The Journey, Entry #3 - What's It Like to Leave?

(A sunset is a beautiful end to a season of darkness.
You might be able to remember the beauty, but when it's pitch black,
you're still gonna run into something that may cause deep injury.
Photo by Ursula Schneider)

Maybe I need to preface the remainder of this story with a reality that hit me recently. For me, faith is all about relationships. Relationships with the Divine, with myself, with others and with the Earth. So, while discussions of theologies, doctrines, religions and their practices are a part of faith, the essence of faith is about relationship. As I read over what I've written so far, the most challenging difficulties have come through shifts of relationship. 

I also want to take a moment to thank so many of you who have reached out with your own stories and encouragement. As I embark on the writing journey, it is more help than I can express to have you share yourselves with me in that way. Please keep it up, I absolutely need all the support I can get. This is hard! This is real! The vulnerability can knock a gal over.

So, what is it like to leave? Well, I'll start by encouraging you, if you haven't already, to consider picking up the book I mentioned in my first post, Leaving the Fold. Winell does an excellent job of telling the story of this journey. Kindle has a very long sample too, so that will get you started. I will say though, if you are active in the Church, it's no picnic reading it. It's like White people reading about the idea of White Fragility. It'll help you discover all of your defense mechanisms. Oh joy!

You've likely seen movies like 'The Matrix' or 'The Giver'. In these movies, the characters discover that they've been living in a false world. Everything seemed very real but when they are plunged into an understanding of actual reality, they find the false narrative is a nightmare which they have a desperate need to escape.

For me, Deconstruction has had a bit of that vibe. I could describe my experience of Evangelical Christianity as one where I've lived with a black bag secured over my head. Inside the bag are screens which depict what life is like. They are a sort of holographic image projected to paint a picture of reality. As I live in this reality, I have no idea that I'm walking around the world with a black bag on my head. People outside of my reality can see it quite clearly, but I and others with bags on their heads are completely unaware. 

Instead of being aware, we seek to convince those who are living in 'the world' that they need to come in to where we are. Perhaps the bag could be called 'the Church'. We try desperately to convince literally everyone that only inside the Church will they be able to see reality with clarity and understanding, like we do. We do this from love. Our desire is to keep people from hell. It's completely sincere.

The holographic projections are made up of theologies, practices and beliefs about almost everything. Where there is no particular belief about a thing, it is largely ignored altogether as unimportant. You might use the word 'dismissed' about these sorts of topics. In some cases, there is a limited amount of information about a thing and all the complexity of that particular issue will be summed up within a few verses spread throughout the Christian text known as the Bible. 

Homosexuality is one example. There are only a few verses that address this topic at all, yet a full doctrine on the subject exists based on those verses and any additional input that might be offered will be dismissed if it doesn't clearly agree with the Church's view of those limited verses.

While hooded inside my black bag, I thought of myself as a widely read, intelligent and well studied person. I believed I had my thumb on the heartbeat of much of modern society. I looked around and was quite grieved about what I saw in the world and I believed the problems could all be solved if only people would join the church.

Then, one day, it was like the bag was ripped off of my head and I could see for the first time. 

What I saw quickly came into focus. Terrifying focus. How I longed to be able to shove that bag right back into place and stay in the world where only one perspective was worth seeing or knowing. It was much easier to live that way. The decisions I made day to day were black and white.

But I couldn't do that. What has been seen, cannot be unseen. I knew that I'd been living with my head in the dark for a long time and that I'd have to start exploring the world of reality.

The concepts didn't all crumble at once. But crumble they did, and relatively quickly. First, the ideas surrounding men's and women's roles in the church and the home toppled. These doctrines crumbling made good sense to me. My whole Christian walk I'd never felt comfortable with the idea that my dreams and voice held no purpose in the world while my husband's held all the purpose. 

That exploration led me to realize that Bible translations had always been made with significant political power manipulations. When I began to read articles that offered comparisons of word studies I realized there was a major problem with trusting translators to do the job in an unbiased way.

This led to questions about the Doctrine of Inerrancy. Once I started to question that (did you know that this doctrine is only, at most, a couple hundred years old and that the specifics of what it means are greatly contested?) it led to everything else being scrutinized.

I began questioning all the doctrines I'd been taught. And what was that like? 

Utterly terrifying.

Up to that point, every thought I had was held up against my understanding of the Bible and a carefully protected collection of Christian doctrines. I was deeply serious in my efforts to evaluate everything I thought and did according to a precise Christian understanding of the world. To shift that focus felt like very shaky ground. I knew that I was heading fast down the feared 'slippery slope' and there was nothing in my way to stop the slide. There was an avalanche pushing me further, destroying every foundational belief I'd been standing on for decades in it's wake.

Marlene Winell puts it this way,

"Leaving your faith is not like letting your library card expire or no longer believing in Santa Claus. It can be shattering to realize that your religion is creating problems in your life.......You may also feel the rage of betrayal or struggle with persistent depression. Many people are reluctant to talk about this subject for fear of hurting loved ones, of alienating others, of appearing foolish and self-centered. They sometimes fear Divine retribution."

Shattering is a good word. 

Everything was shattered. Literally everything.

At least in regards to self and faith, community and support and even daily life purpose. It was like starting from scratch in an alien world. I was trying to get my bearings on a world that I had become almost entirely unfamiliar with. How do I develop relationships based on something other than a shared Christian faith? What do people talk about? How do I make friends at all? What do I do to find meaning in my life? What is my purpose? Do I even have a purpose? How do I go about learning about other perspectives? How do I talk to people about politics, social issues, relationships, the times I need support, personal hobbies?

Every single aspect of my life before was encased in a Christian bubble outside of which the rest of the world lived and about which I understood very little, and even that was deeply biased by my Christian worldview.

As a result, what I've been doing is slowly unraveling all of that and putting myself in the position of learning from people from diverse backgrounds. It truly is like starting over as a young child in many ways.

Next time, I'll give a bit of insight into what the Recovery Process entails. That process is ongoing, because I make new discoveries almost daily, but I'll do my best to give you an idea of that makes some sense of the chaos. 

If you're joining for the first time, you may want to check out previous posts that are earlier installations of this story by clicking on the following link. The Journey Also, if you are enjoying reading about this Journey, please consider subscribing. Thank you so much for reading today!