My Deconversion - A Cruel Test

[Dexter]

My Deconversion TL;DR:

 

A husband and wife are at a party. The wife is in a room alone and her husband has gone to look for her. As the husband is about to round a corner he hears voices in the next room and so stops to listen. A third man enters the room with the wife and he asks her to leave with him so that he can show her a good time. The husband hears this but waits to see how his wife replies. She tells this stranger that she is married and not interested. The man then grabs her wrist and tugs a little trying to goad her on, telling her not to worry, it’ll be fine. The husband waits. She pulls her arm back saying that she doesn’t want that and to leave her alone. The man then tightens his grip, starting to hurt her, telling her she is coming. She gasps out in pain and starts to call out for her husband. The husband waits. Finally, the man is twisting her arm so hard that she collapses to the floor gasping and sobbing and at last says, “Yes, I’ll go with you, just please stop hurting me.” And the husband thinks, “I see, she never truly loved me.”

 

My Deconversion; The whole story:

 

I grew up a true believer. As a kid, there were those in the church who just went but didn’t live their faith and were no different from anyone else. We were different. Though, not a whole lot different I suppose. We were not the ultra-hard-core types who never watched movies or thought that women should only wear dresses. But we did take our faith seriously. More than that, we believed our faith was self-evident. So, easily provable and denied only be those who obfuscate the truth or confuse themselves with their own convoluted thinking. And so began my journey. 

 

Having a logical faith, I pursued the evidence for it. I read the books of many apologists like Norman Geisler (one of my heroes even to this day) who wrote a book on formal logic and is still one of the best books on logic I have ever read. I highly recommend it. I devoured everything that came out of Answers in Genesis. I revered people like Dr. Jason Lisle (a legit peer-reviewed PhD) and all of the scientific minds in Creation research (yes, I have since learned that most are not legit). It all seemed legit to me at the time. I as a kid. But I wanted to understand so I became an amateur Apologist. My faith had reason, other faiths were wrong and I could explain why. 

 

After high school, I joined the Navy and served for five years. Admittedly these were hard years of my life. I was so ill-equipped for this world that I didn’t even know how to apply my faith while I was in and had several crises that my brother helped me through. The Navy changed my faith hugely. See, it would have broken my faith completely because my faith was rigid that rigidity could not survive the military. But his faith was much more fluid and dynamic. In other words, it's not that we can’t understand the minutia of scripture, but not to get lost in it. Ultimately, God’s nature is goodness and that he wants all to repent and be saved. John 15:17 “This is My command to you: Love one another.”

 

It gave me a new approach to my faith. Don’t sweat the details. You know God’s nature because you are a reflection of His nature. God is goodness and mercy and salvation. So too this should be you. And I came home from the Navy reconciled and ready to save the world, only to re-enter the one of rigidity I had left. I went to my parents Sunday School class and was shocked and horrified by how bigoted and closed minded it was. The views expressed were shockingly dense and ignorant. I didn’t understand what corruption had fallen on my church since I had left. It was losing members and dying. But I wanted to do something. I got active. I wanted to do outreach programs, go to the hurting and the suffering. I wanted to save the world. But more than this, I wanted to find a wife, settle down and have a family. I wanted very much to be a pillar of the community like my dad. 

 

The family thing wasn’t happening but the with a great deal of tugging and getting other young families (Gen-Y’ers) excited and active I got the church to begrudgingly start doing outreach. It wasn’t nearly enough so far as I was concerned so I started going out and seeking those who were lost and abused myself. And the world got a little bigger. I started hanging around with subcultures, fandoms and people who even normal society would eschew. This was also at the peak of the gay marriage debates and I met many hurting and disenfranchised homosexuals who I befriended. I was shocked by number of people who were lost and confused and “…where the bloody hell is the church?!” I asked myself. I spent time with the lost and disenfranchised, the very people Jesus spent time with and there were no church, no missionaries, no preachers, nothing for these people. Not even secular help! I tried to get the church involved. They wanted nothing to do with these people. I tried to take aspiring preachers, elders, anyone who felt we didn’t have to travel to Timbuktu to send missionaries but that there were people just outside our doors for missionaries and missions to focus on. I got no help.

 

This began my disillusionment and my loneliness. I was frustrated with the church and it’s un-Christlike behavior. And I tried to pursue a family. I bought a house, I secured a good job, I remained celibate (no easy feat to do while in the Navy) but it wasn’t happening. I prayed often for God to watch over my future wife and that we may soon meet. And so passed nearly 8 years, trying to get the church off its ass and petitioning God for my future family. 

