It Must Be Worse in the Deep South…

I was 17 at the time, and dating a girl who wasn’t particularly religious, but her mother was a diehard catholic. Being young and what we considered to be in love, things were starting to get heavy when we thought we were alone, little did I know her hyper religious mother was hiding in the closet of the basement we were in, to jump out and start screaming about how I was a great defiler and an agent of satan. She then blocked my exit and read scripture to me for something like twenty minutes before I just made a dash for the stairs and to my car. Left my gameboy color there. Never looked back. We broke up a week later.

I met a guy at a student party. We went out once or twice and I invited him to my place. That evening he told me that he’s not going to have sex until marriage. (I honestly don’t remember how that came up.)

I never saw him again… He did invite me to his church group (on the biggest student party night of the year) but I politely refused.

Oh, this is a good one! I’m Latino and dated my first African American woman last summer. We have many things in common (music, movies, moral beliefs, etc.). She is very affectionate and loved to kiss. We fell in love with one another in just a week’s time. I felt that we were lovers despite many differences: cultural, racial, social. We successfully breached that interracial gap.

On the eighth day, though, a Sunday, she asked me if I went to church. I said no, to which she asked if I believed in God. I said I didn’t know if anything was out there and I was okay with that–she definitely was not.

“Honey, no, that’s a deal-breaker,” she told me. We had a horrible, tear-soaked break-up that night. But that wasn’t the end of it.

We had an off-again-on-again relationship for many months after that, breaking up three times in total. My lack of religious conviction “got in our way” the first time we broke up (she said I needed to know that God loved her because she was made in his image). The last time, she said something that shot off like a red flag: I told her that her touch could heal cancer; she said no, that her prayers do. When we broke up, she said she was “disappointed,” as if she expected me to turn around for her. I sure didn’t expect her to go faithless for me, and I think that’s the major difference. You should love someone for who they are, not for who you want them to be.

Shawn, I don’t even… *shudder*

I dated this chick who called herself “super christian” and everytime i talked about religions other than chrisitanity she flipped shit at me

Having lived in Nashville for 4 years now, it is definitely very possible to avoid all the religious stuff here. However, being a grad student at Vanderbilt helps out a lot, as most of my friends are similarly non-religious.

My biggest beef is with the blue laws still on the books that ban liquor sales all day and beer sales before Noon on Sundays.

Heh… with my ex, she ended up ceasing going to church, which was fine with me… but it caused her mother to ask no less than five people at our wedding to try to talk her out of it.

I mean while we were at the altar. We specifically had to ask the pastor (father of a school friend, because nobody else would do the ceremony) to skip asking if anyone had any objections because of the mother-in-law to-be. xP

I never had a date with a fundamental Christian because in my circle of friends in the deep south one of the first questions when you meet anyone is about which church they attend. If one of my friends or co-workers had wanted to set me up on a date, the co-worker would have already known that I didn’t attend the “right” (or any) church.

What sucks is even if you date ex-christians, people still have the same hangups. A few months ago a girl hit me up on OkCupid (where I’m listed explicitly as an atheist and I mention heading up an atheist group). Despite not being a Christian or believing in God, she was scared about anything that had to do with her morality. She was particularly defensive about justifying her sex life.

It was really obvious that she loved sex, despite the way she said “I’m just not a very sexual person.” And she also insisted that she “only had sex with people she was in a long-term relationship with.” This girl was obviously sex-negative and just had huge hangups about being viewed (or viewing herself?) as a slut. The entire thing was just some cage she built in her mind.

not quite but almost on topic:

A friend in college was not just atheist, but actively and vocally anti-Christian, as only the young and indignant can be. A mutual friend met with her to announce her engagement. After the immediate exchange of congrats and whatnot, J rather sheepishly admitted her fiance was a christian, bracing against K’s response. Surprisingly, K just said, “Oh, well, that’s fine if it works for him. At least he’s not a mormon!”

Oops.

In Canada I’d say it’s the complete opposite. If you want to date a Christian, you pretty much have to meet them at church. And considering the church is something like 70% women and is mostly over 50, that usually leaves an average of about one single guy of datable age (I’m 23 and most of my friends are in the similar 20-25 range). I’ve had a few female friends complain quite a bit about the challenge of it.

I’ve lived in Nashville for four years and counting, and I haven’t ran into many “devout” at all. Although we do have Lifeway here, which is a Christian publishing company and a huge employer. But then again, most of my peers are fellow freethinkers and college-aged adults.

