I have two tattoos. Which isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be. Everyone has tattoos now. One of mine is only a couple years old. My wife and I got matching ones on our 13th anniversary, Celtic love knots with four loops (loops for the two of us + each kid).

But I also have another tattoo. At least, I used to. I got it a few months after we got married, in the spring of 1995. It’s an ichthus — a Jesus fish — on my ankle. Yes, it’s a cliche and not very creative, but I was only 21 at the time. After deciding I wanted a tattoo, I remember thinking that one of the best things about getting a tattoo that proclaimed my faith was that it was permanent. It would always be there. I’d never be able to hide my Christianity. (At least not when wearing short socks.)

This was at the tail-end of a really passionate season in my spiritual life, and I was inking my faith onto my skin, knowing it would be there forever.

That tattoo is nearly gone now. For whatever reason, it’s almost completely faded. I can still see it if I look for it, but if you saw me in shorts and flip-flops, you’d need to get down on your hands and knees and put your nose about six inches away from my ankle in order to see it. And that would make us both feel really awkward, so just take my word for it: Somehow I got a tattoo with an expiration date.

Now, don’t go reading too far into the symbolism. My faith isn’t as gone as the tattoo, and I’m nowhere close to saying my faith has faded away. But I think of my tattoo a lot, and about how spiritually gung-ho I was when I got it, and about how I’ve spent so much time since then in this period of doubt, and every once in awhile I’ll remember the tattoo and think about the connection between my ink and my doubt.

Tattoos aren’t supposed to disappear. Sometimes we’re surprised when things fade away. We didn’t want it or expect it, but it happens. And it happens all on its own.

When I asked the question on Tuesday about whether or not you were becoming more or less religious/faithful as you aged, I wasn’t surprised to hear from a number of readers who freely admitted that their faith was starting to fade, or had been fading for awhile, or was completely gone. And the fascinating thing about it was that they weren’t at all happy about it. They didn’t want to lose faith. Becoming less religious meant dealing with a lot of regret.

Haley wrote, “As I have gotten older the questions have begun to seep in and cause me to doubt severely. It breaks my heart, and the sad thing is no matter how much I pray for strong faith it never seems to come.”

David wrote, “Much less [religious] as well, and it depresses the hell out of me. I’m not sure why I want to be religious, but I do, and then deeply regret that I’m unable to be.”

Tyler wrote, “I’ve always been filled with doubt, but in recent years the sound has grown too loud to ignore. I wish this weren’t the case, and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it.”

Growing up, I tended to think that those who doubted or rejected God were doing so out of sin. Losing faith was convenient. It gave people a moral out, I thought, so they could go out drinking and hooking up and doing drugs and taking advantage of guilt-free living.

But that’s rarely the case, is it? From personal experience and by talking to others in the same place as the commenters above, religious people often find their faith fading away…and they don’t like it. It’s happening on its own and seems to be out of their personal control. They didn’t go asking questions because they were prideful or stubborn or sinful or looking for a way out. The questions were just there, and the answers that eventually came weren’t intellectually or spiritually satisfying, and then the doubt crept in. And they prayed and prayed and prayed against it — Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief! — but nothing ever changed.

In the face of doubt, I’ve prayed for my faith to increase. It hasn’t happened. Why not?

Yes, I still believe, but my belief isn’t always an intellectual belief, because my prayers for intellectual certainty or stronger faith haven’t been answered. So today my faith takes an active form rather than an intellectual one. My faith is what I do. And sometimes it’s all I know to do, because I haven’t figured out how to make myself believe. I can’t just flip a switch. There wasn’t a switch to turn my tattoo off, and there’s no switch to turn it back on either. I looked down one year and it just wasn’t as intense as it used to be.

“It depresses the hell out of me. I’m not sure why I want to be religious, but I do, and then deeply regret that I’m unable to be.”

I hear you, David. You’re not alone.

You guys are smart. Maybe you have answers to these questions:

Why does faith fade even when we don’t want it to?

When we pray for faith, “earnestly seeking him” in light of verses like Hebrews 11:6, then what does it mean when God doesn’t answer?

And what in the world happened to my tattoo?

Daniel Radosh is the kind of freelance writer who makes other freelance writers jealous. Or inspired. But mostly jealous. He’s earned himself bylines in the New Yorker, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, GQ, Esquire, Salon, Slate, and Playboy. He’s been a contributing editor at The Week for a long time and used to be a staff writer and editor for Spy magazine.

