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IN 1969, I did something that in my teens I’d never expected to do—reach my fortieth birthday. In a Byronic, Romantic mode, I had earlier seen myself as destined for a premature, no doubt spectacular demise in the midst of some high adventure. Reflecting on this development, I was aware that all of the major goals my parents, their friends and various clergy had set before me from the beginning had been reached. I was an ordained priest of the Anglican Church of Canada, a former Rhodes Scholar and hence a graduate of Oxford University as well as the University of Toronto, where I had graduated in 1951 with the gold medal in Classics. I was also a graduate of Wycliffe College, Canada’s evangelical Anglican seminary, and had been the class president and valedictorian in my graduating year. Furthermore, I had had a highly successful parish ministry for eight years, highlighted by the building of a beautiful new church to accommodate a large and growing congregation. I had left there in 1964, after another year of graduate studies at Oxford, to become an assistant and then a full professor of New Testament and Greek back at Wycliffe. I was in good health. So too were my then wife and three much-loved daughters. There was every reason for me to be happy with these successes. “They”—the proverbial and in part shadowy influences that too often one can attempt to live one’s life by—were happy. But I was not.

The truth is, I was profoundly miserable. At times I had a feeling of having arrived successfully at a defined destination after having taken the wrong boat. It seemed that I was reaching a major turning point. Deep inside I felt I was bursting with repressed creative energy, but at the same time I was baffled and uncertain about where to go with it. Although it was far from clear at the time, a process was beginning that would utterly transform me at every possible level. I was about to experience a radical series of changes that I now realize was a kind of second birth. It would lead eventually to a total transformation of my understanding of God, of the Christian religion, of human evolution, and of myself. What ensues is the story of how that came to be and of what it led to. Like all births, it happened in stages. Like most, it wasn’t always neat.

What follows, then, is not a memoir in the usual sense. It is a spiritual odyssey, the story of one individual’s escape from the narrow grip of a rigid, wrong-headed religion. Many who grew up in similar backgrounds have escaped as well, by abandoning their spirituality altogether. In my case the struggle was to hammer out a believable faith in God. Of course, by the traditional term God, I mean that transcendent, ever-present “presence” whose offspring, as the ancient Pagans also saw, we truly are. This is the great mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of Rudolph Otto—the Mystery that kindles in us both an overwhelming sense of awe and a heart-yearning desire that can never be satisfied with anything less.

The question most often posed in the many hundreds of letters that have poured in over the past few years is this: “How did you come to the radical conclusions set out in 2004 in The Pagan Christ? You were once an evangelical preacher, weren’t you?” A partial answer is given at the beginning of that book. But the real answer, like most truths worth knowing, can only be fully told in a more detailed narrative. I invite you to come with me on this adventure.

While we all are born as genetic composites of previous generations, our ideas and outlook must of course grow and adapt to our ever-changing surroundings and intellectual development. Over the last fifty years and in the span of only two generations, beliefs and ideas in my own family have changed radically. Few could have predicted the extent of the change in the understanding of God and religion that I am about to describe. But I am fully aware in saying this of the truth of an aphorism attributed to Muhammad Ali: “The person who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”

Both my parents were born and raised in Northern Ireland and came from fairly large families, with each of them having six siblings. My maternal grandfather, who always wore a wing collar and a black bowler hat for going to church and other dress occasions, served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and I vividly remember him telling how their convoy was attacked one night by bombs from a German dirigible or blimp and they all had to scramble for cover into a ditch, where they lay for several hours in the cold. He could be very kindly, but his basic demeanour was stern and forbidding. I first met him at the age of nine in 1938 on a visit to Belfast, and soon shared my cousins’ view that he was dangerous when provoked. Grandpa Hoey, as he was called, was definitely of the old school where discipline of children was concerned. Following the end of the war he was hired as chauffeur and gentleman’s gentleman by a wealthy Belfast industrialist. My grandmother’s family name was Cooper and they were from farming stock near Portadown on the coast. She was a jolly, comfortable-looking woman who loved nothing better than being up to her elbows making Irish soda bread.

