Leaving Christianity - From Christ to the New Age to Atheism

 

As I prepare to type I switch on the radio and hear the opening bars of a setting of Ave Maria, the beautiful melody by Gounod placed over an equally beautiful composition by Bach. Ave Maria. “Hail Mary, Full of Grace,” words from the Biblical story of the angel Gabriel visiting Mary right at the start of the third gospel.

Perhaps those aren’t ideal words with which to begin when writing about leaving Christianity behind. I wrote yesterday of the path by which I came to leave the final church of which I was a member and how save that congregation and its pastor made it to explore options and walk away. I ended with a common question to those who escape from conservative, narrow, “one way”, groups that damage yet supply so many of our psychological and sometimes physical needs. “Where do I go now?”

It would be easier if there were clear divisions in my story. I left Christianity. Then I looked here. Then here. Then there. One place at a time. One option at a time. That’s an easy story to write in fiction but in truth it’s not one that’s common in life. We explore as we leave. We experiment as we move on. Leaving Christianity took me years and I was exploring and adjusting throughout that time, reading books and actively participating to some extent in different groups and practices.

Before becoming a Christian, praying the sinner’s prayer, and deciding that it was my only possible option I’d been interested in and involved with new age groups including taking training courses at the White Lodge. It’s not a well known name because it didn’t ever advertise or promote itself but many of the people who were “names” in the new age movement trained there or had involvement with it. Of course the ideas and practices of the White Lodge weren’t compatible with my new found faith. I was taught about demons, false religions, the dangers of possession, and that every last thing about the spirituality I’d explored before conversion wasn’t merely evil but demonic and invented by Satan and the humans he controlled.

The Galilee Chapel, White Lodge

Demonic was a convenient word, a very easy way to dismiss whatever we didn’t agree with. So I repented and asked God for mercy, cleared out all my books and paraphernalia, smashed my crystal ball since it was a “doorway of the devil.” I was taught a total rejection of all spiritual practices that weren’t Christian. From witchcraft to healing to Buddhism. I was taught to reject lots of practices that are Christian too. Catholicism was demonic and evil and not Christian at all because of saints and Mary and the Pope and all kinds of other things we believed weren’t only wrong but were inventions of the Devil.

In many conservative protestant churches true Christianity was said to have died out sometime after the apostles died although it picked up a bit maybe to make some creeds before being a false church until the sixteenth century with the exception of Wycliff.  I saw a big book recently of heroes of faith from the history of the Christian church. From the hundreds of people only Wycliff was around between 100CE and 1500CE.  It both funny and saddening.  I was a young enthusiastic convert and full of faith. So I believed what I was taught and even studying two theology degrees didn’t overcome that teaching.

I am intelligent. Mensa said so and who am I to disbelief them?! However intelligence can’t necessary see through the control of a system that teaches there is no hope anywhere else. There are very intelligent people within fundamentalist religions, cults, and cultic political groups. Faith can make a person blind. Faith can take away the opportunity for honest questioning, honest study. Faith can be a wonderful thing but it can also be an extreme prison. Sometimes simultaneously.

As my own faith began to collapse I wondered about my past. Had I been right to reject so many spiritual possibilities and experiences in my zeal to follow Christ? Would it be worth exploring some of them again and seeing if they were my future, a future only postponed by religion? So I took the risk. Explored what I’d left behind. I could no longer see it as demonic because my belief in literal demons was shaking apart into nothingness. So was this new age (so-called) where I was meant to go?

The first impetus and, I thought, confirmation, of risk taking came through Quakers. A nearby meeting house held a study day led by Jim Pym, a Quaker Buddhist. Or a Buddhist Quaker. I loved that day and it was the first time in twenty-three years I’d heard the word “chakra” in any way that was positive rather than condemnatory. I still have the little book that was a gift that day and would happily read his longer work. From what I saw he’s a lovely man. I met lots of good people that day and for a while wondered whether I should be training to be a spiritual healer. That was the terminology when I became a Christian. Healing. Aura balancing. Chakra treatments. I’d learned all of them in courses at the White Lodge and at the age of seventeen there would have been a future there and elsewhere, offering myself for others, had I not rejected it. At seventeen I was at the head of my generation, by far the youngest person who had ever been able to take the Spiritual Psychotherapy courses. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned had I not committed my life to Jesus as the only true Lord and Saviour.

