It’s Time

I stopped writing at all about this several years ago. I had begun to internalize all the feelings I had - both positive and negative - about my deconversion experience, thinking that it didn’t matter if I said anything else, and that no one really cared.

Well I care. And I think it’s time to tell this story in full.

Before, I wrote carefully, trying very hard to not be outright offensive to those who had given me grave offence. This is a pattern with me. Even when I am deeply wounded I have a history of trying desperately to make sure those around me are not hurt directly by my words or actions.

But recently I read a little saying somewhere on social media that whipped through me, electric, when I saw it: Everything that happened to you belongs to you. If people didn’t want you to write about it, they should have treated you better.

I spent decades hating and doubting my words and ideas and values; my very self and experience of reality. This is a thing that happens when the one person who’s approbation you crave above all others tells you things like, “Nothing you want to talk about is worth talking about,” or, “If someone held a gun to your head and asked me to deny God, I wouldn’t,” or, “Your body belongs to me until you get married, and then it belongs to your husband,” or, “I wish you wouldn't say ‘I love you,’ it makes me feel obligated to say it back,” or, “you were both old enough to know better. get over it,” or, “how do you expect any of your relationships to last when you have no moral foundation,” or, “you are not my daughter.”

I spent hours and hours ensuring that my blog posts were clear and calm. That my discussion of the pain my father caused was careful to show he thought what he was doing was right. It shows in the limited amount I wrote; This story cannot be told without that pain and that anger.

So I’m done.

It’s time to heal. I have been so damaged by the conservative christian religion I grew up under - and it is under, not with or beside - and I have too many times burst into sob-choked tears as I brush my teeth or cook dinner or brush my cats because the words my father said “in love” have left such abysmal wounds.

So, welcome to my journey, let's see where it takes us.

On the Journey, Pt. 1: Culture Shock

My journey and transformation from conservative, fundamental Christian to Agnostic Atheist was not a fast or easy one. 

I know that for many members of my immediate family, it was as though I went from Good Christian Girl to Apostate – seemingly overnight. The reality is; that eventual outcome was the result of about seven years of doubt, fear, searching, researching and emotional turmoil. The biggest turmoil, of course, came near the end of the transformation, when I came out to my family as a non-believer, but that’s a post for another day. Over my next series of posts, titled "On the Journey" with various subtitles, I hope to give a glimpse into that those years and to present my Ex-timony, or the story of my deconversion from Christianity.

As I mentioned in a previous post, when I was in my mid-teens I began to experience bouts of depression that were (to me) inexplicable and confusing. I cried out to a god who I desperately wished would acknowledge my pleas, but to no avail. I remember telling my parents that I was so sad, but I didn’t understand why, because I had been taught for so long that when anything was bad or sad in my life, it meant that I simply needed to focus more on God because God was trying to teach me something or was reprimanding me for not being focused on him. If I refocused hard enough he would fix it (or not) depending on his ultimate plan. When I graduated from (a private, Christian) high school I had neither the grades nor the ambition to attend a university and I transitioned directly into community college without knowing who I really was, what I wanted to do, or how to handle my spiraling depression. I spent about 7 years at that community college, shifting from major to major, and flunking out of numerous classes because I just didn't care. I had sunken deep into apathy, and I still couldn't understand why.

As is the case with many religious kids who grew up in The Christian Bubble™ (the protective, exclusive environment that keeps kids from “secular” influences) attending a public community college was a serious culture shock. I grew up in Southern California, which is fairly liberal in its political leanings, and is fairly diverse in its demographics. I had grown up in a racially and ethnically diverse environment, but for the most part I had only ever been surrounded by theists of some flavor or another. Suddenly being in an environment where I couldn't be certain that everyone believed in God was both disconcerting and liberating. I was suddenly forced to acknowledge that much of what I had assumed everyone just KNEW, because I had been taught that way, was not known by the majority of the people I was now surrounded by on a daily basis. 

I had spent the whole of my formative years growing up in a world and religion that told me what and who to be. Rather than feel encouraged to take pride and joy in my achievements and talents, I was taught that pride was a sin and all my talents were god given and that I should “give that glory back to god.” I’m sure this is a mantra that many ex-fundies are familiar with; the almost constant grating down of the self. I had no idea how to BE without religion, and no concept that such being was even possible. I thought that everyone, deep down inside, knew that God was real and that he was the god of the bible. I wholeheartedly swallowed the  religious defense mechanism that non-Christians were all unhappy, immoral deviants who were deluded about their beliefs. With that belief that came belief in the follow up defense mechanism; That atheists in particular were miserable, sin-soaked people who God had "given over unto disbelief."

So, to be suddenly entrenched in a world where there were people who were out atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, as well as many of sects of Christianity that I had never really had any exposure to, was stunning. I started hearing different points of views, not just knowing that there were differing views, but hearing them, and understanding the basis for them. I took a philosophy class for the first time, and started learning how to think instead of what to think. I began to allow myself to have questions about my faith and system of faith, instead of assuming that such questions were human doubt that needed to be squashed by prayer. 

One of the big Christian-faith warnings is: Beware being friends with "The World." This is another of those defense mechanisms: When you are exposed to many differing worldviews, when you start exploring and questioning your own worldview with the same logic and criticisms that you use on others, when  you step OUTSIDE of that Bubble and honestly question and evaluate your beliefs, the supernatural world starts to fall apart. 