My mother’s family had been Presbyterian for generations, and she too was raised in that somewhat unbending, rigorous mould. She grew up in Belfast when the Troubles were just beginning. She remembered swinging on the lamppost at the corner of her street with two or three other little girls while soldiers nearby crouched behind sandbags with an eye out for snipers. Tragically, one child on her street was killed when a soldier accidentally dropped his rifle and it fired. This incident made quite an impression on me when I first heard about it at the age of six or seven. It was at about the same age that I heard my father, who joined the Ulster special police at sixteen by lying about his age, describe some of the violence of that period, including an account of one night while on duty near a cinema in downtown Belfast when he was set upon and attacked by three Fenians (IRA sympathizers) who immobilized him by suddenly winding his rain cloak about his arms and then proceeded to beat him up.

My father was born in a tiny village in the heart of County Tyrone about sixty miles west of Belfast. When my siblings and I were young, he talked incessantly of Tullyhogue (it means “the hill of the young men” and at one time the kings of Ulster, the O’Neills, were crowned there), and when I first visited it as a child I saw why. It’s even today a kind of storybook place. The hill, called Fort Hill by the locals because of the ancient earthworks of a fortification going back to prehistoric days, affords a view of lush green countryside for miles around, and the gleaming waters of Lough Neigh off to the east. At the edge of the village the Tullywiggan River descends swiftly to join the larger Balinderry River, a prime trout and salmon stream flowing into Lough Neigh and from there on to the North Sea. Where the two join, at the foot of Fort Hill, there is a small castle with crenellated towers called Killymoon. In a nearby estate there still stands the rural retreat of Dean Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame, who used it on his summer vacations when writing. It overlooks the rapids of the Tullywiggan, and the sound of the falling water never ends. I couldn’t know on that first brief visit what a part Tullyhogue would play in my later life and how I would grow to love it almost as much as my father did.

My paternal grandfather, Thomas William Harpur, whose full name I was given, was a blacksmith and postmaster by vocation. But his avocation was leading and teaching flute bands throughout the towns and villages of the county and beyond. He was a great reader, though it’s difficult to fathom how he found time for it. Books were scarce, but he made great friends with the local Church of Ireland minister and often disappeared up the lane behind his house to call on the rectory and borrow items from the library there. I still remember him in his smithy, hammering at a glowing horseshoe on a huge anvil, plunging it with fierce hissing into the water, and then allowing me to ply the bellows for him as he thrust the shoe back into the fire. He gave me a wonderful penknife and then taught me how to make a passable pocket flute with it from a willow branch.

When I next visited Tullyhogue as a young man of twenty-two, he and Grandma Harpur had both gone to join their forebears in the walled, circular cemetery in a field beyond the village and close to the ancient church. The burial ground is called Donnarisk and whenever I recall it I remember the priory well a few yards outside its perimeter. It has iron caging around it to keep out the cattle, and when you stoop and look into it you can see the grains of white sand at the bottom boiling as the spring bubbles up. That sight fascinated me as a small boy and has somehow reassured me ever since whenever I have had the privilege of going back. It has always been an archetypal image for me of “living water” and of the life of the Spirit in each of us.

Both my parents left school early. My father joined the police in Belfast and my mother worked as a sales clerk in a downtown millinery store. Just before they met—at a fair, near a ride called the roundabouts—a pivotal event occurred that was to have a great impact not just on their lives but later on those of myself and my brother and two sisters. A then-famous British evangelist by the name of Billy Nicholson came to Belfast for a week-long crusade. He was a somewhat rough, plainspoken man—more like Billy Sunday, another well-known preacher of the period, than Billy Graham in our own day. The meetings were packed and Nicholson was able to evoke such a “conviction of sin” and other emotions that local papers reported how Belfast’s main employer, the great shipbuilding works of Harland and Wolff (who crafted the Titanic), didn’t know what to do with all the stolen tools that workers who had been “saved” were returning!

