I’m no longer a Christian.
(You can stop reading here if you want.)
I almost didn’t write this.
I wondered if this was something that even needed to be said. Would this topic offend people I love or make them sad? (Probably at least the latter.) Would anyone even care enough to read this? (You’ll have to let me know.) “There’s a lot going on in the world, and Nathan’s personal beliefs are not high up on the list of things I have time to care about, anyway!” There was also a part of me that didn’t even think it would matter to me if I wrote this or not. Do I even want to take the time to do this? I’ve got a busy life, I’m behind on all kinds of chores right now…writing about my beliefs and my life seems kinda pointless, in light of all the productive things I could be doing, doesn’t it?
If you’re seeing this, though, it appears I decided to postpone my chores and write about it; regardless of how it will be received, or how valuable of an exercise it may not be.
Maybe it would have been best to just process my religious deconstruction privately. Religion is one of the main things you’re not supposed to talk about if you want to avoid long, drawn-out internet arguments, right? Unfortunately, anyone who has me on Facebook (or knows me in person) knows that long, drawn-out opinions are something I thrive on giving. I suppose, then, that this essay was an inevitable step on my journey of processing my thoughts on the topic that has shaped my life more than anything else for over 30 years.
Some of you may still be wondering, “Why bother writing this? Just move on.”
I’ll give you three reasons:
First, as I alluded above, I like to process my thoughts through writing. Writing this essay will give me an opportunity to organize my thoughts on a personal (arguably critically important), and complex topic.
Second (also alluded to above and related to my first point), I have always been an extremely vocal and opinionated person, both online and in person. Anyone who has been friends with me for 10+ years knows this, and has seen me 1) decry various things I had (at the time) deemed biblically immoral (being gay, premarital sex, men being effeminate/not leading their households, etc.) 2) be generally argumentative and oftentimes quite arrogant with people who weren’t approaching life from the same religious framework. A big part of this behavior has been because I genuinely enjoy argument as a way to flesh out a more thorough understanding of my own beliefs. A more regrettable facet to this behavior is that I love being right about things and proving people wrong, quite often as a way to assert my voice at the expense of other opinions I deem incorrect. Thus, we have my second reason for writing this essay: I want to proclaim loudly that I’ve changed my mind. I want to apologize for errors I’ve made and for holding my religious opinions in arrogance. I’ve made a lot of progress to this goal over the years even before my deconstruction. I’ve prioritized more fully-listening to perspectives I disagree with, and I think I’ve gotten much better over the years at changing my mind. That being said, I’ve only recently come to realize how damaging many of my old beliefs were, and wanted to do my best to acknowledge that damage somewhere public.
Third, and potentially most offensive to those readers who still hold to a fundamentalist version of Christianity: I wanted to write this as an inspiration to consider changing your mind. I’m aware that for most of you, this will be out of the question. Not only may you not be interested in changing your mind, it just might be impossible for you to get to that point where you could. Belief is so ingrained in a Christian’s identity (and psyche), it might even be impossible for you to seriously consider the possibility that a non-Christian belief system could be true. You likely have numerous answers for why you believe what you do. (A big part of any fundamentalist paradigm is coming up with responses to common critiques.) There is a LOT of ingrained fear behind fundamentalism. After all, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10a) If you grew up in the church like I did, you may have had nightmares about hell as a child. For many Christians, even saying the sentence “Jesus is not God” could give you a physiological response akin to a panic attack. I hesitate to say the word “brainwashing,” because in my experience, Christians actively and genuinely believe these things: but there are few words that more accurately describe the act of training up a child in a fundamentalist Christian tradition, to the point where they wake up in bed at 6 years old crying because they are worried about going to hell. The cumulative effect of accepting the Christian paradigm I was given as a child, and living it each day has left me feeling like I was wrapped in a tight ball of yarn and added more yarn to it every day, by my own hand. With a lifetime of being steeped in, and actively steeping myself in fundamentalist Christianity, I have had to unwind a lot of thread on this ball of yarn. Each successive day of unwinding has given me clarity, hope, and peace, but it hasn’t been easy or painless. As an adult, gathering the courage to leave Christianity was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. If this essay inspires you with questions, or helps you start unraveling your own ball of yarn, I will consider that a success.
