The Missionary Who Lost His Faith

I stayed up too late this week reading about Daniel Everett. He went into the Amazon in 1977 to translate the Bible for the Pirahã people, a small tribe on the Maici River. He learned their language, which almost nobody else on earth could speak. He raised his kids there. He nearly lost his wife and daughter to malaria and paddled them down the river for days to save them.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, quietly, over about twenty years, he stopped believing in God.

That's the part that got me. Not the atheism itself. People walk away from faith all the time, and usually there's a story with a clear break in it: a tragedy, a betrayal, a church that hurt them. Everett's story doesn't have one. His faith didn't shatter. It eroded, the way a riverbank does, one wet season at a time, and by the time he noticed, the ground he'd been standing on wasn't there.

I've been chewing on three questions since. What actually happened to him, whether God was somehow in it, and why, after sitting with his arguments for a few days, I find I'm still here.

1. Faith rarely leaves the way it arrives

Mark 4:26-29. Jesus says the kingdom is like a man who scatters seed and then goes to bed. The seed grows, night and day, and the man doesn't know how. First the stalk, then the head, then the full grain.

I've always read that as a comfort. Growth happens underground, slowly, without my supervision. But this week I noticed the parable cuts both ways. If faith can grow in the dark without our watching, it can wither in the dark too. Everett says he was an unbeliever for years before he could admit it, even to himself. The harvest had failed long before anyone walked the field.

That should sober us. Not into panic, but into attention. The question is not "did I believe last year?" It's "am I still watering anything?"

2. Was God in this too?

Here's the uncomfortable question I can't put down. The Pirahã have a rule for what counts as real: you believe what you've seen, or what someone standing in front of you has seen. When they asked Everett if he had ever seen Jesus, he had to say no. And they shrugged and went back to fishing. His message had no witness behind it, so it had no weight.

Job 38:1-4. When Job demands answers, God doesn't hand over an explanation. He asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. Which is another way of saying: you don't get to see the whole ledger.

So was God at work in Everett's unraveling? I honestly don't know, and I want to be careful not to play prophet over another man's life. But I've come to believe God is not threatened by the Pirahã's question. "Have you seen him?" is not a trick. It's the same question Thomas asked, and Jesus didn't scold Thomas for asking. He showed up with his hands out. What happened next in Everett's heart is between him and God, and the story, as far as I can tell, isn't over. He's still alive. Riverbanks erode, but rivers also deposit.

3. Why I don't find the argument compelling

Here is Everett's case, as fairly as I can state it: he brought his faith to a people who demand direct evidence, he had none to give, and under that pressure his belief dissolved. He concluded the Pirahã were right all along.

Hebrews 11:1. Faith is confidence in what we hope for, assurance about what we do not see.

Notice what the Pirahã standard actually is. It isn't an argument against God. It's a filter that screens out anything not directly witnessed, and then declares whatever passes the filter to be all there is. But run that filter honestly and it takes more than religion with it. Nobody standing in that village has seen the Roman Empire, or the year 1850, or their own great-grandparents. The filter doesn't disprove those things. It just can't see them.

So when Everett says his faith couldn't survive contact with radical empiricism, I believe him. I'm just not convinced that tells us anything about God. It tells us what happens when you measure an ocean with a rain gauge. The gauge reads empty. The ocean doesn't care.

What his story does prove is humbler and scarier: that sincerity, sacrifice, and two decades of service are not the same thing as a living faith. He had all three. Something else went missing anyway.

I keep thinking about the man in Mark, asleep while the seed grows. Faith was never supposed to run on our competence. But the man did get up each morning. He did watch the field.

What I know is this: I didn't come to faith through an argument, so I'm not especially surprised that a man can leave it without a good one. The seed grows, we know not how.

If you've walked through a season where belief thinned out on you, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.