My parents attended the mass rallies independently, and though both had been raised in a church context from childhood, they went forward at the altar call to “give their hearts and lives to the Lord.” It was a commitment to an all-embracing, fervent evangelicalism that was to last a lifetime. But more of that later.

Both were very young to be dating, given the mores of the time in Ireland, and when my father appeared on a motorcycle to whisk his youngest daughter away on what seemed like a “casual pinion,” Grandpa David Hoey was less than pleased, to put it mildly. There were the usual rows common to this atavistic struggle between love on the one hand and parental caution and control on the other. When my father finally wrote him a formal note asking permission to marry Betty, Grandpa Hoey relaxed a little and gave cautious consent in a letter that my sisters still cherish.

My father, having grown disillusioned by police work, soon afterwards announced that he was going to emigrate to Canada in search of a better future than strife-torn Northern Ireland seemed likely to offer. He already had an older brother who was living and working in Toronto, and the plan was that my father would live with him, get a job and then be joined by my mother a year later. A few days after his arrival, although work was scarce in Toronto in the late 1920s, he was hired by a prominent wholesale paper firm, Buntin and Reid (today a part of the Domtar empire), to sweep floors. With an energy and determination that marked him all his life, he made a rapid advancement, and it was not long before he became foreman over the entire warehouse on Peter Street, not far from where the SkyDome (Rogers Centre) and CN Tower now stand, and where he would work through the Great Depression and eventually become a traveller for the company.

Though it saddened her family, my mother, a shy and somewhat anxious person by nature, kept to her resolve to join Billy, as she called him, in Canada. Her father feared—or perhaps even hoped— she would change her mind when she met her husband-to-be after the long absence. Accordingly, he insisted on sewing the money for her return passage into the lining of one of her dresses (it eventually helped pay for some furniture). The ship, the Cunarder SS Athenia, left Belfast Lough on April 14, 1928. The ocean voyage, which in those days took from nine or ten days to a fortnight, was not pleasant. My mother, who all her life could grow queasy at the mere mention of boat travel or even a swing, was wretchedly seasick for most of the time.

My father met the boat in Montreal and on April 25, 1928, a day after arriving in Toronto, they were married in historic St. Peter’s Anglican Church at the corner of Bleecker and Carlton streets. It was and remained for many years one of the bastions of Low Church, evangelical Anglicanism in the city. Only two witnesses were present and there was no honeymoon in any modern sense of the term. I was born the next year, the year the stock market crash echoed around the world. My sister Elizabeth arrived seventeen months after my birth, my brother George was born a full ten years later, in 1939, just after World War II had begun, and my sister Jane was born in 1943. Another baby brother, Robert, was born in 1950 but lived only a few days.

My parents lived for a couple of years in the flat my father had at his brother’s home at 13 Badgerow Avenue, not far from the old Don Jail and Riverdale Zoo. I was born shortly after midnight on Sunday, April 14, 1929, in a small private clinic a few blocks away, on Victor Avenue. The next year, expecting another child, my parents moved to a rented house just south of Queen Street and east of Broadview Avenue. My mother used to push me in a large, old-style pram along Queen Street to meet “Billy” when he came home from work by streetcar every night. There was very little money, but in 1930 anybody with a steady job was among the truly fortunate. One night a short time later, while out for a walk after supper, again with the pram, they met a man they recognized from “over home.” They talked and it turned out he had a house for sale on Lawlor Avenue, which was a little farther east, running north off Kingston Road in a district known today as the Upper Beaches. A deal was struck, my parents came up with $200 for the down payment, and they moved once more. The full price of the house at 164 Lawlor Avenue was $4,000. In all, we lived in three different houses on the same street over a span of more than twenty years. In 1949, I left home to live in residence at the University of Toronto, and finally for good in 1951, on my way to Oxford.

