Why I am no longer a Christian
A dear friend of mine, a pastor, recently asked people on Facebook to share why they personally have left the church. This isn’t a new question, but I have a lot of thoughts about it that are new to me.
I was raised as an Evangelical Christian, attended an Evangelical college and grad school, and worked in the church professionally for around a decade. I, personally, don’t find the term “atheist” very useful to me, but I know that by most people’s definitions I would qualify these days.
So what happened to me?
Stories of leaving
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
— G.K. Chesterton
Recently Evangelical darling, purity culture juggernaut, and pastor Joshua Harris publicly announced his divorce and then his exit from Christianity. The amount of writing and thoughts and opinions on this shift are vast. I don’t have anything to add to it, but I’ve noticed some trends in the way faithful Christians have responded from the comments section to blogposts.
The first is to announce that Harris never was an authentic Christian. He must have had a legalistic religious experience that wasn’t an authentic encounter with the love of Jesus. I find this to be the most common way of shielding the Church from critique.
If you find any fault with Christ, Christianity, the Church, then you’ve actually found fault with “Religion” a deceptive, counterfeit approximation of the Church. “Oh, you’re disappointed with X? That’s because X is dead, legalistic religion. True hope, joy, peace, private jets, are actually found in Y.” Whatever your concerns with faith are, the answer is a deeper, more elite, more authentic, free-range version of faith. A more refined, more reformed, more Spirit-filled journey.
The second is to pronounce that Harris is only on a detour that God will use for God’s glory in the long-run. He’s having his dark night of the soul, and will surely return to the fold bigger and better for the experience.
But either way, Evangelicals must insist that Harris did not try the Christian ideal and find it wanting. Either he tried some false religious decoy, or he’s mistaken in his assessment of Christianity being wanting (and likely will eventually realize that). What seems impossible to say out loud is that Harris was an authentic, reverent, zealous follower of Christ who came to sincerely and honestly believe, through accurate observation, that there was a better life outside of Christianity.
It’s impossible, of course, because it challenges any sincere Evangelical’s world-view too profoundly. And I don’t mean that as a criticism.
What we know to be true
While I don’t believe that all world views are anywhere near equal, I do believe that we all cling to our world views with similar levels of tenacious and illogical fervor.
In their book Dollars and Sense, Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler discuss a limitation of the human mind and money. $10 can be exchanged for an effectively infinite number of things. No human could evaluate every possible way $10 can be spent and then choose the optimal choice. We have to limit our mental options to even begin to navigate the decision.
The same holds true for our world views. If we were to regularly and consistently evaluate our world view for its accuracy and fidelity in relationship to all other world views our lives would grind to an existential halt. By necessity we have mental fences and dykes and backup generators.
By necessity we have mental fences and dykes and backup generators.
Furthermore, we hold our world view as a placeholder for ourselves and our personal value. In our anxious need for attachment, we find our identity in our beliefs. And when that world view is challenged, we are personally challenged. In this way, Harris isn’t announcing that he’s found Christianity wanting. To the Christian recipient of that news, he’s announcing that he’s found them wanting. They are insufficient.
It’s deeply personal.
Psychological research since the 1970’s has been trying to alert us to massive gaps in how we perceive the world. It turns out that rather universally we are not shaped by facts, but rather filter facts to suite our purposes. We consistently over-estimate our understanding how the world works. We find genuine delight in hearing our beliefs echoed back to us. To top it off, facts that disagree with our beliefs consistently, study after study, cause us to hold to our beliefs more deeply rather than second guess them.
I (and others) have come to believe that Christianity, the Church, God, Jesus, all have serious and irreparable problems.
In this way, the problem with the question of why I left the church, why millions have left the church, is that it’s often really a search for any explanation other than the truth. There must be some explanation other than that I (and others) have come to believe that Christianity, the Church, God, Jesus, all have serious and irreparable problems.
Leaving
The truth is that I didn’t find the Christian ideal difficult. And I certainly didn’t leave it untried. I excelled at it. Sexual abstinence. Hours of prayer. Fervent evangelism. Deep Biblical learning. Earnest and transformative time in worship. Intimate fellowship with other believers. Discipleship and submission and humility. I bathed in the Kool-Aid. I did the thing. And, eventually, painfully, I found it wanting.
Like so many former Christians I know, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll weren’t what lead me away from the church. The exhausting project of trying to reconcile the scriptures and the church with the magnificent, loving Jesus I’d come to worship is what drew me away. The values of truth, integrity, wholeness, peace, love, humility, and grace are what drew me away from the Church in the end.
Like Peter Rollins’ priests who realize that they must convert to Judaism in Nazi Germany in order to love their Jewish neighbors as Christ would, I personally found that I had to leave Christianity, the Church, and Christ, to be faithful to the teachings and spirit that drew me to all three.
