If you grew up in the 90’s and were a fan of The X-Files (as I was), you may remember a certain poster that hung above Fox Mulder’s desk: a UFO flying above a countryside, with the words “I Want to Believe” at the bottom. As it turns out, those four words effectively summed up my faith journey prior to identifying myself as an atheist.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a family that went to church every Sunday. My experiences in church were squarely positive. I sang in the children’s choir and performed in the annual children’s musical. As a teenager, I attended youth group on Sunday afternoons, where I had a steady circle of friends who would sing songs, play games, and even make the yearly “mission trip” to Mexico where we would build houses for poor families. There were several spheres in my life where I felt like I belonged, and church was definitely one of them.
The problem wasn’t my relationship with my church — it was my relationship with Christianity. Looking back, I realize that I believed in the existence of God and the “good news” about Jesus… pretty much just because that was what my parents taught me, and I took their word for it. However, I now think that believing something because of external factors (read: family) is different from believing it because you yourself have an internal impetus to do so.
There were a handful of times I tried to behave the way a Good Christian™ behaves, but every one of them felt like I was forcing something in order to please the people around me. For example, sometimes in conversation I would mention that “God is leading me in this direction,” or in youth group I would contribute to discussion about “what God wants me to learn” from that week’s lesson.
As another example: at the church family camp where my grandma took me (and other grandkids) each summer, there was one evening where the preacher directly addressed us youth campers, inviting us to join him at the altar and accept Jesus. My 12-year-old self was the first to stand and walk up, because 1) I understood it to be the Right Thing to Do, and 2) no other teens were standing, and the preacher really seemed to be waiting for something to happen!
Furthermore, I could probably count on both hands the number of times, in my life, I personally prayed without anyone around to lead. I remember praying as a teenager at a moment when I was particularly fearful of my mortality. I prayed for guidance the night that I learned I had gotten a “D” in Organic Chemistry. (In my defense, O-Chem is a really hard subject.) And then maybe a handful of other times. But every single time, I did it because (again) I thought that’s what I was supposed to do — not because I ever experienced the feeling that someone was listening on the other end.
When I left my parents’ home for college, I was naturally expected to find and join a church. I did find one a couple blocks from my apartment, and recommended by a friend who had graduated from my school, no less. My attendance there lasted for maybe two months. After that, I found that I would much rather spend my Sunday mornings sleeping in, or studying, or performing at whatever community gig my college’s marching band was asked to play. I was far from ready to admit it, but church and religion already had no significant place in my life as an independent adult.
Still, while I didn’t specifically identify myself as Christian, I would continue to claim belief in God pretty much all throughout my twenties. For all of that time, I “knew” that turning fully to Christianity was the Right Thing to Do (again, because that’s how I was raised), but I often wondered what it would take to spur me to dedicate myself to that way of life, and how long I would be waiting. Put another way, I didn’t necessarily believe, but I wanted to believe.
That line of thinking began to phase out in my early thirties, when I started to take a good, honest look at my own life and the world around me. As best as I could see, everything that happens in our lives (certainly my own) can be explained by human decisions and/or forces of the natural world, each of which contributes to coincidental outcomes that our minds interpret as favorable or not.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I genuinely had no reason to believe in anything supernatural at all, much less structure my life around it. I also concluded that if any higher powers out there really do care enough to pursue a relationship, they would (and would have to) come to me first.
In the middle of summer 2016, at age 33, I was comfortable enough to say the words out loud to myself: “I’m an atheist.” Once I started self-identifying that way, I found that I could express my opinions and ideas more articulately, even when thinking in private. More importantly, from then on I felt far more at home in my own life.
I wanted to share my story as a complement to the myriad outspoken atheists who actually were genuine, devout Christians, and then left their faith. Of course, each and every one of those stories deserves to be heard as well. But I want to put it out there that for those of you who were raised in a Christian (or any religious) household, and the religion simply never resonated with you on a real, personal level, you are absolutely, 100% not alone.
If you’re someone who needs any kind of support, no matter where you are on the faith spectrum, please feel free to visit the Recovering From Religion web site, their blog “Ex-Communications,” or the Secular Therapy Project.
