Free at Last, Free at Last!

One of the most life-affirming, uplifting, joy-returning, burden-lifting things I have done in the last two years is stopping going to church. I also quit my Bible study and stepped down from a fledgling leadership position I had in a faith-based nonprofit, but the most impactful decision, by far, was no longer scheduling worship into my Sundays.

I was positively guilt-wracked the first few Sundays I deliberately slept in, even though I had been attending church out of nothing more than obligation and habit for months. I hated the evening rock band service at my congregational church, but neither did I get much out of the traditional morning service with the long-winded preacher exegeting Hosea five weeks in a row. I hated my friend’s Vineyard church, and Catholic Mass was hollow to me as well since I couldn’t partake of the Eucharist and wasn’t a total fan of their theology anyway. I was definitely a spiritual orphan, and it manifested very concretely in my extreme discomfort and sense of banality at virtually every church I attended.

Still, I felt guilty about no longer going to church. So one week early after I stopped going to church, I tuned in to the public radio broadcast of a local church service (bleah); another week I watched Joel Osteen (he has really white teeth!); yet another week, I tried to read my Bible some, but that felt flat too.

When I realized I wasn’t getting much out of these church surrogates, it hit me that I mainly felt guilty for letting down friends and family who saw me as a “Good” Christian. I realized, like a bolt of lightning one day that I didn’t actually miss God.

And I started to notice that heavy, heavy layers of obligation, legalism, expectation, and duty had settled around my shoulders. Quite physically, too: I carry stress in my shoulders and my back was positively a thicket of knots.

I came to realize that everything about my faith had devolved into being about me cultivating the right beliefs and actions; it never seemed okay to wonder “well when is God going to bend down and carry part of this? What happened to the light burden and easy yoke of Jesus?” The answer always seemed to be: do more in order to get closer to God and hear his still, small voice (which is there, you just have to somehow be in the right frame of mind to hear it). Read your Bible more. Join another Bible study – better, lead a Bible study. Do more service projects. Pray more. Confess your sins. Go to church every Sunday even if you don’t feel like it – faith isn’t about feelings, you know. Do the right thing and the feelings will follow. Jesus will meet you where you are.

I did all the right things, earnestly, sincerely, genuinely, for years. And you know what? The feelings did not follow. God did not stoop down to meet me, to lift me up, to answer my questions. Jesus did not meet me. The two-way “personal relationship” we are to cultivate with Jesus was oh-so-one-way: I was doing all the work. I didn’t hear from Jesus, cosmic hug or otherwise. It was indeed a “one-way mirror”, described so eloquently here on Memoirs of an Ex-Christian’s blog.

Well-meaning Christians make things worse by asking questions like “are you keeping up your end of the relationship?” (Oh. My. God. Are you kidding me? What else am I supposed to do here?) When you are sincerely trying to find God, this line of questioning tends to fuel ever-deepening spirals of self-recrimination, as well as increasingly frantic efforts to “do” the right things so that God will finally respond. It is in this kind of environment that grace loses all meaning.

So I walked away from church, hanging onto the thinnest hope that God’s grace would somehow be bigger than whatever sins I was committing by leaving the fold.

And I have not been so happy or burden-free in years.

I have not become an amoral hedonist; I have become someone unburdened by guilt and obligation. The knots in my back have receded. I am healthier physically and emotionally. I have become someone who is no longer afraid to ask the big questions – the really really big questions – and I am becoming less afraid of the answers.

I do not plan to go back to church on any kind of regular basis. I went on Easter Sunday and realized that I still didn’t miss it. When friends or family invite me to come to church with them, I inevitably shudder. I have come to associate church – any church, any denomination – with the legalism that had me trapped so desperately for so long. I refuse to put myself back into that environment. I have come to believe that whoever God is (if God is), he does not intend for us to live fear-based, guilt-ridden lives of perfunctory service.

I am finally learning to extend grace to myself. Now I simply hope that God does too.

The blindness of the abused

Let’s start with this: Christians defend God. As you’d expect, right? They love God. They’ve been redeemed by Jesus. They’re in a relationship in which they’re getting something out of it (eternal life, of course, but also a day-to-day presence & guidance).

