Some thoughts on why I left the church.
Note that this isn't a research paper and I am citing a lot of information from memory years after when I studied these things, so (in ironic fashion considering some of the topics I cover here) my recollection here may not be entirely exact on some details, etc.
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I grew up going to a nondenominational church (which basically means Protestant with some Baptist flavoring) + its associated private Christian school for the first 8 years of my school life. We were expected to memorize a different Bible verse every week, attend chapel on Fridays, had a class dedicated to studying Biblical stories, and so on.
Growing up in that kind of environment, you end up coming to assume that your experience is "normal." I can imagine it sharing a lot in common with more conservative environments in the US that have internalized this experience as a part of their culture. It is also completely different from the experience of church I had in my college days.
I had a bit of a temporary break from regular church attendance when I switched to a public high school, but I always had an underlying intent to return, which I ended up doing in college when I found out a few dorm-mates were attending a church a bus ride away on Sundays. This eventually led me to join Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, a parachurch (multidenominational) organization attended by other college students on campus (one of several Christian groups on campus, actually).
IV challenged me to think about religious experience in a way completely different from what I had learned growing up. Church was less a (uniquely American) cultural experience and more an actual spiritual experience one pursued through genuine community and fellowship with fellow peers who were also struggling through life.
We had weekly small groups at people's apartments that studied Bible passages in a more academic manner than I had learned in school (more akin to rote memorization). This process was called inductive Bible study, where rather than coming to the passage with prescribed interpretations, we attempt to infer meaning from reading the passage directly (akin to how one would analyze a book from the text in English class).
I actually started thinking critically about how to interpret Scripture thematically and how its messages applied to our lives. Oftentimes these themes reflected broader challenges (i.e. how does my faith tie into my life's work? what does God have to say about suffering in the world today? how do I make sense of my ethnic identity and the privileges I was born into?) and these ideas played also into the kinds of serious conversations my small group had.
If there was one thing I gained from these experiences, which continued in my post college years as I transitioned to a church in the Bay Area that included former IV members from other schools, it was that I developed high expectations for what community and relationships should look like. Through group prayers and serious talks about the problems each of us were facing in our lives, I developed the capacity to share more openly about my personal struggles with accountability partners, some of whom I am still friends with to this day. We didn't shy away from the deep stuff, even things typically seen as "taboo" in open conversations today (i.e. politics -- some of the people I met from my IV days are the most progressive and politically active people I know).
And then gradually... I started shifting away from this in my own beliefs.
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Underneath all of this, I had always struggled with a sense of doubt about the foundation of Protestant Christianity - the Bible itself.
My school upbringing had raised me into the tradition of Biblical literalism, which when taken at its most extreme, assumes the Earth is only around 6000 years ago because of how the numbers in Genesis add up. It assumes that because the Bible is the Word of God, it is fundamentally perfect in inception and thus every word in its text was written for a reason. This includes assumptions about how the books were written (traditions that have it that Moses wrote the first 5 books for example), the historicity of events described (Noah's ark and where it landed; Jews moving to and then fleeing Egypt generations after; everything about Jesus' life), and so on.
This leads to a branch of Christianity called apologetics that is meant to address questions and concerns people may have when reading the text... like why there are slaves in the Bible; the widespread human suffering described in the early pages (besides Genesis/Job which I've described in other posts on this blog, try reading Judges sometime); literal apparent contradictions in the timeline of Jesus's ministry and final week, and such. There are apologetic answers for all of these if you bother to look.
These answers also tend to feel a lot like they bend over backwards a lot just to justify things being "true" if you bother to think about them beyond just accepting them at face value.
I had an underlying feeling that these answers weren't sufficient to address concerns skeptics raised (as much as I wanted to believe them), so I started reading academic books about the composition and historicity of the Bible, as well as church history from the time of Jesus onward. What I learned shook me.
Traditionally ascribed authors of books weren't necessarily who they said they were. The first five books of the Bible were in themselves a messy collaboration, stitched together from multiple authors, and this can be inferred enough just from conflicting accounts of the same story in Genesis (compare chapters 1 and 2 on the details of what happens when God makes man).
Same goes for the New Testament authors; Matthew and John for example were both part of Jesus' original 12 disciples, but the authorship of their books date many years after the earliest Gospel (Mark) and differ enough in detail that something is off in reconciling their accounts of what actually happened when the same story is told in each book (what day of the week did Jesus die, for example? Friday? Sunday?).
Dive into this further and you realize historical accuracy wasn't even necessarily the point, because authors back then didn't have historical accuracy as a concern when they wrote what they did. That in itself is a modern-day construct. Like anyone else, these authors had agendas / messages they were trying to tell, and sometimes the details mattered less than the underlying message.
Which makes sense when you think about it from a critical perspective, but goes completely against the "facts" I had learned growing up. And I'm touching the tip of the iceberg here.
