[Content Warning: Mentions of suicidal ideation, religion trauma,]

Hello dear readers! It’s Friday morning so that means once again exploring a journal prompt from the wonderful book, Changing Paths by non-binary witch Yvonne Aburrow. This week’s prompt comes from chapter two, which is titled “Leaving Your Religion.”¹ Today’s chosen prompt reads as follows:

Imagine yourself staying in your current situation, and fully inhabiting that choice. Fully experience all the emotions involved in that choice. Now imagine yourself leaving your current situation, and fully experience what that choice will be like. What feelings arise from that choice?

For this prompt, I’m going to hop into the wayback machine and share with you how I was feeling around the time I left Christianity, which was in early November 1998. I feel it’ll make for a far more interesting and instructive read that if I tried answering this question about my current religious path.

In the autumn of 1998, I was going through a bunch of emotional turmoil. I had come out as a gay man two and a half years ago and decided to accept that I was gay and that it was okay to pursue a romantic and sexual relationship with another man. I had even entered into such a relationship, which had just ended around this time due to a variety of reasons (which mostly boiled down to it was an unhealthy relationship and I probably wasn’t really ready for a relationship at the time.)

I had left my church in late August of that same year, but I still considered myself a Christian. I was still committed to Jesus, and thought he was the only way to heaven, though I was struggling with the thought that God would send some of my friends who I had recently come to rely on for support (I’ll talk more about them in a little bit) to hell just for not believing in Jesus.

I was also dealing with the religious trauma of growing up gay in a religious environment that told me gay people were bad little sinners who made God sad and/or angry as well as the emotional results of repressing my feelings for roughly a decade.²

I was also dealing with a lot of guilt at the time, and not just about being gay.³ I grew up in a church that really pushed the whole theology about people being sinners and unable to do anything for themselves about their retched state. So I had some serious self-esteem issues over my lack of perfection. So the fact that i had just watched my first relationship explode and watched the dissolution of dear friendship at the time — both of which I was largely responsible for — left me feeling extremely guilty and worthless. I also felt a great deal of guilt over the dissolution of my relationship because I was still operating under purity culture ideals, which told me that I should only ever have sex with one person (even if it was another guy), who would then be my lifetime partner. So I had failed in a great way in my mind and considered it a great moral failing.

This led to my second crisis and I realized that my feelings were slowly leading me to self-destruction. It became obvious to me that If I remained with the religion I was brought up, i wasn’t going to survive. So for the second time in my life, I chose survival over my religious indoctrination. I started looking at other religions.

So I found a religious tradition that saw me as inherently valuable rather than retched and in need of grace. I found a religion that looked at my flaws and told me that sure, I was flawed, but I could be so much better. Not only that, this new religion provided me motivation and the sense that such self-improvement was worthwhile rather than a hopelessly Sisyphean task.

As a result, I felt valued⁴ and hopeful. I felt freedom. I knew that this change was the right one for me. And I’ve never regretted it, no matter how difficult the transition and subsequent journey became.

Footnotes

1. I would note that this chapter is not about how to leave your religion, but provides insights into the kinds of questions and ideas you might want to explore when trying to decide if it’s time to leave. It’s entirely possible you could read this chapter and come to the conclusion that you want to stick it out instead. ↩︎
2. At one point, I realized that I did not emotionally feel like I was 24, which was my biological age at the time. When I considered how old I felt, I realized that I seemed to be emotionally fourteen trying to live in the adult world. I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but I’m glad my emotional development eventually caught up with my body. I now fully feel like a guy about to turn fifty. (How I feel about being about to turn fifty is a whole other conversation.) ↩︎
3. To be honest, being gay was the one thing I didn’t feel guilty about. My coming out experience two and a half years prior had been its own crisis that almost did not end well. As a result, I don’t think I’ve ever looked back and wondered “what if I was right the first time and my feelings toward other guys are sinful. I will note, however, that there were other issues surrounding my sexuality. For example, see my reaction to the dissolution of my first relationship, which is describe later in this post. ↩︎
4. There’s a reason one of my favorite personal slogans is “Jesus loved me. Freyja taught me to love myself.” ↩︎