Why I am no longer a Christian

My crash out of Christianity was unexpected. I wasn’t looking for a way out. I wasn’t deeply dissatisfied per se. I didn’t fall out with the church. On the contrary, I had found a faith so deep and real to me that it became my whole world. I won’t go into all the details of how and why I was a Christian. Suffice to say that Christianity wasn’t just something I was born into, it was something I had chosen for myself over and over again over decades. The person of Jesus Christ wasn’t just the main character in a series of stories found within the pages of the bible, he was a personality that I spoke to everyday, who I trusted and felt I knew personally, someone who had got me through horrific familial abuse, who had helped me find silver linings in dark clouds.

I wasn’t just a fair weather, non intellectual Christian either. I’d read the bible cover to cover many times. If someone told me something was written in the bible, I instinctively knew if it was or wasn’t because I’d read it and internalised it over decades. I knew what the voice of my Lord sounded like. I had even toyed with the idea of going to theological college so I could go even deeper, despite already being quite deep. I understood the history, I knew about the Nicean Council, I understood and wrestled with fundamental theological concepts and made my own mind up on what I believed.

Despite (and maybe because of) all of this – I hadn’t been to church in many years. I’d grown up in church but couldn’t fit into one. I’d got tired of the happy clappy nonsense, weak theology and emotional and financial manipulation of church many years prior. For me, Christianity and the church were two different entities and I was fine with this.

Church people weren’t necessarily my people but I had Jesus.

So how did such a rich deep faith disappear out of my life almost without a trace of ever being there? And without warning?

It’s difficult to explain but if I’d summarise it in a nutshell I’d say I became so Christian that it became impossible to stay a Christian any longer. Here are some things – I don’t have enough space to write about all the things – that contributed to this – all accelerated by the pandemic, which gave us all 2020… and a lot of time to do some much needed thinking.

I started going deep into the Old Testament roots of Christianity – the Torah.

I found it beautiful, coherent and it brought so much more context to Christianity. In fact it directly led to me giving up eating pork. However as I started down this path, I started to find out about the Sumerian roots of the Old Testament. This is something I had never come across before and I consumed everything I could find like a hungry animal, disbelieving at first what I was hearing. There was something older than the Old Testament and I couldn’t escape the idea that the whole bible was most likely… plagiarised.

The 2020 US election showed me that many self-professed Christians hated black people. (And were crazy in general)

This one was a hard pill to swallow. I had always told myself not to judge a religion by its followers, but it started to get to me knowing that my “brothers and sisters in Christ” did not really consider me to be a sister.

They didn’t empathise with the plight of black people, of women, of the LGBT community. They had no love in their heart at all.

I watched as so many “prophets” said Trump would be re-elected and then backed down when Biden won. I saw many more revel in their delusion. Trump was God’s Will they said, despite all evidence to the contrary. It became so clear to me that God wasn’t with these people. And if God wasn’t with them, then what did it mean about what I should believe?

This also coincided with a deep re-reading of the Gospels and about Jesus. I started to really understand what he was saying.

I realised that those who proclaimed to be closest to him were the farthest away from his teachings.

Pharisees. Modern day Pharisees.

It was all so clear to me.

I asked God some real questions about gay people (and those of other religions).

I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d been raised to hate gay people. And although I didn’t hate them at all, and by this time would call myself “progressive”, my faith did not leave as much space for them as I wanted.

I found in Jesus’ actual teachings so much more compassion than I had found in traditional Christianity and this led me to discover progressive Christianity.

In fact I had the BLM movement to thank for some of this. I couldn’t reconcile wanting to be included and yet excluding others. I ended up writing a personal statement of faith. An inclusive creed, if you will.

And all along the way I kept getting signs that I was on the right path. The path of love. And bit by bit, the fear that I had held, that I didn’t even know permeated everything about my life, began to slip away.

It was also at this point that I concluded that the bible couldn’t possibly be the literal Word of God. And this was big for me. Letting go of this cognitive dissonance was the equivalent of at least one year in therapy.

I came to realise the difference between good people and bad people.

I saw clearly that religion had nothing to do with whether or not you were righteous or good. And I saw even more clearly that this is what Jesus had been preaching the whole time. It sounds trite but being able to discern good from evil based on peoples actions, not what they said or believed was so liberating.

Whilst I was going through all of this, I reconnected with my father after 18 years of being estranged. (Definitely a story for another day). My father is a deeply spiritual, Muslim man is someone I’d been raised by a Christian woman, my mother, to hate.

And yet, I found in him not just a beautiful righteous and enlightened soul but someone who had been on this journey much longer than me. I found a friend.

A real friend.

Finding my father to be as he was, let me know that I’d been so wrong about religion, and wrong about what it meant to be “saved” and who was going to heaven and hell. In fact I abandoned the idea of a literal hell altogether.

And then, not too long after rekindling a relationship with my father, I met and fell headlong in love with the man who is now my husband. Like my father, he is spiritual, knowledgable and well read. And a good person. Not perfect, because none of us are, but deeply, deeply good.

And I would never have met him or even considered him if I hadn’t been on this journey.

I’ve described my journey this way – which, by the way, is by no means over – Christianity started to feel like a sweater I’d once owned, worn and loved for so many years that no longer fit. And so, I took it off.

To be continued…