He writes a successful blog at Radosh.net, which has gained quite a following for its always-fun anti-caption contests of New Yorker cartoons.

And then last year, he went and got himself hired as a staff writer for the Daily Show. Yes, the one with Jon Stewart.

Daniel hit my radar two or three years ago with the publication of his book Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. We have a handful of mutual friends, and he was kind enough to offer an endorsement of my Pocket Guide series as well as my new book. So when I learned that Rapture Ready! was being released in paperback this week, I figured it was time to do a blog interview.

Stick around after the interview for details about a fun Rapture Ready! giveaway. And please do not confuse Daniel’s Rapture Ready! site, which contains an excellent multimedia appendix to accompany his book, with RaptureReady.com, which is a very serious watchblog for the End Times. Both are hilarious, of course, but in vastly different ways.

I know you’re “a secular Jew,” but how observant or devout was your Jewish upbringing? How would you describe your current religious beliefs or outlook?

Secular probably describes how I was brought up better than it does my current beliefs. As a kid I had a cultural identification with Yiddishkeit (that is “Jewishness” rather than “Judaism” in the religious sense) but I didn’t go to synagogue or anything. The only Jewish holidays my family observed were Hanukkah, Passover and Oscar Night. These days I identify more as a Humanistic Jew. That’s probably splitting hairs as far as most of your readers are concerned since Humanistic Judaism is still secular, but it does involve observance and practice. That is, I belong to a non-theistic congregation, light candles on Shabbat, celebrate holidays and so on, though I see all these traditions as human-evolved rather than divinely ordained.

Where did the idea for Rapture Ready! come from?

A few years back and I was visiting my wife’s family in Kansas. Her teenage half-sister is a born-again Christian and we went with her to one of these traveling rock festivals. After one of the bands, her friend came running over and gushed, “Awesome performance! They prayed like three times in a twenty-minute set.” I was like, Wait, the stuff between the songs was the most important part? As I explain in the beginning of the book (which you can read here), I’ve attended plenty of rock shows and thought I’d looked at pop culture from every possible angle, but this was new to me. I found the whole thing simultaneously familiar and disorienting in a way that was incredibly intriguing.

Rapture Ready! seemed to come out at a time when there were several other similar outsiders-immerse-themselves-in-Christianity books, like Lauren Sandler’s Righteous and Robert Lanham’s The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right, along with AJ Jacobs’ Year of Living Biblically. And all you guys kind of run in the same writerly circles in Brooklyn, right? How does that happen? Was it a contest or something?

AJ lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That’s like a totally different country, so I challenge your premise right there. But don’t forget Andrew Beaujon’s Body Piercing Saved My Life, and excellent recent books like In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch, The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose, and My Jesus Year by Benyamin Cohen. So I guess what I’m saying is the contest is over and AJ won. That’s why we all go to him for blurbs.

I’m guilty of that, too, and I don’t even live in the same time zone as AJ, much less the same city. One thing I love about Rapture Ready! is that you’re not afraid to be critical of the stupid things, like “Jesus junk” or the Rock for Life logo of a fetus shredding on guitar, but you also find some positive things about the subculture. What are some of the things that confounded your expectations? Did these surprise you?

With little knowledge about evangelicalism other than what I’d seen in the media, I went into this project expecting to find that Christian pop culture was largely a delivery mechanism for a conservative political agenda—a spoonful of sugar to help the napalm go down, if you will. And while that definitely exists, I discovered that there is another way in which pop culture serves as a moderating force within evangelicalism. Maybe that shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, since creative people are often the most open-minded of any society. Many Christian artists, musicians in particular, no longer want to be constrained by the Christian bubble, so they play secular clubs and tour with mainstream bands. They get to meet a wide variety of people and are exposed to many different ideas. Their stature in the culture gives them a kind of grassroots moral authority to challenge the intolerance of many church leaders. They don’t necessarily espouse liberal politics, though some do, but they are likely to help their young fans understand that the world isn’t necessarily as black and white as their youth pastor might have led them to believe. That was an eye-opener for me.

I think there’s a lot of value in looking at our faith from an outsider’s perspective. Since you can provide that kind of expertise, what are a couple of things that come across as weird, disturbing, or misguided to secular people, but which Evangelical Christians don’t realize because we’re too close?