Now: I’ve written way too many words about why I’m writing words. Let’s get to the meat of things.
1) My background:
For those of you who don’t know, my name is Nathan. Now ex-Christian, but formerly very Christian. I’m the son of a pastor, who, with my mother, also happened to be a missionary in Japan for the first four or so years of my life. (That one-two PK/MK combo!) Some of my very first memories involve bible studies in Japan and singing songs in church. My parents wanted to go to Japan to share the Gospel (literal meaning: “good news”) of Jesus Christ to the largely unchurched population. Since Japan is approximately 1% Christian, it was a perfect place to do that. We left Japan when I was about five years-old, and moved to Los Angeles, where my dad finished up his master’s degree at a seminary (Bible school) run by John MacArther, a fairly famous megachurch pastor who subscribes to a rigid, “Reformed Baptist” tradition, and is also the president of a large Christian college adjacent to the seminary. When I was about nine years-old, we moved to rural Eastern Oregon, where my dad became a pastor of a small church for the remainder of my childhood. While my parents had (and have) their own nuanced beliefs, they essentially subscribed to the vast majority of the Reformed Baptist tenets, and passed those beliefs to the rest of our household. There is a lot of nuance to what different fundamentalist Christian groups believe (see here for details), but the essentials I was taught can be roughly summed up as: 1) The Christian Bible is perfect, and is the only legitimate way to learn about God. 2) Humans are flawed and exist solely to please God 3) God is perfect and encompasses all good traits.
From there, the Reformed Baptist interpretation of the Bible leads to many specific beliefs and mentalities. I won’t go into too much more detail, but understanding this framework is critical to understanding the mindset of those in this system (and understanding my mindset before I began to abandon it.) Here are a few substantial beliefs:
1) Men should lead their households, and women should be “helpers”
2) Marriage between a man and a woman is a specific God-designed structure to reflect the relationship “between Jesus and the Church [the global collection of true Christian believers]” (with men being like Jesus and women being like the Church)
3) Human desires and (and even needs) are inherently wrong and illegitimate unless they are executed with an intent to please God and guided by the principles in the Christian Bible.
4) The guiding force behind all human actions should be the question: “Is this what God wants?”
Understandably, this may feel like a bit much for those of you not living in a faith-based paradigm. Suffice to say, I fully bought-in to this framework after my initial conversion at 6-years old. I did have several brief lapses in my faith, notably about 10-years old, when I briefly determined I was agnostic and held that belief privately before converting back and praying for Jesus to save me again. At 12 years-old, I went publicly before my church and got baptized (reading aloud my desire to live within God’s will for my life and commit fully to him, as well as acknowledging how he’d saved me from my sinful nature.) I believed my words fully in that moment, and I was fully committed to my role in life serving God.
Fast-forward a few years. I remained extremely involved in church, and truly enjoyed my life there. All my good friends were from church, and were as fully-bought-in as I was. We had mid-week Bible studies, Sunday school, Sunday service (my dad preached almost every Sunday unless we had a guest), as well as lots of special church-related events like potlucks, Christmas caroling, etc. I also got involved with local youth groups at other churches, because our own church was of the opinion that youth groups weren’t productive and kids should just learn with the adults. For many people, this much church might sound like a special kind of hell (irony not lost on me). For me, it was a sense of purpose, the right thing to do (because it was what God wanted), and most importantly: it basically made it impossible to doubt your faith for more than a couple days before you got a spiritual boost from your church family.
