Note: The Escape Route Series was inspired by messages from “religious survivors” who - as of June 2018 - were afraid to leave the church or ask questions they’d spend years avoiding. I hope my new friends find inspiration, solace, validation, and hope. Resources are available at the bottom of each post.
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Since that “I Said It” post, I’ve received some messages from a few well-intentioned acquaintances who are afraid I’m going to de-convert people with my honesty...as if one person’s Facebook post were powerful enough to do such a thing. I wish I were that magnificently influential. Alas...
These messages have prompted me to clarify something: Although I happened to leave the institutionalized church, I am not a proponent of people leaving Christianity as a whole, nor am I defending a position of any sorts. I’m not one of those angry, baby-eating atheists who thinks religious buildings should be burned to the ground in the name of math. It seems some readers assume I think Christianity is bad because the message of original sin destroyed my life and made me wanna kill myself. Surprisingly, this isn’t totally true.
I should differentiate between Christianity (Christian Mysticism included) and fundamentalist evangelicalism. Christianity - with all of its varying expressions - is broad and roomy...there many beautiful forms of it (I discuss a few examples toward the end of this blog post). There are real reasons evangelical fundamentalism didn’t work for me in the long run, the narrative was too...awful.
My Final Surrender. When I got sober in 2006, I saw all sorts of people receive miracles who didn’t believe in Jesus. It was sort of like the experience most people have when they attend a mainstream University: Man, these are really, really nice people...they are normal and caring and have character. They are continuously bettering themselves and value concepts like forgiveness and self-reflection. Could all of them really be going to Hell “just because?” Hhmmm. That’s sort of messed up.
As I watched people heal from their perpetual “sin issues” (addictions) without knowing Jesus at all - oftentimes using supplemental religious resources that had nothing to do with Christianity - I concluded the whole “we-have-a-monopoly-on-God” gig was pretty much impossible. Here were people, right before my eyes, being transformed from a state of suicidal self-destruction (literal Hell on earth) into life-filled individuals with an endless outpouring of Love for their fellow man. Their altruism had no profit motive, nor was it inspired by the idea of an afterlife, nor were they seeking approval from any authority figures. There was no discussion of a sacrificial lamb or “being like Christ.” Most of these folks had never even heard such language. These people had access to miracles of Goodness that reached beyond any particular religion - and much more access, it seemed, than any church I’d ever seen.
After you watch these miracles happen over and over for atheists, Jews, Buddhists, humanitarians, LGBTQs, feminists, and anyone else traditionally described as “not-Christian” in the early 2000s, you concede to the fact that the whole basis of the dominant Evangelical ideology is pretty prejudiced.
Once I belonged to this loving community of sinners, I didn't fear the inevitable abandonment of my intensely evangelical friends. Psychologically speaking, the idea of being ostracized and condemned was less life-threatening. Because of this, I felt safe to ask myself questions about the seriously dark-sides of evangelical theology - the same ideas I’d swallowed as fact since childhood. Over time, my fears of Hell and “being sinful” were no longer the basis of my belief system; I couldn't conceptualize an eternity made up of two opposing destinations: one for the forgiven, and another for the unfortunates.
I just couldn’t get my head around the idea of a God that showed favoritism to a select group of people while allowing others to suffer eternal damnation. This idea wasn’t loving or merciful or worship-worthy to me. It’s wasn’t even just. I also couldn’t ignore my discomforts by telling myself “God works in mysterious ways,” or “there is free-will, but there is also predestination, so the paradox is beyond our mental faculties.” I wasn’t satisfied with the metaphors and object lessons fed to the spounge-like brains of Jr. High students: “just as an ant can never grasp the workings of humans, we will never comprehend the dimensions of a God who exists beyond time.” These analogies didn’t answer any questions; they just gave seekers permission to suppress and ignore them.
Even if I could get my head around a God who sufferd from hybrid-nepotism, I certainly didn’t wanna spend eternity with it. That would sort of be like getting to spend eternity with Hitler because you’re part of the Arian race...
...so I gave up the idea. Entirely.
Defining the TBWs. Before I explain how I made peace with this decision, let me first explain “The Big WTFs” that arose in my late teens and early 20’s (we’ll call them TBWs for short). They are familiar to to most Christians I know:
The existence of Hell
The idea of a God who plays favorites
The idea of an allknowing Creator who exists beyond time and still abandons 90% of his own children
The certain fact that most humans are not born into evangelical families and there is no Equal-Opportunity-Jesus-Awareness program to compensate for all the North African children abducted by terrorists
etc.
