Leaving Christianity - From Certainty to Freedom to a Question

 

Isn’t it interesting how it can be easier to write about pain that’s in the past than about the excitement and questions of the present moment?

Last night I wrote about leaving Christianity, about depression, about self-rejection. I didn’t mean to write any of it. The intention was to write about what followed. The emotions. The exploring. The directions walked.

Leaving Christianity behind is difficult too for a reason I didn’t mention last night. Leaving behind any conservative religion, any cult, any form of dogmatic group, is difficult for the same reason. My faith was my meaning. Jesus saved me, or so I believed, and that was the only thing that truly mattered or at least its importance far outweighed anything else that was or could have been part of my life. When you leave, where does the meaning go? How can you live when the vast centre of your life has gone? To leave behind the Christianity I lived is to lose meaning, lose purpose and it’s very easy to lose yourself to nihilism or to anger or to grief.

I was angry. I grieved. I lashed out and became very defensive. I knew that I was more free than I’d been at any time in my life but I also felt lost throughout the process of escaping my religion or, as my old friends put it, of losing my faith. I never counted it as a loss. I still don’t. The religious mind can only see leaving a religion as a negative but I see it as the potential for greater positives. Years on I can see that staying has that potential too if accompanied by the rejection of whatever in that religion is an insult to the soul, to reason, to knowledge, to scholarship.

I acknowledge that what I wrote last night was only part of a story. Not everything was as grim and crushing as those words make it seem. There were good times too. Times with family. There were friendships, sometimes very deep friendships. There was a happiness in writing sermons and I was able many times to lose myself in worship songs. I can still treasure the weeks spent experiencing the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises under the guidance of a Jesuit guide. Sometimes there was more laughter in a church than I’ve found anywhere else. Philosophers and comedians laugh less than some of the Christians. Last night’s writing wasn’t a fully balanced autobiography of a pilgrimage through many churches in different places. That’s acceptable. It didn’t have to be. The emotions and situations expressed may only have been part of truth but they were all true.

I acknowledge too that I have immense gratitude for some of the process of leaving Christianity. I used the phrase “original blessing” quite deliberately. A book with that title was the very beginning of finding my freedom. It was written by Matthew Fox, a Catholic priest who had been expelled from both his order and his church for heresy before joining the Episcopalians and finding more freedom there. To read that book, a book I never finished, was an act of major rebellion for me. We were warned away from Fox for his creation spirituality. It’s not Christianity we were told. Stay away. Stick to the correct books by our literalist, evangelical comrades or you’ll be drawn away by Satan himself into errors that Jesus hates. You may even lose your salvation and burn forever. Just like Matthew Fox will.

We were told to blame Fox too for the wrongdoings of others. In the 1990s part of the Church of England introduced the “Nine O’clock Service,” a service after the service for young people to explore Christianity in more exciting ways. At some point the leadership there had been influenced in some way by aspects of creation spirituality, a spiritual way that among other things emphasises cherishing this excellent planet in greater ways. I sometimes heard preachers claim there was no read point to environmentalism because Jesus was coming back soon. Climate change won’t end the world, they said. The second coming would and in any case didn’t God command his people to subdue the earth? Matthew Fox is almost as far from those preachers as it’s possible to be. I still have his books and one day may even finish reading Original Blessing. Back to the Nine O’clock Service. There were problems with there. To be brief, there was a lot of sex that wasn’t stereotypical chastity. And there was a lot of abuse in that sex. They blamed Matthew Fox, implying that Fox consistently promote such things in his love of creation.

It wasn’t true of course. Fox may have written about the beauty of sexuality but he never condoned abuse or anything that went against the idea of sex having to be fully consensual. Nevertheless we all came to believe Fox was the guilty party. Not the people involved in the service. Not the leadership of that group. Not them. We happily placed guilt on Fox because we saw him as a devilish fake Christian. So to buy one of his books in a charity shop and later begin to read it was deeply rebellious for me. As I write this week another report on abuse in the Church of England tells of four-hundred more cases of people being sexually abused in the denomination. There’s no Matthew Fox to blame. There are only the people who committed the offences to blame and the organisation that so often enabled them and covered up their crimes to protect the reputation of the institution.