When I would have doubts (albeit rarely), they always melted away after the first harmonies of “Amazing Grace” were sung by the congregation…And I didn’t have that many doubts. I knew (and still know) the “correct” Christian answer to any critique of the faith. I was always “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15)...and I DID have hope, and I DID make a constant defense for my faith. I was constantly witnessing to my friends at school and trying to subtly influence them to see the truth of the Bible/Christianity. I was fully convinced the vast majority of my friends and the people I interacted with were going to hell, and that it was my responsibility to help guide them away from that fate. Since every action of mine was guided by my desire to please God, I felt like I was on a constant shadow mission to witness to and “save” the people I interacted with. Even small interactions were flavored by the mindset that the person sitting across from me might not be saved, and I needed to limit my interaction in ways that didn’t make Jesus look bad and that made them more likely to convert at some point. As one can imagine, this constant subtext to all interactions made it hard to genuinely connect with people who weren’t Christian. I didn’t care about that, though: I truly just wanted to help save people from hell.
2) How and why I abandoned my faith:
From the outside-looking-in at fundamentalist Christianity, there are many obvious concerns. From the blatant sexism in the New Testament, to the murder of babies and genocide that are glossed over in the Old Testament, it’s easy to find things that are hard to justify. To the fundamentalist, however, these concerns are irrelevant. With the perspective that God is the ultimate, all-powerful being of truth and all that is good, you can immediately rationalize these things as “part of God’s plan.” God sent an Angel of Death to kill all Egyptian first-born sons? “That’s okay: Evil Pharaoh needed to learn a lesson, and God (who knows everyone’s entire life before they live it) probably knew that they’d all grow up to be evil anyway!” Women shouldn’t ever give verbal opinions in church and should wait until they get home to ask their husbands’ questions? (1st Corinthians 14:34–35) “Uhhhh…personal preference: depends which church you go to. Probably a safe bet to just make sure they aren’t ever pastors? It’s okay though: doesn’t it *make sense* that women and men are meant to have different *roles* in life? With women being submissive to men, of course. I mean, it’s part of God’s design.”
Good fundamentalists (e.g., those who believe in Biblical inerrancy) can generally never be shaken with a simple critique of “bad things” in the bible. When you start from the framework that God is the very definition of all things good, you can’t ever truly criticize him, even for patently evil actions. (Not that a true Christian would dare criticize God, anyway.) “Well, God knows best” is always an acceptable answer for the fundamentalist, because it truly is the essence of their belief. All of it rides on God. Even if it feels bad, it must be good, because God did it, and God IS good. As a fundamentalist, I got very good at reasoning my way around these critiques in ways that didn’t make God seem like a bad guy, (even if I was really just using word salad and circular logic to muddy the waters.)
My journey to leave my faith began with a simple question about 6 years ago (I can’t put an exact date on it, it’s something that just slowly ate away at me until it became a fully-formed thought): What if the Bible isn’t fully inspired (“God-breathed”)? There are some verses that even modern Christians debate as inspired (Mark 16 has several, for instance), so why not consider the possibility that entire books (out of the 66) aren’t supposed to be in there? Humans assembled the Bible, didn’t they? Who is to say that God inspired Revelation, for instance, and that it wasn’t just some weird fever dream John had? Am I really trusting a bunch of historical humans to have assembled the Bible in the exact order that God wanted? This question led me to the rapid realization that I would lose my faith if I didn’t figure out exactly how and why the Bible came to be in its entirety. I began reading and researching everything I could. I bought books, and I requested more book recommendations on the topic from my dad. I dug online, I dug into the Bible itself and used every available tool (including prayer) to try to convince myself of the validity of the Bible as a source of truth. My search for truth was exceptionally disappointing. Not only could I not find good (logical) reasoning for why some passages are considered inspired over others: but I began coming to terms with the large amount of inconsistencies and general weirdness in the Bible that isn’t really discussed in Christian circles. I finally came to terms with it: None of the Bible was inspired: It was all just words, written by humans. Many of these words contained great human wisdom, poetry, and beauty: but they aren’t God’s words. Humans decided to ascribe deeper meaning to them after the fact, or specifically wrote them with the intent to pass them off as God’s words. The Bible was no different, in substance, from any other religious text. Human-written.