The TBW’s also include obvious discrepancies in Evangelical values of the 90’s, demonstrated by Christians who:
Ate shellfish while demonizing gay people
Enmeshed capitalism with Christianity even though Jesus hung out with homeless prostitutes and told us to give all our possessions to the poor
Violently supported pro-life campaigns, abstinence education, and heteronormative marriage laws despite the concubines and incestual behavior of biblical icons
etc.
The longer I was in ministry, the more I wondered why some teachings were chalked up to historical culture, while others were used to measure my obedience to Christ. Who got to pick? And why did we pay more attention to Paul’s letters than Jesus’ actual teachings? Wasn’t Paul just a man like the rest of us? Also, I thought Jesus traveled to other countries; was he exposed to the Eastern Philosophies older than the Bible? Where did he go for 20 years? If he’s really God, I wondered, you think we’d be kinda curious about this shit.
My questions weren't just about God; they concerned the strange Evangelical fetishes for which I found no sound explanation. When it came to the teachings of Jesus himself, I wasn’t very concerned*. They weren’t nearly as difficult to swallow as a literal interpretation of the Old Testament and books authored after the crucifixion.
*(I learned to interpret the gospels in a way that made sense to me. For example, I didn’t know anyone who - as instructed in Matthew 5:29 - actually gouged out their own eyes from watching porn...so when Jesus spoke of separating the sheep from the goats [Matthew 25:31-46], I just assumed his references to eternal fire were a metaphor for the realities of living through our own egos. After all, I had experienced the prison of my own ego. A life void of gratitude, trust, and compassion - plagued by the isolating nature of secrets, worry, and narcissistic self-pity - had certainly felt like endless pain.)
When it Comes to Denial, I'm a Hypocrite. I can totally see how most evangelicals can ignore the TBW’s. If you aren’t gay, aren’t divorced, don’t have addiction or mental illness in your family...if you’ve never had an abortion or been sexually assaulted or lived under the poverty line...if you’ve never touched a malnourished baby or heard the wailing screams of a mother whose lost her child to dehydration...then it’s really easy to forgo these existential questions and just ride along on the evangelical train. Why not? The system is working. You sleep good at night. I get it, I was there.
People don’t typically question the entire foundation of their reality unless they’re in a lot of pain. It takes pain - usually extreme pain - to challenge the “absolutes” of our identities and collective purpose. As was so brilliantly stated on yesterday’s podcast (choose “Indoctorination” with Warzel and Finch): evangelicalism resembles a team sport; as long as you’re on the winning team, everything is great. So I don’t expect anyone who is actively benefiting from an evanglical lifestyle to seriously consider anything I’m talking about...ever. Like, for the rest of their lives. And that's totally Ok. Don’t fix what’s not broken.
I also don't believe that accepting these contradictory and exclusionary TBW’s “on faith” is wrong. I’m not anti-denial or anti-hope. I gleefully suppress a lot of things that are too enormous to handle. In fact, I block discomforts out of my awareness all the time (environmental problems, animal suffering, sex-trafficking, and my recent ten pound weight gain, just to name a few). Looking at these things would require that I actually do something about them...and honesty, I’m a really lazy person.
Even though I can willfully ignore my excessive use of disposable plastic and endless piles of unwashed laundry, the TBW’s were different. Why? Because I had that soul-destroying eating disorder as a missionary. While I put bandaids on little Mauritanian boys who would probably wither away from diarrhea or else be recruited for ISIS, I died inside. The poverty-stricken parents of these 4 and 5 year-old village boys had willingly surrendered them to abusive con men who’d promised their children a proper education and a chance for a better life. When they weren’t at our medical center, I watched these boys panhandle for their slave owner and scavenge for food in the city garbage. This was their life...this was the REST OF THEIR LIFE.
By the time these boys were 15 years old - beyond the “age of reason” according to most Christians I knew - most of them turned into the same con men who’d ruined them. I’d never witnessed the cycle of abuse so clearly: born victims, grown abusers, zero choice. It took a mind-altering addiction to numb the injustices of the very ideologies to which I had subscribed and dedicated my life: This is a closed Islamic country...it’s illegal to be a Christian. These boys have already been abandoned by God; will the peace of death abandon them, too? Even if they don't go to Hell, am I’m supposed to trust this tortured life is "God's plan" for them, while "His plan" for my American friends is to eat sushi after church on Sundays? I can’t think about this shit...I just can’t...I gotta tune out. And so I did.
