empire, in 313 A.D. And the rest of the story, beginning immediately, consists of more killing -- of heretics at first and continually since [Arians, Nestorians, Albigensians, Waldensians, Unitarians, Quakers], of opponents [pagans, witches, "savages," Saracens, Aztecs, Incas], and of each other [Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist, modern liberation theologians]. It is a disgusting bloody story.

The history of the Papacy is a marvelous study in deceit, betrayal, torture and slaughter. For those of us brought up in little rural churches, ready to believe in love and peace and service, all this new knowledge of the history of the churches was a source of pain and anger. They sucked us into the service of an institution that can never clean the blood from its hands, nor from its soul.

I remember my chagrin, reading Kenneth Scott Lattourette's THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY, finding his account of the first time that Christian soldiers went to battle against other Christian soldiers and civilians. Before Constantine, it was, in wars the results of which matter very little to any of us now. But something very basic was betrayed.

The Crusades were a wicked mockery of the church's supposed message. To free holy places from unbelievers, by killing those unbelievers -- is that what this is really all about? The height of cynicism was reached when the crusading army went out of its way to sack Constantinople, which was as Christian as Rome. Western Civilization has not yet finished paying for the hatred caused by the Crusades and their impact on the Near East.

We studied the Protestant Reformation. It seemed so justified, given the abuses of the Latin Church. Luther seemed so right, in denouncing indulgences -- did anyone really believe that God's good will and forgiveness could be bought, at bargain prices? "Justification by faith alone" -- Luther added that last word, since it isn't in the Biblical text -- it seemed to be the very heart of the gospel.

And then we read of the Peasant Revolt, and Luther's response to it. He took the side of the princes and the landlords, even though the cause of peasants and laborers was obviously just and would have had the support of Amos or any of the prophets of the Old Testament. But, no. I was well aware of my peasant/proletariate roots, Pennsylvania farmers and Scottish coal miners. But, no. Luther thundered against the rebels, encouraging wholesale slaughter of them, and Lutheranism, and Protestantism generally, has never since been able to remove the stench of its instinctive alliance with The Establishment.

The story in North America is not much different. "Wilderness Zion" in Massachusetts, and "The Holy Experiment" in Pennsylvania, were set up to give Christianity a fresh start in "the New World." The story becomes a non-stop record of genocide, slavery and ecological destruction. The continent certainly would be healthier if the Christians had never come. Native cultures were ruthlessly destroyed.

Cotton Mather gave public thanks to Almighty God for the plague that wiped out entire tribes in New England. William Penn's sons cheated the Lenni Lenape of entire counties of land in one day's operation, called "The Walking Purchase." In areas to the south and west, the Spanish Empire spread with missionary zeal, destroying native culture, including written languages and lore that cannot even be imagined now. Whole populations were enslaved and worked to death in mines and fields. It was genocide, on both continents, in the name of the Prince of Peace.

An anecdote caught my attention and has stuck with me. An Aztec chief asked his tormentors if there were Christians in heaven. He was being offered the chance to be strangled before burning, if he would become a Christian, so he could go to heaven. When assured that heaven was full of Christians, that that's where they went when they died, he said, "Light the fire! I don't want to go where any of them are."

Slavery was endorsed by the Christians, Catholic and Protestant, and the quantity of misery on three continents remains incalculable, and not yet repaid.

I began to wonder whether I really wanted to represent all this wickedness in the world. I felt guilty, just being a fellow-Christian, with all those evil-doers wearing the same label.

I did the seminary class work at a slightly slower pace than my classmates. I had been appointed "student pastor" of a rural parish in northern New Jersey and moved my family into the manse there. Our daughter had been born during that first fall quarter of my school work, and we moved in a raging snowstorm just in time for Christmas. From there I commuted sixty-seven miles one way to classes in Princeton, in the days before limited access freeways. From this perspective, it seems merely stupid, but I did it willingly, gladly, even proudly, -- I could combine obedience to God with a family of my own and the fun of studying matters that fascinated me.

I preached every Sunday, conducted youth classes, visited the sick, buried the dead. I did everything a pastor does, except conduct the sacraments [baptism and communion] and officiate at weddings [a state function]. One had to be ordained to do those things.

All through seminary I balked at the idea of ordination. I did not believe that clergy were in any way different from or separated from the people. I had an extremely egalitarian form of Christianity in my heart. I liked the Quaker system, at least in theory -- no clergy at all.

At the end of three years I was not through with the seminary course, since I took fewer classes at a time, with all the commuting and the parish work. I had another year to go. And then a unique opportunity opened up. The Board of Foreign Missions, as it was then called, offered a year's study fellowship in Madrid, Spain, to a "mature" seminary student. "Study" would be to learn the Spanish language, and write a thesis. The mature part involved serving as a sort of chaperon for two Junior-Year-Abroad college students, since the full-time fraternal worker assigned to Madrid was going to be back in the U.S. on furlough. I had a wife and daughter, and my wife was pregnant. I had served three years as student pastor. I was very young, still, but perhaps I has more "mature" than some. At any rate we applied for the fellowship, and received it, and spent a full year in Madrid.

We all became bilingual. I had two tutors a day that summer. By the last Sunday in August I was able to preach in Spanish in one of the churches of the Spanish Evangelical Church. I attended the University of Madrid, earning the Diploma of Hispanic Studies. I adapted for the first time to a large city, adapted to life under a Fascist/Catholic police-state dictatorship, tolerating subtle and no-so-subtle surveillance from the Guardia Civil. I taught English to fifth graders in an illegal Protestant school. I learned much about cultural diversity.