So Fox gave the first crack in the coffin of despair. Perhaps original sin is a lie? There was another crack in those couple of years too. That crack arose from boredom and from wanting to find a place in a new city. That crack was a philosophy group that opened my eyes to other ideas. I moved to Newcastle as a very conservative Catholic having been received into Catholicism five years earlier. I’d seen it as potentially a purer Christianity with more similarity to what I was reading in Patristic writings than I was experiencing in evangelical, charismatic traditions. Looked at from certain angles there’s an element of truth in that. From other angles, there isn’t. Within a year of moving to Newcastle I was no longer Catholic and had settled in the local Church of England parish. The reasons don’t matter here.

Of course the biggest crack in my coffin came when I accepted myself as transgender. I’ve written lots about that elsewhere both from secular and Christian perspectives. My story of self-acceptance in this way even appeared in a Franciscan journal that’s read across the world. That was a couple of years after I’d begun to live as myself and a year before I finally left the church for reasons entirely unconnected with gender or sexuality. Three exciting years and the best years of the twenty-five I spent as a Christian.

Even before “coming out” I’d been struggling with faith. Perhaps even becoming Catholic was a result of the struggle. I’d been increasingly lost in the Pentecostal church of which I was a part in Wales and had spent a long time thinking it was my fault. A natural conclusion given the preaching there and elsewhere. If you’re not happy, repent. If you’re hurting, trust. If you’re depressed, pray for healing. If you’re suicidal, you’re an evil bastard for pissing all over the gift of life God only gave you because he’s so utterly wonderful! Catholicism seemed better. One Sunday I left for church and ended up walking in the hills because I couldn’t be in church. The next Sunday I found myself in a Catholic church and something inside was very excited by what we found there.

In Wales the struggle repeated. It seemed I had a choice with the local Catholic parishes. I could either have liturgy that was nearly perfect and was utterly reverent or I could have a parish that was friendly. The two didn’t seem to co-exist. Friendliness or obedience to the General Instruction in the Roman Missal. In frustration I walked out on the first Sunday of Advent 2011, met a friend on the way home and ended up drinking tea with him at the back of an Anglican church.

I found new hope there. Some kind of community. And quite soon a chance to lead prayers, to preach again, to begin the journey towards becoming a licensed Anglican preacher or reader or even maybe to be ordained.

My evangelicalism began to die there though and I felt a deep sense of guilt. If Jesus is the only way how could I question the need for the world to follow him? What kind of hateful being was I? Matthew Fox broke through, philosophy broke through, a few other things broke through. And I couldn’t cope with it, at least not for a while. I put my foot down and decided that I had to become more evangelical. More pure. I listened to sermons, long sermons, by people including some I would now call hate preachers because that’s what they are. Of course they didn’t satisfy me. When cracks are hammered into fundamentalism light inevitably gets in.

After coming out there was more light. Initially there was some pain too as a week after the Anglican diocese promised to give me their full support as a transgender woman I was banned from preaching or leading anything. The pastor of the church I sought out trying to save my evangelicalism decided I was an abomination. I never went back. Another church tried to ban me from even setting foot on the premises because I was transgender.

There was more light though. More space too. I found support and community especially in three places. Metropolitan Community Church, a church originally founded as a safe place for queer people to be Christian and accepted. There’s a wide variety of Christians there from evangelical to ultra-liberal and that’s a good thing. MCC gave space to explore in acceptance and love and when the time came it was a safe place to “lose my faith.” Since leaving the church I’ve recommended it to quite a few people who want to worship without fear of hate. I found safety and space too in the local Quaker community and for a while with the Unitarians. I decided that neither of those places was where I was meant to stay but I am full of gratitude for the time spent in both of those groups.

I did lose my faith. From strong theism and necessity to non-theism to atheism. I’ve written at length about the process in theological and emotional terms and don’t want to write about it again now. Somewhere on another blog there are multiple posts about realising and coming to terms with just how much pain my religion and faith had caused.

They say there is a God shaped hole at the centre of each one of us. I don’t believe that. What I do believe is that leaving a religion leaves a massive hole. Religion fulfils many of our psychological needs. Religion gives us many things and it still gives them even when almost every belief of the religion is false or abusive. The emotional tie to a way of faith can be much stronger than reason too. That tie becomes almost our everything. Leaving it behind is difficult, potentially one of the hardest things anyone does. We do it though. Thousands, millions have left religions, controlling groups, cults. We do it because we can do it. Because we are human and that’s an incredible thing to be.

We leave. And before, during or afterwards most of us ask the same question:

Where do we go now? Where is meaning?