By John Draper ~ “God’s promises never fail.” O uch. Just saying stuff like that makes my teeth hurt. It’s so candy-coated. Believers say things like that just to placate people who ask legitimate questions. The truth is that God’s promises almost never come true. Deal with it. Let’s say you’re a believer and you find you have Stage 4 cancer. Your well-meaning Christian friends gather around your hospital bed and tell you to be strong. “Remember,” they say, “God has promised us in His word, ‘Truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven’” (Matthew 18: 19, 20). “So we’re just going to  agree in prayer  for you and watch God act,” they will say, laying hands on you in your hospital bed and praying. But the healing doesn’t come. Your Christian friends advise you to be patient. God’s timing isn’t our timing. They remind you, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thous...

By John Draper ~ M y ex-brother-in-law is a Trump supporter. Other than that, he’s a great guy. I helped “lead him to the Lord” about 40 years ago. He was zealous then and he’s zealous now, deacon at his church and all. He loves the Lord. However, he also loves Trump. To give you a little context, he also loves Benny Hinn. Anyway, since he’s my ex-brother-in-law, I don’t have to endure holiday gatherings listening to him say Trump is the greatest thing since Benny Hinn. But there’s no way of drowning out the evangelical clamor for Trump in the media. They won’t shut up about him. I can’t help but wonder: What would they do if Trump was a member of their church—right over there, sitting in the front pew? See? Right there. See the bald spot? I know what they’d do, and I know because I was a zealous Christian for 35 years. I know what they would do—because I know what I would have done. Long story short: They wouldn’t put up with his nonsense. New Christians—and supposed...

By John Draper ~ T hings were getting dicey. You know me—push, push, push. “So what you’re telling me,” I said to the well-scrubbed missionaries, “is that you can become a God.” “Yes, that’s true,” the thinner of the two missionaries said. “It’s in the Bible.” “Really?” I could see the beefier of the two missionaries looking at my bookcase filled with “anti-Mormon” books and videos. Anything written about Mormonism by non-Mormons is by default anti-Mormon and to be avoided as a product of—for all practical purposes—Satan Himself, prolific trickster. The beefier missionary narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” the thinner of the two missionaries said, pulling his mega-scriptures from his backpack—not just the Book of Mormon but the Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Covenants. All three Standard Works. And the King James Version of the Old and New testaments, included because the authorities back in Salt Lake knew the missionaries would encounter  gentiles  like me. It ...

By John Draper ~ I belong to a Facebook group called Recovering Ex-Christians. I join in the conversations, even though I don’t think I’m  recovering . Truth is, I  enjoyed  being a Christian. In particular, I enjoyed  fellowshipping  with fellow believers. My last church, for example, was full of love and laughter. The church met in a grange, a two-story box of a building that smelled of scuff marks and Murphy’s Oil Soap. After service, we’d pull the creaky chairs around folding tables and chat and poke fun at one another over coffee and cake. I also enjoyed worshipping God. I felt it. I’d raise my hands and close my eyes and pour forth my adoration. During the confession of sin, I’d go to my knees and place my forehead on the hardwood floor. I was so grateful He saved a wretch like me. I also enjoyed serving God. The church was small enough that the midweek Bible study comprised basically the entire congregation. Together, we’d search the scriptu...

By John Draper ~ I want God’s job. The guy never has to do a bloody thing and people still throw rose petals at his feet. No, no, no, believers say, indignantly. God is “active in my life”! But what do they mean? For my part, I’ve never had a miracle occur in my life. That is, nothing’s happened to me that I couldn’t explain through natural processes. I say that as someone who was mentally ill the first 10 years of his Walk With Christ. I had all sorts of people lay hands on me for healing. To be fair, I didn’t really think of what I was going through as something I needed to be healed from—a disease. I didn’t know what it was. I just wanted it gone. And then I was given a little pill and—poof!—it was. Ten fucking years. Likewise, I’ve never met anyone who has had a miracle occur in their life. I’ve met a lot of believers who know someone who has had a miracle occur in their life—or know someone who knows someone. Probe a bit. Here’s what I think you’ll find about God ...

By John Draper ~ R ight out of the chute as a Christian, God saw fit to put me in a Bible study with a bunch of guys who had a weakness for bare-naked ladies. It was sort of a practical joke on His part. All of us were “sold out” for Jesus Christ, no question. The burning passion of our lives was to serve the Lord. Yet we were fully aware that as 19-year-old men, we were each at our sexual peak. Never again would we be this horny. The comedy of our situation didn’t escape us. So every study would be well peppered with jokes about choking the gopher and the difficulty of not turning our heads to watch a beautiful girl pass us by. And it wasn’t just lust. You name the sin, we committed it. We could laugh about our “carnal mindedness” because we were convinced God was going to empower us to “live in victory”—eventually. It’s known as the doctrine of sanctification: God’s Holy Spirit works in believers to make them more like Jesus. At least that’s what we were sure of when we...

