“[Y]ou subject the tradition to your irreverence to get back to where it truly began, only that, back down to the ground level of simple…unmediated awe. It is there, which is necessarily the state of reverence, the sharp perception of God’s presence in the fact of our consciousness… and therefore everywhere and in everyone and everything – it is that constancy of awe we hope for, a pre-scriptural state as alive to us as the contemporary moment, and which, of course, comes with absolutely no guarantees. That is where we begin…” – E. L. Doctorow, City of God

For so long my faith was delicately held together with bubble-gum and scotch tape. However, the cognitive dissonance soon became too much to overlook, till I finally let go and let the pieces fall where they may. I finally allowed myself to subject this faith I had been given to my irreverence. If I truly hoped to encounter the Divine, to find some sort of truth, could I have sacrificed anything less?

This honest irreverence has led me to certain conclusions about myself: that I cannot and will not ever be able to accept infinite punishment for finite sin as justice. Nor can I accept that only those who have made some sort of cognitive assent to a particular narrative as the exclusive recipients of redemption and restoration. It seems to me there is an underlying theme to religion that life is just a game of Russian roulette – hoping to beat the odds, hoping you were born into the right religion or right culture, hoping that you hold the right theology. This whole notion has become so absurd to me that I don’t even find it to be an interesting question anymore. I have done away with dogma, and in doing so found I no longer could call myself a Christian.

I would like to say that my doubt was solely rooted in logical inconsistencies and unsound reason.  However, long are the days since anyone’s beliefs have been swayed by apologetics alone. At base, all our beliefs are determined and reinforced through our lived experiences.

As a man who is also attracted to men, I have for years tried to find my place in the Church. I recently came to the realization that I had been running around trying to convince everyone else to draw me within their lines of in-and-out, of those who are “right with the Lord” and those who are not, and yet somehow my privilege to the same task had been forfeit because of my sexual orientation. I no longer had access to whether or not I could define myself as part of that community – that seemed to be the right of those around me.

This realization, that no matter how much I fight there will always exist this disparity, was perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back. I never walked away from faith, I just realized that the lines had been drawn with me outside of them. After having found myself outside the confines of the Church, it’s as if I have experienced the freedom they had always offered yet had always seemed so elusive. As if I’ve learned how to breathe for the first time.

Though I find many of the particulars within scripture disturbing, I still find the grand arc of the biblical narrative beautiful. I’m moved by this story that tells of the Divine joining her creation in order to save it. But I cannot affirm belief in it – only an undirected hope. The same sort of hope I feel in those first days every spring – belief somehow seems to be arbitrary. The awe and wonder of this feeling humbles me, and keeps me from ever relinquishing hope in the Divine. And I don’t see this wonder exclusive to a particular religion.

One of my best friends happened to be raised by a Muslim father and a Jewish mother. Growing up in Pakistan, his parents had him attend a Christian missionary school, so from an early age he was ingratiated in all three of the world’s main religions. He explains himself as a spiritual mutt. And in our discussions of faith and spirituality, he doesn’t claim any particular religion, but simply defines himself as “ecumenically spiritual.”

He tells a story of when his father took him on a Hajj to Mecca. He fell asleep on a terrace, while his father stayed up through the night praying next to him and his brother, surrounded by millions of other worshippers as far as the eye could see. Though not a self-defined Muslim, he recalls a moment he feels to be the most spiritual experience of his life, when he awoke on that terrace to the call of prayer singing to the millions of white-robed worshippers, the sun slowly rising over that holy city, his father whispering hushed prayers to heaven.

These are the experiences that make us truly human, that humble us in the face of the Divine.

One evening not too long ago, I shared about my “loss of faith” with another good friend of mine on a long car ride back from the City.  He had been with me through a lot – through the initial stages of coming out, through the fear, doubt and self-loathing – with a confidant compassion through it all.

But he wept for me in the car that night. He plead with me, saying we could be Church for each other, “right here – you and I. This can be our Church.”

I hold these fragments in my hands and subject them to my irreverence, and yet I continue to hope for a flicker of the Divine in and through it all.

Thank you, friend – brother – for always being Church for me.

If you asked me right now, on January 1st of 2012, if I was a Christian, I would not know what to say. Honestly, I don’t think I can call myself a Christian. I do not attend church and I regularly avoid going to chapel here at Gordon. I don’t know where my Bible is and to be frank I’m not too concerned. I feel awkward when people invite me to Bible studies; I have no interest and I have no real connection with what people are talking about.

