Jason Brocious (left) officiates a discussion at Lehigh Valley Humanists. PHOTO COURTESY OF JASON BROCIOUS
I have fond memories of Route 61. During my childhood summers, it was a yellow brick road to the paradise that was Knoebels Amusement Park. The lush mountain scenery and small towns my family and I passed through, along with the increasingly elaborate billboards advertising the park (a 3-D Ferris wheel!), made the journey as exciting as the destination. Last winter, I had the idea to do a column about interesting places people can visit on the way to Knoebels. During my research, I found that Knoebels is surrounded by an unusually large number of religious sites. Route 61 is a sort of pilgrimage route, probably the only one on Earth that ends with roller coasters and baked potatoes. You can call it El Camino de Kozmo. In this column, I seek to reveal the histories of these holy places and what they mean to the people who worship there. From great churches to one man’s passion, these sites tell diverse stories of faith, love and humanity’s relationship with the divine in Northeast Pennsylvania.
“Let me ask you this,” James DiPrima says. “Do you remember being in the womb before you were born?”
DiPrima and I were talking about what happens when we die. It’s an unusual topic to discuss with a stranger, but for this column, nothing is off the table. 27-year-old DiPrima, born and raised in Pottsville, is an atheist. He doesn’t believe in any god, nor does he believe in the afterlife. When he dies, he expects nothing, the same complete unconsciousness he experienced before he was born.
“It’s not to say I know there isn’t a God,” DiPrima said, “because you can’t disprove a negative. I just believe that the organized part can make religion a questionable institution.”
In 2014, DiPrima wrote a letter to the editor of the Republican-Herald about atheism in Schuylkill County.
“We exist, we are among you and no, we’re not trying to destroy your religion at all,” DiPrima wrote in his letter. “I feel that you don’t need God in order to be a good person.”
After his letter was published, DiPrima got a book in the mail from an anonymous sender. The book was a religious prophecy about the end of the world - DiPrima rejected it as “pseudoscience.”
“Being an atheist has made me think more critically of life in general,” he said. “I question more than I did when I was religious.”
The Lehigh Valley Humanists clean up a road. They want to prove that you don’t need to be religious to do the right thing. PHOTO COURTESY OF JASON BROCIOU
DiPrima was raised Methodist and began questioning his faith in 2011. At first it didn’t bother him - even Saint Thomas doubted. While attending college at Penn State Schuylkill, he was part of a religious group on campus. When he mentioned that he wanted to get involved with the campus LGBTQ group, the reaction was not positive. The religious group did not want to be associated with such a thing. This made DiPrima, who is bisexual, even more doubtful of his faith. He was frustrated by how some religious people’s attitudes did not align with what they claimed to believe about loving thy neighbor. He started listening to George Carlin routines skewering religion, and “things started to click.”
For this column, I have been interviewing people of all faiths and denominations in Schuylkill County and the surrounding area, but I realized that something was missing. Where were the people who identified with the fastest-growing religious affiliation in America: none? Speaking to three atheists who grew up in Schuylkill County, I found that it’s not easy being a nonbeliever in a region where religion is a cornerstone of civic and cultural life. The atheists of Schuylkill County find themselves in complex relationships with the faith they lost, and conflicts within the atheist movement. That being said, Jason Brocious warns me against painting with too broad a brush.
“I’d caution you from stereotyping atheists according to what any one or two people would say,” said Brocious, 43, of Gordon. “Ultimately, any atheist is an atheist because they lack a belief in a god, but their motivations behind it, an important part of their identity, can range quite a bit.”
“I don’t use the identity title ‘atheist’ because thanks to the Internet, it’s almost as cultish as the religious right,” DiPrima said.
DiPrima is referring to the “New Atheist” movement of the 2000s and early 2010s, in which atheists began to carve a space for themselves in the public sphere. Figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens became icons due to their fierce criticism of organized religion and belief that society would be better off without God. The abrasive nature of such statements, and the political implications thereof, turned atheism into a culture war, not just with religious zealots but with other atheists. Brocious calls the whole thing “rather ugly.”
