The Turning Points That Make It Work
Tom and Danielle
The suburbs north of Atlanta have gone through a profound change in recent years. An influx of new residents from around the country and around the world during the economic boom of the 1990s swelled the population of the county by more than 25%. What had been a reliably white conservative Southern Baptist area transformed into a religious and cultural mosaic unimaginable a generation before.
Danielle was born there and grew up in the area in the 1970s and 1980s, the last decades of that earlier Atlanta. Her family was “definitely Southern Baptist,” she says now, but “didn’t go to church that much” when she was young—mostly Easter and Christmas.
When she was in middle school, Danielle’s parents divorced and her sister became chronically ill, requiring months-long hospitalizations at Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. “One of the nurses started taking my sister to church,” Danielle recalls, “and pretty soon we all started going with her.”
The church was First Baptist Atlanta, a theologically conservative congregation under the pastorate of Rev. Dr. Charles Stanley. FBA was in its first decade of a massive expansion that would result in a membership of more than 16,000 and a global multimedia ministry with materials in more than 100 languages.
“We went for a few years, and it was not a good experience. Very strict Southern Baptist. They kicked a friend of ours out of the Sunday school for flirting with boys on a ski trip. Never even talked to her, just kicked her out. Around the same time, my sister and I began asking complicated questions in the Sunday school class. We weren’t trying to be disruptive; we were just very curious. I guess we didn’t follow the correct path of just listening and agreeing, because we were all asked to not come back to class. It left a very bad taste in my mouth, and I stopped going to church entirely about the time I graduated high school. I still believed—I just had a problem with the closed-door feeling of churches. To this day I do not like to exclude anyone.”
She went on to attend the University of Georgia and never stopped identifying as a Christian.
On the face of it, Tom had a more religious background than Danielle. “I was raised in a liberal Catholic family, baptized, went to Sunday school, confirmed, had my First Communion, the works,” he says. After his family moved to Miami, he voluntarily attended a Catholic high school for boys—“in part because some hot girls I knew thought the guys who went there were hot! What a great idea—go to an all-boys school to get girls. Eighthgrade decision making at its finest!” he says with a laugh.
Tom’s family didn’t attend church often. “Mostly Christmas and Easter type of stuff,” he recalls, echoing Danielle. “But I did go to Sunday school. And in high school, my mom encouraged me to go to a Catholic youth program. She wanted me to socialize more and knew how to sell it: ‘Oh, you’ll meet friends and girls.’ I went willingly for a while, then eventually quit because it was boring, not really my scene.”
That’s not to say he wasn’t a religious believer. “I was almost always a skeptic from a very young age about things in general, even in elementary school. But I was always a believer, and very much so in high school,” he recalls. “I wore the cross, I felt the spirit. I went on a religious retreat and had a profound religious experience. Hey, those things work!” he says, laughing.
It was while taking a course in Old Testament history at Duke University that Tom started calling himself an agnostic. “I was probably even an atheist at the time, but I didn’t understand the distinction. The word has that baggage, you know.” He assumed he was the only doubter in the family. Years later he learned otherwise. “As an adult, I learned that my father is basically an atheist and was all along. He doesn’t embrace the label, but he doesn’t believe. Mom is basically a Catholic agnostic—still prays sometimes, still goes to church sometimes. If things are rough, she’ll go to church because it calms her. She is still technically religious, but with a big element of doubt. When I asked why I was raised Catholic despite their own doubts, they said they did that to give me morals.”
Tom became part of the influx of outsiders to the north Atlanta area during the 1990s boom, moving in to work in the local division of his family’s business. Not long after his arrival in 1997, he and Danielle met while playing pool in an Atlanta nightclub.
