A Reformed Jesus Freak: My 4 Year Journey Out of the Christian Faith
For some reading, it is a shock at the sight of the title. Perhaps they have not connected with me since high school and came across the following post on accident or checking up on me during a late night social media binge. They most likely remember me as the church-going, youth group-participating, mission trip-going, and service project-serving teenager on their Facebook feeds.
Or others beyond my small circle of college friends who did not even realize I actively grew up in the Dutch Reformed church, due to my reluctance to talk about it beyond a certain point, if even at all. They see my political views and swearing as: “Okay, what now?”
Yeah, folks. It’s true. I was *that* person.
I’m not anymore. I left that road behind me a few years ago, right around the time of my high school graduation. Strange, especially since I signed away the next four years of my life and decades worth of debt to attend Cornerstone University, a small Christian liberal arts school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which required 25 chapels a semester.
So, this begs the question: Why leave the church?
It’s not a simple answer nor just a statistic like spiritual researchers paint how my generation is leaving the Christian Church in droves. I was never pressured by society to give up my faith to take up the battles of the world and be involved in the “secular” culture. It was a chain of singular causes all adding up to the big, megachurch Easter event of making the unkeepable promise to never step foot in another place of worship.
To start things off, it’s important for my readers to understand where I was less than ten years ago. It’s not as if I am railing against my former religion for no reason. I’m not even saying that I regret the time I spent in church, my Sundays taken up by worship in beige church pews and dodgeball tournaments in the community center during youth group.
On the contrary. I loved every little bit and nuance of it.
For most of my adolescence, I was “on fire for the Lord,” a disciple 24/7, online and offline, in church and at school. My non-Christian friends told me that my friendship to them gave some hope for Christians and where the Church would be headed.
At one point, I wanted to be a full-time missionary and permanently live in a third-world country, flouting my white skin and gentrifying, superior religion. I started with local workcamps in Kalamazoo and Holland, eventually raising money and going to Greenwood, S.C. (2011) and Wilmington, N.C (2012).
I had a passion for serving people, ignoring the developing discomfort in the pit of my stomach in the colonization within my own country, talking down to grown black and brown people as if it were in my right to do so as a white Christian teenager.
Jesus Loves Kzoo, a street ministry in my hometown, seemed to be the purest way of connecting with the community and bringing the gospel to Christ in a responsible way. A year-round connection to people living around you versus the overall pointlessness of short-term mission trips.
It was easy for me to be a disciple because the message of Jesus was simple. Serve others. Be kind. Help those who don’t look like, have as much, or believe in the same thing as you do. Be a light in a dark world and just try to make it better through small acts of love and grace. Anything else just seemed as the kids would call it, extra.
John 15:12: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”
Though I’d been raised in the same church since infancy, I have almost always been a skeptic of the way the Dutch Reformed church interprets the Bible, not leaving much — if any–wiggle room for other points of view or cultural/historical context. I believed in what I was told to believe in, but questioned a lot of the angle that reformers came at the Bible from and never seemed to be given the answers I was desperately searching for.
From the time I was 10 or 11, I often questioned the deeper meaning of existence and why we were all put here in the first place. Human oblivion was a serious concern of mine and no one could ever seem to be honest and answer my question. They just directed me to the Bible; no original thought or interpretation. Just more fundamental literalism. If anything, the ‘answers’ given to me stressed me out anymore as I cried out to God for answers.
Radio silence and a dead dial in the other end of the phone. A blackhole whirling with chronic depression began to develop, threatening to swallow everything I had ever believed in, including the value of my own life.
It could be said that I was disappointed by people, not God, or that I was always a lukewarm Christian, but I would argue that it was the exact opposite. Lukewarm — or good weather — Christians typically go to God only in times of trouble and ignore His will when times are prosperous. Meanwhile, I praised God daily and prayed several times a day and carried a Bible with me at all times and opened it throughout the day.
However, when it came to the hardest parts of my life (bullying, mental illness identity, family trauma, etc), I was left alone. Nothing. Just numbness, as if, like Job, God and the Devil were in a battle over my loyalty and soul. Anger was all that I eventually had in regard to God, because it was if the constant worship and prayer were all for nothing. I was disappointed by God, as much as have been disappointed by His followers, if not more.
While going through my journals for another piece I wrote earlier this year, I stumbled across a poem that I turned in for a poetry writing course in the 2016 winter semester, arguably the worst time for my mental health and faith since I was a suicidal 13-year-old.
Depression. Apathy. The wish for
relief and a purpose to keep going.
The fear of oblivion and the inevitable end of
a meaningless existence. A punishment from
one’s own mind, like the lead from Flint pipes
that corrodes and eats away, poisoning the mind.
Why has He forsaken me, giving me something that
only makes me miserable and turn against myself?
If only for the sweet pills and release of the
sharp whiskey to eat at the liver and slowly fall away
like the dead leaves from shedding trees.
