Joel Klinepeter recalls the exact moment a few months ago when he realized he no longer believed in God.
“I was actually watching Bill Maher’s ‘Religulous,’ ” the 26-year-old Fort Wayne resident says, referring to the HBO talk-show host’s 2008 movie sendup of religion.
“But it wasn’t just that movie that did it,” he adds quickly. “It was a lot of things. … I just had that epiphany (then) that belief in God didn’t make sense.”
For several months, Klinepeter says, he thought he was alone in the universe, let alone Fort Wayne. Raised in an evangelical Christian home headed by a father who was an ordained minister, Klinepeter knew well what a prominent role religion played in Fort Wayne life.
But then he found FreeThought Fort Wayne, a group that bills itself as “a community of people who want to live without religious belief.”
“Everyone at this table I can call a friend and I can discuss issues with,” Klinepeter says, gesturing around a table of six at Fort Wayne’s Firefly Coffee House, where group members sometimes meet informally – yes, on Sunday mornings. “We may disagree on a lot of things, because we tend to be a very diverse group, but we have a lot of things in common.”
Andy Diekroger, 34, of Fort Wayne, one of the group’s founders, says FreeThought Fort Wayne has as a major purpose – comforting the religiously unaffiliated.
“It’s such a taboo,” he says of admitting non-belief. “We want people in Fort Wayne to know there’s an environment where you can tell people you’re not religious and not be disowned.”
Still, several members say declaring their own non-belief has been difficult at best.
Rachel Surface, 26, of Roanoke says her hardest moment was trying to tell a relative who knew of her stance that she wouldn’t feel comfortable being a godparent of the relative’s child because it meant instructing the child in a religion she didn’t believe in.
Katie Ward, 28, of Fort Wayne remembers the reaction at a play group when she declared not only that she didn’t go to church but she had not had her daughter baptized.
Another mother looked at her, aghast, she recalls. “She said, ‘Well, are you going to get her baptized? Because if you’re not, she’s going to hell.’ That was the last time we went to that play group,” Ward says.
But group members say they’re determined to make Fort Wayne residents stop looking at non-theists as if they have two heads.
Diekroger says the group wants to expose Fort Wayne residents to perspectives not often heard in the City of Churches.
He defines free thought as “a philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of science and logical principles and not be compromised by authority, tradition or dogma.” Free thought does encompass atheism and agnosticism, he says, but the group consists of people with many belief systems and anyone is welcome.
Besides formal meetings at 7 p.m. the second Wednesday of the month at the Allen County Public Library, FreeThought Fort Wayne has sponsored speakers, including a recent talk by Christian religious scholar-turned atheist Robert Price, who last month offered a critique on biblical literalism.
The group also maintains a Web site at www.freethoughtfortwayne.org and a presence on Facebook and Twitter.
Then there’s “The Enlightenment Show,” a Diekroger-produced public-access cable TV program that airs at 7 p.m. Mondays on Comcast’s Channel 57 and Verizon FiOS Channel 27 and is also posted as video on the Web site.
The show has included interviews with proponents of atheist, rationalist and free-thought points of view and group members’ spin on current affairs.
The most recent addition: “Dial-an-Atheist,” once-a-month call-in editions of the show in which Chad Butterbaugh of Fort Wayne and others in the group field questions from viewers live.
“An atheist in the broadest sense is simply one who lacks belief in any god or gods – that’s ‘a’ as in ‘not’ or ‘without’ and ‘theism’ as in ‘belief in God or gods,’ ” says Butterbaugh, 29, introducing the June 15 edition, “What is an Atheist?”
“It’s a descriptive term, and that’s all. It’s not an insult, it’s not a club, and it’s not an indicator of some other big, broad philosophy,” Butterbaugh continues, with the bespectacled, earnest demeanor of a 19th-century law clerk.
“And under that definition, I would say that I am an atheist. Jake, comfortable saying that?”
“Oh yeah. I’m an atheist, definitely,” replies co-host Jake Doelling of Fort Wayne with a cheery smile.
The two go on to talk to one caller about the difference between “atheist” and “non-theist” and another caller who confesses to being an agnostic before wrapping up with discussions about whether it’s possible to be friends with a theist and whether one needs to believe in God to be a moral person.
Diekroger says the answer to that is emphatically no. The group is beginning to organize community service projects for members to prove they value helping others. One project is cleaning up litter in Indiana’s Adopt-a-Highway program.
Members, he says, also want to advocate for societal positions they consider important – separation of church and state, the teaching of science in public schools unadulterated by religious beliefs, civil rights and pseudo-science and health quackery, among other things.
“We want people to know we’re normal people. We have our own joys and fears and disappointments and sorrows like everybody else,” Diekroger says.
Adds Doelling: “Most people I talk to wouldn’t know I’m an atheist or that I don’t believe in God. It’s not something that I go shouting from the rooftops or anything like that. It’s one of those things that normally doesn’t come into play.”
But sometimes, one has to break the news. “Less than a month ago was when I talked to my family. I never hid it. But I was worried I’d get a really bad reception. My biggest fear (was) that I’d make my mom cry,” Klinepeter says.
“No, she didn’t cry. She took the news fairly well,” he adds. “Our relationship hasn’t changed. We still act the same way around each other.
“But I got the impression she thinks I’ll eventually come back to the fold, which isn’t terribly likely. But all in all, (it was) not a bad experience.”