I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, but I got involved in the church at the end of middle school. By the end of my sophomore year of high school, I had decided that I was going to go to Gordon and major in Youth Ministry. I was a middle school student leader and was at the church almost every day throughout the week. Amidst this involvement in my home church, I struggled with doubt. It was an up and down progression. Some months were better than others. I would try to bring it up with my youth leaders and I was always given the same answers. Just keep praying. Read your bible daily. Participate in the church. I would like to say that these worked, yet nothing got better. During my senior year of high school, my faith completely shut off. I remained frustrated. I figured going to Gordon that fall would fix everything.

I was wrong.

When I arrived at Gordon I was excited. (Scared, but excited.) I didn’t have a roommate my freshman year, so this could be an additional factor. My floor was absolutely wonderful, though. They were more than I could ask for and I still love them to death. Despite so many deep conversations and questions to be asked and answered, I had a real community of people I could talk with. Yet even with that community, I didn’t attend chapel, church, or even class regularly. Then spring semester, a friend from home died. I did not understand. I went from frustrated to mad. I headed on a downward spiral. I didn’t understand why God would let this happen and then I just felt alone. Part of me still feels alone.

Sophomore year I had a new roommate, new building, and a new, but counterfeit, faith. There were devotionals on Monday, Wednesday and Friday before class. I attended all my chapels and the ones I needed to make up (45 if you were wondering). I wish I could say that I truly cared but I didn’t. When I had to lead the devotion, I would Google a popular verse, get just enough information on it to lead discussion then I would make it short and to the point. Spring semester that year, a good friend that struggled with the same questions as me left to go abroad. That was tough. The devotionals stopped and I started to skip class more often.

Over breaks I found (and still continue to find) excuses not to go to youth group and Sunday services. I have a headache, I’m busy, or I’m exhausted…something along those lines.

When my junior year began I had no expectations. I found out I was struggling with depression, and I probably had been for a while but I carried on. I didn’t complete chapels for fall semester. I didn’t attend church once. I made my work schedule take up my Sundays so I would not be available. This gave me a legitimate reason for not going to church and prevented me from developing unreasonable excuses not to go. I do not feel guilty simply for my lack of attendance, rather, I feel guilty for not living up to the expectations my friends have of me. Christians are supposed to go to church. More importantly, Christians are supposed to want to go to church. My friends are all second semester seniors and they have 15 chapels to attend. While chapel isn’t designed to “be” church, Christians desire gathering with others in order to worship and to read Scripture. I simply do not. When my friends stop going, so will I; I have no intention of completing my chapel credits this semester.

What finally made me take an honest look at myself was after I was rejected for two mission trips I applied to. I was very open about my struggles in my faith in one of the interviews, but I believe I was also clear about how much I wanted to grow to know who God was. I was searching for answers and hoping that reconnecting with God’s people outside of Gordon in some way would spark something. I feel like because I was struggling in my faith it was assumed I was not spiritually ready for these trips, but maybe I was. This trip might have been something to push me back onto the right path. I don’t think about that too much anymore; I realize now when I look for answers I will not find them in ways I expect.

All of my good friends right now are currently engaged to Christian men, all in different areas of their faith. I watch them and realize that their genuine discussions are ones I cannot have, something that will hold me back from being open and honest with my future spouse. I’m at this Christian college with the knowledge that when I marry it should be to a Christian man— but shouldn’t he marry a woman of God? If so, then that isn’t me.

I’ve contemplated getting married and raising my kids as Christians, because I know what to teach them, what to say when they are struggling. That seems wrong, but I don’t want them to struggle like I do.

Where was God when I lost my faith and it turned my life upside down? This is one of the stereotypical questions people ask Christians for answers to, and all the answers I’ve heard do not cut it for me.

I constantly ask myself if coming to Gordon was the best decision for me. Academically-probably not. Emotionally- yes. Spiritually- unknown. If I went to a secular college, would I have continued to live a life of this “fake” faith I needed to get through the day? Maybe it is better that I came to Gordon and I have come to terms that I’m not a Christian. I still do not know.

I do hope, however, that I will look back on this submission and laugh one day and wonder what I was thinking. As I write this, it is nothing but an honest reflection of my heart.

I can’t tell you exactly how I lost my faith, because I myself don’t know. I do know that it didn’t happen overnight – I didn’t wake up one morning and instantly know that I wasn’t a Christian anymore. It was a long process. I wish that I had a record of what I was going through, what I was thinking and feeling at the time. But I don’t. I don’t have that because I stopped journaling. The doubts felt too dirty to write down. Good Christians don’t have doubts, right?

