Losing their religion: Atheists deal with isolation

After graduating from high school, Nan Owens attended a Bible institute with hopes of becoming a missionary. But before she finished seminary, her opinion on religion had changed.

So Owens did what more people find themselves doing - she left the religion of her childhood to join the ranks of the unaffiliated.

About half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once in their lives, according to a recent report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The group that has grown the most in the past several years is the one unaffiliated with a church or religion - those defining themselves as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.

But taking the nonreligious road can be a rocky one, particularly for those who do not believe in God.

Families split; friends are lost; social norms can become awkward.

"I had good friends who found (atheism) hard to accept," Owens says. "They told me, 'We have never met an atheist.' "

From an early age, Owens' goals were clear. She would study the Bible, become a missionary and spread the Gospel to others.

She met a man with a similar goal, got married and attended seminary with her husband.

Then she went back to college, and her opinion about religion began to change.

"As I studied, mostly history, I began to doubt my beliefs," says Owens, now a 75-year-old retiree who lives in Mango. "I was a very good Bible student, and I had deep questions that many ministers weren't trained to handle."

After much deliberation, Owens became an atheist. The decision caused friction in some of her relationships.

Owens' sister found her new way of thinking "rather disturbing," but the two have managed to remain close. And although her husband had also become an atheist, he was reluctant to talk about it, leaving Owens feeling alone and struggling with her decision.

Still, Owens decided she could raise her children to become "ethical, achieving adults" without the church. As for career, she found one in professional association management and human resources.

Ten years ago she found a group of like-minded people she could talk to, Atheists of Florida.

"I was thrilled at the idea of finding other people like me. ... I didn't know there were other atheists around," Owens says. "It's a community where I can be myself."

"Faith in Flux" survey: Most people who change religions do so before age 24, and many change more than once. A large majority of people said they joined their current religion before turning 36. Very few report changing religions after age 50.

Under the radar

When she was 12, EllenBeth Wachs began describing herself as an "agnostic."

"The word is easier, softer than 'atheist,'" says the 46-year-old, who had worried about offending religious people.

Throughout her school years, the word kept her under the radar.

"It's so much more sociably acceptable to be agnostic than atheist that it was never an issue," she says.

Then, at 22, Wachs met resistance. She was battling a drinking problem and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

"The only help out there was AA," she says, "but there is a requirement to believe in God."

Wachs took issue with that.

When she argued against the religious step, she was told, "You will come to believe."

"But I never did. I've always had a problem with this (AA tenet) and have had a love-hate relationship with the program. When I told them I couldn't do the religious step, I was told to 'fake it till you make it.'"

In 1997, Wachs was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She had to quit her job as a lawyer and now runs an Internet store.

About a year ago, Wachs says, "I took a good look at myself and decided to start calling myself what I am. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God."

She has started a chapter of Atheists of Florida in Lakeland.

"It's for people who want to come out of the closet," she says. "It's unacceptable to shun us, and we're the last group in society you can do that to."

"Faith in Flux" survey: The unaffiliated have one of the lowest retention rates of any of the major religious groups, with most people who were raised unaffiliated now belonging to a religion.

Faith lost in foxhole

John Kieffer describes his conversion simply: "I went to Vietnam as a Christian and became an atheist in a foxhole."

Raised a Catholic, Kieffer, 59, went to war in 1968 "to do my part to stop those atheist communists and to protect the ideology of Christianity from being run out of Indochina."

He was a rifle platoon leader in the demilitarized zone. It was there that he started to rethink things.

Religion "did not make sense in a combat scenario where you see some pretty horrible things - guys getting their brains blown out," he says. "Between the fighting, you have a lot of time to think about things."

Kieffer said his mind was made up one night after a firefight.

"I looked around and there were three dead Americans and three dead Vietnamese. And I am thinking, 'So these guys are in heaven right now because they came from America and are Christian, and those three guys are in hell right now because they grew up in Vietnam and are Buddhists.'"

Kieffer couldn't reconcile how God would sort out the three Vietnamese. "I started to rethink things," he says.

His parents were not happy when Kieffer "came out of the closet," as he calls it. His father, a career military man, had studied to be a priest. His mother was raised in Italy, and his parents were married in the Vatican.

Kieffer's atheism wasn't discussed much at home.

"My mother just decided I had lost my mind in Vietnam," Kieffer says. "It frustrated me and made them unhappy."

"Faith in Flux" survey: Two-thirds of former Catholics and half of former Protestants who have become unaffiliated say they left their childhood faith because they stopped believing in its teachings. About 40 percent say they became unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most religions.

Born and raised

Anita Garcia has traveled a long and winding road to get where she is now.

Born in West Virginia to illegal immigrants from Spain, Garcia moved to the Tampa area in 1945. Her father was a coal miner, and her mother ran a boardinghouse. Both were atheists.

Garcia says there was no need to discuss religion in her childhood home.

"It was just understood," she says.

But elementary school was a different matter.

In the fourth grade, her teacher started classes each day by asking one of the students to recite a Bible verse from memory.

"We didn't have a Bible at home!" Garcia says. "I listened to what the other kids said and then repeated what they said. It never dawned on the school system that there could be an atheist" attending classes.

When her classmates saluted the flag and recited the Lord's Prayer, Garcia followed suit. As a child, she remained quiet about her atheism.

After she was grown, Garcia's parents told her they worried that she had missed out socially by not having church groups to attend. Garcia didn't know other atheists, and there were no organizations for people like her and her parents.

When it was time for Garcia to enroll her son in school, she chose a parochial school because she worried about him missing out on social events and perhaps being ostracized for being an atheist.

"I thought it might be too difficult for him," she says.

Her son is Catholic, and she's fine with that.

"Being an atheist isn't the easiest thing," says the South Pasadena retiree. "You have to be a strong person to accept reality."

"Faith in Flux" survey: Only 7 percent of American adults were raised unaffiliated with any religion.