“My friend and I were working at a department store after graduating college,” Danielle says. “Sometimes we would go to this place next door after work to eat and have a drink. We always ended up meeting guys there but never anyone that I was very interested in. I really enjoyed playing pool, and we were playing a game with two guys we had just met. I noticed Tom at the table next to ours. I thought to myself, ‘Why can’t I ever meet anyone like that?’ He was tall, good-looking, and clean-cut. My friend drank more than she should have and ended up going over to his table and was very forward with them.”
“That’s a polite way to put it!” Tom says. “Her friend walked up to me, pressed her body against me, and said, ‘Are we solids or stripes?’ This is not my thing at all. So I flashed this sheepish, helpless look at Dani. It’s the first look I ever gave her. She smiled. Right away I was plotting for her instead. Way more my type. Not so forward for one thing, but also … well, she was attractive, but also had this wholesome look. She looked like a good, decent, genuine person. I thought, ‘I have to hand this one off to my roommate so I can start talking to this other girl.’”
“Tom and I started to talk, and I found that we instantly had a common interest in college basketball and baseball—even though he liked the teams that were rivals to mine!”
They all ended up at Steak ’n Shake, where Tom mustered the courage to ask her out. “I was not a player at all, but somehow I had a stroke of brilliance. I had just moved to Atlanta six weeks earlier, so I started with the ‘new-in-town’ questions. I asked what her favorite restaurant was in the area, and she named this place called Dante’s Down the Hatch. So I said, ‘Sounds like a great place. Hey, would you like to go there with me sometime?’”
“We instantly hit it off,” says Danielle. “We had a long phone conversation before our first date. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate to talk on the phone and it is usually short. But our conversation flowed so smoothly, I couldn’t get off the phone.”
“I did have some disqualifiers when I was dating,” Tom says, “but it never had to do with religion. If a girl liked country music, or she didn’t think The Simpsons was funny—well, that was automatic wipeout criteria.”
“So after dinner on our first date, you took me to a comedy club to make sure I would laugh,” Danielle says.
“I did, yes! A sense of humor is important to me, so part of our first date was a kind of test. I took her to a comedy club to be sure she wasn’t easily offended and to see if she laughed at different types of humor. Part of that goes to the open-minded skepticism thing, not just about religion but about things in general. If somebody wasn’t open-minded enough to laugh, or was too easily offended, she was out. I knew I didn’t want that. It wasn’t about religion. Christians were fun; I knew tons of Christians. I still thought my parents were Catholic! I thought religion was false, I completely rejected the Bible and the rest, but I didn’t have a big issue with people who felt otherwise.”
“We actually had a lot of overlap there,” Danielle adds. “I still don’t take the literal meaning of the Bible, and I still don’t believe in dogma. I have issues with a lot of organized religions, and I did at the time. So we had plenty of common ground even then.”
They discovered this common ground through conversations early in their relationship. “Tom didn’t call himself an atheist when I met him,” Danielle remembers. “He called himself agnostic.” Not that it would have mattered much to her. She says she had few preconceptions about atheism. “My beliefs had always been really personal, and I didn’t know anybody who was an out atheist, so I don’t think I even knew what to expect. Same with agnostics. I just figured, ‘Okay.’”
Tom nods. “She never gave me a hard time about it at all. She was always just like, ‘Okay, that’s nice,’” he says.
It was during the first few years of their marriage that Tom gradually adopted atheism as his preferred label. Danielle remained Christian. There were a few tense periods as Tom struggled to accept Danielle’s continuing belief, but they both felt at every stage that their common ground was strong.
“If people are struggling to find that common ground, get past beliefs to talk about values. Do you think rape is bad? Stealing? Murdering? Seems silly at first, but it makes you realize that your beliefs don’t matter as much as those values. We both believe in family, fairness, and honesty, and we have a strong sense of right and wrong,” Tom says. “Our values are very much aligned.”
“It’s true,” Danielle says. “It helps that we have the same values, regardless of what we believe. You’ve always been a good person,” she says to Tom. “I don’t get my values from religion. I still believe, but I left the church because so many people did bad things in the name of God.”