By John Draper ~ T he problem I have with the resurrection is not the resurrection itself—that is, the act of a physical body sparking back to life. First off, that does happen. People do “come back to life” after being pronounced dead—and everybody’s at a loss to explain it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a miracle. It just means we don’t understand the physical process—yet. But let’s say you insist on the resurrection being a classical miracle—that is, it never would have happened if God hadn’t monkeyed around with things. If God is God, I suppose that means He has the power to circumvent the laws of the universe. Either way, I have no problem with the act of the resurrection. It’s the way it was pulled off that bothers me. The creation of The Christian Church doesn’t look like a beautiful plan unfolded by an all-wise God but, rather, like something that was ad-libbed by humans—a real Keystone Cops affair with goofy goons running around, pants around their ankles, bumping into o...

By John Draper ~ P rogressive Christians need to have the proverbial Come to Jesus Moment about the Bible. Earlier this year, the trending hashtag on Twitter was #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear , started, I guess, by a Christian feminist as an afterthought as she was boarding a plane. At least it was trending in progressive Christian circles. The gist was that most male churchgoers misinterpret the Bible. The majority of the tweets testified to a daily barrage of discrimination and double standards for women in ministry and beyond. Some examples: First off, I agree. The Christian feminists are right. Patriarchy and misogyny are indeed rampant in the church. But the people who are pushing those agendas are just following the clear orders of scripture. The Bible says what it says about women. Progressives Christians need to come to terms with the very human book they call scripture. It’s not God’s word. Progressive Christians say all scriptures from Bible that adv...

By John Draper ~ I t was stapled on by the Church—and ham-handedly. I came to this realization the other day when I was busy arguing with myself on Facebook—my former self, my mid-20s Sold-Out-for-Jesus self. These young evangelicals and I were discussing my post  No one has a personal relationship with God . I was trying to get them to see that the “relationship” they had with God was nothing special. It’s the same thing all devoted religious people have. In fact, what they call a “relationship with God” is just what nonbelievers call  life . So when an evangelical says, “God has given me a  peace  about this decision,” a nonbeliever just calls it “gut instinct.” Of course, they couldn’t process that. So they grilled me. How could I say Christianity was just like all the other religions? Didn’t I realize that other religions are people reaching  up  to God—whereas Christianity is God reaching  down  to humans? As they went on, I couldn...

By John Draper ~ T he most incredulous person in the world is a fundamentalist who is reading someone else’s holy book. Suddenly, they can smell subterfuge a mile away. But point out something ridiculous about their holy book—and watch the fur fly. Obvious discrepancies are “apparent” discrepancies. Any “apparent discrepancy” a True Believer can’t resolve is an “unsolved mystery.” We’ll just have to ask God about that when we get to heaven. Everybody seems to have a personal bullshit detector, which they’re eager to use on all holy texts except their own. I discovered this truth when I was researching my first novel, which is about a Mormon missionary who goes insane on his mission. I read more books about Mormonism than you can shake a stick at it. How can people believe this crap? Then I read the Book of Mormon itself. Here’s the Book of Mormon in 79 words: It was Jews who populated North America, coming over first in wooden submarines. The good Jews were “white and delig...

By John Draper ~ H umans discovered lust long before they invented religion, naturally, right around the time they concluded Flange A could be inserted into Slot B. Basically, the first humans lusted from the get-go, else there never would have been the second humans. But until they invented religion, humans had no problem with their lust. Suddenly, it was sin. The Jews restricted sex six ways to Sunday—or Saturday, I guess. From the first century on, Christians were told to take their lust, smunch it into a tiny ball, and slip it under the bedroom rug. If a Muslim woman doesn’t bleed on the wedding night, the husband can accuse her of moral laxity and unencumber himself from his marital bonds on the spot—a definite mood killer. Pretty much for the past 3,500 years, religion has been shining its flashlight into society’s backseat and chiding us to “get a move on, you two.” We hastily buttoned and zipped ourselves up, yet when religion was out of sight, we were right back at it....

By John Draper ~ B ack when I was a Christian, it was important to me to always have the Word of God close at hand. So I would keep a “pocket Bible” on my person. No telling when a well-formed female would cross your path, exciting your animal instincts. Funny thing—those pocket Bibles were never the full Bible. They were just the New Testament and the Psalms. Why is that? Most Christians have learned to ignore most of the Bible—that is, the Old Testament. It’s just so bloody and harsh—over the top. Not to mention hokey and boring. Sure, they pay it lip service. For example, they may tell themselves that the Old Testament focuses on the justice of God as opposed to the love of God. (Somebody had to teach those sinners a lesson.) But not even fundamentalists try to live by the Old Testament, not really. Maybe a verse here and there that they can use to bolster some point about Jesus but, for the most part, they live to the east of Malachi. Check out believers’ refrigerator mag...