Faith Dissolved: My Religious Background
Okay, a (sort of) brief history...
I grew up in a small town in rural Ontario where most people are Protestant evangelicals of some variety. My parents left the Christian Reformed Church when I was two and joined a small Standard church (somewhat related to the Wesleyan denomination) which had around 200 members at the time. By the time I was in high school, the church had anywhere between 700 and 1000 people in attendance. My family was involved in Bible studies, choir, youth group, kids programs, musicals, Christmas and Easter presentations, Sunday school—pretty much anything that was offered, we were in it. Church was a very large part of my life, and I loved it. I believed that the Bible was inerrant, that God made the world and everything in it, that Jesus died for our sins and had a wonderful plan for my life, and that separation from God would be unimaginably horrible.
I've always been a sucker for anything academic, so I studied the Bible on my own from a pretty young age. I knew all of the Bible stories and I mean all of them. Sometimes I ran into questions that I didn't have the answers for, but I assumed, as all children do, that when I grew up it would make sense somehow. I assumed that the reason it seemed odd to me that God would tell us not to kill people and then command the Israelites to kill everyone living in the Promised Land was that I didn't have enough information. I was taught that God's ways are higher than our ways and that it is presumptuous to think that we, finite humans that we are, could understand the massive wisdom of God. So my questions were pushed back for a while and I believed wholeheartedly. I loved God and I tried to share that love with my friends.
In high school, things went awry. I got involved with the charismatic movement. I started noticing that there were these chapters in the New Testament about "speaking in tongues" and "prophesying" and I couldn't get a straight answer from anyone in my church as to what that might mean. So, I started going to the Pentecostal church with some friends, as well as the Salvation Army.
Fast-forward a few years, and I'm 17 and going to the Salvation Army fulltime. This particular corps (church) was run by two very charismatic leaders, and it got cultish. The services were not for the faint of heart. There was speaking in tongues, wailing, shaking, yelling, "words from the Lord," visions, flag-waving, shofar-blowing, you name it. I was there because I believed that God had told me to go there. Two years later, I left abruptly as I realised that no one there really cared about me at all and I was alienating my friends and family as I picked up more and more elitist doctrine.
The year after that I spent living on my own and working full-time, managing a Christian bookstore. I read anything I could get my hands on, books by authors like Philip Yancey, Henri Nouwen, Joseph Girzone, Richard Foster, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I was disillusioned, I was hurt. I was confused because I believed that God had told me to go to the Salvation Army and it had been such a bad experience and I believed that God had only the best in mind for me. These things did not work together. I could only conclude that I had heard incorrectly, that the fault lay with me.
I started to fear that I was losing my faith, so I decided to go to bible college and revamp my theology. I was uncertain about most things at that point, because I knew that my former pastors must have been wrong about most things, but I wasn't sure how much of my theology was good and how much was just brainwashing. So, I signed up for a year-long course that included Systematic Theology, New Testament, Old Testament, and Church History. I wanted to sort things out for myself, I wanted to get my confidence back about my relationship with God, and I wanted to do it systematically.
So, off to bible college. I hated my first few months there, since I was rather church-shy and this school had mandatory chapel attendance four times a week, and everyone seemed SO Christian, whereas I had spent the previous summer volunteering at a local stage company and going to after-parties—not exactly the bible college crowd. In time, though, I grew to love and trust the people that I met there, and I developed some strong friendships and the desire to pray and know God again. By that summer, I felt at home in chapel services and I had made a lot of progress with my theology.
The next year I went to another bible college, this time pursuing an English degree. I chose a bible college rather than a university because I felt that my faith was fragile and I would lose it otherwise. My doubts were building again, and they were stronger this time. My experiences at this second bible college did not help matters; few people were serious about their faith or about life at all, and I was desperately seeking something concrete and reassuring, rather than the pat answers and fake cheeriness that I was being offered. Superficiality was the last thing I wanted.
Somehow, I finally found a church that I felt comfortable in, and I went there every week. I had many discussions that summer with my roommates about religion that grew into arguments as my questions grew less orthodox in nature. Some things are to be believed and not questioned, but I could not stop asking. I needed to know how to deal with my growing belief that opposition to gay marriage rights was nothing less than discrimination, despite Biblical sanction of such discrimination. I needed to know how to reconcile God's goodness with his seemingly evil actions in the Old Testament, and indeed, in my own life. How could a good God allow me to spend two years in a cult when I was honestly seeking his will for my life? Why had two of my friends' devoutly Christian mothers died of cancer? Where was his mercy and healing and attention when we needed it? Why wouldn't my questions stop? Was I a bad person?
The next year, I switched to a university to pursue Linguistics, partially due to my disappointment with the college, and partially due to their rapidly climbing tuition and my limited resources. I'm not sure why my deconversion happened two months into my time at university, it certainly wasn't anything to do with any of my classes, but I woke up one day and realised that my faith was gone. I just didn't believe it anymore, and I couldn't make myself believe it.
The first week was brutal. I cried a lot. I felt like I had lost my best friend, and I had. Jesus has been my closest companion for my entire life, and now he just wasn't there, and I wasn't sure if he ever had been. I felt betrayed and I felt like a betrayer. I had no idea who I was without God. I didn't know where to go from there—my answers had always come from my faith and now it was gone and I couldn't get it back. It was terrifying.
Things got better though. The sky did not fall down, I was not struck by lightening, I did not become suicidal. I was still the same person. Almost everything that had been true about me a month before was still true about me. I still liked the same music and the same people, I still had the same opinions and morals and the same dumb jokes. Suddenly my world opened up. I didn't have to find God's will for my life, I needed to find myself and decide for myself what to make of it.
That was November 2003. I am still learning a lot about myself and I am happier and more comfortable with my opinions and feelings. I used to have days when I was livid that I was ever taught it in the first place, and days when I missed my faith, but those days have become fewer and farther between. It took another six months after deconverting before I really started thinking about atheism as a possible worldview, and my current thoughts on the matter would be best described as weak atheism.
Anyways, that's a brief history of my religious life. This site is a collection of my thoughts and journal entries and poems and scribblings over the years as I've worked through all of this.
Feedback is always welcome, so long as you're nice. :)
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