I dated a pastor’s daughter in college. I’ll never forget the time that we hung out with her friends from class (a Jewish girl and a Muslim girl) and afterward she whispered to me how sad she was that they were going to hell.

Also she had an unfortunate combination of a strong sex drive and shame issues. Which meant that we would fool around on Saturday nights but then she’d go into a shame spiral and spend the rest of the week repenting.

I think I’ll start calling it the “Ignorance Belt.”

The only overtly religious person I’ve dated was actually a Scientologist, when I was 20. This was long before Tom Cruise was jumping on couches or John Travolta even considered playing a goofy-looking alien in Battlefield Earth, and I was intrigued by the whole idea. After reading the copy of Dianetics that he loaned me, however, I couldn’t understand why Scientology Guy was so negative about psychology when he fully subscribed to this bullshit version of it without anything but Hubbard’s say-so. It was like being with someone who not only subscribed whole-heartedly to astrology but rejected astronomy altogether. The story would be more interesting if he had tried to sue me or something, but we just quietly broke up with me thinking he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the world.

At least they’re trying to be somewhat consistent. There is at least one passage that says Christians should not marry non-Christians, and many of them feel that dating and romantic relationships are supposed to be to find a marriage mate.

And frankly, I think atheists would generally save themselves trouble if they can avoid dating religious people.

I dated a beautiful (virgin ) nurse .We got along great and I was falling for her .One night she asked me to stay over her friends house with her .Well We made out pretty hot and heavy ,which led to her first 69 experience .We fell over exhausted and hugged each other until morning .Shortly after she told me she felt so guilty ,that she confessed to a priest and shortly broke off with me .I still care for her til this day

I’m gay. I had a couple dates with a mormon guy once. If that isn’t weird enough to begin with, he was a real true believer, really involved in the church… knew the head of the church personally and everything.

While we had two dates, at no time did he touch me in any way. He explained that he’d decided it was okay for him to date guys as long as he didn’t get physical with them, and he wouldn’t kiss a guy or anything unless he knew it was the guy he would spend the rest of his life with, because it’d have to be a guy worth going to hell for.

And he meant it.

A true and touching dating story:
Once upon a time I was dating a confused girl who was considering entering the novitiate to become a Catholic nun. She was Irish-Italian from an insanely hardcore Catholic family.
She had done the whole sleepover thing at the convent several times and was undergoing counseling, etc. to see if this was the right thing for her.
The Mother Superior begged to her stay away from me as she was sure that I was Satan tempting her.
She was a virgin when we met. Was.
Then heaven and earth were torn asunder as the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary and Lord Jesus wept at what I had done.
Afterward, I retired before a crackling fire to a pipe and brandy. (Okay, I made that last shit up.)
The end.

When I was an agnostic I went out with a woman who told me that she wanted to be married and would only marry a pastor of a church.

I asked her, “What the heck are you doing here with me?”

She said something about being bored.

I had a boyfriend in HS who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family. His parents told him he was going against his family, his church and his god by dating me. Funniest part of the story, though, is that they didn’t know I was an atheist… they assumed I was Catholic because I was attending a catholic high school. We didn’t last long… not because of his parents, but because me being such a bad influence was the most exciting part of our relationship.

I went out with a girl who was into EST (the Forum) which is very culty, but doesn’t have a god – more of a self immprovement through neurosis kinda thing.

The worst thing I’ve ever been told was from a 20 year old girl:
“You can’t be an atheist, you claim that just to impress people”!

(she couldn’t imagine that she was ever going to meet an atheist in her life!)

cheers from Greece

I left my religion at age 21 — I didn’t date before that. I knew I couldn’t handle the no-sex-before-marriage thing. Plus, I wasn’t the “normal” kind of girl that all the boys wanted, so I got only leftover pickings of boys in that church. I was friends with ’em, but couldn’t date them. I knew how it would go, also apparently I was always a lesbian but didn’t know it.

My friends of the time, including my siblings, all got married too young. They don’t “believe” in divorce, so no matter how crazy (possibly in a technical way) my in-laws are, they won’t be leaving them. Frankly this subject makes me sad.