Heaven fades and the Bible falls from the pulpit.
The candle flickers out and He turns away.
When I reached out for guidance from church leaders as my mental health took a nosedive for the worse, they told me to either pray harder or read the word for comfort, because if “I prayed hard enough, I wouldn’t sad anymore.” Again, there is nothing wrong with this on the surface, but looking back, I wish a leader of the community — the community that I had been a part of since before I was a year old––would have reached out and told me, “This sucks. Jesus is here for you, but you know what? So am I.”
The only person who came close to this was my youth group leader, Jonathan. Every time I seemed to have doubts, questions, etc, he was right there for more than a bible verse. He was there when everyone else seemed to be present to hit me with the accusation of not loving the Lord enough. He exemplified the Lord in his actions, not only his words.
Using Jesus to avoid personal relationships with someone struggling with faith is a scapegoat. It is not taking His kindness and gentility and sharing it with someone for the betterment of His Kingdom, but leaving the comfort to Christ and Christ alone. For someone who has never had a mental health issue or a wink of skepticism, that may work, but it did not for me. Jesus brought me great comfort in days of stress but constant earthly loneliness and bereavement of “pray it all away” only solidified my evolving view that the church was about filling the cushioned seats in chapels and not caring about personal troubles of the people in the pews.
The Body of Christ cannot function if individual believers are left on the fringes to fend for themselves.
Some other leading forces in my leaving the church were my evolving political views. Those aren’t always welcome in a religious space, particularly with my parents; we have debates now but it hasn’t always been easy to get along come election time.
While the church is supposed to be a nonpartisan space to worship God in a communal and loving space, church pews are doused in the GOP-red every election cycle and have been like that since the 1970s.
At first, I thought it was okay. I’d been raised to be a gun-toting, anti-gay, and pro-life Republican and, at 15, 16, even 17 years old, I thought I would die one. I voted for Bush in 2004 in a mock school election and put my full vocal and digital support behind John McCain and Mitt Romney in their respective elections against President Obama. Just as I was on fire for the Lord, I was willing to put my full-throated support behind candidates who I knew almost nothing about and just supported them because they supposedly walked the same path and were baptized in the same waters as Jesus and His disciples.
“#GodBless #NightyNight,” I tweeted every night for a year and a half, as I signed off of the social media app; the half-hearted, borderline condescending last messages I left until the next morning.
Why? Well, why not? Teenage Hannah was trying to evangelize to her very liberal online community with what she thought was the best of her ability.
Then I got pushback from my more liberally aligned friends on Twitter and they challenged me to do research and talk more with people who did not agree with me instead of the echo chamber I was used to being around. While at first I was not very, um, open about questioning the beliefs I’d been told to hold so tightly to my chest that I was willing to sacrifice friendships over them, I eventually came to really embrace and research different perspectives.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it”
– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Christianity is political. Jesus was political. He was a radical, a rebel when it came to the status quo. He was an outsider when it came to the leaders of the synagogue, allowing the marginalized of society to touch Him, the Son of Yahweh, and to follow Him as he reached out to those whom the Roman government and the Jewish temple in Israel had forgotten about.
Pastor Brad Chilcott said it best in his 2017 Easter Opinion article, explaining that Jesus’ view on the politics of his time was non-partisan but always on the side of the less fortunate:
“Jesus was overtly on the side of the poor, the excluded, the ignored, the disenfranchised and the exploited. He was on their side when it damaged his reputation, his earning potential and any hope he had of moving up the ranks of religious or political power. He was on their side when he drove out the price-manipulators and rent-seekers in the temple courts and he was on their side when it cost him his life.”
In my view, Jesus cannot be confined to this box that the church’s political affiliations have assigned Him and have promptly voted by for decades. All I heard growing up was how Republicans were the moral compass of the American political landscape and reflected the goodness of Christianity, much more than those wretched, immoral Democrats.
However, at the tender age of 20, I watched them embrace a man who bragged about sexual assault and is openly racist against non-white people, whether they be from the Middle East, Latin America, or in the systematic racial oppression against our own brothers and sisters. I witnessed the downfall of American Christianity, as white Cornerstone students chanted “Build the Wall” in the busy mess hall during peak lunchtime the day after the 2016 general election.
To say that I was very hurt and disappointed in the church’s embrace of Donald Trump is putting it lightly. They fell for his obvious pandering to the “moral majority” and ignoring his mistreatment of racial and religious minorities, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and the poor. His appointment of Mike Pence for his running mate made my stomach churn with rage and bile; it was the last nail in the coffin for the evangelical church as they went out in droves for the thrice-divorced con-man and the man who is staunchly behind reparative therapy.
So, when my own interpretation of the Bible and Jesus’ words go against the general grain of beliefs of evangelical, right-wing believers, there is a push to through side-glances and passive aggressive comments. Being a Humanities major at Cornerstone at such a changing tide in history caused a whirlwind of emotion for me and how I look at scripture and the evangelical church.