During the next years I became more involved in different practices. I went to meditation groups. Reiki sharing sessions. Shamanic drumming groups where we were taught to prophesy and have words of knowledge for each other. Meditation groups. Discussion groups. Angel groups. A séance or two. Sound baths. Card reading groups. Five rhythms dance groups. Mindfulness groups, with and without a spiritual side. A few witchy things and I still have my handmade wand from a witch. I led a pagan funeral one night with liturgy I’d written that day with a green witch. I bought lots of books to replace the ones I’d chucked out twenty-five years earlier. I still have many of those too. I chanted Om. Properly. With three syllables. I chanted mantra drawn from Hinduism. I meditated in triangles and went places to practice Transmission Meditation. I prayed the Great Invocation taken from the front of books by Alice Bailey. I got through Yogananda, the Course in Miracles, reacquired the books of Ronald Beesley who founded the White Lodge. I burned white sage of course. I also went to some Buddhist meetings, sat in the Sikh Gurdwara on occasion, had discussions with a Sufi. And I did most of that while still attending church!

I like to think I approached everything hand in hand with reason and with my natural scepticism. To some extent that’s true. To some it isn’t. My mental health didn’t help either. I was incredibly vulnerable and the drugs the doctors gave me made things worse producing lots of visual and sometimes auditory hallucinations. The new age people called them visions but they were only ever drug side effects that went away when I got myself off the drugs. In church I saw angels gathered on all sides. In the night I saw demonic figures watching me. In new age circles I saw whatever was culturally acceptable and meditation at home became a technicolour, exuberant thing where I could truly believe I was getting more and more in touch with my higher self and higher worlds. One week I hallucinated Poseidon talking to me from a tree. A few days later I hallucinated him again by the sea and baptised myself in a very deep rock pool because I believed he had told me to do it. Just a hallucination but when I mentioned it to the great woman who ran a new age centre she told me it was real and that she talked to Poseidon all the time. Confirmation of my psychiatric delusion wasn’t good for me.

I wanted to believe too. I wanted my “God shaped hole” filled up. A lot of the time it was fun being involved with all the practices and I found myself surrounded mostly by lovely people whose desire was for the good of others. Mostly. There were a few horrible ones and transphobia wasn’t uncommon, often justified with statements like, “It doesn’t matter because in reality we don’t have a gender and in your next life any of us could be a man or a woman so I’m just going to call you he and you should be more advanced than you are and it’s only because you’re not as advanced as me that you think transgender is something you should do.” I found that attitude from quite a few people.

Yes. I wanted to believe. I wanted to find fulfilment. The unhealthiness of fulfilment in one religion being replaced by the unhealthiness of fulfilment in a spectrum of spirituality. Contentment is found in neither. Contentment is found in acceptance, of self, of others, of circumstance. Contentment is found in the possibilities for change that can follow radical acceptance. That’s a bit Buddhist! It’s also stoic and I do like a bit of stoicism. It’s also common sense.

Ultimately though what I found was disillusionment. My head wouldn’t accept not challenging things and when I challenged much of what the lovely people believed fell apart even more than Christianity had. Now I cannot conclusively disprove the experiences of others but in one meditation group someone had messages from the visiting angels, another had messages from the visiting dead people, and a third had a long message from the nine dimensional Venusians and I promise I am not making that up. Sometimes I preferred a touch of scepticism to the absolute agreement given by the gathered meditators.

I’m grateful here for a Christian book, The Way of A Pilgrim, a classic from Orthodox tradition about the life of a wandering pilgrim in Ukraine, Russia and Siberia. Early in the book his teacher tells him to question deeply any experience that seems to be God for the simple reason that most likely it isn’t God because we humans are very, very good at tricking ourselves and being tricked. Where spirituality is concerned, even in a life of faith scepticism is a good rule to follow.

In so many of the groups I spent times with scepticism was almost banned. Accept everything if you want to progress. There was sometimes less reasoning than I found even in the most conservative churches. If someone says they’re meeting with Poseidon or Venusians or purple angels then they are. If someone says they are channelling from an advanced soul then they are. If someone says they have a gift they have. And if someone claims something works then it does.

