The Difference a Child Makes
Arlene and Nate
Ask Arlene for her fondest memories of church and she’ll go straight to the black Southern Baptist church she attended in 1968 when she was all of five years old. “This wasn’t the creepy, freaky, Westboro Church kind of Baptist,” she says. “It was the kind with great gospel music, fried chicken on Sunday, and uplifting messages about God. I loved it.”
The church was in Glendale, California, a city on the north end of the sprawling Los Angeles area. Rising north of Glendale are the San Gabriel Mountains, dividing the L.A. basin from the high desert beyond. And rising on the lower slopes of the San Gabriels in the 1960s, just below the Angeles National Forest, was a small line of suburban towns—quiet, picturesque, with a population that was mostly upper middle class and white.
Her family moved to La Crescenta, one of those suburbs, at which point Arlene discovered what she calls “the horrifying truth that we were actually white. You’d think I’d have noticed this when I was the only white girl in a black church, but my whiteness didn’t register for some reason until all of the faces around me became white. I was totally shocked.”
She also discovered yet another kind of Baptist church. “Not only did all the black people disappear,” she says, “but so did the really good music and the uplifting messages. The sermons became just that—sermons. They droned on and weren’t uplifting at all, nothing like I’d grown up with. It was like the joy and the music and the happiness dried up. The meaning of the message was the same, but the delivery and the spirit just vanished.”
Her parents felt the same. They wanted a lively, down-to-earth church or nothing, and in 1960s La Crescenta, options were few. So at age six, Arlene says, “my Sunday-goin’-to-meetin’ church days were over.”
She spent many weekends with her grandmother, “a very sweet Christian lady” who likewise couldn’t find a church that spoke to her. Around age 13, Arlene began to question everything she’d been told, and Grandma was her sounding board. “She’d listen to me go on and on for hours about what B.S. a virgin birth was, and how did people really come back from the dead, and how could God be everywhere, and if he knows what I’m going to do then how did I really have a free spirit, and on and on and on. She’d take it all in and eventually say something like, ‘That’s why it’s called faith, Lena.’ When I was finally done, she’d simply tell me that the answers I was looking for were not in the Bible—they were in my heart. She said I would eventually find out the truth if I kept my mind keen and never stopped searching for the right things. She said I’d know them when I found them.
“I respected her for not throwing the Bible at me as the answer to all my questions. She realized that times were changing from when she was a child—she was born in 1895!—and that questioning everything was now the way of the world. My grandma was and is a wonderful Christian role model for me.
“I grew up with very strong traditional values and surrounded by people that had a strong sense of their faith. That strength of faith and their unshakable personal beliefs are what allowed open and frank conversations amongst family and friends about things they agreed on as well as deep conversations about things they did not embrace.”
Fifteen hundred miles away in Kansas City, Missouri, Nate was busy growing up in a Woody Allen movie with a Catholic twist. “We had Jews, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Baptists in the larger family, but mostly it was Italian Catholics. I had a great aunt who was a mother superior at a Catholic high school for girls. Almost every evening at the dinner table was an open debate, especially when my great aunt would visit. Abortion, premarital sex, homosexuality, capital punishment, the nature of God, the infallibility of the pope, transubstantiation. That was an awesome family dynamic.”
Even though debates over the details were allowed, in the end “you were still expected to walk the walk,” he says. “That didn’t sit right with me, and they knew it. I was the black sheep.”
Born with a bad case of yellow jaundice, he had been baptized quickly, just in case. “I didn’t ask for it, but apparently my mortal soul was at risk,” he says. The family’s Catholicism was nonnegotiable, but “it was more of an obligation than an identity or belief. Going to Mass was just what you did on Sundays. It was important to my grandparents, and my aunts, but not to me or my uncles. Some of my distant Italian family members would come to Mass, and then go out and do things that would be discussion points in the confessional the following Sunday. They didn’t go to confessional a lot, but when they did they were in there for some time!”
His own doubts started very young. “I can recall sitting in Mass when I was about four or five listening to the priest yammer on about absolution, and the word that came to my mind was bullshit! Okay, maybe not that exact word, but that’s the idea. Every time I heard about this jealous God, the God that wanted you to believe or burn, I thought that this God they pray to was egomaniacal, petulant, and self-centered. We’re supposed to be master over these behaviors, but we accept them in our God? Sorry, even if I did believe, that’s not a God I would subscribe to.”
He was confirmed and had his First Communion at age 11. “I didn’t want to do it, but to refuse would have made me a pariah in the eyes of the family. So my Confirmation was a lie and my First Communion was a lie. I despised those lies, but going through the motions was what was expected of me.”