In the end, I am so glad that I ended up in the community college, because it afforded me the freedom and friendships that eventually led to my freedom from religion. 

On Belief and Disbelief

"I never really even believed in Jesus."

These are the words I said to my father a few months after I told my immediate family I didn’t believe in the “God of the Bible” or in Jesus as god (but before I identified as Atheist). I was desperately trying to somehow get my father to come to grips with the reality of my lack of belief in a way that would cause him the least amount of pain. 

However, recently, in working on creating content and coming up with ideas for content for this blog, I have been thinking about how wrong I was in saying that I never really believed.

I fell prey to the clever and devious trap I now know as the “No True Scotsman Fallacy.” (More on that in a later post). I was still caught in the thinking of Christianity, or, in the words of one of the lovely people who helped me through my deconversion transition over at Ex-Christian.net, “the furniture of your mind is still quite coloured by the theology.”

Essentially, I believed what I had been told: That if I didn’t believe now, then I had never truly believed, because true believers don’t just stop believing. This is a pretty ubiquitous teaching in the Protestant church, so deeply ingrained that I actually thought it must be true. It wasn’t until months later that I concluded that I had deeply and truly believed and trusted in the Christian god. No one who didn’t believe, and who did not desperately want to believe, would have spent the amount of time I did praying and pleading with their God to reveal Himself and to take away the horrific doubt she was feeling. I spent days and months in a silent, solitary struggle because my faith was teetering, crumbling, dissolving.

I’ve been thinking about my childhood and adolescence rather in-depth the last couple months, as I try to formulate a cohesive and coherent story about my deconversion, which was a flood of upheaval, sorrow, stress and family strife. My faith had been an ever-present piece of me, and a nearly constant prickling of contention between my father and me since at least adolescence.

The story goes that at 3 years of age, I turned to my mother while we stood at the end of a pier overlooking the Pacific Ocean and told her I had “accepted Jesus into my heart,” with no prompting from anyone else. From that point on I was “born again,” though I was to rededicate myself multiple times, and be baptized multiple times, once by my own father.

The interesting thing is that I have always felt a strong tie to and peace from the ocean. Being near the wide open expanse of the water calms and rejuvenates me in a way little else can, so looking back now I find this story very interesting. Perhaps as a child I merely saw this incomprehensible expanse of water, and was overwhelmed by the power and depth and breadth of it, stretching far past the limits of my childlike imagination and ability to contain, and tied it to the stories I was being told in Sunday school and by my father. In any case, from that moment (or at least as far back as I can remember) until the final moment of my deconversion, I felt the “power of God” in nature around me, and any natural event was another confirmation to me of His existence.

As a teenager in high school I began to suffer from depression, and with the depression came an almost crippling guilt. Why was I so sad? Why did I feel so useless, worthless, tired, lazy? I had everything anyone could ever need. I had friends, a family who loved and provided for me, a roof over my head and food to eat. I had no reason to be so blue, and yet every day I felt that sadness. I cried out silently to the God I loved to take away my sadness and my pain after my father convinced me that I didn’t need anti-depressants. I just needed to be more faithful to God, and He would take away my depression and replace it with His peace and love.

So I tried. I tried to be “constant in prayer” and to read my bible every day, and to remember that no matter what I was feeling, that The Christ had suffered infinitely more than my meager psychic pains.

I failed. Of course I failed. I was a hormone riddled, sensitive, introvert of a teenager at the time of life when my brain chemistry demanded not only selfish exploration in search of my identity but during which my genetic tendency towards depression was also blooming. Each time I prayed and felt no relief, or forgot to read my bible, I felt more and more a failure, and more and more deserving of the darkness that was starting to color my everyday life.

I began to feel that god was punishing me for my lack of conviction; my lack of living a life “on fire.” I began to feel I was a lukewarm Christian. I never evangelized people I met on the street, or the cashier serving me at the market, as I saw my father doing. I was quiet with strangers, and introversion doesn’t reconcile well with fundamentalist Christianity.

The depression and the struggle to deny it, to hide it, and to justify it as merely a symptom of a not-good-enough life continued after I graduated high school and began to attend community college. For a few years, I still struggled to be a better Christian. I took on teaching Sunday school classes for the younger children at my church for a short time, I debated with my friends about aspects of theology we had differing opinions on. I struggled to find God in the world around me but instead became entrenched in my depression, to the point where it seemed like all I had ever felt or known. I failed out of a full semester of classes, although I went and sat through all of them. I failed to do homework or show up for tests. I simply didn’t care. I felt abandoned by God and every prayer felt like it fell on deaf ears.

It was during this time that I began to self-harm. Each failure, either perceived, implicit, or plainly stated filled me with guilt and pain. I felt like I had to punish myself for my obvious lack of faith, for my failure to be the daughter my father so wanted me to be, for my failures at school which were so clearly caused by God’s judgement. I was not good enough.

Looking back, I understand that these were all symptoms of my depression, and I wonder: if depression did not run in my family, if I had not developed it at the age I did, or at all…would I still believe?

That year of college, as I sat failing class after class which I should have passed easily, or sat in private cutting into my skin in hopes of reconciliation or retribution or relief, or cried out to a God I felt was no longer listening to me, was the beginning of my real doubts. I began to doubt, instead of judge myself.

Though it would be years before I would conclude that I was an atheist; that I was without a belief in any sort of deity, I began to view Christianity through a lens of skepticism and cynicism.
         I started the journey that would lead, eventually, to my apostasy.