In My Gut, I Don’t Believe: A Memoir by Joe Armstrong has just been published in paperback and Kindle editions. https://www.amazon.com/My-Gut-Dont-Believe-Memoir-ebook/dp/B08MCS5VWX This book has been 25 years in the making. An intimate coming of age memoir, set in a Catholic seminary in 1980s Dublin. Using his private journals, Joe Armstrong shows his personal, psychological, emotional, sexual and intellectual growth, from boy to young man, escaping a dysfunctional mother and a Church calling for the submission of his mind, body and will. A journey from belief to critical doubt.

‘A fascinating, courageous and moving account of an individual leaving the trammels of religion for the good light of humanism – an educative story on many levels, well told.’ – Professor A. C. Grayling

Torn between faith and doubt, safety and risk, love and fear, this memoir is a portrait of a young man struggling to live the vow of celibacy while awakening to his need for affection, intimacy and love. It shows him wrestling with the vow of obedience while discovering his need to obey himself.

This is a life-changing story of trusting and becoming yourself and making the hardest decision of your life. This personal journey from belief to convinced doubt articulates the experience of millions.

In this episode of Losing My Religion, Joe Armstrong reads an episode from his newly published memoir. By coincidence, the book has been published the same month that it was announced that Mount St Mary’s, the Marist Fathers’ seminary in Dublin, has been sold and is to be demolished. This book is a surprising, invaluable and peerless account of a vanished world and a changing Ireland.

Aged 17, Joe Armstrong, like so many of his contemporaries, became entranced by the Charismatic Renewal. The movement, supported by bishops and priests, was sweeping the Catholic Church in the late 1970s. People were ‘speaking in tongues’ and being ‘prayed over’. There were ‘Camp Jesus’ youth jamborees and all-night vigils.

It was as if the Holy Spirit had been released again, like the story of Pentecost, when the disciples went out to ‘preach the Good News’.

If God had really become human, if the Christian message really was true, it had to be the most important thing in life. But that ‘if’ is a very big word, upon which the lives of millions turn.

Secular Humanist Joe Armstrong reads a letter of religious enthusiasm that he wrote to his Uncle John, a priest in South Africa. Once embarrassed by the letter, now Joe is proud of it. It captures the feeling of the charismatic movement and it shows, even at the height of charismania, an underlying, and welcome, sense of doubt.

Weaving the theme of belonging, meaning and hope, I recall Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. My brother Paul banished from home in his teens. My brother David vanished in his teens, his whereabouts unknown. ‘The family that prays together, stays together,’ says my mother, missing the irony of my two absent brothers. She warns me that if she turns against someone, ‘that’s it’. Frightened of being treated like Paul and David, I seek solace in religion. A Christian Brother sexually abuses me. Another brutally beats a boy for not understanding a school lesson. Religion was part of the air I breathed: at home, in school, in my parish of Donnycarney. On a contemporary note, I suggest again the benefits of online Humanist ceremonies during the Covid19 pandemic.

In this second episode of Losing My Religion, Joe Armstrong compares our propensity towards religious belief to our vulnerability to Covid-19, especially when exposed to religion in early childhood. He explores how religious beliefs seeped into his mind as a child, given his family and 1960s Ireland. He also shares a funny tale of his recent purchase of a caravan, its close encounter with a gate post, a steep hill and a raging river! Joe also considers the benefits of online Humanist ceremonies given the ongoing uncertainties of Covid-19.