As he moved into his teens, Nate grew more resentful of what he saw as religious hypocrisy and deception. “From that I pretty much ended up hating all religions that claim to have the inside scoop on the will and nature of God. It’s offensive. I’m okay with someone having a belief in God, but telling me that your belief is an indelible truth is delusional. Nobody can prove or disprove the existence of God. These were the discussions we had when I was a teen, and the frustration of trying to get believers to understand that they don’t exactly corner the market on truth, that their faith was just that, a faith, was maddening to cope with.”
Southern Baptists earned a special place in his disdain for religion when he was 16. “I was dating a girl whose mother was a hard-core Southern Baptist. I was openly atheist and her mother could not wrap her brain around the idea. She decided that I was the Antichrist—literally the Antichrist—and asked her minister what to do. His instructions were, ‘If you want Jesus to come back, the Antichrist has to do his job. Welcome him with open arms.’ It instantly went from this underling hostility to an almost surreal acceptance by her family. It was completely bizarre.”
After attending the University of Southern California, Nate went to work for an L.A. law firm in 1981. It was at a birthday party for a colleague at the firm that he met Arlene.
“The first thing she ever said to me, walking up from behind me, was, ‘Get the f**k out of my way. You’re between me and my drink!’”
“Hey—never stand between a nice Baptist girl and her drink!” Arlene says with a laugh.
Nate grins. “I was hooked.”
They started dating, and the religious difference came up immediately. “We were open about everything right from the get-go,” she says. “He told me he was a recovering Catholic, and that of all religions, he respected Catholics the most, hated Baptists the most, and thought they were all equally bullshit! I told him that was fine and I’d pray for him, then we’d laugh and go do something else. But I can’t say I never worried about it. He just detests the Biblethumpin’ you’re-all-gonna-burn-in-hell Southern Baptists he grew up with. The whole thing with that early girlfriend’s mother helped me understand where the loathing was coming from. But that’s not me, so we were okay.”
“I figure everybody has to believe in something, right?” Nate says. “If it’s not an issue with them, then it’s not an issue with me.”
“So we went on having these long, interesting conversations about religion for about 12 years,” Arlene says. “It was a big catalyst for my interest in apologetics [the reasoned defense of religious beliefs]. I knew that saying, ‘’Cause the Bible and my grandma tell me so’ was not going to cut it. We both found it amazing that the other one could be so well spoken and so well educated and yet be so damned wrong! But it never got too serious during those 12 years, mostly just lighthearted ribbing, really fun.”
Then their son John was born—and things got serious.
“Everything stopped being anecdotal and became very real for me then,” Arlene recalls. “I was a Christian, Nate was not. I had a child with a soul. My beliefs were no longer opinions but matters of life and death.”
Nate felt the change immediately. “After John was born, I felt like I’d become ‘unclean’ because I did not believe. We didn’t discuss it much at first, but by the time we settled in Arizona, there was a clear problem.”
Arlene and Nate had some heated discussions about the eventual religious identity of their son. They eventually agreed that John would be raised as a Christian, but Nate would be free to share his own opinions, and Arlene would not stifle John’s questions. He would be free to explore those questions, just as she had been.
But the seed of a deeper discontent about the religious difference had been planted. “As I got older, I began to realize that I was really missing the familiarity that comes through mutual faith. I wanted to share my growing feelings with someone who didn’t just listen but understood.” Their interesting discussions became “icy debates,” she says. “It was no longer fun. It was confrontational.”
"I began to realize that I was really missing the familiarity that comes through mutual faith. I wanted to share my growing feelings with someone who didn’t just listen but understood. It was no longer fun. It was confrontational."
“Religion was a huge factor in our divorce,” says Nate. “It wasn’t the only one, but it was the deal breaker. When I served Arlene the papers, she looked at the settlement clause and said, ‘Great! Let’s go have lunch!’ We were going to kill each other the day before, but now we were instantly best friends again.”
Arlene found someone who shared her faith. Brian had been a close friend to both of them for many years. Nate’s divorce from Arlene was so amicable and his friendship with Brian so close that Brian asked him to be his best man at the wedding, and Nate accepted.
Brian and Arlene were married at 5 p.m. on September 15, 2000. Just after the reception dinner, Brian collapsed and was admitted to the emergency room. He underwent surgery the next morning and died of liver failure the following day.
Arlene reeled with grief. “No one knew he was that sick. Not his doctors, not me.” Nate remained her closest friend through the pain and shock of the loss, as well as through her eventual remarriage, and to this day they remain the best of friends.
“Without the pesky marriage thing hanging around our necks, our sparring religious jabs and lighthearted yet in-depth discussions have returned,” she says. “So it seems that it’s not religious differences that ruin good relationships—it’s marriage.”
(More details on Arlene and Nate’s wedding, their parenting choices, and their divorce appear in Chapters 14, 15, and 19—look for the dotted arrows with the couple’s names.)