I soon came to realize my whole belief system for what happened in the past in the Bible was based on an unstable foundation, on sand instead of rocks if you go back to that one parable of Jesus. My whole purpose in believing that Jesus was my Savior was founded on the assumption that the stories about him in the Bible actually happened the way they said they did. Because what is the point in believing in a Messiah who didn't exist the way I was taught he lived? What exactly was it that I am believing in?
And if I couldn't trust the Bible on these details, what else couldn't I trust? What about what it has to say (or doesn't have to say) about homosexuality?
Because deep down, I was in denial at the time... but I wasn't fully straight.
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I started experimenting with weed around this time for unrelated reasons after a friend introduced me to it (long story), which I treated as my vice in the sense that I never could enjoy alcohol in the same way (I have something akin to an allergic reaction whenever I have alcohol).
One of the things about weed, especially when you first try it, is that it forces you to confront thoughts that you normally wouldn't want to think about, because it is incredibly difficult to hide and compartmentalize thoughts from yourself when you are high (at least in my experience). And one thing that I came to notice whenever I got high and happened to be browsing the Internet is, I couldn't stop looking at certain other guys... in an infatuated kind of way.
It got to the point where during a particularly high experience a decade ago, I had a moment where my high self told my sober self, "Dude, you're attracted to this guy."
I immediately linked this feeling I was experiencing back to an infatuation I had when I was in third grade, a similar experience where I couldn't stop looking at another boy slightly younger than me. It was the exact same feeling, and my first time ever experiencing it. My first crush was on another boy.
And I had stuffed that feeling somewhere deep into my subconscious, in denial of what it was, because the religion I had been raised into had raised me to believe that this wasn't okay. That it was a sin to be with another man, another person of the same gender as me.
And my own father had told me to vote against gay marriage when the proposition was raised in college because "marriage is between a man and a woman."
Because I was at a point where I had normalized sharing what was going on in my personal life as the "right" thing to do in my religious community, I eventually shared this experience with my small group. It was not easy. But I felt that I had to, because this was now my struggle, and I wanted my community to know.
And the moment I did, something snapped in me. I immediately stopped attending Sunday service.
It didn't help that later around this year and the next:
- InterVarsity released a controversial doctrinal policy forcing its staff to comply with a statement not affirming homosexuality, not accepting LGBT individuals in leadership positions, and forcing those who did not comply to resign within a month.
- My church started a series on reaching out to the LGBT community, but with sermons phrased in a way that felt that they were speaking more to congregation members who didn't know how to speak to LGBT individuals rather than people like me directly.
The fact that it even took this long (me being in my mid-to-late twenties) for me to realize this, and only because of a morally gray (as substance use tends to be treated in these circles) experience that I initiated outside of the religious context I had grown up in - that was what really got to me. The fact that there was a fundamental part of me that I was totally blind to and could not self-actualize until I started pushing the boundaries of what church had allotted for my life. (And that was just the first of many more.)
I was the good boy for most of my life, and just being that had prevented me for so long from actually growing in my adult years. I had no idea how to approach relationships because I didn't really allow myself to pursue anyone I actually had real feelings for. And even after this realization, I still haven't for years. (which I am still working through.)
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Amidst all of this, I didn't stop attending my small group (up until it disbanded during the pandemic). Even while my faith started to erode away, and I stopped revering the Bible as truth and started seeing it as just a man-made product of its time -- I still attended weekly studies, just with a new, much more critical lens of what I was reading.
I still actively funded a few folks I'd known from college in their ministries -- although with the justification to myself that I wasn't funding the organization so much as I was funding these individuals I believed in as people, imperfect as the efforts now felt to me. I even got asked to lead a Bible study once or twice by friends who knew full well how I now felt about the Bible (speaking of which -- I can probably still do that today with some refresher lol).
Meanwhile, American politics dovetailed into a mess intertwined with the same religious culture that I originally grew up in, and I got into arguments with my parents over it until we finally agreed to stop talking on the subject altogether to preserve our relationship.
Even though my college spiritual experiences had taught me to value having authentic conversations and not hide things from my community, I couldn't even be transparent with my own parents, who were supposed to be fellow Christians. They couldn't understand what I was going through, and their responses often hurt me more than they helped (even though they never intended to hurt me). Church didn't prepare them for their own kid being this way.
And then as recently as a year ago, I switched from my (Christian) therapist to a new therapist who almost immediately uncovered that I had gone undiagnosed with ADHD for the first 35 years of my life. My previously therapist wasn't trained necessarily to deal with neurodivergent individuals, and I had no way of knowing otherwise until I finally decided to shop around.
(On a more petty note, I also still have random resentment about the ways in which my private Christian school actually didn't prepare me for academic rigor in public school; I nearly did not make it out of Algebra when I transitioned to public due to failing the entrance exam, until I took remedial summer school and almost immediately improved with straight A's for the rest of high school. And my parents paid a few grand+ for that private school.)