Then I returned to Princeton Seminary for my final year of study, and to the Sussex County parish 67 miles away. Our third child was born in another raging snowstorm that winter. As the end of the school year loomed, our family went into serious crisis.

Where, after all this preparation, does the Lord want us to serve him? I was not going to stay on "full-time," where I had served "part-time" for four years. I had assumed there would be some kind of assignment offered from the Board of Foreign Missions, somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, but nothing came up. It took a while for me to grasp it, but I finally realized that the Board regarded me as something of a potential trouble-maker, given my analysis of the conditions inside the Spanish Evangelical Church, which I had been a part of, and careful observer of, during my year in Spain. I had written the required thesis, while there, and in it I told chapter and verse of the history and current conditions, calling things by their correct names. Not everything was sweetness and light.

The Spanish Evangelical Church consisted of about 10,000 members in the entire country. A couple dozen pastors led the group. One group were in their eighties. The other group were in their twenties and thirties. All the rest, except one, had been killed off during and after the Spanish Civil War. That one had spent the war on a Nazi gunboat off the coast. He ruled the church with the same dictatorial power that Franco used to rule Spain.

The Board forbade that I ever publish that paper, and I wonder now, after all that has happened, why I obeyed. At any rate no "call" came from the Board of Foreign Missions. I made myself available to parishes all over New Jersey, thinking I would enroll for additional study, if a call came. None did.

Meanwhile the family was going deeper into crisis. My wife slipped into a form of mental illness, which frightened her, and all of us. It started as post-partum distress and depression, but became more serious, and finally threatening, she thought, to the baby. She went into therapy, which was traumatic in itself, back in those benighted days.

A seminary class visited the Board of National Missions. One of the officials latched on to me, and my bilingual abilities and experience, and wanted to send me to a three-point Spanish- speaking parish in New Mexico. I balked, for reasons that are still not clear. Contrariness, pure and simple, maybe. New Mexico? I learned castellano, in order to go to New Mexico? Where is it, even? I had never been west of Chicago.

The family tension grew. Where will we be in six weeks? Graduation is only a month away! The mental illness worsened. I was in a class called, "Pattern of Life." The course consisted of much reading, and an analysis of one's autobiography, seeking the pattern. The professor believed implicitly that God had a plan for each human life, and so, for that matter, did I. I had to find the plan. I mean I really had to find it, and pretty quick. I went to talk to the professor. "Board of Foreign Missions?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"What about the Board of National Missions?"

"Well, they have something out in New Mexico, but I don't want to go there, with my wife sick, and all."

His eyebrow went up. "You say your life is locked? Well, who locked it?"

I left him and went to a pay phone and called the Board offices in New York, and told them I was going to New Mexico. When I told my wife what I had done, she relaxed visibly and began to mend immediately and was well before we arrived in New Mexico.

The rest of "Pattern of Life" included the theme of rural parish work, and the blessing of family and intimacy, and the virtue of obedience to a call. I was really ready and eager to serve the Lord in New Mexico. I went out, like Abraham, who also went out, "not knowing where he was going." When the Board changed the destination from Mora, Holman and Chacon, to Alameda, Placitas and Bernalillo, I shrugged. The map meant little, since I had never seen any of it.

There was one little catch. I couldn't go serve my unseen parish, without being ordained. Well, in comparison to my eagerness to go, my ecclesiastical doubts about the efficacy of "the laying on of hands," carried little weight. So I underwent the Presbytery examination.

It was an all-day, formal oral examination, by a committee, mostly of young pastors. I did very well in Bible and church history and "polity," that is, how the Presbyterian Church is organized. The interesting part was theology. I knew the history, the schools, the definitions. I knew Augustine and Calvin and Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher. When it came to what I personally believed, we hit a snag. I did not believe in the Virgin Birth. I thought it was an anti-woman, anti-sex doctrine, cooked up by frustrated celibates, and that it detracted from the full humanity of Jesus. "Oh, that's what we think, too," one of the examiners said.

"Aha!" said I. "So what should I say when you ask me, in the ordination ceremony, whether I believe that the Westminster Confession of Faith contains that system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures?" The Westminster Confession of Faith was written in 1643, as part of the Cromwellian Revolution in England! The ordination questions were meant to cement modern loyalty to that. "I don't believe the Scriptures teach a system of doctrine at all -- the Scriptures are far too complex for that. And just for instance, I don't believe personally in the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth. So, should I say, 'No'?"

They all smiled, looking at each other. "Oh, no, don't do that," one said. "That would stop proceedings."

"So, I should say, 'Yes,' meaning, 'No.'"

They looked sheepish. "We all did it. We're working hard to change the ordination ceremony. You can help us."

It was subtle. Guys I liked, who wanted to be honest but weren't being so, were encouraging me to join them. But the only way I could join them was to be as dishonest as they. It was going to be called "boring from within." It was later going to be compared to the French Underground -- "Smile at the Nazis all day, and blow 'em up at night."

But, from this perspective, the dishonesty stands out more than anything else. My view of all this will be colored forever by the sense of relief, of freedom, when I could at last, upon quitting and demitting ten years later, be honest again.