I dated a very religious Christian guy (who was basically a fundamentalist) during the end of my freshman year/beginning of my sophomore year of college. We had a lot of things in common- we were both nerds, we both had a strange sense of humor, etc. There were lots of red flags that I stupidly ignored because I liked the guy so much. Before we even officially started dating, he told me that he would never marry me because I wasn’t a Christian. That didn’t bug me too much. I didn’t (and still don’t) want to get married. After we had dated for a few months, he told me that when he first met me, he thought God was calling him to save me. Looking back on that conversation, I realize that I should have dumped him right then. Alas, I didn’t.
I went to his church with him several times. It was the typical fundie church that had rock music and a younger pastor to make it look “hip”. The sermons were often about how nonbelievers couldn’t have meaningful lives and that women were supposed to obey EVERYTHING that men told them to do. I often burst into tears after those services out of sheer anger.
My ex’s family definitely disliked me. His dad told him that he needed to convert me or else we had to stop dating. Amazingly, I didn’t get too freaked out until my ex wanted me to read “Case for the Creator” and a Christian dating book. Both were so rage-provoking that I still can’t think of a coherent response to them. After 6 months of dating, we had a nasty break up after he told me that he had never really liked me that much.
(This occurred in SC)

Speaking from 50 yrs of experience of being lost in the bible belt, specifically the “buckle of the bible belt” aka Nashville, TN. There are a surprising number of atheists out there but most are “in the closet”. If you come out of that closet you risk being ostrisized(sp) by friends, family and even risk your job if your employer discovers your view(s) as many employers in the area are connected to christian music/literary publishing. I have even experienced a co-worker expressing her request to have the department pray for a family member and then have the dept manager lead the dept in prayer! I have been at family dinners where the local high school football team was given 5 minutes in prayer for victory! I could go on but it makes my head spin just thinking about it.
But…as I inch my way out of the closet and see many in a younger generation being more questioning and less accepting there is a little hope.
I do not aspire to “de-convert” anyone. All I want is my right respected to believe anything I want to believe just as I try to respect others’ right to freedom of and from religion.

The very first time I said something about the way that the churchgoers gossip about one another *right after* having heard sermons about treating one another with respect my relationship began to crumble. Not because of the guy I was involved with, but because of his mother. It was a horrific process, and one that would take ages to document, but it involved an attempted intervention/exorcism.

Canadian crazy religious nutjobs are just as insane as their American counterparts.

I briefly dated a Christian once. He was friends with my cousin and had a huge crush on me so we had a drunken one night stand after which he wanted to date me but do nothing physical beyond kissing, because he thought that sex was reserved for marriage and we shouldn’t have done that before. He also thought I should regret every guy I had ever slept with before as well, and I was new enough as an atheist that I couldn’t stand up for myself. Any time we drank together I ended up crying.

Then I moved for a 3 month internship and he stopped calling me (it was daily before that) and didn’t return my calls. I later found out he was already dating someone else (this after he told me he was getting his life back on track and shouldn’t really be dating anybody, but he’d make an exception for me. I feel “blessed” (haha) that my internship got me out of that relationship before it was too late.

Oh, and his biggest reason for believing in god had something to do with rainbows and sunrises.

Josh, is it possible for you to date the non-religious partiers and help them change their minds? In a non creepy way, of course.

My friend’s husband asked her one pointed question while they were first dating, and she’s an atheist now. Presumably it isn’t quite this easy, but she is a minister’s daughter who attended a xtian college.

*anecdotal and perhaps apocryphal, but maybe inspiring of hope?

“What do you have against God?”

In a very long life, I have only been asked this question twice (actually once it was “Why do you hate god?”) – my standard answer is: “Which one?”

If the say “But there is only one, true god” the reply “that’s just your opinion” usually closes the conversation. Really nasty people can say instead: “What do you have against all the others?”

Angel wrote:

The very first time I said something about the way that the churchgoers gossip about one another *right after* having heard sermons about treating one another with respect my relationship began to crumble. Not because of the guy I was involved with, but because of his mother. It was a horrific process, and one that would take ages to document, but it involved an attempted intervention/exorcism.

Canadian crazy religious nutjobs are just as insane as their American counterparts.

Being a Canadian in Southern Ontario and having met/known only one CRN (crazy religious nutjob), I’m very curious to know where you are….

If it’s not too personal, what province are you in?

I really wanted a good story here. I’m a life long atheist from Georgia.

I’ve racked my brain for an instance where religion precipitated a fight or breakup in my life. It never has.

The current me says it was the lower level of religiosity in the early 80’s.

The highschool me says because talking about god never got you laid.

