Skip to main content

My Deconversion Aversion

By tattooedmind ~

Where to start. I'm 30 years old, I’ve been married for 7 years and have one daughter with another child on the way. I love my family and wouldn’t change our circumstances for anything. I should mention that my wife is still very Catholic. More on that later though, I guess I’ll start at the beginning. I apologize now that this will be long. I need to get this out for me more than anything, even if no one else reads it.

I went to the Nursery School at the church that shortly after I started, became our home church. I grew up in the Lutheran Church from as young as I can remember. I went to Sunday School most weeks. I had a few really close friends that I grew up with at church since Kindergarten. I learned all the stories that looking back on them with a different perspective seem absolutely batshit crazy. But I believed they all happened, because I was told God said so.

I was part of my youth group as young as I could join. I loved it. Made some new friends and got closer with older ones. As I got older not only did I get much more involved and interested, I began to help with the younger kids. In high school, I was eventually planning and leading some of our youth group meetings. I had been volunteering at many overnight retreats and working with many different groups. I had begun exploring other denominations (primarily their youth group events) with friends.

By the end of high school, I thought I was so in touch with Jesus Christ. I was mostly happy with my life and continued volunteering and helping at my home congregation. I felt like I was doing such a service in helping people connect to their Lord and Savior and build a relationship with Him.

Then hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. I live in the Northeast but I had an experience like no other. I felt this “calling” to go and help. I volunteered for a few months in Mississippi helping clean out houses and rebuild. I was doing God’s work. I met some awesome people from around the country all there to serve their God and their neighbor. It is still to this day an experience I treasure and will never forget.

While I was down there, I felt another “calling.” One of the organizations I had worked with for nearly 10 years as a youth advisor also put together music/youth ministry teams. I had been interested in joining one of their teams for a number of years, but never to the point where I signed up. Not til then. I decided I was going to join this group and tour a part of the country for a year with a handful of complete strangers.

Just before I left for this yearlong ministry, I met the woman that is now my wife. I was trying to avoid getting involved with a girl knowing I was leaving for a year, but we felt as though “God wanted us together.”

I went away and so the first year of our relationship was built over the phone. In the meantime I was living in a van, going from church to church playing music, running youth programs, Vacation Bible Schools and other ministry activities. I was so deep into my faith at that point, and again, it was and still is one of my most amazing experiences that I will never forget. I made some incredible friends on that journey.

When that journey was over, my girlfriend at the time and I had only spent about 2-3 months time together, but we were “together” for almost 15 months. We were engaged roughly 6 months later and married 5 months after that.

I had intended for us to get married and immediately move south for me to pursue a career in youth ministry and she would go to nursing school. I cannot express how glad I am that never actually happened. As I said earlier, my wife is Catholic and we were married in the Catholic Church at her parents’ request. I wasn’t thrilled, as most Lutherans usually aren’t huge fans of Catholicism in the first place, but it was tolerable. She got into nursing school locally, I got a job and we moved in with her parents for a year.

Life was good, and we were both now volunteering together at both the youth groups we grew up at. I was even on the staff part time at my home church. I eventually left, but continued to volunteer at the other one (the Catholic one). The other volunteer leaders had grown to be really good friends of ours. When we weren’t planning youth group meetings together, we were hanging out with each other socially.

All was well in our lives and I can’t really say that anything specific changed. I was doing some more intense personal Bible study and began to notice things that didn’t quite add up the more I read. I took a handful of college classes, religion being one of them. It obviously opened my eyes to the practices and beliefs of other worldviews and people around the world. Months had gone by and I continued studying, but one idea kept resonating though all the study I had done of religion throughout history up to present day 2015. And suddenly in one instant, I came to understand religion, all religion, as merely a political tool.

I no longer believed in everything that helped to shape me as a person for the better part of 28 years. Ummm…what?! Suddenly everything was different. I felt both free and trapped at the same time. Nearly everyone I knew, associated with, loved, was related to or had any connection to my life aside from professionally was a believer to some degree. So how did I go about telling people?

For a while I didn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t sure if I was sure. I needed more time to process. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted so badly for God to actually do something to prove to me that I was wrong. Not a “sign” or a person with a kind word, I wanted to be talked to by a bolt of lightning or a burning bush, or see someone walk across a lake to me or do some crazy Bible story miracle. Suddenly I thought more about all the stories I had learned over the years and looked at them from the eyes of a rational adult who had never heard of any of it, and realized I couldn’t continue to lie to myself. I would be absolutely nuts to go on pretending I believed in any of it.

I thought more about all the stories I had learned over the years and looked at them from the eyes of a rational adult who had never heard of any of it and realized I couldn’t continue to lie to myself.And that was it, I decided that I would no longer consider myself a Christian. I agree with idea of agnosticism. There may be something out there, but it certainly cannot be anywhere as quantifiable or explainable to such detail as any of the religions of the world do. Then I felt very alone. Again, I didn’t like the idea of that. I liked that there was a God looking out for me and his son who died for me. I wanted to believe, but there’s no way to make yourself believe something, especially when every part of your logical self says otherwise. But its not real, so its time to get over it.

I’m over 2 years deconverted at this point. I told my wife first, and she was very understanding. A little confused at first, but now very understanding and supportive. I try not to belittle her feelings toward church and God. I told my mom and my sister pretty early on but not right away. I’ve wanted to tell my dad for a long time and only just about a month ago actually was able to. Opportunities for “Hey, I know you brought me to church my whole life and tried to teach me about God and all the rest, but I don’t believe any of it anymore,” don’t exactly come up too often.

I’ve yet to tell my in-laws, and many friends who are still religious. I actually still help on occasion at the youth group, because I believe in the good, other than the religious part, that comes from it. It’s a safe place for young people to have friends and I see them truly being themselves and I do think that’s necessary. So unfortunately, there are still many people I’m lying to, or at least just avoiding telling.

Part of me knows that my life would be very different if I never had Christianity in it, and I’m certainly curious how that would have worked out. The other part doesn’t care, because I’m happy with my family, which would certainly have been a very different outcome.

I have noticed negatives to my mood. I’m not sure if its related, or maybe I was just better at squashing my negative feelings before with “the help of God” and whatnot, but my wife and I have both noticed that I get angry more easily at things now. Things upset me that didn’t before. Usually petty things. It may be stress from work, which is definitely more, and just seem like a coincidence. I just hope I can manage my mood better. I don’t want to be angry.

Thank you for taking the ridiculous amount of time to read this. Sorry if I tend to babble. I’m glad I found this site though, as everyone here has the unique perspective of “leaving the flock.”

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

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

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro