In the process of letting go , you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.

I grew up in a community where truth was searched for in every direction. But I also grew up in a family of deep conservative generational faith. Faith was seen as our legacy. It wasn't until college that I ever even doubted this idea of faith being true, and it took me another 10 years to really start the exploration of what truth might be. For me, it was an intellectual pursuit that lasted another 20 years and ended with the veracity of the Bible. Although I still find good lessons within it, I cannot see them as lessons of truth or God-derived. For me, letting go of this final pillar meant letting go of all I had built my life upon. Although my family knows and still accepts me, the pain was in rebuilding a life on completely different pillars that were all mine and not just handed down to me. Truth matters to me as well as things like beauty, nature, goodness, kindness, and grace. These things can be found everywhere but I want them built on a foundation of truth and not some story of omniscient revelation that no one can agree upon. I am so much happier now but it took a very long time for me to let go.

I was a pastor for many years. I thought I was hired to pursue truth and share that with my congregation. I quickly found out that people go to church to be comforted, not to be challenged (especially outside their current belief system). The problem was money though. I had to raise money to keep things going and I was paid by those same funds. My congregation and career were both at stake without that money and this greatly changes your approach. Giving the ideas that I was finding in my pursuit of truth let uncertainty creep in for some. Uncertainty is not comfortable. People come for comfort, even when doubting your faith. People want a good sermon that might challenge their living out their beliefs but doesn't challenge their beliefs. They want a message of certainty that says the Bible is true and all its words are true and trustworthy. But the further I went in my journey, the less I could offer that in good conscience. Money was not at the root of evil here. It was at the root of untruth, of certainty, of inauthenticity. I finally realized that getting paid in any way to lead a spiritual quest for truth was not possible. I left the church and continued my journey but lost many friends in the process.

My journey involved many steps to freedom from the false stories in which I was raised. The first was doubting my faith and the recognition that all did not add up. The world wasn't formed in seven days. The world never flooded in the last ten thousand years. There are many virgin birth stories so why is mine true and not the others. Things like this. But it took a long time for me to work through letting go of faith. First it was letting go of the small faith group I grew up in and accepting that others of faith might be right instead. Then it was letting go of the traditions and expectations that didn't have much value (church 3 times a week, no communion with catholics, etc). Then it was asking tough questions and honestly looking for and listening to good answers. Finally it was letting go of the foundations and recognizing that all the good stuff I had enjoyed in faith could be held without the supernatural underpinning. Nature, other people, art, science and more gives beauty and community and a sense of purpose if you seek it. I don't need to have a grand story to live into if that story is based on false premises and beliefs. I just need to live today and decide how I want to be a giver of the things that I think make the world a great place to live.

I identified as a Christian for my whole life until two weeks in 2017 changed all that. In the subsequent seven years since then I’ve been trying to work out whether I really deconverted then or if that train had been a long time coming. I still don’t really know, but it’s probably more the latter than the former.

As I’ve blogged about before, I was indoctrinated into Christianity from birth. The particular version of Christianity I grew up in was what I call Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. The way I define this is it was Fundamentalist in that we believed the Bible was the literal “Word of God”. And Evangelical in that the type of church my family attended was of the Evangelical tradition, meaning it was different to say Baptist or Presbyterian traditions.

What that means is that I grew up under the eye of God. I understood that God knew everything, that everything came from Him, and He had a plan for my life. And although I might stray from this plan, and naturally rebel at times, I should expect to always find myself coming back to Him, apologising for straying, and recommitting myself to His plan for me. Looking back now, I wonder why I didn’t leave Christianity as I got older and could think more for myself. Some days I tell myself it was because I wasn’t equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary to do that. But other days I think I may have wanted the things Christianity promised me too.....

To read the rest of this story, go to https://oblivionwithbells.com/2024/04/14/losing-my-religion/