In such a loving relationship, Christians will not blame God when disappointing or unexpected or bad things happen. “It was God’s will.” “I needed to crucify my desires, anyway.” “It was selfish, what I wanted, it wasn't what God wanted.” “God is trying to teach us something through this suffering.” “We just can’t understand…God’s ways are higher than our ways.”

In other words, God always gets let off the hook. Always, always, always. It’s the assumed stance: God can simply do no wrong. So it is always the human’s fault, the human’s misunderstanding, the human’s limited pea-sized brain that can’t understand the perfect workings of an infinite, and infinitely good, God.

And let me be clear: I believed this myself, for decades. So I am not saying it lightly, and I am not saying it from an outsider’s perspective. I lived this for 20+ years.

At risk of offending the Christians that read this blog: isn’t this pretty much the same dynamic you see play out in abusive human relationships?

A woman falls in love with a man. He treats her well, at least at the beginning. She feels loved, she gets attention…she’s getting something out of it. But over time, the abuse begins. Maybe it’s verbal abuse at first…but it eventually escalates to physical abuse.

Yet, when a woman is way deep in the relationship, she will defend her man no matter what he’s done: “He just had a bad day.” “I interrupted his ball game, so really, I don’t blame him for getting mad.” “You don’t know him the way I do – he is actually very tender and loving.” “He had told me twenty times not to hang out with this friend, but I did it anyway. I had it coming.” “He’s big and strong and understands the world better than I do…I need him!”

When you’re inside an abusive relationship, you are brainwashed to actually believe that you’re at fault, you deserve the abuse, he’s justified in doing it, he’s still a good man. I have watched women make these kinds of justifications for men who yelled at them or hit them. I lived through a milder version of it with a narcissistic boyfriend some years ago.

Any person outside of this relationship can clearly see it for what it is: the woman is obviously trapped and brainwashed, unable to even consider the possibility that what her man is doing is wrong, unable to even conceive of leaving him, unable to imagine having any kind of different life.

A Christian reading this entry might well be offended that I’ve just compared God to an abuser, and thus immediately dismiss the whole idea. But what I am trying to describe is a dynamic in which Christians repeatedly, consistently, and perpetually try to explain away clearly terrible things that don’t square with their notions of who God is – because those notions of who God is are inviolable. Psychologically, I don’t see any difference from that which happens in an abused woman’s mind. And I am finally in a place where I have stepped outside of my faith and my church to examine who it is I have believed in all these years. To allow for the possibility that maybe my notion of who God is isn’t inviolable. That maybe there are other explanations for why all the things that don’t add up in the faith don’t add up, including the possibility that God doesn't actually exist.

I did not arrive in this place overnight. As I mentioned in one of my comments to Bible Student, I have struggled for 6 or 7 years to reconcile my God with what I saw happening around me in the world. I have not stepped out of the faith lightly, and I don’t make this comparison lightly.

Someone early on read my blog and said that she doubted I was ever a believer, based on what I am saying today about God…an accusation I will probably have to get used to hearing.

To the commenter I will say this: it’s not terribly unlike an abused woman who finally does leave the bad relationship. As the scales fall off her eyes and she sees her man for who he truly was, she gets angry. She may cut him down, criticize him, get angry with herself for not seeing it earlier, may even try to warn others off from getting involved with him. But it doesn’t mean that she didn’t love him while she was in the relationship. It doesn’t mean that she wasn’t devoted to him. And it doesn’t mean that there weren’t occasionally good times.

But most of us would say that any human who would deliberately harm, or allow significant or long-lasting harm, to come to their loved one doesn’t actually love them. We usually call them sick.

So why we don’t apply the same reasoning to God, who supposedly has a supernatural-awesome-cosmic-everlasting-deep-deep-overpowering-love for us?

Gender Roles, Schmender Roles

When I was growing up, a "feminist" was a very bad, man-hating, prideful woman who was trying to push her agenda (which was, obviously, to be a man!) and confuse the natural order of things. We tossed around the term "feminazi" casually, jokingly, anytime we encountered one of these liberals.

Today, I can't believe I bought into that view so thoroughly. And I don't know how to explain it except to say that when you grow up in a church that teaches you that you can do certain things but not others because you're a girl, you kind of just accept it as truth. You think: they're good people, they wouldn't lie to me. And I should be clear: I wasn't even part of one of those ultra-fundamentalist churches that made women cover their hair or not speak in church. Just your basic Bible-based non-denominational evangelical church.