I hoped that I would figure things out relatively quickly – my goal was a year. A year came and went – a year filled with TGC, chapels, and late night theological discussions with friends. But the problems were far from being solved. This hadn’t been a minor hiccup in my Christian walk. I wasn’t back in the loving arms of the Father like I had expected to be. Like I had hoped would happen. Instead, I was further away from the familiar faith of my childhood, and for all practical purposes, just as alone.

I’ve only told a small number of people about what I’m going through. They’ve been encouraging, but it sounds like this isn’t something that someone else can figure out for me. So these days, my “faith” is characterized by feeling alone and living a lie. For the most part, I carry on, trying to look like I’m still a Christian, praying out loud when situations require it.

I can’t tell people, especially my parents. Not because I’m afraid that they wouldn’t love me. I can’t tell them because it would break their hearts. It would devastate them. I don’t want to put my parents or my friends through that. I know what it’s like to weep for unsaved friends and feel terror for their souls. I refuse to do that to those I love, because I can’t think of anything that would hurt them more. I can’t think of anything more unloving to do to them. I lie so that they don’t have to bear that burden.

I lie to protect those that I love. It’s also possible that I lie to protect myself. I’ve never had an identity outside of Christ. Losing my faith was like having the foundation ripped out from under me. Now I have to reconstruct myself from the ground up, and I’m face to face with a vast emptiness where anything is possible. How would my friendships change if I told people? Where would my place in my family be? What would people at my church say? These are daunting questions that I don’t know the answers to.

As time passes, I’m less sure that this is something that I can keep a secret forever. As much as I don’t want to tell people, as much as I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this façade. It’s not a part of who I am anymore. I don’t know how people that know me will deal with that. I don’t know how to deal with it myself to be honest. And that’s scary.

“When you set the table/And when you chose the scale/ Did you write a riddle/ That you knew they would fail?/ Did you make them tremble/ So they would tell the tale?/ Did you push us when we fell?” “All fallen leaves should curse their branches/ For not letting them decide where they should fall/ And not letting them refuse to fall at all.” These excerpts from “When We Fell” and “Curse Your Branches” are just some of David Bazan’s lyrics that resonate deeply with me. The words that he sings are the ones that I’ve been unable to write in my journal. Don’t get me wrong, my life is not all bad. I’ve been working through this for a while, and it’s been rough for sure, but I’m accepting that things are different now. For me, the matter is far from resolved, but I know that I can’t go back to what I used to be. That is no longer an option. I can only go forward.

I am struggling with my faith.  I did not use to worry about it, but after coming to Gordon, this issue increased greatly.  Before I came here, my Christian life was a safe haven, with people who I knew loved and respected me as a person.  Of course, I knew certain Christians who acted judgmental and cruel, but they were individuals I did not worry about; they had less of an impact on my life, for I had so many other friends whom I loved.  At Gordon, though, I find myself facing people who think of themselves as Christians and sense that they are creating a Christian environment, but in reality are self-centered.

Yet if I see that these people are acting horribly, what is to say that I am not?  I do not understand how God could make a world where those who are supposed to be his followers who act justly are, in actuality, cruel, judgmental, and cliquish. I do not understand how God could have created me—a person who desperately wants to be a good person and make the world a better place—without the capability to know if I am making the right choices or being kind to others.  The one thing I want to do with my life is use it to make the world a better place.  Everywhere I go, the “Christian” aspects of the classes I take and the people I meet make that seemingly impossible.

Horrible things, like illness and death, happen to the people who try to make the world a better place. I was taught that God is active in the world, but I cannot believe it.  The kind people who strive to do the right thing die in the worst of ways.  God may exist at a distance, but he has not given me a personal relationship.  I do not enjoy going to church anymore.  How can I, when I come out feeling emptier than when I come in?

How do you have a relationship with someone who does not speak back?  People say, “You have to find ways to let God speak to you.  He works in mysterious ways.”  That is stupid.  If God wanted to communicate with me, why can’t he speak to me in a rational way?  If he were so omniscient, if he knew that we were going to fail and most of us would die for all eternity in hell, why on earth did he create people, the tree, the garden?  Save the trouble!    If God is so capable, why did he make us so weak?  My faith is not being merely challenged.  It is being crushed by all of the things I cannot understand.

