His words hit me right in the gut.
Not because he was a writer for the Los Angeles Times discussing his views about religion, and in particular my brand of faith and all its failings, but because this was a friend of mine, William Lobdell, doing it.
I was pained by it and knew what he was saying came from the heart, even if I didn’t want to hear it.
It also pained me because I knew it wasn’t always this way for him.
Lobdell, a former Daily Pilot editor and former Los Angeles Times religion writer was one of the most devout people I knew in the news business. That in itself was unusual. Most reporters or editors don’t discuss their religious beliefs much in public, including me.
Lobdell changed all of that.
“I label myself a reluctant atheist,” he told me recently. “I’m not there to convince people I’m right. I’m not sure I’m right. I know what it is for me.”
The end result is the culmination of a long, rocky, even appalling journey into organized religion that he chronicled in a first-person account.
Ironically, Lobdell started this journey because he too knew that most journalists avoided discussions about religion, or just weren’t interest in the subject.
And he suspected because of that, the topic just didn’t get very good play in the media.
So he set out to change things. First, he pitched a column called Getting Religion, which ran every Saturday on the Los Angeles Times religion page. That soon developed into full-time job writing about the religion beat. Problem was the religion beat he thought he was going to cover became something very, very different.
Instead of deepening his faith, which was his initial hope, writing about religion and all of its scandals, such as priests molesting children and televangelists fleecing their flocks of viewers, shook him to the core.
“I went into a kind of reverse spiritual journey,” he said. “I did an intellectual analysis of whether faith is real. And that’s always dangerous. I really didn’t want to give up my faith. But I had to admit I just didn’t have it anymore.”
For Catholics and Christians like me, the upcoming Christmas holiday has always been a special time of year. It marks the birth of Jesus, who we believe to be the savior of the world.
