Featured

“As a fucking nerd who grew up with orcs in my nerd-dom – I’m a fucking Christian-ass, god damned, Odin-worshiping motherfucker!”

This was my drunken declaration moments before the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2018. It was cathartic, if I remember correctly, to openly declare my freedom from defined faith as a way to welcome the New Year. Especially so, since I spent the first 25 years of my life deeply entrenched in independent, fundamental Baptist Christianity. The veritable Nazis of the evangelical Christian right.

This blog is meant to tell a story. It was an idea that occurred to me, nearly a year ago, when I began to hear some friends who I’d grown up with start to speak their truth about their experiences in the church, and how they had come out of that community. It was liberating to hear these experiences, relate to their struggles, and be inspired by their new perspectives.

A little bit of history…

I never remember a time when I wasn’t in church. I used to joke that the first time I left the house as a baby was to go to the church nursery while my parents attended the worship service. It wasn’t actually a joke. Our brand of Christianity was a special one, in the way that a crazed bull elephant is a special kind of elephant. We were strict, we were judgmental, we were exclusive, and we were fanatical.

I got saved when I was 5 years old. Getting saved means that at the tender age of 5, I proclaimed that I understood the intricacies of right, wrong, morality, and judgement, accepted that I was completely and irreversibly flawed, and accepted the act of a 2000-year old deity as payment for and freedom from eternal damnation and hell-fire. I was a fucking smart 5-year old.

Except I wasn’t. I repeated this process of self-flagellation and redemption several times throughout my adolescence and teenage years. It’s funny what kind of effect week-long camps full of exhausting physical activities followed by hours of preaching, singing, and crying will make you want to do. Especially when everyone else is doing it.

When I wasn’t getting saved again, I was volunteering the rest of my life to serve in the Lord’s work in some capacity. Sometimes it was going to be as a youth pastor. Other times, I pledged to plant new churches across America. But the one I loved the most, the one that always got the most admiration and spectacle, was missions work. I mean, what kind of teenager willing tells his friends that he is going to leave all American comforts behind to journey to a strange land, learn a new language, and give his life in the work of converting those heathen souls to the goodness and rightness of American Baptist Christianity? A hero!

False. I was an asshole.

But that was the dream. Constant self-humiliation, never-ending humble-brags about how difficult life would be on the mission-field, and what a privilege it would be to serve the Lord with my life in this way. Jesus, I was a prick.

After high-school, I headed off to seminary. Oh boy. Everything that I’d experienced as a kid and in high-school was leading me to an environment completely dominated by people with a single-minded focus on creating carbon-copy servants of the Lord who talked, looked, thought, and acted exactly the same. It was bizarre and amazing.

I didn’t last.

After a year, I came home, I spent a year lusting after the ways of the world while trying to keep everyone in my small community of believers convinced that I was still the poster-child of faith and devotion. I just needed to find myself.

And I did, in a new, smaller, though equally fervent, seminary that was also closer to home. Two years went by, and I met a girl. A girl who loved that I wanted to serve the Lord in missions. I also met the nightlife in a big city. I met beer and dancing and movies and porn. And amazingly, I did not instantly combust with hellfire when I met them.

The second seminary lasted two years, but I came out of it with a wife who hated me, parents who disapproved of me, and a church that judged me. It was great. Naturally, I started immediately down the road of repentance and redemption. I taught classes in Sunday School. I entered an addictions program for lost souls whose hearts had been tainted by evil. I graduated and became a leader. I was asked to be a deacon in the church.

My wife still hated me. My parents were still disappointed in me. And the church didn’t care.

So I said, fuck it. I left everything. Wife, parents, church. Specifically, wife, and everything else kind of followed after. Friends that I’d known for years stopped speaking to me. My sister spent hours trying to save my soul. The deacons held a special service to remove me from the church membership roster.

It was intense.

But, the single thought that remained in my mind through the entire process was what it wasn’t.

It wasn’t kind. It wasn’t compassionate. It wasn’t loving. It wasn’t thoughtful or helpful or respectful. It was not, in fact, any of the things I had been taught for 25 years to believe that Christians were supposed to be.

And that’s when I knew. That’s when the light bulb came on and I understood. It’s all bullshit.

So. Friends, family, Christians, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Satanist, whoever you may be – I am here to tell a story. My story, your story. The story of what a warped and twisted thing religion and fanaticism and cultism can be. The story of my personal journey out of a secluded, judgmental mindset into one of compassion, love, openness, and peace.

I’m the Spiritual Agnostic. I believe in the force that connects us as people and the power it gives us to help, love, and support one another. But, and don’t get mad, I don’t love Jesus.

Talk soon.