I am a Christian in a long-term, very very wonderful relationship with a (insert whatever title he prefers today) non-believer. Well, I’m not even quite sure if that’s right now–it certainly was two years ago when we started dating in an agonizing 2-month long display of love/guilt/excitement/fear. Since then, here is what has changed: we have each grown incredibly as spiritual people. He has started to recognize and find beauty in his own (still non-Christian) spiritual journey, and I have found incredible connection with God and the universe through openness to non-Christian ideas. We have each become much more humble about our beliefs, knowing that no argument, no matter how clever, will convert the other. A few weeks ago we almost broke up; I found that I had been censoring my own (very real) religious life in order to keep him from being uncomfortable. Since then, and our decision to give it another shot, we’ve started sharing more openly about our spiritual and non-rational lives, and found new depths in our relationship with each other and in our own existential journeys. We’re both changing, becoming more open, both to each other and to God/the universe/beauty/Truth. No doubt its hard; some days it feels like we’re totally crazy and will never succeed; but I can credit so much growth in my journey with God to my beautiful, non-believing, open-minded, compassionate lover.

“Do you believe in the Easter Bunny?”

“Of course not!”

“What do you have against the Easter Bunny?”

I married one…
Had to leave topics like “evilution” alone and avoid discussing many other scientific advancements.
Her family would “cast out demons” on me whenever my back was turned. They also burned well over a decades worth of my writing and stories, some that were due for submitting.
She had a deep issue with my not being christian, yet she had no problem cheating on me with my married best friend… and a random guy at the lake… and whoever a friend set her up with…

Palebluedot5 wrote:

I went to his church with him several times. It was the typical fundie church that had rock music and a younger pastor to make it look “hip”. The sermons were often about how nonbelievers couldn’t have meaningful lives and that women were supposed to obey EVERYTHING that men told them to do. I often burst into tears after those services out of sheer anger.

YES. I went to the same kind of church with my ex several times. One time they had a Muslim convert talk about how sad she is that her parents are going to hell. The other time they screened a short film about an “average non-Christian’s life” and ended with a fade to black with the words “Isn’t something missing?” on it. I was appalled beyond belief.

I’ve really enjoyed reading all the comments. I have dated MANY religious people ….and the most religious when I live in NC of course! Now I am married to an nonreligious man from a very Catholic family. It is nice that he is not ‘into it’ for sure. The in-laws would love us to become interested in going to church especially now with children. With our first child I was worried that they would sneak baptize him while they watched him because she did say if something happened to him he would go to hell. I asked my husband once if his mother would be interested to know why I am not interested in Catholicism (the short version) and that being I don’t believe Jesus is the son of god. He though I shouldn’t go out of my way to upset her. At least she isn’t aggressive about it most of the time but Easter is very important to the family and it can get tough then.

I grew up Southern Baptist in Mississippi. I refused to date any one who smoked, drank, or was not a virgin.

Once I left home, all that changed.

I dated a Libertarian once. Does that count?

He was painfully naive. I hadn’t had much interaction with Libertarians before, so I didn’t realize the extent of his naivete until we’d been dating for several months. The extent to which he believed in theory and had no understanding of reality was astonishing. He was seriously privileged and he just had no idea.

His religion was weird too – he believed in a 1970s invention called Eckankar, which is full of woo. I’d never heard of it before I met him, and I found it baffling. The other woman he was dating also found it baffling; we couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I couldn’t understand why someone who was otherwise rational (other than the Libertarian thing, which I realize is a big “other”) would go for something as obviously fake as Eckankar. The best we ever got out of him was that he believed it because he thought it was pretty. I think he also liked it for the social aspect; he went to Eck conventions and made lots of friends there, and he’s a big extrovert, so that was a big draw for him.

The happy ending is that his other girlfriend and I are now great friends, and we’d never have met if not for him.

Okay so I normally save this for 2 beer gone, bar conversation but I think it should be added here. Premise, High school, I was still faithful, though not religious, and this was in a city in Alberta. I hung out with this girl and her friends for a couple of days trying to get to know her, and the courage to ask her out. They asked me all kinds of philosophy questions, and in the end I received a letter. 2 pages of dribble came down to one sentence

“You are not in love with the same god I am”

So yea, CRN’s are all over.

Luckily for me, I met my wife of 10 years in N. Carolina. She is very accepting and understanding of my atheism (but her family, not so much). She was raised Baptist but is now self defined as “Not Baptist, and not sure.”. NC is nice, but we moved away after about 3yrs, that culture now is almost intolerable to me. I dodged a bullet with her, she is a great mother/wife and I was not filtering for extreme religiousness (sp?) when we met, so for me to find her in that mass of religious girls in NC must have been god’s plan… ;]

Late to the party, but wanted to share:

My senior year of high school I dated a very Christian guy. I told him I was an atheist during our 3rd date, and later that night he kissed me for the first time, so I thought that maybe it would work out.