 

The thing that was confusing me more and more with each passing year was how I wasn’t finding a wife. This confuses my family terribly as well. I didn’t understand why God willed it this way, or if I was doing something wrong. I was told he must have someone REALLY special in mind or that we had not reached each other in our own Christian walks yet and I kind of went along with this. But I was not faring well by doing this and no one seemed to know how to help. I moved to Chicago (well, near Chicago) and this loneliness hit harder than ever before. Family helped stave the loneliness some though not fully. But without family, I was deeply lonely and increasingly frustrated. And then began my rapid decline from faith. It started with one young gay man in deep Kentucky. He was a broken soul and one who I help through his depression and abuse. I came to care about him quite a bit and hoped for his future. And one day… he told me how special I was to him. How much he wanted to be with me. That he loved me. And he often fantasized about a future with us together. I did not relent on my convictions then, though he spoke right to the very core of my deepest longing.

 

The thought then was that this was a test. God was testing me to see if I would trust him or give in to the sinful ways of the world. And this thought infuriated me. Why this? Why THIS? A point of greatest weakness. But then, would that not be the best angle for Satan to get at me? Would that not be the truest test of my devotion to God? Yet so long denied companionship, so long denied sex, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this test was utterly cruel. Like starving a friend nearly to death then calling the cops on him if/when he steals food from you. What kind of monster are you to do this to him in the first place? But the Bible is not short on these types of tests. Job being the number 1 example. 

 

As  time went on, I grew bitter and I decided that I was going to experience sex. Marriage be damned, I resolved in my heart that this was a thing that was going to happen. And it was already sin, so being that it was with another male didn’t really make a difference. I did not lose my faith, I just decided that I’d accept the consequences of my rebellion, whatever they may be. And so I did. And nothing happened. I mean, sex happened, but there were no consequences. Nothing changed. And I remember the very first thought I had after being with another male. It was, “Huh… So that was it?” Like, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, in spite of it being awkward and uncomfortable (first-time after all) but nothing in the world changed. Except perhaps me. You see, I for the first time experience a level of intimate connection that I have NEVER experienced in my life. And I wanted more. And so I continued to pursue that intimacy where-ever I could.

 

Around this time, I met who is now one of my dearest friends, Chris, a gay man, a then employee of mine and blindingly intelligent (though no small amount of flaky). But most relevant to me was that he is an ex-Christian. And I do not mean he fell away as a kid. Rather, he converted in his adulthood, took his faith as seriously as I took mine, and fell away. He and I had many many discussions. He was once a young-Earth Creationist, as I was. He was once a Biblical literalist as I was. But what he had that I did not was time. When he started his adult Christian journey, he was homeless at the time living in a warehouse whose owner knew he was there but allowed it and didn’t call the cops on him. Chris at that time read the Bible. Prayed constantly. Went to churches all over. Asking preachers questions, trying to understand himself and understand God. He wanted to KNOW God. But he is gay in attraction and desire. Whereas I can leave it if I so chose, he could not. And he prayed fervently for God to take this away from him. He resolved that he’d have to be celibate for the rest of his life. And after a few months of celibacy, he had dreams of other men. And Chris was confused why God was not helping him. And once he told me in a drunken moment of honesty that he nearly committed suicide because he could not bear the shame and pressure of it. To me, this is the instance where God should have reached into Chris’s life. This is like, all of the conditions for God to rescue someone. He was homeless and broke. He was hungry and cold (winter in Wisconsin). He read scripture and prayed. And nothing. Even to this day he still asks Christian apologists for answer to his questions just to make sure he didn’t miss something but when he tells them the story of his adult Christian journey, the usual response is, “You just weren’t sincere enough.” Which he takes great offense to. 

 

When I started to debate with him, I knew instantly I was outclassed. He took his blinding intellect and pointed it at deconstructing his faith far more than I ever had. My intellect was just pointed at how to patch the holes. And he pointed out a few times with frustration that my faith seemed to be very flexible. Like, too flexible. Like I was making shit up as I went along. And I could see what he was saying. It did seem that way and it ran completely opposite of what I actually believed about my faith. But by this time, my questions and frustrations had done nothing but grown. I tried to resolve again and again how I found myself in a gay relationship with this young man from Kentucky. I concluded that I must have failed the test. But then, my life seemed no less blessed than before. Should God’s blessings in my life have gone away? Then I wondered if maybe this relationship was what God actually DID have in mind for me and that thought scared me the most because if that was true, then everything was broken. I am ignorant in all ways and everything I once understood is now broken. Or could it be that God is… inactive?

