Finding God outside the church walls

During times of turbulence in politics, culture, and religious life, it’s tempting to hold tightly to current convictions. Allowing a change of one’s mind or heart can be difficult work. With this in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939, in which we ask leading thinkers to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, and hopes as they address the topic, “How my mind has changed.” This essay is the second in the new series.

The idea of God has been dying for most of my life. When I was a sophomore in high school, I used to hang out at a coffee house in the basement of Glenn Memorial Church on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta. My father, who once taught psychology there, appreciated the writing of an Emory religion professor named Thomas J. J. Altizer. There were also a lot of books by Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti lying around our house.

In 1966, Time magazine came out with its first text-only cover. “Is God Dead?” the headline read, in giant red letters against a black background. No one I knew bothered to read the article inside, which explained that Altizer and his like-minded colleagues were not the first to surmise God’s demise. Nor did they all mean the same thing when they talked about the death of God, although two world wars, the Holocaust, and the racist violence exposed by the American civil rights movement figured centrally in their thinking. How could a benevolent God live through human catastrophes like those?