A retired member of the military, Gabrielle Tolliver began questioning what she was taught in Sunday school early into her childhood. While the adults in her family were not frequent attenders of church, they did require the children go to service as often as possible. When Gabrielle challenged the inconsistencies and cruelties taught in Sunday School lessons, she was chided with: “You are just too young to understand.” In this episode, she talks about being a nonbeliever in North Carolina, where church and god are as deeply woven into the culture as speaking to strangers and asking after a casual acquaintance’s Mama. From missionaries knocking on her door offering her salvation through Christ to grocery store clerks wishing her God’s blessings, Gabrielle often has to “out” herself as an atheist even when she’d rather just sit at home and watch television with her wife or buy broccoli at the supermarket for that night’s dinner. Gabrielle dismisses the suggestion that because she does not believe in a supernatural deity, she does not have a solid moral code. She finds it insulting to imply a person needs some force outside themselves to influence their decision to be a decent human being. “I don’t need a sky pappy to tell me when I’ve wronged another person or harmed a defenseless animal,” Gabrielle explains. “I don’t need the god gap to fill in the blanks about the world for me.”
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