Straw faux Christians
A consistent narrative Evangelicals have about why young people are leaving their flocks in droves is that overindulgent pastors have created self-centered faux Christians who are parasites on the church, asking only what their church can do for them and never what they can do for their church. Materialistic, millennial snowflakes.
And all movements certainly have under-devoted members who fall away when the going gets tough. But this narrative unravels when applied to the Joshua Harrises or Jamie Lee Finches of the world. We were zealous and devoted. We gave until it hurt and then kept giving. We spent dozens of thousands of dollars and years in Christian schooling and training. We travelled to other continents on our own dollar to spread the good news. We gave our 10% and then more of every dollar that crossed our paths. We scrubbed the toilets and vacuumed the foyer and showed up for prayer when no one else did. We lit ourselves on fire on behalf of keeping our churches warm, and we were glad to do it.
We lit ourselves on fire on behalf of keeping our churches warm, and we were glad to do it.
If there is any honest curiosity about the question of why Christians leave Christianity, it is going to have to be willing to examine these uncomfortable cases. The authentic believer who gave their all.
What’s to love?
Any critique of Christianity, Christ, the Church, or even religion that concludes that it’s a bad deal through and through is incredibly off the mark. If that were the case the Church would fade into history.
I found a great many things on my journey through different branches of the church to be remarkable. Many of which I have yet to find replicated anywhere else outside of religion. The intimacy and community found among people so devoted to a common way of life is profound. The consistent willingness to ask big questions about life, peace, happiness, meaning, and purpose was a perfect fit for me. Exploring Christ’s messages of sacrifice, love, humility, and hope regularly opened up healthy alternatives to self-indulgent capitalist ecosystem we’re all living in (especially as someone with a tremendous amount of privilege).
Prayer and worship practices were genuinely transformational spaces to connect with the transcendent beyond me, quiet my mind, re-center my heart, revisit my deepest values, and learn to trust that I was not alone, I was loved, and that there is good in store for me.
I loved the Church. In many ways I still do. But I’ve had to face that my time as a Christian was rather enchanted. I was a straight, white, cis man. And I’ve come to believe that because of these things I escaped many of the kinds of the trauma that Church seems to routinely inflicts on others.
Bitter
Another narrative the Church has about those who leave is that they were hurt by the human, imperfect church and rather than make amends “became bitter”. It can easily be a mechanism that excuses perpetrators and blames victims, deeply minimizing of the harm that so many people experience in Christianity.
But homophobia, misogyny, racism, and sexual abuse are endemic in the hierarchical patriarchy of the church. The swath of victims is so staggering that few of us can wrap our heads around it. Only the fourth on that list is universally even technically a sin. The first two are enshrined in the formal structures of the majority of Christian churches. And only a tiny percentage of churches are interested in declaring all four to be corrosive to the spirit of Christ and his teachings.
There are those of us who left the Church after “benefitting” from this exaggerated patriarchal, homophobic makeup. But I’ve come to understand that many more have left after being brutalized by it. The gas lighting of these victims (it’s your job to turn the other cheek) and the tone policing of those who have left (bitter) can be a closed-ranks response to raw, sincere pain.
Several years ago a local non-profit summer camp in my area with a great mission was confronted by feedback of racism and transphobia. They immediately suspended the next summer’s camp and used their time to explore these issues with those affected by them. And at the end of their self-reflection they did something surprising: they decided to close their doors.
Because they concluded that the problems were too deeply embedded in the organization to reform their way out of the problem. And they would rather close shop than continue these patterns of harm. Whether or not their conclusion was the “right” decision, I have been deeply impacted by how seriously they took harm that they were causing. How often I’ve wished the Church had the kind of the integrity that they modeled.
Should I stay or should I go?
After producing a dramatic reading of Eve Ensler’s The Good Body with students from my seminary, I sat in my living room with one of the readers and her spouse. She was a fellow Christian, he was an atheist. He was fascinated with our Evangelical world view and genuinely trying to understand it. I tried to describe the work our hip, enlightened flavor of Evangelical Christianity was doing, brewing our own beer while celebrating U2charist and fighting against human trafficking.
“We’re trying to figure out how to be Christians without being assholes,” I explained. After a moment he responded with the natural question, “Why not just try to figure out how not to be assholes?”
My answer was good and authentic and sincere, “Because we are Christians, so that’s already part of the equation.” But it turned out to not be a good enough answer to his question.
I was recently co-presenting a workshop for spiritual directors (think Christian Yodas) on caring for post-Christian directees. During the Q + A the inevitable question came up, “Why didn’t you stay and help solve the Church’s problems rather than leave?”
The answer was simple.
I did.
I reminded the asker that I had been a youth director for almost a decade, graduated from seminary, and co-pastored a house church. But at some point it became too much.