 

Chris was the best person I have ever talked to because he never found talk of God to be ridiculous. He took it seriously and he took my faith serious and even tried to help me resolve my own misunderstands at times. He actually corrected my theological misunderstandings when I was making them. And he had no agenda to de-convert me. If my conclusion was “God” he was not threatened by that in the least, but he did have some questions for me if that was my conclusion. But by this time, the idea that I was being tested was started to turn my hurt and confusion into anger. Like a person who is being abused when they suddenly realize that the relationship isn’t getting any better. Here’s the analogy I can give for how “God’s test” felt to me:

 

A husband and wife are at a party. The wife is in a room alone and her husband has gone to look for her. As the husband is about to round a corner he hears voices in the next room and so stops to listen. A third man enters the room with the wife and he asks her to leave with him so that he can show her a good time. The husband hears this but waits to see how his wife replies. She tells this stranger that she is married and not interested. The man then grabs her wrist and tugs a little trying to goad her on, telling her not to worry, it’ll be fine. The husband waits. She pulls her arm back saying that she doesn’t want that and to leave her alone. The man then tightens his grip, starting to hurt her, telling her she is coming. She gasps out in pain and starts to call out for her husband. The husband waits. Finally, the man is twisting her arm so hard that she collapses to the floor gasping and sobbing and at last says, “Yes, I’ll go with you, just please stop hurting me.” And the husband thinks, “I see, she never truly loved me.”

 

That is what it felt like to me. I spent many hours sobbing and in prayer. No one came to save me.

 

But this was not the end of my faith. I was still confused as hell. I listened to Christian Apologists. I studied scripture again and again. I started studying and talking about my faith more than I ever had before. I needed answers. The one thing that I held to was at the very center of it all, I knew God’s nature. God’s nature was of mercy, peace and love. That was God’s nature. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t observing that. The world I knew to be true was not lining up with the world I observed.

Then, not long ago, I was discussing with Chris about our thoughts on God and the various models for him that we understood and in a rare moment of emotion, Chris said, “If my God actually does exist, I have nothing more to say to him that I have not already said. I am resigned to the fact that he will torture me for all eternity. But at the very least, I will not do it to myself.” And I replied that “If my God does not show mercy and compassion to those whom I have come to love, then I harbor nothing but hatred from Him. Because…” And then I saw it. I saw it plain as day. And I cried for a solid hour before I could even finish that sentence.

 

“…because those are my values.”

 

What I saw in that moment is hard to describe except in metaphor because I have no words to describe it. I held true to my faith because I knew I was created in the image of God. That my goodness was a reflection of His goodness. And in those words I spoke, it was like I turned to look upon the face of God and… it was my face. God, at least as I understood him, as I worshiped him, as I was confident in his nature of goodness… was me. I had taken my values and personified them into god. And while a Christian would argue that this should have been the time for me to let go of my false idol and turn to the Bible (Chris actually had a great C.S. Lewis quote I wish I could remember about our mental idols) I had been training my skepticism since I was a kid. It was the tool I used to field strip other religions and denominations and see their flaws like a Marine could field strip a rifle. And Chris had helped train my skepticism even further by pointing me to the “Less Wrong” community. But I learned that day that skepticism is like a wild animal, looking to tear apart anything that shows weakness. And I showed weakness. And I could not stop my brain from deconstructing every facet of Christianity piece by piece. It was, not a pleasant experience. But at the end of the day, the lynch pin of my faith was predicated on knowing God’s nature. And when I realized I did not know God’s nature, I lost everything. 

 

Since then has been a hard road. But perhaps my first moment of shame came when my roommate asked me a question. He knows I am very Biblically literate and sometimes asks me what things are really in there. So one day he was watching a YouTube video where someone made a glib comment about God killing you because you jerked off onto the floor. My roommate asked me if that was in the Bible and I nodded. He paused the video and asked me to explain. This may seem off topic but follow me for a moment. Once when I was a kid, I played Final Fantasy 10 and loved the story. Soon after, I was explaining the story to my mother and it sounded like utter madness. Within the game, the story made sense because you had time to accept its rules. To explain the story to someone else who had not played the game was just complete nonsense. And so I just said casually that it wasn’t the whole “seed on the ground thing” that upset god but that the man, Onan, did it so that he wouldn’t get his brother’s wife pregnant. Which caused my roommate to give me an even more ‘WTF’ kind of look. So I started at the beginning with Judah’s three sons, Er, Onan and Shela and God killing the first two and Judah not allowing the third to impregnate his brothers widow so she dressed like a prostitute and tricked her father-in-law to impregnate her and he got upset and wanted to kill her because he thought she was being a prostitute… the illegal kind… but called it off when he found out the baby was his and called her more righteous than him because he did wrong by withholding his son and she did right by, well, getting pregnant because that was the highest honor for a woman. My roommates jaw was hanging and he just said, “THAT is some f***ed up shit!” And I actually let the raw madness of the story sink in for the first time as I actually felt it and felt crazy even recounting it. And all I could say was, “Yeah, it really is.”

 

My family does not know. I cannot yet bring myself to tell them. About my love life, or my deconversion. I do not know which would hit them hardest. And part of me just wants the lie to continue. I don’t know what to do. But I do not think I am ready for action yet.