My addiction was inextricably linked to the unavoidable questions I wished to deny, but couldn’t. It would be accurate to say that I could no longer “afford” to keep them if I wanted to live. I was drowning in an emotional ocean of bulimic insanity, and these unexamined TBW’s were cement filled cinder-blocks sewn into my clothing; I was destined to sink if I didn’t take them off.
I had to sincerely consider the facts: Ok, Rach, you are living in hell right now…the hell of addiction and stored up pain. If God is as loving as they say, he’s probably not so codependent that he needs you to worship him 24 hours a day. He’s probably not so insecure that he punishes people who don’t pay attention to him. He’s probably not a manipulative martyr who makes sacrifices to hold over the heads of his children. If God is as loving as they say, then you can probably assume he doesn’t want you to die... If God is as loving as they say, then I think he’d be all right if you took off these cement clothes... If God is as loving as they say, then the OTHER stuff they say just can’t be true... And even if it IS true, I just don’t think a loving God would give a shit if you have to live as if it isn’t.
Freedom & Faith Can Go Together. I still believe in a force of Miraculous Good, in Spirit, in Progress, in “God.” Challenging my long-defended beliefs is what brought me healing and gave me the room to find Real Love, Liberation, and Rebirth. It was a slow process, and it took years of wrestling with a god-concept I no longer believe in. Everytime I wondered if unworthiness might characterize the default of my humanity, my eating-disorder would resurrect itself and cut me to ribbons. I just wasn’t strong enough to survive fundamentalism...but I dig Christianity.
For those who can’t subscribe to the TBWs but don’t want to walk away from the Christian faith altogether, consider this: There are some Christian philosophies that believe everyone (absolutely everyone - past, present, and future) is payed for via Christ, and the blessing is simply knowing about it. People who are in touch with their freedom from “death” enjoy unshakble security, self-forgiveness, and bask in the beauty of the human experience...not because they said the sinner’s prayer, but because this God-concept is actually Loving...and Truth sets people free.
There are other Christian philosophies that believe we are all Sons and Daughters of God, just as Jesus was. The difference is that Jesus understood and demonstrated his Divinity to it’s fullest potential. In this model, sin is not seen as irreconcilable impurity; it’s not something that has the power to separate us from God for eternity. The word “sin” is used to describe the patterns and illusions that keep us from “feeling in touch” with God’s Peace and Freedom in the here and now. The question is not “Am I going to Heaven?” Rather, it is “Can I experience Heaven on earth by experientially knowing what Jesus knew?”
When Christianity is approached from these angles, the real journey is about character transformation and facing our demons courageously (demons like dishonesty, resentment, fantasy, blind submission, entitlement, manipulation, long kept secrets, codependent neediness, prejudices, and fears). We focus on the Hero’s Journey rather than converting people for points, seeking approval, memorizing dates, preparing for a terror-based rapture, purifying our outsides, or avoiding “evils.”
I think these models are pretty cool. The gist is: “Face everything that makes you uncomfortable and speak the truth once you find it - you’re allowed now because the law has been abolished and legalism has failed. You will have more room in your life to love people better. You will be more useful, generous, and empathetic because your mind and heart will not be clogged with the incessant demands of your ego. Less noise, more Love. Less noise, more Peace.”
A lot of evangelicals will feel that these philosophies are not Christian at all, that they are watered down versions of the grace message and give people an excuse to sin. But I have never found this to be the case in my 12 years of practical experiences with real-life, drug-addicted humans. Like seriously, not once. You can read about this in the next post.
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Free Resources:
Podcast for those Questioning their Faith:
The Life After Podcast (interviews w/ people who've left fundamentalist Christianity)
Book on Spiritual Abuse & Leaving Fundamentalism/Religion:
Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists & Others Leaving Religion
Book on Spiritual Abuse for Christians:
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse: Recognizing & Escaping Spiritual Manipulation & False Spiritual Authority
Printable Workbook for those Harmed by Religion:
Free Religious Trauma PDF Workbook by Dr. Marlene Winell