But I remember dreaming of becoming a pastor one day - after all, I loved Jesus and wanted to preach about Him - and telling my mom about it. Mom informed me that as a woman, I just couldn't be a pastor. Something about it not being right for a woman to teach men. I was a little indignant about it, but I was also a fairly young kid so I think I just accepted it and went on with my life. I think Mom said I could be a missionary, though. (Wait - what? I can't teach men in my own church, but I could go far, far away and teach foreign men?)

Anyway, that's what I grew up with: men were in charge. And I mostly accepted it - the whole headship of man, the whole symbolism of Christ and the church modeling the husband-wife relationship, and vice versa...there was a strange mystical appeal to it.

Even so, I didn't completely accept it. I started having issues with "wives submitting to their husbands" many years ago, though at first I attributed it to my stubbornness and obviously selfish desire to "rule" over my husband. (Another example of, if I disagree with something my faith teaches me, obviously I am in the wrong and need to examine my heart for my real (sinful) motives.) I have since developed a real disdain for marriages where men act as the spiritual "head" (and the 'head' in all other matters) and the wives act as support. Or, perhaps I should say: no way in hell do I want a marriage like that. For one thing, the simple truth for most of my twenties was that I was more spiritually mature than most of the men in my local Christian dating pool. For another thing, I had a lot of opinions about things, and made a lot of decisions about my own life, so the idea that I would have to delegate decision making to someone else made me squirm. I wanted to be treated as an equal in my own marriage, and had no interest in a husband who might abuse the notion of his headship, and get controlling on me. (A close friend of mine got into exactly that kind of marriage, which was very emotionally abusive.)

Over time, my marital role discomfort broadened to become a more generalized discomfort with how women are allowed to participate (or not participate) in their church communities. When I was exploring Catholicism, it really bothered me that my boyfriend was against any potential daughter of ours being an altar girl. (I guess that wasn't allowed until semi-recently (?), and the boyfriend was super old school on that kind of thing.) I know now that that was just him, but his attitude made me take a step back and observe how most churches view women and women in leadership.

So it has taken a very long time for me to see the sexism that permeates the doctrine and practice of Christianity, and the power dynamics that relegate women largely to sitting in the pew (unless they are running the nursery and childrens' ministries). Isn't it odd that, at the same time, there's this funny critique out there that the church is becoming feminized, and men are leaving, or staying away, from the church in droves? How can this be, when women still aren't running the show?!

Basically my views have undergone a big 180. Today, I would say I'm a feminist... but not because I signed up on the list, but because I fundamentally believe that half of the human population needs to stop being shut out of the centers of power and decision-making, where those in control get to decide things that affect them.

But here's the funny thing: even today I feel slightly uncomfortable listening to women pastors preach. I have been so conditioned to see it as wrong and unnatural, that even if I am thinking "yes! you go, pulpit woman, follow the call God has put on your heart!", emotionally and physically I still feel a little ill at ease. (Ugh. I am still working that particular piece of conditioning out of my system.)

I will say this: I give my parents a ton of credit for never putting gender-based limits on what I could or couldn't do - even my mom, who inadvertently crushed my dream of being a pastor. I am one of three girls, and we did everything from cooking and sewing to mowing the lawn, taking care of all of our pets, and cleaning Dad's boat. Mom and Dad pushed us in our academics and fully expected us to go to college. Dad in particular did not want us ever to be dependent on a man so he encouraged us to pursue whatever we wanted, as long as we could make a living at it. I credit my parents with giving me an independence and self-confidence that allowed me eventually to question what my church was teaching me about what I could and couldn't do or be.

Becoming A Spiritual Orphan

I left off my last post with the questions that started pooling in my mind around Truth. Given the huge number of Protestant denominations that exist today (I don't know this number exactly, but something like 20,000 is in my head. (?) Anyway, a LOT.), how could I be sure that my childhood church had a lock on The Truth?

So began an incredibly painful and difficult period of time as I began to question some of the bedrock truths I had known my whole life. I kept a journal during that time, though unfortunately on a computer that has since died. So while I can't quote anymore the exact questions I was asking, I do remember spending tortured hours hunched over the computer, reading stories of evangelicals like me on the same search for the Truth -- and, incredibly, finding it in the Catholic church. I spent countless more hours reading books and praying earnestly for clarity and direction.