Except, it doesn’t. And sometimes that’s easy to definitively prove. Definitive proof is rejected as much in conservative religious circles as in new age circles. Sometimes. People were pushing salt lamps to cure all kinds of things. They don’t. People were pushing “Fibonacci Frequencies” including one that would purify your DNA. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t, and nobody ever really explained what purified DNA was. I had a lot of fun one day researching the origin of that theory. Trust me, it’s worth researching for yourself and is the gift that keeps on giving in ever stranger and more outlandish ways.

The leaders and teachers help up as great lights were often evil too. The leader of a local new age centre, a firm believer in the teachings of the transphobic David Icke (the least of his faults maybe) sexually assaulted me in an energy healing session. He said it didn’t matter because he was one of those people who refused to call me she for “advanced spiritual reasons.” He’s not around now so doesn’t need to be named. Friends promoted Osho, known for all kinds of nastiness and the extent of paedophilia enabled and even pushed by him is only just coming out. People I know are into the groups that arose out of the teaching of Yogi Bhajan who sexually abused at least three-hundred of his followers. Even the founder of Triratna Buddhism turned out to have been a serial sexual predator. Gurus are not safe people and there’s damn little safety even in local groups.

That wasn’t the big source of disillusionment though. The big source was deciding that so much of the teaching was bullshit. Most of the chakra and aura teaching isn’t ancient Hinduism as claimed. The Enneagram isn’t Sufi. At a séance the medium “contacted” my mum’s mum and told me about the close relationship I’d had with her growing up. Which was odd given that she died before I was born. She also asked a man in his seventies if any of his grandparents had “passed over”. The man was very impressed by such knowledge. Everyone there was. Except me and I was told how stupid I was being to have doubts about any of it. I don’t mind spirituality being non-rational. Many parts of life can be non-rational. Creativity is often filled with beauty, brilliance and terror that don’t come from our rational side. But I do mind spirituality that’s irrational or anti-rational.

Show that salt lamps don’t do a thing and it makes no difference. People don’t want to not be irrational. A belief cannot be overturned with a fact. Debunking doesn’t work whether it’s Kirlian photography, salt lamps, Venusians, David Icke’s failed prophecies, the daftness of thinking that pulling a random card from a pack will tell you what your spirit animal is, the wrongness of cultural appropriation with regard to spirit animals, hallucinations, the hot and cold reading of psychics and prophets, the mediums who get their information from cards people fill in (Psychic Sally debunked in Sunderland is worth reading about as are Christian prophets). An emotionally held belief is among the strongest thing in our head. Facts mean nothing against them. Outside of spirituality we see this in the proliferation of conspiracy theories. A fact is nothing when a misinterpretation or a lie holds up. Even an absolutely certain demonstration that the theory is wrong is taken as further evidence that it’s right. In the ways of the cult, fundamentalist or narrow religion, firm spiritual beliefs, fringe political groups and conspiracies facts don’t work. I’ve talked with a flat earther, with a man who believed going to the moon is impossible. I’ve talked with anti-vaccine believers, transphobes. And I’ve been a very conservative one-way to God Christian with a completely trustworthy in every way Bible. God said it. I believe it. And that settles it.

I don’t want to tread on beliefs too much.  I definitely don't want to tread on people or insult them. The people are good. I have respect for many spiritual traditions. There is lots to praise in Buddhism, Hindu spiritualities, Sikhism, the compassion taught in the White Lodge and in so many other places. That’s why I still have many of the less peculiar books bought in those years. There’s good too in Christianity and I’ll talk about that in the final part of this writing. I don’t want to put down believers and the ways in which they seek light. I might think how their seeking is utterly bonkers but they are seeking light and love and they are not the enemies of our world. They believe and I would have no desire to change them unless their beliefs became a danger to themselves or others. They’re often very good people, very human. And frequently they’re good at hugs!

I was disillusioned though. No Christianity. None of the other spirituality. I would reject it all. So where should I go for fulfilment? Where is truth? I thought that was an easy answer when the time came. Secular humanism. Atheism. And a bit of stoic philosophy on the side. They weren’t the end of my story though. There is no end until the final end.