Five Years Later

What I’ve learned from my time outside the Christian bubble

Hyde Park. I just came home from visiting London (with the ‘vain’ purpose of seeing a metal show and meeting a pagan friend.)

I started deconstructing in the spring of 2019, after I moved out of my parents’ house. It was in mid-April, so my freedom is now a little over five years old. I left behind my Christian guilt and years of hiding my true self, and I wrote about that in this article.

Here’s what I’ve learned since then.

‘Ex-Christian’ is one of my identities, but not my entire identity

Stay with me, I promise I’m not giving you the stupid ‘don’t make it your whole personality’ argument. I think that there’s a danger for us who found community online, namely… something of an addiction to the news from the Evangelical world. If you follow atheist and ex-Christian YouTubers for example, you’re sure to learn about the latest exploits of Greg Locke and John Hagee, about the Trump-loving prophets, about John MacArthur’s insolence, about Paul and Morgan and Girl Defined. I personally stayed a bit too long with that online content, and in the indignation I felt from it. There were other places I could have directed my energy to.

Watching YouTube and Tiktok is, among others, a way for me to dissociate and procrastinate. That makes it even more important for me to switch content and limit exposure.