I was reading a lot of Catholic theology at the time (thanks to my Catholic boyfriend and his conversion ultimatum) and remember being both surprised and impressed with the depth and nuance of thinking within the RCC. In particular, I thought they fit faith and works together in a way more persuasive way than evangelicals do (who basically try to ignore works, though strangely they sure seem good at coming up with lots of rules to follow). And the Catholics seemed way, way, way closer to the Truth on the heaven/hell question. I was so happy the day I came across what seemed like the "loophole" that was totally absent in Protestantism: in Catholicism, it seemed that someone who had never heard the gospel might still have a chance of getting to heaven. It had something to do with a person believing as best they can, and God basically having mercy if their beliefs end up not being quite right. Something about it being okay, or forgiveable, if someone's conscience was malformed or they didn't hear the message of Christ, or couldn't understand it.

In evangelical Protestantism, you get stuck with these unanswerable and uncomfortable questions: if someone who professes Christ later renounces Him, what can that mean other than he/she was never a believer to begin with ("once saved, always saved")? What of those who never heard the gospel message? Well, the Bible is very clear on this matter: they are going to hell (except an evangelical is quite loathe to admit that, so they fall back on "well, God is perfectly loving and perfectly just, and only He knows our hearts.").

Oy. My brain by this time was really hurting, because I came to see that evangelical theology was too bound up in sola scriptura, too bound up in having to interpret everything literally, except you couldn't interpret everything literally, exactly, so you had to figure out all these work-arounds to make the stories fit. You couldn't admit that there actually are inconsistencies in the Scriptures, you couldn't admit that Genesis doesn't contain accurate creation accounts, you couldn't admit that God is a major monster in the Old Testament. "We are under the law of grace now - we no longer follow the old law" would be a typical response to any doubts about the OT God. Yet, how could that be, if God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow? If he was so terrible to people back then, what is stopping him from being so today? Why is the NT God painted primarily as our "loving heavenly Father" when that is not at all how one might describe the God of the Old Testament?

So I thought the Catholics were really onto something. And they had the weight of history behind them. But I couldn't sign on to all the Mary stuff and I couldn't sign on to papal infallibility. And because I couldn't say I really believed those two pieces of Catholic theology, I couldn't convert. Or so I believed, because to convert I had to get up in front of the church and say that I affirmed everything the Catholic church teaches. I couldn't do that honestly, and so I couldn't do it at all. And I carried around a chip on my shoulder for quite awhile on that front, because it seemed so unfair that all of these cradle Catholics could do their faith cafeteria-style, not even knowing what their church teaches, but in effect signing on to some stuff but not other stuff (eg using artificial birth control), but someone who was honestly seeking and who read and understood, in depth, the core theology of the church but had honest and deep disagreement on a couple of fronts, couldn't get into the club.

This all took place between 2000-2002, and by the end of the whole process I was exhausted, confused, alone, and very much feeling like a spiritual orphan. I could no longer attend my evangelical church because I had developed way too many problems with their approach to Scripture, but neither could I participate in Mass - which seemed like the only other logical place to go - because I had problems with some of their theology as well. I felt at sea, with no land in sight, and no guidance from God himself as to what direction I should go.

Easter Lies and Old Boyfriends

I told a lie on Easter, of all days. I might as well have poked the risen triumphant Jesus in the eye. I was in a foreign country for work. Friends living there invited me to go to church with them. I am a Christian and therefore of course I wanted to go. It is what Christians do on Easter Sunday: we go to church and we celebrate Jesus. I have been a Christian for almost thirty years. That is saying a lot because I am only 32.

The 100-minute Easter service featured a 30-minute CCM-inspired musical tribute to the passion of Christ, clips from the “Jesus Film” in which our Savior was, naturally, white (did I mention I was in east Asia at the time?), and a 20-minute altar call during which an unfortunately timed movement of my head made the pastor think I had just accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I hardly breathed for the rest of the altar call for fear that the pastor would invite me onstage to share my newfound joy in the Lord.

It was when my friend asked what I thought of the white-Jesus Easter service in Asia that the lie spilled across my lips: “I liked it,” I said brightly. “Just like at home.”

