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"I realized that my faith had never been something genuine. It had just been a way of survival", says content creator Mateus Dolny, now 30 years old.
Raised in a Lutheran family in São Leopoldo (RS), Mateus attended church since childhood, decided at the age of 17 that he would be a pastor and entered the seminary to study theology.
But it was precisely during the years dedicated to studying the Bible and the history of Christianity that his convictions began to change.
Mateus says he always had doubts about religion, but says he learned from an early age to silence them to remain in the environment in which he grew up.
"I asked myself if all that was real, if it wasn't strange to believe in this invisible being", he says.
The questions remained during religious formation, but gained new importance when they began to confront what they found in academic studies.
Although in practice it is often an area of training for religious leaders in Brazil, theology, as a higher education course recognized by the Ministry of Education (MEC), is open to anyone, regardless of whether they profess a religion.
It has an academic character and brings together different areas of knowledge — such as history, archaeology, philosophy and linguistics — to critically study religious texts and traditions.
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Mateus completed his undergraduate, master's and doctorate degrees at institutions of Lutheran origin.
But his in-depth reading of the Bible during his training brought him discomfort — such as passages that, in his opinion, describe episodes of violence, genocide and unequal treatment of women attributed to God. Or even interpretations of excerpts traditionally used by churches to condemn homosexuality.
Para ele, essas narrativas e interpretações passaram a entrar em conflito com a imagem de um Deus justo e moralmente perfeito apresentada durante sua formação religiosa.
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The problem, he says, was not just in the texts, but in the way these questions were answered.
“What bothered me most was the intellectual juggling act done by pastors and theologians to make sense of it all,” he says.
At the age of 28, shortly before completing his doctorate, he decided to abandon Christianity and declared himself an atheist.
Currently, he states that he continues to use his training in theology, but in a different direction: he writes about religion, produces content on social networks and publishes critical analyzes about the role of Christianity in society.
He also says that he maintains a respectful relationship with his mother, who remained Christian, and with religious friends who accept his choices — although he recognizes that the feeling of guilt learned during years of religious experience is still part of this process.
Matthew's trajectory is part of a little-known group of Bible scholars who claim to have lost their faith precisely during years of dedication to the study of sacred texts.
'Half a dozen books were enough'
Osvaldo Luiz Ribeiro, 60 years old, is categorical: "Before the seminar, I didn't question anything. Afterwards, I started to question everything."
The theologian, born in Baixada Fluminense, grew up in a diverse religious environment: his mother moved between spiritualism, Candomblé and other beliefs, and his aunt was the mother of an Umbanda saint.
It was only in adulthood, in 1984, that Osvaldo joined a Baptist church and adopted a stance that he defines today as "fundamentalist". Three years later, he decided to enter the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary of Brazil to learn Hebrew and translate the Bible.
Contact with academic research on the formation of biblical texts and with authors who presented different interpretations from those taught in churches transformed the way Osvaldo saw his own religion.
“Half a dozen books were enough”, summarizes the theologian, who now lives in Vitória (ES).
Osvaldo became a professor, coordinator and researcher in theology and, later, in religious sciences. The change in belief, however, happened gradually. According to the theologian, biblical criticism led to questions and, later, to atheism.
"The process was purely cognitive. It did not involve trauma of any kind", he states.
For the theologian, while exegesis — an area dedicated to the interpretation of texts in their historical and linguistic contexts — can follow academic criteria, part of theological production seeks to justify beliefs previously established by religions.
"I discovered that theology is a political game, that exegesis allows itself to be covered by dogmas and ecclesiastical commitments. I dealt with it with serenity", he says.
Today, away from higher education, he is dedicated to the project of translating the Bible directly from Hebrew.
For him, the Bible should be studied as a set of documents produced in specific historical contexts, and not just as a religious text.
Experience, he states, shows that academic deepening can lead some scholars to review their convictions — although this is not the path followed by everyone who studies theology, highlights Osvaldo.
Life after church
Abandoning religion did not just mean stopping attending services or changing beliefs.
For the two atheist theologians interviewed, the rupture required rebuilding the way of interpreting the world, reviewing personal relationships and finding new meanings for life outside the faith that had accompanied them for years.
Matthew describes this process as similar to mourning. According to him, leaving Christianity meant no longer having a structure that organized his routine, his bonds and his own identity.
This reconstruction is still part of his life and involves psychological support and conversations with people close to him.
On this new path, Mateus discovered that there are other opportunities to socialize besides religion.
“I have community and belonging in my football group, for example,” he says.
But the theologian points to a more painful facet of this process: breaking with the guilt built up during years of religious formation.
Today, he says he seeks a spirituality disconnected from religious institutions, based on values, practices and personal commitments. He also claims not to believe in heaven, hell or life after death.
"Living without religion is not living without moral values. It is to stop obeying out of fear and start choosing out of conscience. It is to stop justifying suffering as a spiritual test and start seeing it as a concrete problem that requires human solutions", reflects Mateus.
Osvaldo, on the other hand, distanced himself not only from religion as an institution, but also from any form of spirituality.
“For me, a radical atheist, there is nothing beyond matter,” he says.
This, however, does not mean giving up moral responsibility.
For him, recognizing one's mistakes, repenting and seeking to repair them is part of the human experience, regardless of religion.
"There is a way to prevent the future from being a repetition of the mistakes of the past. I think that is maturity", he says.
Atheist theologians and religious theologians
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According to the experts interviewed by the report, theology dialogues with areas such as philosophy and religious sciences, but has its own object of study.
While philosophy rationally investigates questions about existence, ethics and knowledge without depending on religious assumptions, and the sciences of religions analyze religious phenomena in a comparative way and without links to a specific tradition, theology starts from religious traditions to critically reflect on them.
"The academic study of theology does not directly analyze God, but the way human beings have spoken about God throughout history", explains Rudolf von Sinner, doctor in theology and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR).
Claudete Beise Ulrich, doctor in theology from EST - São Leopoldo, explains that one of the functions of theology is to produce studies based on a critical reading of the Bible.
"What we have today are translations, which do not always fully correspond to the original texts. Furthermore, each narrative has a historical context and needs to be interpreted based on it", explains the theologian.
The centrality of the study of the Bible in this area of knowledge gives clues to its connection with Christianity.
Von Sinner explains that the term "theology" originates from ancient Greek, referring to discourse about the gods. It was, however, Christianity that developed much of the structure of theology as a field of study that we know today.
In the first centuries of the Christian era, the term began to be used to organize and intellectually explain the contents of faith. Later, during the formation of European universities in the Middle Ages, Theology established itself as one of the main academic areas.
Currently, however, the term is also applied to the systematic study of other religious traditions — whether they are texts considered sacred or are based mainly on oral traditions.
For theologian and philosopher Ivone Gebara, those who do research in the area may or may not have a religious belief. Judging the role of the theologian based on the opposition between faith and atheism would be to simplify personal trajectories marked by different experiences and sensibilities, he argues.
"If I'm going to observe a religious initiation in Candomblé, for example, I don't need to be a believer in this faith. I observe and explain what I see within my limits. However, the initiated person adds personal meanings to the action they are experiencing", says Gerbara, a professor with a doctorate from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) and the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium,
Mateus Dolny, however, claims to have reached a different conclusion after years of study.
“Contrary to what most people think, I find it strange that a serious theologian is not an atheist,” he says.
According to Osvaldo Luiz Ribeiro, atheist theologians are rare in Brazil, but more common in some European countries.
Still, he claims that for decades he taught theology without transforming the classroom into a space for the propagation of atheism.
"I was never a 'non-faith' missionary. Foreign colleagues told me that I should move to Europe, because there I would be considered somewhat in, whereas here in Brazil my way of being was totally out in relation to the establishment", he says.
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