My whole life feels like a recurring sequence of events where Christian-specific organizations and culture have failed me. They did not prepare me to tackle complex questions like doubt in the face of real concerns raised by skeptics; the nature of my own sexuality; a chronic condition that has plagued my mental and personal life; and how to authentically engage living with my own family. One of my friends has told me that my experiences are literally why he wouldn't consider Christianity.
And when I broke down deep into depression from the weight of all of this a decade ago (amidst also being laid off), it wasn't faith that saved me in the end. I eventually climbed out of this hole on my own, because at one point I had this realization that God wasn't going to answer the questions I had for him in my lifetime. He was silent in all of this, and that silence felt deafening.
But I wasn't ready to die yet.
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I don't know if I can ever return back to the Church personally. There is too much pain I associate with that environment and what I see there has not really improved for me at face value (my old church recently went through a scandal after its former youth pastor was arrested for child sexual abuse in the past, which did not help at all).
My beliefs are also not really there for me to make it work, and belief, as I have learned over the years, is not something I can force, especially when all of my life experiences have taught me otherwise. I cannot ignore the reality of the failures I have experienced, how ill-equipped I felt in dealing with life's complexities until I finally left it all.
As a book written more than 2000 years ago, the Bible is unfortunately silent or not immediately clear about complex subjects that pervade American society today like the treatment of LGBT people. Yes, people will point to passages condemning homosexuality, but they often fail to understand that relationships as we understand them today were not understood in the same manner 2000 years ago. So what exactly are they condemning, and why are they condemning it?
And even if the Bible does condemn homosexual relationships, does that justify the downstream impact of following through the implications of that, where you have this belief contributing to a spike in LGBT individuals either committing suicide or being murdered by others who feel justified in doing so? And otherwise being treated as inferior, less than human today?
Most debates around these subjects immediately become reductive and people end up talking past each other, because they fundamentally cannot agree on how to communicate or translate across conflicting value systems. We are living in entirely different worlds, different realities, within the same nation and space.
I fundamentally do not think that church prepares people to deal with these kinds of complexities in adult life in an adequate and fulfilling way, especially for people who are born not fully straight as I am. At its core, I think the fundamental structure of American Christianity, designed around Sunday experiences where attendees go to have a message spoken at them rather than engage with a speaker in dialogue and challenge them back, is not designed nor equipped for this.
The church is often decades behind where societal discourse is at, and in America's case, American culture is a huge contributing factor to this. Many Christians in America make the mistake of conflating their religion with their culture and assuming the two are the same thing, that an attack on the mistakes in their culture is an attack on their personal identity and values.
I regularly saw people in my Christian circles over the years who struggled to figure out how to talk to non-Christians, the people who they were supposed to reach out to, because they could not figure out how to relate to people outside of their own insular church communities. They fell into the same in-group and out-group dynamics that define American politics and all of its shortcomings today.
Church leaders in America often do not realize that they are making the same mistakes the Pharisees did in Jesus' day of gatekeeping what it means to be pious and religious, and the messages of the Bible are ironically lost on them while they go about using the Bible to justify telling people how to treat others who do not fit into their communities due to differences of opinion, belief, looks, upbringing, identity, what have you.
Finding a church community should not have to feel like having to wade through field of landmines, where I feel at risk of stepping on a bomb that could literally kill me for simply trying to be authentic and not lie to myself about who I am.
People can use the argument of God working through imperfect individuals and structures all they want, but what does that even mean when I can find much better, safer spaces for community that support LGBT people outside of the church itself? Where I don't have to literally die before I can even learn how to live?
The reality of the matter is, if God were really truly working in these organizations, I would have expected better by now. So I left, and haven't looked back since.
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And here I am today, years later. For whatever the reason I only just now feel capable of writing this out, after a dry writing spell, and a conversation I had with someone from my college years just last week, where that person told me they still see God working in me through all of this, even if I don't see it myself.
And she is the third Christian who has told me this since I went through these experiences and shared with people; one of the others even said they felt this was the real God working in me, as opposed to the exact opposite I have been calling out in churches up till now.
I told her this and we were both at a loss at what to do with that knowledge.
I am struck by a question she asked me in response - what do I consider my anchor today, if I have one? One of the side effects of leaving the church is it can leave you feeling aimless, unclear on where to go, when most of your life you have felt God be that anchor.
I don't remember exactly what I said, but she took my attempts to figure this out for myself to mean that my anchor is the process I go through in figuring out what it means to be authentic and true to who I am. It means having to wrestle and confront uncomfortable truths when I would very much rather be doing other things.
It means not settling for conventional explanations that the cultures I have been part of have used and not taking these institutions at face value. "For you will know them by the fruits of their labor." (The literary Jesus had it right all along.)
I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life after all of this, picking up the pieces of three decades worth of shattered expectations of what I should be doing according to my upbringing. I wouldn't wish what I went through on anyone... but I also wouldn't change anything about it, in retrospect.
It feels scary in many ways, to not know and not have a sense of direction and feel lost in a cloud of haze and fog.
But I can still hope. And hope is all we have.
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