When approached by fundamentalists, I point out that the story of Sodom in the Bible was not about the supposed wickedness of homosexuality but their inhospitable attitude toward foreigners, arrogance, and greed. Evangelical conservatives fire back about how I’m wrong and that I need to look at the literal meaning of the Bible instead of “a modern twist on scripture” to fit my own worldview.
Ezekiel 16:49: Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy
Not literal enough?
Exodus 23:9: Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.
“But that’s the Old Testament and the old covenant. We don’t need to follow it.” Alright, Joyce. You seem to care about following it when it comes to gays being an abomination and not letting your child get a tattoo, but sure, let’s go with your logic. What does the New Testament say about embracing the poor, immigrants, and those who believe differently than you?’
Matthew 25:25–36: For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.
Now I haven’t always been the best at remembering specific verses, or at least since candy was used as a bribe in Sunday School during my prepubescent years, but a simple Google search would leave any doubter of personal and Christian duty in deep spiritual concern.
Luke 10:30–34: A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
I have heard the Good Samaritan story touted in several sermons but rarely received cultural context as to why it was such a big deal that a Samaritan helped a modern Jew in the popular parable.
Samaritans were seen as a lesser than, because they adhered to different interpretations of the Torah, specifically where the holy city was as decreed by God to Moses in the Ten Commandments. Jesus was accused by temple priests that he was a demon-possessed Samaritan, because of his open embrace of healing and talking to them. He did not see them as lost sheep and did not try to persuade them to leave their homes to go to Jerusalem. He knew that they would inherit the kingdom of heaven, as they were also Israelites by birthright.
Jesus believed in the power of loving neighbors, no matter what it came to, and that love is the greatest decree of Biblical law. There are many parts of the Bible that are not relevant in current times (Leviticus, I’m looking at you), but the mention of love is consistent. It seems to be the most difficult simple concept to grasp.
It’s important for Christians to question their faith, or rather why they believe, not going into it blindly and without thought or reason, especially when regarding how it intersects with politics. Belief without reason is misplaced and dangerous, because when believers go out of the church and use their faith for evil purposes — slavery, Ku Klux Klan. Right to Life, and missionaries illegally trying to colonize vulnerable tribal people — others will try and excuse their actions, disregarding them as part of the faith.
They follow the same book and God as you do. If Muslims have to be held accountable for every member of Daesh and terror attack on Western whites, Christians have to be held to the same regard in their violence and hierarchal thinking over brown people. Fundamentalist extremism is inexcusable, regardless of which God is being praised.
Modern politicians try to distance themselves from the great pillar of Christianity and twist it into something that it’s not, leading to making the word toxic in the hands of those dressed in disciples’ robes.
So, after all that, many of you may be wondering as to why I am writing this testimony/rant. Part of it was my dad asking me one-night last month what I was doing to heal my relationship with God; unbeknownst to him, I have been piecing this post together since the end of August. And for that, I have to thank him. It gave me the fuel I needed to finish it and make me think as to why I left the church in the first place.
In all honesty, the inspiration came from Spotify, directing me to Sam Smith’s song, “Pray,” from his latest album Thrill of It All. Many of my alma mater at Cornerstone would say it’s the Holy Spirit leading me to write my thoughts and feelings, but I strongly believe that hearing Sam’s soulful voice grappling with the thought of a higher being is much more likely.
Then again, the Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways…
You won’t find me in church (no) reading the Bible (no)
I am still here and I’m still your disciple
I’m down on my knees, I’m beggin’ you, please
I’m broken, alone, and afraid
The second verse of this gospel-inspired song makes me feel a swell of unconscionable emotion every time I listen to it. It’s as if Sam, a secular openly gay man, wrote it with me, a recovering Christian with a potty mouth, in mind. The push against the conformity to a single belief system versus the brokenness of one’s soul and finding solace in believing something bigger than ourselves.
For many people reading this — hi, Ma and Dad — it is important for them to know that, deep down, I still believe in something bigger than myself, whether it be the Abrahamic god or merely a latticework-type design in the universe that ties altogether. The lessons I learned through my study of Jesus Christ are not futile now that I have left the church.
If anything, I feel as though I understand more about the overall message of the Bible than I did while I was doing mission trips and head-over-toe in ministry. Not to say that it’s been an easy journey, as I mentioned. To get to the point of writing what I am now, I’ve had to work through a lot of pain and anger, some of which is not entirely gone. There’s still some healing that needs to happen in order for me to completely make peace with any kind of organized religion.
However, I have given it over to writing and have created a messy map with no permanent destination in mind. Lately, I’ve been thinking that it is possible that the destination includes a community-based faith, with an open-door policy and exemplifying the true love of Christ.
Until then, I will continue to be here, waiting for that predestination compass and a one-on-one call with the big man himself. At this point, I am more than willing to pick up.
