Fleeing the Fold
I was told from further back than I can remember, that belief in God and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ would save my soul. Not unlike three quarters of the American population, my parents raised me on the Bible and in church. My faith was a huge part of my life which I didn’t know to question until it was so much a part of me I was terrified to let go.
I was born belonging to the evangelical Christians whose customs and beliefs were a bit crazy to the outsider or apostate’s eye. As a child I grew up used to seeing respectable adults in their Sunday best flopping around on the floor “slain by the spirit”, jumping and shouting prophecies and praying in “tongues”👅.
My first Bible was a red hardcover comic strip Bible with awesome illustrations. I loved how the paper smelled. I read those stories over and over and over. I loved the Old Testament stories about Joshua and the Wall of Jericho, Moses and the plagues; I knew all the New Testament parables, stories Jesus told, by heart: The Lost Sheep, The Good Samaritan, The Fig Tree. 📖
As I got older my passion about my religion, about Jesus, only grew. I wasn’t the kind of person that could believe something fantastical without acknowledging how amazing it was. I had a personal relationship with the creator of the universe! I felt incredibly special.
My church taught that although many branches of Christianity claimed to worship Jesus and believed the Bible, we as evangelicals were the closest to God, as we interpreted the scripture the most accurately and we had the most personal relationship with Christ. 😇
How I worked on that relationship, with far more effort than I contributed to relations with mere mortals! I spent my youth on my knees in my bedroom closet which I had converted to my prayer closet. Now I had a purple New King James version Life Application Bible for Students, and I covered the margins with notes, crossed verses on every page with multiple colored high lighters. Hours sometimes I spent in prayer, often for the souls of my friends, and my parents, who didn’t go to church anymore. 🙇
I dreamed often of being thrown into hell; the skin would be peeling from my body as the flames licked me. I was always naked and my teeth would be gnashing together so extremely that my head would nearly explode. Gnashing, like the Bible said they would. I would wake sweating, my head aching, sometimes my mouth bleeding.🔥🔥🔥
Oh, the guilt when I said a bad word, when I kissed a boy, told a lie. I knew Jesus had been crucified 2000 years ago for these horrible sins of mine, and God would not damn me to hell because of that sacrifice, but the guilt and shame still consumed me. My sins drove those nails through his hands!
I also obsessed for years trying to reconcile the god I wanted to believe in and the god I had to believe in. See, it deeply disturbed me, how in the Bible God did things like order the slaughter of innocent babies, command people to take slaves, burn cities, in the Bible. I had no idea when I was eleven that I was reading some old book about the laws, customs and superstition of an ancient ignorant people and their depiction of their god. 😮
I would pray with a heart full of fear knowing he was liable to strike me dead if he felt like it. And I was supposed to believe that I deserved it for being a sinner. As much as I loved Jesus, I feared God. I knew he knew it, too.
God was considered in everything I said and did. If even my thoughts were impure I endangered my salvation status. I wasn’t allowed to question; this was my god, from the time I folded my little four-year-old fingers and gave him my soul at the threat of eternal hell fire and with the promise that as quick as he would sizzle me for my childish little sins, he would love and save me if only I believed and loved him. 👌
It wasn’t hard to believe then. I was a child after all. I would trust anything all the grown ups insisted was true. But it was hard to love God, that jealous, homicidal maniac. I didn’t have anyone to help me work it out in my head yet, but I felt all these questions burning in my soul my lifelong. For example, it irritated me terribly that the apostle Paul, writer of most the letters that make up the majority of the New Testament, said so many degrading things about women. I tried to talk to my youth pastor about it but he did not have answers. Many of my questions began to go unanswered, or I was given a “one Bible verse answer” which was supposed to cover everything: “God works in mysterious ways! ” 😩
I believed as I was taught to that demons were real and could both oppress and possess a person who isn’t right with God. I was told that invisible angels and demons were physically fighting just a few feet away from me, as I wrestled with a decision about whether or not to sin. I can’t stress how real this was to me.
As a Pentecostal kid I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of normal kid things. I couldn’t go to the movie theater o watch anything my parents hadn’t approved, which wasn’t much. No non- Christian music.
Calvary Shadows Assembly of God church was my second home in my preteen and early teen years. The little congregation was family to my brother and I. We were especially close to Pastor Andrews with his gray beard and button down shirts tucked around his big belly, jumping all over the platform, waving his old Bible in the air, laughing and joking all the way to California with us the summer I was thirteen, taking us to the beach. Pastor used to be a biker and a big-time sinner until he gave his life to God. 💒
I began to really question God, entertaining the idea that perhaps I had not stumbled upon the One True Way We were around eleven or twelve when we joined the church praise team. I couldn’t sing so I worshipped with my hands instead, performing sign language to music, an art I had taught myself using library books and videos.
