I have no calling in a world where we all wonder what we're meant to do, who we're supposed to be.
My mom called me the other day to tell me one of my childhood friends would be moving to my hometown soon because her husband had accepted a job with the Baptist church next door to her Methodist church. I don’t know why she thinks I give a shit about small town gossip or any news that concerns the church seeing as how she’s very aware of how I feel about organized religion. Nevertheless, she has nothing else to tell me because her world is much smaller than mine.
“He used to be an airplane pilot,” she says.
“Then why is he going to be a youth minister? How will they survive? Where will the money come from?” I ask, appalled. I know from my instagram that his wife is a stay-at-home mom of three.
“It doesn’t matter, they’ll figure it out,” she brushes it off. “He has a calling to work for the Lord.”
A calling.
A goddamn calling.
Half of my life, I waited for some fucking calling to hit me in the face.
And it never did. No matter how much I prayed to the wall.
Nope.
This ideological concept of having a calling goes way way back. Religious scholars, especially the ones who study the three big Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, & Islam, in that order), have named this the Prophetic Call Narrative. Back in the Old Testament, if you remember, there were a great many prophets detailed in the books that have been passed down to us. Isaiah, Jonah, Daniel, Gideon, and so on and so forth. You know these names because you live in America, and there’s no escaping Christianity in some form. These men (and they were always men, of course) were called to a job, called to serve a higher power for some great unknowable purpose. That’s the definition of a prophet, being called to serve for a greater purpose. And this concept has made it all the way to modern day alive and well. Churches are still telling children in Sunday school that if they listen to God, they too will learn what their calling is. And despite the separation of church and state, this idea has permeated our culture as well. All you have to do is google, “what’s my calling?” and you’ll get articles for days telling you how to find your life’s greater purpose. And even when we aren’t dressing children up for church so they can learn about the prophets before them, we ask them in school, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as if they can only be one thing, and that’s what their calling will be.
But this narrative is toxic, and I’ll tell you why. Trusting blindly in the belief that the system (and organized religion IS a system) will guide you to your one true calling causes a great deal of unnecessary stress over which passion to follow. Not only do many people grow up wondering where God will put them, they neglect the other multiplicities of their selfhood in order to fulfill this one true calling.
You are a human. You are complicated. You have interests all over the board. Why should you have to pick? Why should you have to trust in a system that pays itself and not you? Because that’s what the church will do, believe me. You’re not being called to serve poor children in third world countries; you’re being used as a poster-child for promoting the church you go to so they can get more members who pay tithes. And don’t forget the narrative you’re participating in with mission trips, the little colonialism narrative, maybe you’ve heard of it?
But not to worry, I’m not the only one with this opinion. Although this topic hasn’t hit scholarship as far as I can see, it’s hit the public. All you have to google is, “I don’t have a calling,” and you’ll find the articles that will tell you why it’s better this way. You deserve to be paid, you deserve to have agency, you deserve to narrate your own life as you see fit instead of letting a system based on blind faith decide for you. This is your story and yours alone. People are fighting this “calling” narrative through confessional blogs and popular articles, but there’s a long way to go yet, if we’re going to tackle what we tell our children about how to identify the things they love without sacrificing their identities to a greater purpose they’ll spend years not understanding.
It’s hard to find the counter-narrative to this “calling” narrative (especially because the narrative itself only exists in theological study), but the 22% of us atheists are writing as many blogs, as many articles, as we can. You don’t need a calling to do what you want, make some money, answer to only yourself. The counter-narrative to this narrative is quiet, but it's getting the work done all the same. People aren't asking their children what they want to be when they grow up. People are quitting the church because the blind belief doesn't suit them. People are exploring their hobbies in new and exciting ways. People are working jobs for the money and doing what they love on the weekends. It's quiet, but it's there if you look for it.
This blog post might have been written by an atheist, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t revisit what you think about the “calling” narrative. After all, I’m willing to bet you’ve been affected by it. Join the counter-narrative culture and take some agency for yourself. There might not be a higher power, but there is life and it’s yours for the taking.
My mom called me the other day to tell me one of my childhood friends would be moving to my hometown soon because her husband had accepted a job with the Baptist church next door to her Methodist church. I don’t know why she thinks I give a shit about small town gossip or any news that concerns the church seeing as how she’s very aware of how I feel about organized religion. Nevertheless, she has nothing else to tell me because her world is much smaller than mine.
“He used to be an airplane pilot,” she says.
“Then why is he going to be a youth minister? How will they survive? Where will the money come from?” I ask, appalled. I know from my instagram that his wife is a stay-at-home mom of three.
“It doesn’t matter, they’ll figure it out,” she brushes it off. “He has a calling to work for the Lord.”
A calling.
A goddamn calling.
Half of my life, I waited for some fucking calling to hit me in the face.
And it never did. No matter how much I prayed to the wall.
Nope.
This ideological concept of having a calling goes way way back. Religious scholars, especially the ones who study the three big Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, & Islam, in that order), have named this the Prophetic Call Narrative. Back in the Old Testament, if you remember, there were a great many prophets detailed in the books that have been passed down to us. Isaiah, Jonah, Daniel, Gideon, and so on and so forth. You know these names because you live in America, and there’s no escaping Christianity in some form. These men (and they were always men, of course) were called to a job, called to serve a higher power for some great unknowable purpose. That’s the definition of a prophet, being called to serve for a greater purpose. And this concept has made it all the way to modern day alive and well. Churches are still telling children in Sunday school that if they listen to God, they too will learn what their calling is. And despite the separation of church and state, this idea has permeated our culture as well. All you have to do is google, “what’s my calling?” and you’ll get articles for days telling you how to find your life’s greater purpose. And even when we aren’t dressing children up for church so they can learn about the prophets before them, we ask them in school, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as if they can only be one thing, and that’s what their calling will be.
But this narrative is toxic, and I’ll tell you why. Trusting blindly in the belief that the system (and organized religion IS a system) will guide you to your one true calling causes a great deal of unnecessary stress over which passion to follow. Not only do many people grow up wondering where God will put them, they neglect the other multiplicities of their selfhood in order to fulfill this one true calling.
You are a human. You are complicated. You have interests all over the board. Why should you have to pick? Why should you have to trust in a system that pays itself and not you? Because that’s what the church will do, believe me. You’re not being called to serve poor children in third world countries; you’re being used as a poster-child for promoting the church you go to so they can get more members who pay tithes. And don’t forget the narrative you’re participating in with mission trips, the little colonialism narrative, maybe you’ve heard of it?
But not to worry, I’m not the only one with this opinion. Although this topic hasn’t hit scholarship as far as I can see, it’s hit the public. All you have to google is, “I don’t have a calling,” and you’ll find the articles that will tell you why it’s better this way. You deserve to be paid, you deserve to have agency, you deserve to narrate your own life as you see fit instead of letting a system based on blind faith decide for you. This is your story and yours alone. People are fighting this “calling” narrative through confessional blogs and popular articles, but there’s a long way to go yet, if we’re going to tackle what we tell our children about how to identify the things they love without sacrificing their identities to a greater purpose they’ll spend years not understanding.
It’s hard to find the counter-narrative to this “calling” narrative (especially because the narrative itself only exists in theological study), but the 22% of us atheists are writing as many blogs, as many articles, as we can. You don’t need a calling to do what you want, make some money, answer to only yourself. The counter-narrative to this narrative is quiet, but it's getting the work done all the same. People aren't asking their children what they want to be when they grow up. People are quitting the church because the blind belief doesn't suit them. People are exploring their hobbies in new and exciting ways. People are working jobs for the money and doing what they love on the weekends. It's quiet, but it's there if you look for it.
This blog post might have been written by an atheist, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t revisit what you think about the “calling” narrative. After all, I’m willing to bet you’ve been affected by it. Join the counter-narrative culture and take some agency for yourself. There might not be a higher power, but there is life and it’s yours for the taking.
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