When they learn I don’t believe anymore, sometimes they react with anger, like the person I matched with on a dating app.
He was in a master’s program, a self-proclaimed Christian working on his psychology degree to become a therapist.
I casually mentioned it, having noticed he called himself a Christian on his profile. He responded, “Oh, did life get HARD for you, princess? Did things suddenly get HARD and you lost your faith?”
I unmatched quietly. I didn’t owe him anything. I didn’t have to correct him. I didn’t have to explain about my childhood with a father where beatings happened regularly, where he rewrote reality to suit his own desires, where food was scarce. Where I lived in constant fear.
I didn’t have to explain my marriage, with a husband who was prone to anger outbursts, who lied to me constantly, where I lived in constant fear.
I didn’t have to reveal my precious Margaret, who died a horrific death with a gunshot wound to the face, dead without faith herself, and, if the Bible was true, condemned to hell.
This person had his own issues that caused his anger, and while I feared for his future clients, they were not my responsibility.
Sometimes, it’s accusation, a different reaction to learning I don’t believe anymore, like the person with a master’s of divinity, telling me I must have never believed in the first place.
He’s a Facebook friend, someone I’ve spoken with, attended church with, and to him, I said simply, “Don’t come for me here.”
I don’t owe him anything else, either.
I don’t owe him the story of how my faith saved my life when I was 15, when I seriously considered suicide and I had a plan for it.
I didn’t owe him the reality of how hard I worked through my fears and doubts, how much I excused the behavior of Christians to have Jesus.
I didn’t owe him any of my time.
And sometimes, there’s magic thinking as a reaction, when I share the exact moment my faith disappeared—at my sister’s memorial.
I wrote about that moment here.
Magical thinking happened to an elder at a church I visited in Arkansas. He got uncomfortable when I shared I didn’t believe. I was at church because of a cute boy— not the elder. The boy was nice and hilarious and invited me to his church, a place he said that welcomed everyone, including the odd and the weird, which was speaking my language. Stepping back into a church a year after Margaret’s death was uncomfortable, but he was there and he gave me an excellent hug and I knew how to hold my own in a crowd of strangers. Plus, I hadn’t denounced my faith. It had simply vanished. I wasn’t angry at God, if he existed. I wasn’t angry at other Christians. I wasn’t angry at the general “church”.
I met the elder on the way out after the service and somehow Margaret came up. I was still interested in making people feel as uncomfortable as possible if they asked about her death, just so I could see how they reacted.
I wanted people to understand. To sit in the pain with me, even if they’ve never experienced it. Losing a sibling breaks a body in a way I cannot describe. Losing Margaret broke me. But losing my faith gave me clarity.
The elder told me that maybe she’d been saved in her final moments, right before the bullet.
“Maybe,” I said, and I was reminded of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Magical thinking isn’t just for the grieving. It’s for those who feel discomfort too.
Maybe unicorns exist, as well. Maybe there are mermaids. Because without something concrete, we can fill the void with whatever we want to ease ourselves, the adult equivalent of sucking on a pacifier. Or clutching a blanket.
Some have heard me, however, and hesitated to share certain things, not wishing to offend me.
I am not angry and I am not offended. I let them know they can talk about their faith as it pertains to them. They can pray for me if they wish. But we better have more things to talk about than just faith, and I’ve thanked a friend recently for being okay with my lack of belief, as we social distance for hours and discuss racism and other social issues. Her faith pops up. But it is not all that she is. And she’s aware of the issues in the church and elsewhere.
Because too, with ultra-conservative Christianity, there is a historical link to white supremacy and patriarchy. It’s not all churches. It’s not all denominations. It’s insidious, tucked into things I was taught (they liked to say that the Civil War was about state rights), and how my body was policed (female teenagers are responsible for the depraved thoughts of men and even their male peers), and what politics were acceptable (two people at a church I attended carted me off to a Kirk Cameron rally movie back in 2016). I’ll be sharing more about this aspect in general, and how leaving my faith made me more clearly able to accept what’s happening in our society without the fears of losing a community I’ve already lost.
It was nothing like what I was taught. And I’d seen that already as a teenager, getting to know kids at my fast food job, hearing their dreams, seeing their kindness, which was a stark contrast to the Christian teenagers I knew. I’d been taught that being an unbeliever, being of the world, being a heathen, was being in a godless, hopeless place. People were stuck in their depravity, and they didn’t know what they were doing. But I didn’t see that in those teenagers.
When a pastor in Colorado said, before I got married, that some Christians have bad marriages and some unbelievers have good ones, I was more confused. So what was the difference, what was the divide then? Good people were anywhere, just as bad people infiltrated the church, and there didn’t seem to be a clear way to tell the difference.
When I lost my faith and all the rules tied to it, I made different choices. I started to learn boundaries. I set up expectations. I’m much healthier now than I ever was as a Christian. I have not fallen into the “curses” and “sin” I was told I would, as a heathen and unbeliever. I’m a much more kind person. I can accept my failings much better. I feel much more at peace without the fickle rules I tried to follow as a Christian.
After I cautiously shared about my loss of faith in 2019, it would creep into my writing more and more. It came up now and then with certain people. But it wasn’t a core part of my identity as a person. I’d rather be known as a dog trainer than a heathen. But as it crept in, the most surprising consequence of beginning to share more about my loss of faith is that there have been others questioning their own. Or starting to dismantle and rebuild. Some haven’t stopped believing entirely, but they know something isn’t working, and they’re doing the work to figure out what and why. I’ve cherished these conversations. I’m not the only one.
As I’ve found ways to explore my own loss of faith, I’ve also found others, people more mainstream. There are quite a few comedians who have lost their faith and have even created entire podcasts around or incorporating it, including:
I’d chosen to dive deep into the darkness alone originally, allowing what I saw to strip away all the excuses I’d held on for years. I didn’t know of anyone else who’d lost their faith when it happened to me, not in the way that I had. My father had declared himself an atheist when my mother finally left him, and I’d seen his switch as denouncing something that had been advantageous at one point, not something he’d truly believed and hoped in. I’d made other excuses, too, when someone fell away, that they’d probably never believed in the first place. That there was something else they wanted that didn’t align with faith.
But that’s not always true. Sometimes it just stops making sense. Or there’s a trauma that strips the bones down bare.
And when that happens, it seems like most people are quiet. It’s deeply personal. It can lead to being ostracized.
Because, honestly, a lot of things weren’t pretty, like the time I sat in a client’s home, ready to stay a week with their animals, and I got a text that their housekeeper had tested positive for COVID-19. She’d been there six days earlier, which should have been long enough to knock it out if she’d been positive then. But fear of death came for me, wrapping cold tentacles around my throat. Before, it had been so clear. As a Christian, I could face death with confidence. I knew where I was going. Now, I don’t know what waits for me, and I’ve had several existential crises.
But I’m not in a hurry to develop a new belief system. Maybe I’m just energy that will be absorbed into the earth. Maybe I’ll be reincarnated. Maybe there’s something else. And in the meantime, I’ll get comfortable with age and dying. It happens to everyone, and it’s not only the Christians who can claim any peace about it.
New essays every Friday.