Skip to main content

Does Leaving the Church Have to Mean Leaving My Family?

By Rhonda Denise Johnson ~

Because I live very far from my mother and sisters, I can go through my days without thinking about them. Yet, because we are family, there are times when we encounter one another and I realize that more than mere kilometers separate us. Every now and again, it occurs to me that Jesus (or at least those ancient authors who claimed they were recording his authentic words) was right about one thing: he came to bring a sword, to divide a house against itself, mother against daughter, brother against brother and that a man’s enemies will be those of his own household. I want to reject this and at times I have proclaimed that I would not let it happen. “I will not allow some religion to destroy my family.” But how do I have peace with people who do not want to have peace with me except on condition that I conform to a belief system that I find is untrue at best and psychologically debilitating at worst?

On more than one occasion I have seriously considered never having anything more to do with my mother. Not that I don’t love her. I do. It’s just that after biting my tongue nearly in two, I invariably require a recovery period and it’s only after I haven’t talked to her in a while that feelings of my love for her can resurface. You see, my mother is an ordained Christian evangelist who for the last thirty years has blamed me for not allowing God to heal my vision and hearing impairments. As an evangelist, she has not evinced the ability to hold a conversation with me without throwing in some comment that leaves me in a state of cognitive dissonance. As her daughter, I’ve heard everything from “You‘re lost and going to hell if you don‘t believe Jesus is Lord” to “God told me He wants to heal you. But it won‘t happen if you don‘t believe.” Sometimes I’ll foolishly offer what I think is a reasonable reply, forgetting that, when speaking to a person who was indoctrinated into the Word of Faith movement, logic and reason do not apply.

My mother is an ordained Christian evangelist who for the last thirty years has blamed me for not allowing God to heal my vision and hearing impairments.My sister is loving towards me. Her behavior—her words have that brightness that tells me she is trying to love me back into the Church. That may sound benevolent, but it’s still manipulative. Admittedly, I haven’t made a big effort to convince her that that simply isn’t going to happen. She has done all but beg me not to tell her my reasons for leaving the Church. Perhaps she thinks I am mad at God just like she was or maybe she thinks the behavior of other Christians drove me away. I’m not mad at my Creator. I don’t think going to Church has anything to do with God. When I think of God, I think of the Creator of the whole universe. But when I go to Church, I find this low-level regional manager whose creation story in the Bible bears no resemblance to the physical universe. No, the behavior of other Christians did not drive me from the Church. Would that it were that easy. But my decision to leave the Church was based on something far more fundamental than that. I left the Church because when I began to read outside the carefully selected memory verses they gave us in Sunday school, I found things in the Bible that made it impossible for me to continue thinking of it as the Word of God. I’ve never talked to my sister about these things and I’m not sure I have the right to force information on her that she is not emotionally ready to deal with. How do I know she is not emotionally ready? Because if she were then I would not have to figure out a way to talk to her about these things. She would bring them up herself. Meanwhile, she continues to smile nervously when people we run into ask what Church I go to. The situation with her is more tolerable than that with my mother. Still, I wish I could at least stop tiptoeing around the subject and have a frank conversation with her. She would have every right to disagree with me if what I told her did not resonate with her, but at least the subject would not be taboo. Her Church gave her a really nice car at a time when she was in a financial predicament. of course, if she considers what I might show her is really in the Bible and acts on it, the Church will say, “Well, give us the car back.” Like Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix, “All I have to offer is the truth.” Can truth stand up to a lie that meets a person’s emotional and financial needs?

It’s not that I want to please my family but don’t know how. On the contrary, I do know how to please them but just don’t want to. Wheat would please my mother is if I called her and said, ”You were right. I was wrong. There are no contradictions in the Bible. I‘ve prayed and asked God to forgive me for ever thinking that there were and now He has healed me and I can hear a gnat piss on cotton and see the boogahs up an ant‘s nose.” That would make my family very happy. It wouldn’t even have to be true. Just the fact that I would be making a “statement of faith” in that direction would make them all say “Praise the Lord.” But I will say no such thing. I refuse to live in co-dependence to people who are addicted to the blue pill. I refuse to go to bed every night knowing that I am living a lie. I have to live with myself. If I am not happy with myself, no one can give me what I don’t already have so doing things to win other people’s favor would be like selling my car for gas money.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not