Looking back, I realize what an extraordinarily rich experience it was growing up in Toronto’s old east end in what was essentially a working-class neighbourhood before, during and after World War II. The public school, of institutional brick, with a cinder playing ground, was named after Sir Adam Beck, the original architect of the Ontario hydroelectricity system. It lay at midpoint on Lawlor between Kingston Road to the south and Gerrard Street to the north. On Kingston Road there were innumerable small shops, much like an English village, a cinema or “show”—which my sister and I were forbidden to enter—and a large United church. At one end of our normal range there was a tavern and at the other a Roman Catholic church where God alone knew what strange rites were performed! As children, we saw this church as a mysterious and possibly dangerous place. In the years since then I have had Roman Catholic adults tell me they were led to feel much the same way about non-Catholic churches in their childhood.

Few people we knew had a car before the war. When we finally got one in 1941, gasoline was rationed and so it didn’t really do us much good. Travel downtown normally took place by streetcar, the old kind where the seats were all made of wood and the conductor sat in a little station halfway down the car. There was a small stove beside him and in winter it paid to sit as close to its blazing warmth as possible.

The streets themselves were alive with every kind of horse-drawn vehicle imaginable: the milkman, the bread man and vendors of every type, including a bearded Jewish junk man who cried his rendition of “rags and bones” as he drove his nag and cart past the door. My mother enjoyed haggling with him over the worth of her surplus odds and ends. To our embarrassment, if we were anywhere nearby when one of the horses happened to relieve itself in a serious manner, we were instantly dispatched with a garbage can lid or other container to sweep up the manure for her precious rose bed. On many a hot summer day there would be a horse, still in harness, standing on our front lawn trying to reach the leaves of the maple tree. The wagon behind would lurch precariously until the driver got back from his delivery.

Since everybody had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, ice deliveries in the peak of summer were almost daily. The ice, hauled from Lake Simcoe in the winter and stored in deep sawdust in sheds until the hot season, was delivered by truck. All the kids from near and far would gather at the back as blocks were chipped out of the larger slabs and grab slivers of ice to suck on. You’d have thought it was something truly special and not just frozen water! Milkshakes at the corner parlour sold for five cents. The pie man, who rode a bicycle with a cart bearing the slogan Man shall not live by bread alone, also charged five cents for small pies. My favourite was pumpkin, although raisin came a close second.

Perhaps because the city limits were just five blocks away— Victoria Park Avenue marked the eastern boundary then—there were regular deliveries of fresh eggs, fruit and vegetables from the Mennonite farms to the northeast of the city, near the villages of Markham, Stouffville and Uxbridge. I vividly remember old trucks laden with crates of fresh strawberries appearing first, and then, later in the summer, the same farmers would be back with boxes of apples, fresh corn, honey, plums and pears. From the middle of August right through the fall the street was redolent with the smells of canning, of homemade jams and chili sauce, and the baking of pies.

Like most women of that day in our neighbourhood, except for a few involved in some war-related factory work, my mother didn’t go out to work but spent much of her time preserving fruit and baking. On the hottest days of summer, though, when my sister and I were quite young, she would often make a lunch and, crossing Kingston Road, walk with us down one of the sharply descending streets that led to Queen Street and on to the beach a block or so south. Lake Ontario seemed freezing cold even on days when the sand was so hot it burned your bare feet, and then too it was often questionable, as it still is today, how clean the water was. But we paddled in it and later swam in it without a care in the world.

The maze of lanes behind the houses in our neighbourhood became a sort of badlands for most of our games, from cowboys to Robin Hood, from King Arthur and his knights to daring explorers. As adventurers, we occasionally pinched a potato or two from home and roasted them in small fires behind the rows of sheds or garages. None of the war games had any deleterious effects, and I am grateful to have lived in a time when children were able to experience such freedom from the constant supervision of adults. Our parents rarely knew where we were. When I was fourteen I received a repeating .22 rifle that a friend and I would conceal by stuffing it down a pant leg. Then we’d walk stiff-legged to a small dump at the north end of Lawlor, where we would shoot rats. Today, that site is prime real estate.

There was once a time, not all that long ago, when almost everyone had a religious upbringing of one sort or another. Of course, there were differing levels of intensity or depth, but Canada was a predominantly, actively Christian country until well into the 1960s. Churches and Sunday schools were well attended. Church leaders still frequently made headlines for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the sex abuse scandals of the ensuing era. Toronto newspapers regularly reported on Sunday sermons from major pulpits in the downtown core of the city.