Well, as I learned pretty quickly a lot of Christians are themselves outsiders to the type of Christian culture sold in Lifeway stores, and I suspect most folks here don’t need me to point out how odd and unfortunate things like gospel golf balls are. But I will say that whenever a Christian warns against being “too heavy-handed” in pop culture, they’re about to embrace something really heavy-handed.

A similar blind spot seems to be Christianese. I constantly heard Christians observing that it’s important not to speak in Christianese—and then almost without fail using a string of Christian buzzwords. I realized that Christians think the rest of us will be mystified by theological terms like “justification” or whatever, when what really sounds weird to us is the spiritual appropriation of ordinary words like “heart” and “walk.”

You’ve said before that you think the world would be a better place if non-Christians were more open to the best of Christian culture. What kinds of things do you place in that “best of Christian culture” category?

I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of a book called O Me of Little Faith, so I’m definitely going to include that.

Thank you for that. Your bag of cash is on the way. Please continue.

Mostly what I recommend to people is the kind of indie music I heard at Cornerstone: artists like mewithoutYou, Over the Rhine, Jonathan Rundman. Unlike the two kinds of Christian music that get played on the radio, the bands I found myself really enjoying neither hide their faith nor sell it. These aren’t advertising jingles for Jesus or anodyne praise songs, they’re complex meditations on the joys and struggles of ordinary people who believe—or at least want to believe—in the messages they find in the Bible. I may not share their beliefs, but I do find them interesting and there are elements of them that I can relate to. Even something like Sherri Shepherd’s new sitcom on Lifetime isn’t particularly cutting edge but it’s legitimately entertaining and uses humor to illuminate real aspects of everyday American Christian life.

What was creepier: the Creation Museum in Ohio, the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, or the time when you appeared as an extra in an anti-Semitic Passion play in Arkansas, calling for Jesus to be crucified? Please explain.

Ooh, tough call. I’ll rule out Holy Land Experience, which was too sterile and and cheesy to be genuinely creepy (or, I probably don’t need to point out, holy). The Passion play was an insane and almost hallucinatory experience, which probably had more to do with the way I approached it than anything—it’s the only time I went “undercover,” which I felt was necessary given, as you mention, this particular production’s anti-Semitic history. It unfolds on this giant outdoor stage the size of two football fields. The audience is so far away that they can’t hear the actors—all the dialogue is prerecorded and the performers just lip synch. So I volunteer as an extra and I find myself in the angry Jewish mob—this show was a real throwback to an unpleasant older era, and it was really the only time I encountered any anti-Semitic overtones. I’m on this very realistic set with all these people yelling and I kind of start freaking out and I think, “I can’t go along with this.” And instead of shouting, “Crucify him!” I raise my arms so the audience can see, if not hear, and I say, “Maybe we should let him off with a flogging!”

That said, the Passion play ultimately seemed so out of step with contemporary Christian culture that I couldn’t take it too seriously. So I’ll go with the Creation Museum because it was actually worse than I expected. Before I visited it I didn’t really understand Young Earth Creationism. I had thought it was a form of pseudoscience—that is, a false belief system that nonetheless attempts to do what science does: explain something. But the creationists at this museum aren’t genuinely interested in how the world was created or where people come from. Creationism is valuable to them to the extent that it is a tool for converting people to conservative Christianity, and, by extension, waging war against what they see as anti-Christian forces.

I know that sounds paranoid, but check out the last photo on my online appendix page for the museum. It’s a slide from a PowerPoint presentation by Ken Ham, the founder of the museum, and it shows how a fortress built on creationism can destroy humanism and its attendant symptoms, such as school violence and homosexuality.

Give your sales pitch. Why do Christians need to read Rapture Ready! Why do non-believers need to read it?

You know, it’s not really a message book. Mainly I hope people will read it because it’s entertaining. But I think in general there needs to be more communication between believers and non-believers. Christians are often too willing to retreat into their bubble and non-Christians are only too happy to let them stay there. But insularity is a breeding ground for fundamentalism, which is not in the interest of either Christians or the rest of us. And on the flip
side, secular America’s insularity from Jesus’ message of universal brotherhood and moral responsibility is a recipe for, well, Jersey Shore. What I’m saying is, we can all benefit from thinking harder about other ways to live.

What was the coolest thing that happened to you in 2009? Was it getting hired as a writer for The Daily Show? Or getting to interview Paul and Ringo for your New York Times Magazine cover story on The Beatles: Rock Band?

