I’ve made the decision that I am no longer a Christian. Or have I? I seem to be scared to make that final call. There’s a sense that once I’ve made it, there’s no going back. It’s one thing to be ’struggling with my faith’…its quite another to turn my back on it completely.
Philisophically, I could ask myself what the difference is. I’m not going to church or really praying (except for the brief heart cries as I fall asleep, asking God to show himself, to save me from my doubts). I don’t believe the Bible is inerrant. I’m more convinced by scholastic theories that the faith of the Israelites was made up by a Caananite society not a God with a plan to bless the world through this one people than I am by the rationalizations brought to bear by the Christian community on the oddities of Scripture. Unless one believes in ‘once saved, always saved’, then I probably no longer qualify as I no longer believe the requisie propositions.
The bits and pieces of this process I’ve shared with friends and family have been met with the typical cautions against thinking too much and reminders that if we approach our doubts with the confidence that God is good and has answers, we’ll see him come through for us, but if we approach him with skepticism and a challenge to prove himself, he won’t. I haven’t yet figured out what the basis for this is. There is Scriptural support for both ideas – admonition against testing God and exhortation to prove him good. Beyond that, how do you believe what you don’t believe. I can say I believe unicorns exist all I want, but there’s no way that would actually be true given what I rationally know. So how can belief be a prerequisite to belief?
I know that many people who have gone through the desconversion process describe a period of time in which they sincerely want all that they once believed about God to be true and grieve as they begin to let go. I’m not sure I can say the same. I feel a sense of freedom as I ponder what life might be like without all the expectations and mental gymnastics that seem to be part of the Christian package. And yet the pleasure of such expansive possibilities comes packaged with a conditioned sense of guilt. I know that one of the primary accusations against those who have deconverted is that they just couldn’t live up to the standards God required, that they sought license to sin. Although I’m sure some of the things I now feel free to consider would be classed as sin by various categories of Christians, that is not the heart of the release I feel.
To be perfectly honest, now that I am no longer including God in every part of my day, its as if I’ve come out of a very crowded city into the wide expanses of a beautiful meadow. For example, the other day I went out and played in the snow. I made myself a snow chair and then just sat and looked up at the sky…stuck my tongue out and caught snowflakes. I just enjoyed the moment. In the past, I would have been focused on trying to channel my enjoyment into an appropriate feeling of worship, expressing my pleasure in the moment as gratitude or praise. I would have been trying to hear what God might have wanted to say to me and fretting that perhaps I hadn’t quieted myself enough to discern his voice.
I’m tired of feeling guilty about my intellect and how I reason through things. I’m tired of trying to balance both seeing that intellect as a gift and guarding against it. I’m tired of trying to rationalize contradictions…between passages of Scriptures, between scholarship and belief, between what Christians spout as ideals and the way they truly live, between the culture of church and the so-called orthodox faith, etc. I’m tired of always trying to be what God wants me to be, trying to find and do his will but never being certain that I’m succeeding. I’m tired of pat answers, of Christians dismissing serious questions and concerns about the basis for their faith as if they were spurious attacks instead of legitimate issues to be addressed. I’m tired of the seperation between us and them that creates division between denominations, between believers and unbelievers, between leadership and members.
So how long does one hang on to a rope, tired and exhausted, before one lets go. I guess it depends on what’s waiting underneath. My sneaking suspicion is that Christians so desperately hanging on to Christ to save them are really only dangling inches from the floor and if they let go, they’ll find a stable place to land and live.
I guess this blog is about peeling my fingers away from the rope, one by one…coming to a place where I can admit to myself where I stand and then maybe someday, admit the same to others…to come out of the closet, if you will. One of my biggest issues with the concept of God at the moment is that, if he truly is a God who desires to have a relationship with us, a God who loved us enough to pursue us, to send his Son for us, then interacting with him shouldn’t be one-sided on my part. Why is it that when I start doubting whether or not he is real, I no longer hear his voice. I could doubt my family is real, but I’d still hear them talking to me. And so I begin to suspect that he is merely a figment of my imagination, a rope that I am holding to rather than a Father who is holding on to me.
And if that’s truly the case, its long past time for me to let go.