Our family was not your average God-fearing household, however—not by any standard. My parents, having dedicated their hearts and lives to God, were very religious indeed. We went to church at least twice on Sunday, and that doesn’t include Sunday school, where my father was a keen, energetic superintendent for many years. Although he had left school around what is now grade nine or ten to join the Ulster Constabulary, he had a quick mind with an amazing memory, and he read serious works on theology and church history even while on vacation. He attended night school at Wycliffe Theological College some years later, well after I had been ordained, graduated with an S.Th. diploma and was made a deacon in the Anglican Church of Canada. His job was supposed to be “permanent deacon,” a position he could hold while continuing to work at his secular job, but about a year later, Bishop Frederick Wilkinson invited him to his Adelaide Street head office and told him he was needed for a rural parish near Peterborough. He consented, gave up his secular job, was ordained a priest at age fifty-four that spring in St. James’ Cathedral, and soon left for the three-point parish of Millbrook, Cavan and Baillieborough, about two hours’ drive northeast of Toronto. They soon had one of the finest Sunday schools in the region, and a band in which my mother played the bass drum.

While Sunday was anything but a day of rest as we were growing up, both my parents also attended Bible study groups, prayer meetings and assorted revivalist gatherings on weekdays whenever possible. My sister Elizabeth and I would walk several city blocks with my mother in all kinds of weather to St. Saviour’s Anglican Church at Main Street and Swanwick Avenue in Toronto’s east end to sit and fidget while a dozen or so women discussed a Bible passage and prayed. There was a fire hall on a nearby corner and I recall being much more interested in that than in what the Scripture Union, as the study text was called, had to impart. I joined the boys’ choir at about seven years of age. When there were special children’s crusades, aimed at getting as many as possible “to give their hearts to the Lord,” I regularly won prizes for bringing in the most recruits.

Looking back, one realizes that the hectic pace of our home life, saturated as it was with religiously based activities of every sort— from visiting English bishops (always of an evangelical bent) coming to dinner, to pressing uniforms and shining buttons for various organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade (a passion of my father’s) and, during World War II, the air cadets—was, as already hinted, anything but normal. However, to me and to Elizabeth it seemed totally normal at the time. What neither of us realized, of course, was just how ultra-conservative and narrow it all was. It was essentially a fundamentalist theology: the infallibility of the Bible, the literal virgin birth, an atoning death of Jesus Christ for the sins of the world. You were “saved by the blood of the lamb.” There was a great deal of guilt in the endless sermons to which we were subjected, and a lot of fear as well. I vividly remember having trouble sleeping after some visiting homespun preacher had waxed eloquent about Armageddon and the coming end of the world.

My parents had a “second family” with the birth of my younger brother in 1939 and sister in 1943, and they were perhaps a little less influenced. By then my father’s reading had helped broaden him just a little. But we literally lived and breathed a rigidly faith-filled life. Elizabeth and Jane both played the piano at various Sunday schools my father led in the years before his ordination. He thought nothing of stopping the entire proceedings from time to time to give them a critical appraisal of their lack of preparation should they happen to miscue.

It was made clear to George and me from our earliest days precisely what, as sons, our life’s work was to be. I, as the first-born, had been dedicated to God even before I was born—with the Biblical story of Hannah’s prayer in Samuel, and of Samuel’s similar destiny, very much in mind. George, presently an active family physician on the Bruce Peninsula, was firmly pointed towards a career in medicine, preferably as a medical missionary. Girls, it seems, were intended to get jobs, get married, have babies, help out at churches but otherwise keep a low profile.