This realization was the nuclear warhead for my faith.
Though I’d previously had it at my fingertips, my only source of ultimate truth was now gone. The truth I’d based my entire life on and used to guide my every action (to the best of my ability) was revealed to be a lie. Not only was this a huge blow to me mentally, but it was a crushing emotional experience. I became depressed and filled the void with as many distractions as I could muster. I wanted to believe in the Bible, and I wanted to believe in the God I’d been taught. It turned out He didn’t want me to.
3) Where I’m at now:
Unsurprisingly, the thread kept unraveling further. I got to a point where I questioned everything spiritual I’d been taught (except the existence of some God (or at least, some sort of Creative Force.) Surprisingly (to me), I started to become whole again. Where I’d once believed (and been told) I would only find pain and lack of purpose “outside of God’s will”: I suddenly realized deeper meaning than I’d ever had as a Christian. The uncertainty of what comes after death gave me a new reason to live fully and genuinely during the short life I have. I could actually build genuine connections with non-Christian coworkers and friends–Connections that weren't predicated on my secret hope to convert them. I could experience new things and interact with new kinds of people who I’d previously silently (to their face) and openly (behind their back) condemned for their “lifestyle choices.”
I’m at a place now where I’ve come to accept that most of what I grew up learning was an extraordinary lie (we can call it a myth if that feels better), taught to me with no ill intent, by people who genuinely believed it with the core of their being. I’ve come to feel very foolish for buying into it in the first place, but find solace in the fact that I also never knew any better until I had the opportunity to learn. I hope this essay prompts similar questions for those willing to ask.
I have many, many friends and family who still believe. (You might even still be reading this!) I know many of them will think (or say) something like this:
“That’s so sad he fell away from the faith, I’ll pray that God pulls him back.”
“He was never actually a Christian before, he was just going through the motions.”
“It really is too bad, I wonder if his parents could have done anything different.”
Of course, this is just the canned reaction to seeing someone abandon their faith. I’ve given it myself countless times upon witnessing a former Christian leave the Church. “They were never truly saved.” Rather than accept the fact that it’s possible to change your mind about something so serious, it’s easier to resort to just dismissing the validity of the decision. (Look up John Calvin if you’re interested in why this response is typical of reformed Fundamentalism.)
One of the biggest issues with fundamentalism is the inability to accept any other differing beliefs as holding potential truth. This leads to condescending responses like this, as well as a lot of well-intentioned condescension/infantilizing of people in general. (I say well-intentioned, because fundamentalists really just believe you need Jesus to change you, and then you’ll be fine.) When your framework for how the world should function becomes exceptionally narrow, with your worldview at the very top, you end up throwing away a lot of legitimate experiences and people with it. I almost wrote this as two separate essays: one for Christian friends, and one for my non-Christian friends, because the way both parties approach the world is so entirely different, and it’s been hard to try to write in what truly boils down to two separate languages, at the same time.
That being said, I’m glad I only wrote one essay, because this has been an all-day affair.
I could keep going and write much more, but I don’t have time for a book (at least not tonight.) I’ll keep it simple: Since abandoning religion, I have never felt more at peace with the world, or able to genuinely love people and experience life more fully. I remain confident that I don’t know everything about existence, and I’m okay with that. This is a journey I’m truly just starting, but I’m thankful for everyone who has taken the time to learn about it with me. If you’re having similar questions about your faith or want to start a similar journey, please reach out. It’s possible to leave, even if you feel you’ll lose every support system you’ve ever relied on. I can’t promise you won’t lose things you value, but I can promise you I’ll personally never choose to go back to the way things were, because the world is so much fuller for me now. It wasn’t easy for me to start either on this path, but living a life without believing in myths has rocked my world in only the best ways and I’m growing more in love with life as I unwind each new thread.
-Nathan