I made a point early on of telling him about times people had told me they would pray for me, and how insulting it was. He said he wouldn’t do that, but later admitted that he did pray for me.

Sex was what really got to him. He subscribed to a version of religion that said that thinking lustful thoughts was the same as having sex in your heart…or whatever. He was fine with making out and dry humping with clothes on, but he would not touch my breasts, even through clothes. It made him super uncomfortable. The night before we broke up, we’d been fooling around at my house and he actually got up and left without saying a thing. I had to chase him down in my car once I’d figured out that he he had headed home on foot. When I caught up with him we had a conversation about god where I thought we saw eye to eye, but he broke up with me the next day.

He was a good person, though. Ended up going to a pretty liberal college; I think he’s still religious but I hope he’s relaxed a bit.

My wife was more religious when I met her, but she’s become a lot more liberal in the 16 years since we married. She’s still a believer, but she doesn’t attend church, and she is a lot more liberal than I am. She even supports the decriminalization of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine.

I am from Alberta, Canada, which is the Canadian equivalent of Texas (Oil and Farming, Conservative Politics, and Old Tyme Relijun). Luckily for us, one can usually spot the really bad fundies a mile away, because they are all wearing crosses and WWJD apparel.

However there are all sorts of in-betweeners here, who are very similar to the cousins Julie_JJ describes in her post. They follow whichever parts of the Conservative/Religious zeitgeist they want and ignore the parts they don’t.

It’s funny how I look back at my teen years and see things through new eyes. My first girlfriend told me that her Daddy sent an angel from heaven to make sure I’d be with her. At first I thought it was cute, but then a few weeks later I realized the exact magnitude of the statement. Since then, I’ve mostly dated non-religious people, mostly because the things I was attracted to in a woman (Skepticism, Independence, Outspoken) were the things that religious women were indoctrinated that they should not be to attract a mate.

Of course, these are all personal experiences, so your mileage may vary.

I was raised in a non-religious household. I occasionally went to church with friends or extended family (my father’s family are fundamentalist Baptists), but didn’t ever really have a strong exposure to religion in general, and certainly not to the specifics of any particular group.

So fast forward to my junior year of high school when I had my first real relationship with a girl. I didn’t really bat an eye when she told me she was a devout Mormon, because I honestly didn’t know what that meant. She seemed to like me a lot, and we had a lot in common, so I didn’t put much thought into it. But it quickly became clear that her dating me was causing a lot of mental conflict (and possibly interpersonal conflict with church members). She really did like (love?) me, and wanted to be with me, but she also wanted to be dating a member of the church.

So she asked if I would come to her church. I did, a couple times. I seriously considered joining. I even read through the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Unfortunately, I think this had the opposite of her intended effect. I started asking questions. Questions she couldn’t answer. Questions the youth pastors couldn’t answer. Questions the church elders couldn’t answer.

She stopped asking me to come to church. Eventually, I had to break up with her because it was clear to me that the guilt cycle of us being together was eating her alive.

Went to high school in Nashville. Took a Church of Christ girl to prom. She was fine with going, and I knew nothing of Church of Christ doctrines.

Reading about them years later, I finally realized that’s why she adamantly refused to dance. At the time she wouldn’t tell me anything. Didn’t get a kiss, either, but that may have been about me rather than Jesus.

I may not live in the deep south, but conservative Carroll County Maryland is almost as backwards a place as I’ve ever been. Going to high school with the scores of teenage born-again christians who somehow find a way to reference God in just about everything they say is agravating. I feel as though having faith is a nice enough thing that I wasn’t raised with, but I have never EVER enjoyed having other people try and shove their religion in my face. I admit, I might be a little pushy on my end as well, but it fascinates me that well educated students in upper level science classes can still take the bible at face value rather than as a set of guiding principles and creation stories, a mythology of sorts.

I have lived in the south (several parts of VA and NC) my entire life and get tired of having to constantly defend it and myself from overblown stereotypes. Yes, there are many religious people here, a church on every corner it sometimes seems…but there are plenty of non-religious, too. In my personal experience…I have done a lot of dating and never found a shortage of atheists or agnostics to go out with.