Their relationship hit a rough patch when Tom became more intensely engaged with his worldview. “He joined a local atheist group when we lived in Miami,” Danielle recalls, “and that’s when I knew he shifted from agnostic to atheist. Most of the tension came from him talking about it more. He started questioning me more about why I believed and giving me a hard time about it. He kept saying it was going to end up tearing our marriage apart, that I was going to end up divorcing him, that I wasn’t going to be able to take it if he didn’t believe in God. This just went on and on and on for a while.”
“Except I wouldn’t say the talk of divorce was that often,” Tom says. “I recall religion being a consistent issue for a year or two. Maybe three. But I don’t recall that much talk about divorce. I remember like two dinners where we got really stressed.”
“Yeah. There were two.”
“It wasn’t like we were constantly saying ‘Ooh, our relationship is in trouble.’ To me, our relationship was strong the whole time. But there were two nights it got really tense and almost turned into a fight.”
“Every detailed discussion during this time, anything that went beyond everyday stuff about the kids and what was going on, always ended up being about religion. And … well, I just don’t talk about religion that much. But there was a time I said I wanted to go to a Bible study on Wednesday mornings after I took the kids to school. He said if I had time to go to Bible study on Wednesday morning, then I had time to get a job and start working.”
Tom shifts uncomfortably, then covers his eyes with one hand. “Sorry.”
Danielle chuckles.
“Do you agree that it only got heated a couple of times, that for the most part it was just a consistent conversation that … may have been a little tense?” Tom asks.
“There was consistent conversation, and there were more than a few times it got heated.”
“It was definitely stressful, and it was because he couldn’t understand why I believed. It always came back to him saying, ‘I don’t know if I can respect people who believe, and you believe, and I don’t know if I can … respect that.’ It was tough.”
“I don’t think our relationship was ever really in trouble … do you?”
Danielle pauses. It’s a long pause. “I don’t know, because it was in your hands at that point. You were the one that had the problem with it.”
“I was definitely trying to … come to terms … with it,” he says slowly. “I will freely admit that Danielle was always more accepting of my lack of religiosity than I was of her religiosity once I started really digging in. You read some of the New Atheist material, and it’s pretty aggressive and condemning. And a lot of it is excellent too. It really does do a great job of debunking religion, hitting the hard points … but I had to work out in my own head how I was going to treat religious people, as opposed to religious ideas—how accepting I was going to be of those ideas. And Danielle was the one who bore the brunt of that because she was the person closest to me.”
“I remember one of the changing moments for you. You went to the Orange Bowl with your friend and his father, who were both very religious. And you came home and said, ‘You know what? I know that they are extremely religious and believe in all of the dogma, but they are good people and I still want to be friends with them.’”
“Good call, way to remember that,” he says. “They are really religious, I mean doing prison ministry religious. But you’re right, I wanted to remain friends with him, but I wasn’t sure we could remain friends because I also wasn’t sure whether he could accept me. See, there’s partly this fear of being rejected myself, and partly having trouble understanding why people would believe.”
Tom turns to Danielle. “I would tell you some of the things I’d read about and had learned and was realizing, and I had trouble comprehending how anyone could hear those things and still believe. Really? You know that the Gospels were written 70 to 100 years after Jesus lived, by people in another country, who didn’t even speak the same language and had never even been to the Holy Land, and you still believe?” Tom clutches his head. “Aaaagghh!” He laughs; Danielle smiles slightly.
“But we’re golden now,” he adds.
“Yep.”
“We talk about religion, but I never really question your beliefs. Every once in a blue moon it’ll come up out of interest, but for me, it was important to figure out what she believed and what she didn’t. It was important for me to realize we still shared the same values as opposed to beliefs. Our religious beliefs were different, but our values were aligned.”
(More of Tom and Danielle’s story appears in Chapters 14, 16, and 19—look for the dotted arrows with the couple’s names.)