Reality
Why I left the Christian faith (Part 2)
My last post was a simplified account. It did contain the primary reasons that my faith broke, why it could not survive the experience of the real world. But my journey away was very gradual. It has to be, when your faith is so intricately woven into your very identity as a human being.
At 19, I started to doubt. At 22, I knew my faith was shaken to its core, and I knew I could not find my way back to that innocent, unwavering belief no matter how hard I prayed, or read the Bible, or searched my soul, or sought help from other Christians. The more I searched, the more the foundations of my faith seemed to crack. At 23, I stopped attending church regularly, but continued to attend sporadically. I had moved far away from where I grew up, and made the excuse that I was still searching for my new “church home”. I still considered myself a Christian, albeit a struggling one. I thought maybe I could just try really hard to trust, to stop thinking, to accept what I was told by the still-faithful ones. At 25, I started realizing that I couldn’t follow the fundamental version of Christianity I was taught as a child. At 27, I finally let go — and no longer considered myself a “Christian” of any kind.
Nearly a decade, just to wake up to the fact that I did not believe enough to label myself a “Christian”. But when did I…