“In the past five years,” he said, “organized atheism has lost a little steam as many of us are more motivated by other political concerns, ones we often have in common with some religious folk.”
Growing up in Gordon, Brocious and his family were “plain Jane” Lutherans. Over the years, his family grew more devout as they began watching evangelists on TV.
“Witnessing evangelical testimony that accompanied requests for donations seemed very manipulative,” he said.
In college, Brocious began having conversations about hell and the tenets of Christianity.
“It all began to make less and less sense,” he remembers. “Why would a loving God sacrifice his son, and require people to believe on faith alone to avoid eternal torture? Why would a loving God allow the choice of religion to be so confusing and divisive?”
At first, Brocious became an Episcopalian, partly because of their rich tradition of choral music. Now living in Collegeville, Brocious believes that religion “can stunt moral and scientific progress” but sings in a church choir. The music still speaks to him, and he wants to find common ground with his fellow singers despite their different views.
“To me, people’s values are much more important than their beliefs,” he said.
When Brocious finally became an atheist, his religious family and friends made it hard for him to “come out” as such. He considers himself lucky - some atheists are disowned by their religious families. Being an atheist in Schuylkill County was lonely. Luckily, a group called the Lehigh Valley Humanists was nearby.
“It was a safe place to speak freely about my views,” he said. “One thing that atheists tend to converge on is skepticism.“
Humanism is a philosophy closely associated with atheism. Scott Rhoades of Ashland, founder of the Lancaster Freethought Society, describes it as “a philosophy that embraces human reason.”
“I reject religious dogma, the supernatural or spiritualism as a rationale for human morality or decision-making.”
Scott Rhodes (center) officiates non-religious weddings. PHOTO COURTESY OF NEW TRADITIONS
In 2011, Rhoades was ordained into the Church of Spiritual Humanism, and he officiates non-religious weddings with his Chambersburg-based business, New Traditions. Rhoades’ experience was similar to that of Brocious and DiPrima. As a child, he regularly attended his evangelical church but also nurtured a love of science. When he went to college, he stopped attending church and began to explore both science and religion. He started reading Enlightenment philosophical texts from the 18th century, which espoused secularism and religious pluralism.
“If I believe something, I want to make sure that there is good reason to believe it,” he said. “I found that there was not sufficient evidence at the end for me to believe in Christianity. I didn’t like how they tended to treat other people who weren’t like them. For example, homosexuals.”
Only one thing was missing for Rhoades and Brocious - community. For the last ten years that he lived in Ashland, most of Rhoades’ discussions with like-minded people were online.
“The one thing that religion does well is community,” Rhoades said, “but I formed my own community.”
“I wouldn’t want to pull anyone’s support from under their feet,” Brocious said, “but I do wish people could find comfort and support in other ways that weren’t intertangled with the problems caused and perpetuated by religion. At the end of the day, our comfort, tribalism, traditions and involvement with institutions often keep us in religions, even when they don’t make logical sense to us.”
Humanist societies like those in Lancaster and the Lehigh Valley provided that sort of comfort to Brocious and Rhoades. Rhoades pointed out that the most religious places tend to be the most filled with humanists wanting to carve out a space for their beliefs. They attacked superstition and promoted the separation of church and state - two central ideals of New Atheism. It took a long time for Rhoades to accept the atheist label after losing his religion, but he has grown proud of it. He still doesn’t discuss the topic with certain family members - like politics, it’s a taboo subject. At the same time, he has gained more respect for other beliefs.
“I gained a life without fear of going to hell,” he said, “I gained a greater appreciation of my life now and how I live it, to love the people I wanna love because this is all there is.”
Brocious found the best t-shirt he ever saw at an atheist meetup. “Smile!” It read. “There is no Hell.” The shirt perfectly summed up his philosophy - live for today. If anything, the idea that nothing happens after we die gives Brocious a strange comfort. “We need to look out for each other as humans because no one else will,” Brocious said. “‘Thoughts and prayers’ aren’t solutions. I know that bad things can happen to anyone, so I never take anything for granted.”