Hmm. I think I’m obligated to say the birth of my daughter in September, even though she’s my third child and, let’s face it, the novelty wears off after a while.

——————

Thanks, Daniel. Rapture Ready! really is a great book. It’s funny, well-written, open-minded, and interested in doing more than just poking fun at the rampant weirdness of Christian culture. You should go buy it right now. And as long as you’re following my commands, go pre-order O Me of Little Faith. And make me a sandwich.

Daniel has graciously agreed to a giveaway. He’s offering a free copy of the book plus an accompanying soundtrack CD. The CD is a nicely packaged but bootleg compilation of, in his words, “great, not-so-great and just plain terrible Christian music inspired by the book.” It features tracks from musicians he meets, discusses, or who illustrate points he makes in the book — from Larry Norman to T-Bone Burnett to Andy Hunter. “I still listen to it regularly,” he says.

To enter your name in a random drawing to win the book and CD, simply leave a comment below. Daniel’s an occasional commenter here anyway, and will be stopping by today to join any discussion that develops. If you have any questions you want to ask him directly, feel free.

We’ll choose the winner randomly after 9 am tomorrow and let you know.

I’m the oldest of three Boyett siblings. I’ve discussed my brother the prestidigitator and his inner-city ministry a time or two, but haven’t ever said much about my little sister. I’m not sure of the reason for this, other than the fact that she hasn’t ever been very active online, and I didn’t have anywhere to link.

In retrospect, that sounds really dumb, but it might in fact be true. Anyway, she’s online now. Micha Boyett-Hohorst is now blogging as the Mama:Monk and tweeting as @mbhohorst, and it’s about stinking time. She’s an excellent writer, a wonderful person, and the only Boyett family member to have lived in the Northeast Yankee Territories (Philadelphia) and the West Coast Liberal Territories (San Francisco) of the United States. She’s practically an alien life form in our family, but we love her all the same.

You need to meet her. So I decided to interview my very own sister, a graduate-degree poet who, just a few weeks into it, has already created a fascinating blog about motherhood and monasticism.

Jason: I’ve always thought you’d make a good blogger, but you’ve held out for a long time. Why make the leap now?

Micha: I am the least Internet-savvy 30-year-old on the continent. I am miserable about Facebook and I’m still getting used to email. I would have been so happy being a character in a Jane Austen novel. I could sit around all day drinking tea in an uncomfortable dress, my only task to write long letters with a pen and actual paper.

Also, I spent the last four years in full time youth ministry. It was not a season of my life where I felt I could focus on writing. Now that I’m staying home full time with my little boy, I’m excited about it.

Where did the fascination with Benedictine monks come from? You know we’re Baptists, right?

I know, I know. I’m the worst Baptist ever. My Baptist college won’t even claim me anymore now that I went off the deep end and baptized my baby in an Anglican church.

The monk fascination started with a love for the liturgy. My faith often feels weak and really delicate. I need an earthy reassurance. There’s something about the liturgy that secures me, that tethers me in a fixed, permanent way to the believers who’ve gone before me. It’s this powerful connection. I love that the prayers and creeds and scripture passages we speak on Sunday in the liturgy are the same that believers all over the world are speaking. I love that we’re praying what has been prayed for centuries.

August’s birth changed everything, including my spiritual life. I was prepared for the outward changes motherhood would bring: diapering and comforting and feeding. But I wasn’t prepared for what motherhood would do to my inner life. My sense of normalcy changed so much that I struggled to focus on anything else but August. The time and attention that prayer required seemed impossible and that produced in me an overwhelming anxiety. I needed to relearn how to pray.

Around that time I was reading Kathleen Norris’ book The Cloister Walk, a book about a year she spent in a Benedictine monastery. Her prologue mentions that Benedictines live as if there is enough time each day for work, study, rest and prayer. And I had this moment of clarity: That’s what I need. Enough time to be a mom and pray and still enjoy the things and people I love. So I figured I’d better let Benedict and his monks start teaching me how to not be a crazy mother.

What was one of the biggest surprises about motherhood for you?

Amazingly, it has relaxed me. August has slowed me down in really lovely ways. Since I’m a naturally anxious person, I was fearful that when he was born, I’d be freaking out and screaming at my husband and constantly worried about all the ways he could die. And don’t get me wrong, I can still be nervous about the little guy, but the first time I held him, I felt my insides settle a little.

I have always been concerned with doing enough, wanting my life to count for something. Being a mother naturally forced me into another schedule, a much slower, all consuming schedule. And I can’t find my worth any more in how much I can “accomplish” each day. Because, really, with a toddler, I can’t accomplish much other than playing and eating and living.

You’ve been a mom for a couple of years now, in two different parts of the country. How is motherhood in San Francisco different from being a mom in Philadelphia?

We were in the suburbs in Philly. And we are right in the city here in San Francisco. I love being in the city with August. He’s exposed to so much of the world here. I love that we can walk down our block at 8:30 in the morning and see fifty elderly people from Chinatown doing Tai-Chi in the park. He hears people speaking Mandarin all the time. We come across homeless people every day and he’s learning to smile at them and say hi. I love the community feeling of having one park that all the kids in the neighborhood go to every day because there’s nowhere else to play.

In Philly, August had some really special adults in his life who loved him and prayed for him. As much as we live in more of a physical community here, it’s surface level and based around location. I know it takes time to develop meaningful relationships, but I miss the support system we had in Philadelphia.

You have a prestigious MFA in poetry from Syracuse. How is that degree impacting your life right now? (I ask this on behalf of the blue-collar side of our family.)

Thank you for the meaningful question, brother! It’s impacting my life because poetry is just a part of my life. I’ve always loved sound and form and rhythm. Poetry creates an emotion or image or moment of beauty in such a small amount of space. Every word has a purpose. Nothing’s wasted. Poetry doesn’t need anything other than words to do its work. The words make the rhythm; the language is the music.

I know that people get their MFAs in poetry to actually “become” poets and though I’m not saying I’m a poetry failure, I’m also not an MFA success story. I worked on publishing poems for a while and got burned out by it. I don’t think I have what it takes to make it in the dangerous world of poetry! Maybe that’ll change and I’ll pursue it again, but for now I think poetry’s role in my life is to make me a mother who loves Art and allows that to give me joy and help me pray.

Plus, my blog is committed to memorizing poems! Woohoo!

Describe the three Boyett siblings, as a whole, in a sentence of six words or less.

Three blond child-waifs eat burritos.

I think that fittingly describes our childhood.

Wow. I wasn’t sure you could do it, but that pretty much sums it up. Well done. So after three weeks of blogging, what do you like best about it?

I love the pressure of writing everyday. I love hearing from readers and feeling like we’re connecting. And I love having a place where I can work through what I’m learning on a daily basis.

What are your goals for Mama:Monk?

I want Mama:Monk to be a place that challenges me and my readers to live a life of contemplation in the midst of the craziness of motherhood. I’m hoping it challenges us to live out a calling to hospitality in a culture that has locked individual families away neatly in suburban homes and broken our relationships to the point that friendships are something we have to schedule.

I want it to be a place where we can struggle with the complexities of being a stay-at-home mom in a culture that doesn’t value that choice. I hate meeting new people and having to answer the, “So what do you do?” question. It’s so loaded. Why is it so hard to value myself and my role as a stay-at-home mom? I want to learn how to answer that question without feeling like a lame-o.

I want to learn with my readers how to be moms of confidence and joy who live like monks, without being bald and wearing robes. (Well, sometimes I wear a robe.)

Why is August (the child) awesome?

Because today while we read his dinosaur book. I read: “There were dinosaurs with clubs on their tails,” and he lovingly caressed the dinosaur and said: “Boomboom! Owowow!”

Why is August (the month) awesome?

Fireflies. Swimming pools. My birthday. New school clothes!

What do you think my readers need to know about me that I probably would never tell them because I am too image-conscious?

They should know that when you were in high school you tried to be a Christian rapper. Mom sewed you several pairs of MC Hammer-esque balloon pants — I recall a pair of black with white polka dots — which you wore on a daily basis (or at least around our house). You and some friends performed a rap at my youth group’s middle school Valentine party. And (should I say it?), you called yourselves “The Sheep Posse.”

Wow. It’s out there. How do you feel, buddy?

Well. I certainly regret having asked that question. You couldn’t have talked about my beautiful hair? Regardless: Sheep posse, ho!

————–

So that’s my sister, Micha. If you’re a mom — stay-at-home or otherwise — you need to be reading her blog. If you’re like me, you’ll also enjoy it, just because my sister is a deep spiritual thinker, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer.

Go get to know the Mama:Monk and follow her on Twitter.