Obviously I hated it (and on reflection, she probably knew that). Every pore of my body was screaming to get out of that oversize auditorium with oversize banners and oversize preacher personalities making oversize statements about the boundless joy, everlasting hope, and unquenchable life that Jesus rising from the dead gives us.

It’s not just that this was a supremely cheesy Easter service (though it was). This is the deal: I don't have boundless joy or everlasting hope; I am tired and disappointed and unsure of who the Alpha and Omega is. For me this is a very unsettling thing to say because until about two years ago, I had problems, sure, but God himself was never really in question. And now he/she/it is. And we know God is really in question because I just now went back and added the “slash-she-slash-it” to the pronoun he in that last sentence and I used to be very traditional and comfortable just calling God “he”.

But you can’t really say any of this serious doubting stuff to people, or at least not the people in my church/faith/religion community. If you do, you immediately set off marathon prayer sessions, friends ask if they can lay hands on you, people suggest seeing a Christian counselor (God forbid you should go see a secular counselor) and above all, they gaze at you with concern in their eyes and wonder what you’ve done (read: sin) to create distance between yourself and God. I am reminded here of a joke that goes like this: an old married couple is driving down the road in an old truck with one of those bench seats that extends all the way across the cab. The wife looks at her husband and says: “Earl, how come we sit so far apart in the truck these days? We didn’t used to. We used to cuddle up!” Earl responds: “I don’t know, Edith…but I’m not the one who moved.” This is how most (conservative) Christians view other Christians who are having a hard time with God: it’s always the Christian’s fault because, as we all know, God doesn’t change.

In my younger, more zealous and certain Christian days I prayed fervently that I would never become what I think I am becoming: a doubting, unsure, frustrated, person who is disillusioned with what life handed her and is blaming God for it. Apparently I have changed.

I know I sound like a bad after-school special, or just very cliché. But I have been carrying around a load, a burden, about the size of a house on my back for some time now. I’d like to thank my ex-ex-heartbreaker-boyfriend (not the gay one – a later one) for helping me notice it. We dated for 7 months before he unexpectedly dumped me, and I have finally found the perfect way to describe our relationship: he was like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby courts Maryann like mad and it’s magical and happy and the chemistry is palpable and nobody sees it coming when Willoughby breaks things off. Maryann almost dies of heartache. In Jane Austin’s story it of course comes to light that Willoughby is a shallow bastard who knocked up some other girl and marries rich in order to pay child support. I am still waiting for confirmation that my ex-ex-boyfriend has done the same thing, but I draw a certain comfort from the otherwise strong parallel to my relationship.

Anyhoo: Heartbreaker helped me notice the house on my back because for a long time after we broke up I prayed that we would get back together. And I swear that God himself was telling me to pray for that, and he was sending all these weird signs to confirm that that’s what he wanted me to pray for. And, duh, we didn’t get back together. The guy never spoke to me again, in fact. So I got all disillusioned with my prayer life, and how I must have only imagined that God wanted me to pray all that stuff, but then I thought that that doesn’t make any sense because it felt exactly like other times when I’ve been convinced God wanted me to pray a certain way (and that the things came to pass afterward that I had prayed for) and so how could I retroactively say that God must not have been leading me in that way, and how could I tell the difference anyway, and what kind of God would be so cruel as to make one of his Children all hopeful and then crush the hope in a big fell swoop? And what’s with this God that had His Old Testament People smite all their enemies, killing women and children and basically committing genocide, when now good Christians say that’s wrong and terrible and we should stop Rwanda and Sudan? Who the crap is this God?

And this is the load I've been carrying around: I've been assuming that, by following the "rules" (oh, but we're not legalistic around here, are we?) and being an exceptional example of the (Accomplished) Good Girl, that God would do his part and give me what I want. Probably, this is very obviously not true to most readers, and it even sounds ridiculous when I say it because theologically of course it's not true, we're not promised anything like that in any version of Conservative Christianity except for the Prosperity Gospel people who have that whole "name it and claim it" idea, which almost everybody else within Conservative Christianity recognizes as a load of hooey.

But there you have it: that idea has been wired into my subconscious for many, many years, and only now am I pulling it out of its dark little place in my brain to turn it around, play with it, figure out how it got there, and decide what to do with it now.