Julia Sweeney on The argument from scripture
Sweeney's attempt to read the Bible seriously was a major catalyst for her loss of faith, as she found it morally and historically troubling.
One of the pivotal moments in Julia Sweeney's deconversion was her decision to actually read the Bible — not the curated selections presented in Sunday Mass, but the whole thing, cover to cover. What she found was deeply unsettling: a text filled with genocide, slavery, misogyny, and a God who seemed capricious, jealous, and cruel. The sanitised version she had absorbed through Catholic upbringing bore little resemblance to the actual content of the sacred text.
Sweeney describes in Letting Go of God how she tried to reconcile the troubling passages with her faith, seeking out apologetics and scholarly commentary. But the more she read, the harder reconciliation became. The God of the Old Testament commanded the slaughter of entire peoples, endorsed slavery, and punished minor infractions with death. These were not isolated passages but recurring themes — and no amount of contextualisation could make them compatible with the all-loving God she had been taught to worship.
Sweeney's critique of Scripture is notable for its tone: she is not angry or contemptuous but bewildered and saddened. She had expected that reading the Bible closely would strengthen her faith, and the discovery that it did the opposite was genuinely painful. Her account resonates with many former believers who have had the same experience of finding that the Bible, read honestly, is its own most effective critic.
“I thought reading the Bible would make me a better Catholic. Instead, it made me an atheist.”