We went with our pastor on crusades, as he called them, deep in the Apache reservation under a huge tent. Pastor preached electrifying sermons and urged the people to repent and come to Christ. He said I had the gift of healing and often encouraged me to place my hands on the sick and pray. No one ever seemed to be healed but I believed still then that God worked in mysterious ways.
Summers we always went to church camp up North in the mountains; it was a special time for me. I considered myself to be set apart and different from my peers in hometown. I found peers at camp who grew up in the Pentecostal church like me. We sang and praised together packed into a huge auditorium, all raising our arms and crying out in unison, all gathered around the altars on our knees. In the dorm cabins we huddled around our Bibles together.🙏🙇
In high school, I finally found myself part of a close knit little youth group of fellow teenage Jesus freaks from several Christian churches. We called ourselves ND Walls: No Denominational Walls. We were Pentecostal and Baptists and Presbyterian; I had become less obsessed with my church being the right church. We gained a reputation for our performances around town and were often booked for a solid month with Sunday church gigs. I taught songs in sign language and we rehearsed skits to Christian rock songs.
I gradually became less involved with church in my late teens but continued to work on my relationship with God, which for me involved lots of praying and trying not to sin.
I went through a huge change in my interior life, my spiritual life at age 23. For the first time I began to really question God, entertaining the idea that perhaps I had not stumbled upon the One True Way, having been born into a Christian environment. 😯
My research was prompted by a few conversations with my brother, who had recently opened his own mind which, like mine, had been so closed in youth; closed by fear. I started to read about the history of Christianity, everything the religion borrowed from other cultures, how the Bible as I knew it came to be, how it found its way to me. I read and studied about other religion and religion in general, about what are thought to be the origins for and reasoning behind belief in god(s).📚📚📚
Reading thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali blew my mind wide open.
The more I opened my mind, read and learned, the easier it became to let go. I felt an immense sense of relief as my mind slowly wrapped around a new reality. Gone was the lifelong feeling of guilt I had carried: not for my sins- I would feel guilt for wrongdoing regardless of my spiritual beliefs – but for being unable to have total faith. My doubt had only been my reason, trying to shine past the walls I had built keeping it out.
Gone was the secret anger I had hidden, anger toward God, for allowing such suffering in the world. Toward that awesome and awful deity that had shadowed over me in youth I now felt nothing. There was still anger: I was angry that I had been lied to, brainwashed. I still have a lot of that anger.
I had never imagined I would reject the religion of my youth and of my family and forefathers. But nothing felt more right, and turning back would be a lie. I am grateful for my doubts, though they left me so conflicted in my adolescence.
“Without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali 💕💕💕
I had been raised believing my doubts were a weakness, desperately trying to conjure the faith of a mustard seed, hating myself.
No child should have to feel like I did, guilty and terrified of committing innocent acts due to my human nature, conflicted over my feelings for that bully of a god. I believe indoctrination of this caliber constitutes as child abuse. Upon learning it was all a myth, a lie, how I mourned the time and energy wasted, but most of all, the guilt and confusion experienced. No young mind needs to be filled with that garbage. ❌
How is religious indoctrination still so widespread in 2018 America? One generation after another is born into the darkness, taught lies. Are we so full of pride that we cannot admit our god and our belief system were created by ignorant men? Can we not see the injustices perpetuated by our religion?
I wasted much of my youth chasing the love and acceptance of an imaginary god. I often say that I truly felt “born again” when I realized life could be lived out from under God’s thumb.🙅🙆
As a girl I had imagined someday I was going to be a missionary, saving third-world souls! Now I understand that just one set of helping hands does more than a billion clasped in prayer. I could be of service to those in need- real service- not just offer my religion and god when actual need is so great.
I guess you can say I miss it sometimes, my private prayer closet conversations with God, believing I was special, saved. I cry out in anger and frustration “Jesus help me” before I catch myself. It wasn’t easy, letting go of that fantasy, that crutch, that faith that was so much a part of who I was. But it was time to wake up.
My family, mostly my evangelical aunties, mourn for my soul; people I used to go to church with are praying for me as I write this. I appreciate the roles they played in my youth but I no longer try to explain. Some people can have blind faith in the face of evidence and believe that ignorance is noble. Not me, and I won’t apologize for it. 😎
My name is Cassandra and I am an apostate of evangelical Christianity.
Check out my book on Amazon: A BACKSLIDER'S GUIDE TO GETTING OVER GOD: JOURNEY OF AN EVANGELICAL APOSTATE
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