During my four long years of seminary we learned how to disentangle the scriptures from reductive, rigid, modernist frameworks and engage it as a living, breathing, genre-laden, post-modern text. We could grieve it, be angry with it, celebrate with it, and question it. We learned how to reframe barbaric texts as liberating. Women were to marry their rapists as compared to dying as outcasts. Slaves were to be treated one way, as opposed to some worse fate. God needed his people to dash the brains out of infants… well, that one I never figured out how to navigate.
But the project of redeeming scripture and reforming the church just kept growing larger and larger. Lenses and interpretations and context and imagery. It eventually grew to consume me. And at some point, I had to ask myself the question: can I rehabilitate my faith into a healthy, whole way to live, or am I better off starting from scratch?
Maybe I should just focus on not being an asshole?
But is it true?
Of course, despite all of its failures, if the local Church is G-D’s plan to redeem the world, then it must be participated in. If Jesus Christ is the way and the truth and the life, then he must be followed. If converting my neighbor is the only way to save them from an eternity of torment in hell, then I must convert my neighbor. If being obedient to Christ is the one true path to wholeness and peace, then being obedient to Christ is what I must choose.
What if Jesus was more of a Jewish rabbi with some good ideas about the dignity of sex workers and the unrelenting hypocrisy of religious leaders?
But what if the local church is more a holdout for some deeply regressive ideas about gender and sexuality mixed in with some beautiful relationships and lovely music and a side of toxic shame? What if Jesus was more of a Jewish rabbi with some good ideas about the dignity of sex workers and the unrelenting hypocrisy of religious leaders? What if converting my neighbor into my image turns out to be the most self-absorbed sort of idolatry I’ve ever participated in? What if a deity who threatens hell can never be in a healthy relationship with anyone? What if being obedient leads to emotional deadness, intellectual numbness, and a moral Nuremberg defense?
C.S. Lewis would urge me to work through his Liar, Lunatic, Lord equation. Pascal would have me work through his wager. But both offer a myopic lens for exploring all of this. What about Islam? What about atheists? What about Buddha? If I wanted to crunch a modernist math equation about whether Christ / Church / God is true, I would have to account for an infinite number of variables.
I’m no more responsible for calculating whether Christianity is true than I am for calculating whether Zeus is real.
Deeper challenges
For me the problems with faith have began to run deeper than any matters of the Church’s good or bad behavior. Even a Church of saints would no longer be viable for me.
There is a deeper problem at the heart of all Evangelical religions: You must believe what I do to be good or clean or whole.
My many attempts to dance around this as a Christian eventually failed me: I didn’t make the rules, I’m just living by them. I’m not trying to convert people to be like me, I’m trying to convert them to be like Christ, who I happen to also be emulating. Most assuredly it’s just good fortune that I happen to be on the side of goodness and truth, but nevertheless I was on the inside, they were on the outside.
As Nietzsche proposed, “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct [them] to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
As Nietzsche proposed, “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct [them] to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” And this corruption was an intoxicating kind of idolatry for me for decades.
Former Evangelical (And Acts 29 member) Jamie Lee Finch’s book You Are Your Own covers a lot of ground. But her central message is most resonant with me: A Christian faith taught us that we were morally bankrupt, fit for hell, and that the only goodness and peace we could find in this life were located outside of ourselves.
Our scriptures taught us, “you are not your own.”
I have found that walking away from that is an opportunity to belong to yourself. To own your own beauty and depravity, to survey your own soul, to inventory your own desires and hopes and dreams. To know yourself and be accountable for your life. My exit from Christianity has been an expansive process. I’ve gotten to know myself and learned to care about myself in ways that weren’t available in a theistic world where a god knew better and my task was to listen and obey.
I once was lost but now I’m found
As an Evangelical the art of sharing my testimony was hammered into me. Life was bad and empty and miserable, and then I tried mainlining Jesus and everything became good and whole and peaceful.
I think what a lot of us who have left the Church have been trying to say is that actually life with Jesus has some serious problems that we need to be honest about. And that moving away from the Christian project has opened up a lot of places of authenticity and maturity and integration in our lives. That leaving the Church has personally allowed us to better love our neighbors, better care for our souls, more sincerely pursue truth, more authentically receive and offer grace.
Leaving the Church has allowed us to better love our neighbors, better care for our souls, more sincerely pursue truth, more authentically receive and offer grace.
And that’s a really painful message to hear when your value is tied up in the necessity of Christian participation in the Church as integral to love and life and wholeness.
I think that what I would want to say, if someone was really able to hear it, was that we didn’t leave the Church because of a misunderstanding or a lazy choice of the path of least resistance. We really, really understand the Church. And leaving was exponentially more painful and difficult than staying ever was.
And we know precisely, specifically how awful considering these realities might be for you. Because we have faced precisely that painful crisis in our own journeys.