 

If you made it this far, thanks. I really wrote it more for me than anyone else. I kinda needed to, to get this all off my chest. But thanks for listening. It means a lot.

[◊ DestinyTurtle ◊]

37 minutes ago, Dexter said:

My roommates jaw was hanging and he just said, “THAT is some f***ed up shit!” And I actually let the raw madness of the story sink in for the first time as I actually felt it and felt crazy even recounting it. And all I could say was, “Yeah, it really is.”

The scary thing about growing up in it is that they brainwash you into thinking it's completely sensible without even questioning it.

 

Seems to me you're a very courageous and sincere person who is just trying to find your own values and make sense of the world. Keep it up!

[MamaCaz]

The most gruelling, emotionally draining journey... but so rewarding in the end.  Thanks for sharing your story, welcome

[Tsathoggua9]

Wow, what a story! Glad to have you on board.

[Jesus]

Wow. The moment of clarity about realizing that you were in fact the god you had been looking to was beyond deep. Beyond words. Thank you for sharing. 

[ag_NO_stic]

16 hours ago, Dexter said:

OP (for shortness)

 

Your story got me very emotional. You are very eloquent and I hope and truly look forward to your feedback in the future on all kinds of topics. You captured well the rainbow of emotions you experience when you begin the process of deconverting. The fear, the anger, the shame, the longing, the questions, depression almost....I was reliving my own story.

 

You and I are similar in many ways, except possibly that we might have some different wounds based on gender. We too were "true" believers, we rejected works based faith in favor of grace and there was very, very heavy Presbyterian influence so there was a TON of predestination and baby baptizing and god's sovereignty preached at us along with "total depravity" doctrine which fucks a person up. What is perhaps the most staggering, to me personally, is HOW LONG I was able to force down my doubts in a way that I did not even realize I was doubting. I brushed off things that sincerely bothered me, I quieted the questions, wrote off my critical thinking, and shushed the criticism of problematic doctrines. I remember even when I was YOUNG wondering why, in the bible, I was not supposed to covet because that is a sin, but that god was a "jealous god" who covets our worship. Oh well, I just don't understand like god does. I will spare you the details, of course, but I just wanted to know that your story really, really hit home with me, I can sincerely relate to it, even down the celibacy and faithfully waiting for god to bless for my restraint.  

 

Very emotional. As I said in my other post, it gets better. Things calm down, people either don't give a fuck, accept you, or they don't. You will be able to breathe again. You will feel peace again, albeit in a different way. Your wonder at the world will increase. The panic eases. The mental acrobatics you forced yourself to participate in to make things attempt to make sense to you go away, which is a relief and a freedom.

 

Many here will tell you that we feel free now, even though we always preached to others that Jesus broke us free from our chains. Feel free, Dexter!  I know you still feel closeted in more ways than one, but just put one foot in front of the other, breathe, and let time to some of the healing.

[MamaCaz]

47 minutes ago, ag_NO_stic said:

I remember even when I was YOUNG wondering why, in the bible, I was not supposed to covet because that is a sin, but that god was a "jealous god" who covets our worship. Oh well, I just don't understand like god does. 

 

Because god is coveting something that should belong to him, of course god is righteous in all things!  Just do as he says, not as he does.

[★ Citsonga ★]

Thanks for sharing your story, Dexter. It was very moving. I'm sorry about all the struggles you've gone through, but I can relate to a good bit of it, and it's great to now have another one who now sees Christianity for what it truly is. I look forward to reading more from you. Good luck as you move on. 

[Questioningone]

I relate to your story. Christianity was painful and sad and empty to me. I tried to please God but got nothing but emptiness and tears in return. I felt I was doing everything right.  But like you this happened. 

I truly felt love for God... I believed in all the bible said about Jesus. I even tried church but something was always missing, confusing or painful. Christians were snobs and awful to me.  I tried getting help... forums..Facebook and even a catholic councillor. Ended up with blame games back on me... I felt like a monster and ripped my mind apart trying to “correct” myself spiritually. For a time being I threw out all my manga, dvds and even stopped all non Christian hobbies and entertainment. This didn’t fulfill me either. I felt better being less worldly with this stuff but I felt no joy in my heart 

 

I dont feel feel like God is loving in any way or involved in our lives personally. I feel it’s all observation. 

[Riversong]

Thanks for sharing. My husband is an army vet- I think being able to move away and come back was key for us. 

 

Good luck to you. It gets better.

[TruthSeeker0]

I'd truly forgotten what an emotional roller coaster it was both in the few years before my deconversion, and what it was like, particularly in the beginning, when I actually became aware of how deep my doubts were, when I knew I was on my way out, and there was no other solution. Your story really brought that back, how difficult it was, how draining, confusing, everything. All the needless guilt and fear. Glad you've found your way here, and a belated welcome to ex-c!