Was my father chauvinistic? Sexist? Yes, indeed. But my father was a charmer too. The ladies appeared to like him with his twinkling Irish eyes, his energetic style and his military bearing. He was a disciplinarian with a kindly side and was much liked by his flock when he finally realized his dream and was given a rural parish of his own. He was very much a product of the conflict-riven Ulster of his day, however, and though he left it as a young man in his very early twenties, he remained strongly Protestant to the end. Unfortunately, in spite of his many great gifts, he never really overcame the anti–Roman Catholic animus that was born and bred in his homeland and later nourished by his selective reading both of theology and of church history. It was disappointing to my siblings and me that his splendid pastoral ministry during the final years of his life was at the same time narrowed by his steadfast refusal to participate in any local attempts at ecumenicity that meant, for example, sharing the same platform as the area’s Catholic priest. However, gradually he had to alter his fundamentalist views on Scripture, particularly the Old Testament, as his theological studies quickly opened his eyes to the impossibility of persevering in a literalist understanding of the great stories he loved so much. And he mellowed in other ways as well. However, he was never a man to cherish the middle position on any matter of controversy—or otherwise, for that matter. In my late teens we had many arguments over when and how I was finally to be ordained, some of them very heated.

Sadly, in 1968 my father died suddenly, but peacefully enough, at age sixty-two in my mother’s arms. I still miss him—the haunting sound of the tin flute that was never far from his hands, his incredibly constant optimism and his deep concern for his family’s well-being. He expected a great deal from each of us, perhaps even too much at times. But I thank God always for both of my parents’ courage in breaking with the past to make a life in Canada. My deep, abiding faith in God, however much it has changed and developed down all the decades since, owes everything to them. It is true, as one of John Wesley’s biographers has said, that “mothers are the makers of spirit” in our earliest beginnings. That being said, fathers, for better or worse, have the awesome responsibility of forming some of our earliest inklings about God. As we grow in awareness and self-knowledge, however, shaped by our own individual experiences of the world and of others, both aspects of our lives are inevitably moulded and changed, sometimes quite drastically.

During my high school years, my sister and I attended weekly Youth for Christ rallies at Massey Hall on various Saturday nights. Charles Templeton, full of charisma and eloquence, was at the height of his evangelistic career and, together with his glamorous partner, a Spanish-looking diva with a wonderful voice, regularly held the audience of eager teenagers in the palm of his hand. When, to the haunting but overly repeated strains of “Just as I am, without one plea”—so familiar from Billy Graham’s crusades—the invitation was given to come forward and be saved, there was a kind of hypnotic atmosphere in which the pull to go to the front of the hall was close to irresistible.

As a child and then in my teens I had asked Christ to come into my heart and life on more than one occasion, but Templeton made it nearly impossible for many of us not to go forward again. However, both Elizabeth and I usually managed to resist the emotional appeals while enjoying the company of our peers, the entertainment of the music and the movie-star quality of Templeton’s leadership. Little did I know that I would one day be a contributor (through my knowledge of New Testament Greek) to his best-selling book on the sayings of Jesus or that we would eventually become friends. He often used to call me on Sundays while I was a regular columnist for the Toronto Star to discuss whatever I had written that weekend. We met at his home, on an apartment rooftop overlooking the Don Valley in the heart of Toronto, not many months before he was hospitalized with severe Alzheimer’s disease. He showed me many photographs and newspaper clippings of his days as an evangelist and, for a while, partner of Billy Graham. While Charles had eventually become an agnostic, he remained in my view “a God-haunted man” all his life. In There Is Life after Death, I outline the story his wife Madeleine told me of a vision Charles had just before he died. Nobody who knew Charles Templeton or who had read his final book, Farewell to God, would have anticipated or predicted anything like that.

In retrospect, I see that my childhood, though enviable in so many ways, was a thorough-going indoctrination into the basic tenets of Christian fundamentalism. This cannot be overemphasized. It was an upbringing heavily into guilt and fear. My parents’ religion was intensely judgmental of others in different camps, particularly the majority of “unsaved church members” who were regarded as Christians in name only. Sin was humanity’s greatest problem and we alone had the answers. To be outside our company of “right” believers was to be eternally lost and headed for hell. It was no easy burden for a teenager, destined by his parents for the ministry, to carry. But, to quote the famous inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller, “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”