Leaving the Church, or, Being Precarious

Atheism, at least in philosopher John Gray’s reading, might encompass any plurality of experience. While the models we are all most familiar with — he outlines the ideas of ‘God-hating’ of De Sade and the universalist or spiritualist creed of, say, Spinoza — might not wholly escape ‘God’ in a meaningful sense, perhaps doing so is at best impossible, at worst pointless. While the Anglican Diocese of Sydney has, for all the wrong reasons, attained the weird status of being both the most populous theologically rigid denomination in the region and the most damned by, say, the Sydney Morning Herald, there is a strange taboo on those, like myself, who have wholly departed from the faith.
I’ve met handfuls of fellow evacuees. Some leave the Church over personal disputes with staff, congregations, or theology. Predominantly, I find, among my friends who have abandoned Christianity wholesale, the cause is more political: the teachings on gender, the rigid interpretation of scripture leaving no space for queer experience, or simply the drift from ‘sanctity of marriage’ to sexual exploration and experience that does not fit the normative narrative its proponents defend. In all cases, a mismatch exists between the Church’s teachings of acceptance in whatsoever form, and the real practice of diminishing — whether from the pulpit, or in personal interactions — the views, attitudes, or experiences of us who, for whatever accidents of identity or birth, do not fit the mould Sydney Anglicans necessitate.
It is a stark reminder, sometimes, of the disconnect between faith and being: where faith might be defined happily as a system of reciprocal, communal trust in a particular pattern of belief, being is much harder to pin — and those whose being in the world cannot be reconciled to the patterns or articles of belief the Church prioritises in its present stage feel with admonishment the uncritical broad-brush-strokes of an Australian conservatism that has wedded itself to the congregational community. This obviously does not need to be the case: Paul’s epistles might be read as much for their radical reimagining of the communal body as their admonishment of erstwhile women, or Jesus’ teachings for the institutional separation of church and state foundational to the idea of ‘rendering unto Caesar’ in a hostile political environment, but in both cases the attitudes of so many within the church community — not necessarily those with the power, not necessarily the ministers, theologians, or even Synod representatives, but perhaps specifically the lay themselves — is to opt for the easy, uncritical approach of what I like to think of as privatising Christian thought.
By this I mean, in brief, that Biblical scripture has an awful lot to say on the radical precarity of human beings; and that transforming this into a political objective of a sort of stock-cartoon 1950s conservatism which alienates and resists the incursions of continually emerging and developing discourses of queerness and femininity, so often the two specific theoretical frameworks continually identified by Church leaders as threats to the body of Christ, does a disservice to the long history of radical engagements with Biblical literature and its unique position as the canonised moral document of Western thought. Atheists like me might seek to unseat the necessity of divine authority for the emergence of an egalitarian, diverse society; but this is less a resistance to the core beliefs in grace and human inaptitude and more a response to the fundamentalist attitudes which have taken root in congregations around the world, and empower precisely the figures of dictatorial authority and cruelty which the early church in its historicization contended against so radically.
In a generation where our precarity as beings is so clear to most, if not all of us, the relative silence or lack of leadership on questions of ecology and the destruction of the climate, the relative silence on the barbarity of a Capitalist system which disempowers the body — so often the body of the Church, too — at the benefit of the elite, and the relative silence on the violence perpetuated against, most often, women and girls sexual development in the pursuit of an ossification of one unique model of heterosexual identity is toxic both to the stated mission of believers — the spread of salvation — and toxic to the more broad secular world with which the Church must engage and is, so often, responding to with the most appalling condemnation and distrust.
In a perverse way, churches and youth groups around the country have it completely correct: limiting the acceptable or normative models of romantic relationships to those that can comfortably exist within the confines of the pews protects the flock from the sort of abandonment of faith I experienced. While I would like to believe I was always already an atheist at heart, it was only in my formative experiences of dating and sex that this solidified into anything remotely resembling ‘comfortable’. Even now, I feel the pang of guilt tugging back towards the security of Sydney Anglican doctrine’s approach to gender and sexuality. In what might be the biggest twist of the blade for us turncoats, 1 John 2:19 echoes every time ‘Church’ comes up: these people left our churches, but they never really belonged among us. I feel strangely justified by this. I was always already damned, in the strictest Biblical sense; and my agency in the process of abandoning faith can’t wholly be pinned on me.
The accidents of identity and birth that separate a believer from an atheist are not merely the presence of a family model, the teachings of the parents, or the inoculation against belief by a secular society. They are the insular mindsets of a Church body which cannot bear for a moment to engage in social discussions with the generosity so many evangelists expect from their listeners.
Leaving the church and the belief I was raised in does not make me happy, and the absent faith has not been replaced by my ongoing introspection and growth into the kind of man I believe I want to be. But in abandoning faith, I have recovered the lack of certainty which has enabled me to perceive my own precarity as being beyond the stifling confines of the pew. It is epistemologically uncomfortable, it is long-term possibly untenable, and I would be lying to say I don’t toy with the Gospel, either in search of metaphysical certainty or the pursuit of an identity which can enjoy some degree of sedimentation. Further, I’d be lying more if I said my formative experiences as a believer didn’t shape my atheism, and I will forever remain in gratitude to the Christian men and women who raised me, taught me the patterns of generosity and kindness which seem so much the core of that mode of being, and let me leave with all the dignity anyone could muster.
The church must change if it is to survive. Not in the numbers game, but rather in the slow erosion of belief of well-meaning people as they are worn down by the additional weights of surety in an environment of radical uncertainty. As the world collapses around us into ecological ruin and Capitalist devastation, I don’t see a path forward for a church of certainty that admonishes doubt and is inflexible to the emerging uncertain bodies which it denies legitimation. Maybe it will change. But it is too late for me, and too late for so many fellow evacuees, for the Sydney Anglican Diocese to reshape itself in patterns of mutual respect that might reopen closed doors.
