enter this space with a reverence for confusion.

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.”

in the quote above, leo tolstoy alleged the existence of a human problem. victimization by the strong upon the weak, regardless of the good intentions of otherwise beautiful people, accounts for a great deal of the misery we feel around us.

evangelical christianity in america has blindly mass-produced “strong preying upon the weak.” leaders in the movement have correctly identified the human’s center of gravity to be his/her conscience. evangelical leaders cleverly condition the conscience to an obsessive-compulsive state.

conscience is morality’s muscle inside each of us.

hijacking one’s conscience is a far shrewder form of sinister than outright crimes against someone’s physical safety. shaking off the bonds of an american version of christianity is far more complicated than experiencing a change of mind. a hyper-active conscience seeking rehabilitation may never be a healthy, functional moral compass ever again.

one can shed an ideology by a mere change of mind. reconditioning a conditioned muscle is a process working independently of any change in ideology. a grown man in physical therapy can understand how his feet ought to move but still stumble about as a toddler taking its first steps.

america’s evangelical christian heritage is rich because it is effective, perhaps profoundly more effective than most religions worldwide. it does not have to proselytize via violence or political coups. it strikes at unaddressed fears carefully lining the kernels of paranoia hidden deep in our souls. once taking hold of our fears, american evangelicalism draws together all things american – affluence, distance from third-world suffering, wealth, etc. – and teaches our consciences to equate god’s pleasure with evangelical camaraderie and american comforts.

not everyone is equally vulnerable to this hijacking and reconstruction of the conscience. but i and my peers were conceived in accordance with, born into, and carefully mentored by this american evangelical christian subculture.

all to say, leo identifies a human problem, and the most reliable way to identify a human condition is to do it as leo did: see it in yourself. negative effects by ideological movements betray an effectiveness of human beings marrying their qualifications with evil intentions, ignorance with good intentions, or some mixture of the two.

your journey out of hyper-religion can teach you much about yourself. the end result can be that you do less and less harm to yourself, others, and your environment.

i suggest that the only healthy way to see our consciences free and clear, healthy, and functional is to detach from the hyper-religious techniques and black-and-white views on life, and then in this detached state embrace rigorous self-awareness. a macro understanding of what hyper-religion is then becomes a metaphor for our own tendencies to harm ourselves, others, and our environment.

we know that we are free when we can learn to mourn and rejoice for the right reasons at long last.