But It Hurts Now
When we talk about the loss of one’s religion, we often expect to hear of a single dramatic shift that sounded the death knell of faith. For me, however, that was not the case. The loss of my religion was a gradual erosion or a death by degrees, something that happened so slowly that I can point to no single event that was solely responsible. One day my faith was simply gone.
Yet, while I am unable to pinpoint specific incidents that ended my religiosity, I can easily recall some of my earliest doubts, and the inner turmoil those feelings caused.
Depending on where you live and how you were raised, Christianity may feel like a salve used to soothe the constant scrapes and bruises left by the jagged edges of a life fraught with systemic injustices. “God is watching” or “God knows” were phrases I grew up hearing. They were meant as reassurance after brushes with racism, violence, and the desperate struggles that comes from living in poverty.
At the large Baptist church my family originally belonged to, our pastor occasionally talked about how God delivered our people, Blacks, from slavery, guided us through the darkest times of segregation and Jim Crow, and would continue to deliver us. The pastor preached that, despite our life on earth being so difficult, our rewards in Heaven would be great.