The existence of such questions presents a desire for answers.  I must believe on some level for the fact that if I had children, I would want them to be raised as Christians.  I want them to believe in and love God. Yet there has to be something I am missing. I am not looking for blind acceptance on my part, nor repenting of my sins and then experiencing the joy of being forgiven.  I already know that I make mistakes every day, and though I wish I could take them back, there is nothing I can do to change what I have done.

So what, then, am I missing?

­Due to family issues, the Christian faith that my mother followed when she was younger had become obscured by the time I was born. By 1997, however, these obstacles were removed and my mother returned to the church, taking me with her. (I was then about seven years old.) Like any child, my mind was a vulnerable sponge willing to soak up any data that it encountered. Mom at that age is God in a sense; she brought me into the world, kept me alive, and had been my one constant, so why shouldn’t I believe anything she says or does? In 2000 she took me out of my local public school and placed me in a private Christian school, which led to me being held back a year due to the differing standards. I was irate—not only at having to stay back, but also at my lack of say in the matter. Adjusting to the school was a memorable experience, one that I’m sure many Gordon students have shared with me—the suddenly minute class size, the increased teacher involvement and expectations, and, of course, the Bible. (I recall that first year as the teacher once asked us to turn to the book of Isaiah; I was completely lost—a far cry from where I’d be a decade later.)

Ultimately I cannot say that I regret those years in private schooling. I felt that I had learned more than I had been learning at the public schools, where it becomes easy for a child to become lost in the numbers. In retrospect I can also say that I appreciate the fact that they were Christian schools, as this gave me a very comprehensive understanding of religion. Throughout this experience, however, my doubts were growing. I am and always have been an incredibly rational person (ad nauseam sometimes) and I was having a hard time seeing God in real life, or Christ in Christians. As we read the Bible and interpreted it more and more, I had a difficult time seeing what it was that set it apart from all other sacred texts. I saw my fellow Christians always talking about Christianity like political candidates—assuming they were right no matter what and that they would win the race; but I began to ask: if Muslims and Hindus certainly felt the same way and if I were always to dismiss them, how could I not expect them to do the same? What made Christianity different or special from other religions?—the miracles? Other religions have miracles—the historical accuracy? Christian script is filled with its fair share of inaccuracies. Then there is, of course, how the sacred texts became the sacred texts. Christians always have a lot of great theological explanations for how the Council of Nicaea was divinely inspired—must have been divinely inspired. It must have been, for were it not, what could we say? Why the Revelation of John and not the Revelation of Peter? And if the Revelation of Peter is heresy, then how do we know we can trust the other canonized works of Peter?

We have been told all throughout our Christian lives to have faith—and a childlike faith at that. What is faith? The Christian bible explains faith as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (NIV, Hebrews 11:1).” In my view, the most dominant religions evolve subject to the forces of natural theological selection. Religions that breed doubt atrophy away whereas a religion that masks doubt survives. This is why I am inclined to believe that faith is, perhaps, the most important aspect of every religion. People have to have some way of looking past their uncertainty and the best way is to have a system where uncertainty is considered unacceptable and you are forced to believe one way or the other—for certainty is certainly not lukewarm. The other contributing motivations are two drawing and repelling conditions that most religions have also evolved: the ideas of paradise and hell.

I feel that there is a tremendous price to be paid with the extreme level of mental sophistication that has developed in Homo sapiens; namely, that we are perhaps the only organism that is fully aware of its imminent death. This changes everything about the way we live everyday as well as how we plan our lives. It is harsh to think that we are the results of natural causes alone and that in the end we shall each one day lose consciousness once and for all and cease to be. This knowledge inevitably leads to greatly devastating sorrow, but what if you tell somebody that death is not as final as it sounds—that there is hope if you can turn off your reason and give yourself up to faith, an idea wherein one ceases to question and, ultimately, blindly trusts. Well, this changes everything. Now the ancient human species is ready to evolve rationally and harmoniously, working by each other’s side furthermore.

When the Catholic Church dominated Christianity in its early days by using faith to exploit people shamelessly, I highly doubt Jesus would have led that charge. Later on in history they did the same to those who supported heliocentrism, as they felt it blasphemously eclipsed God’s creation.  And while there exist Christians who look upon this with as much skepticism as I do, there are other Christians who still deny major concepts of science and that which is observable in the universe (origins mainly). Many fear it, as older authorities did a heliocentric solar system, because it would undermine God and Scripture. For some, they do not want to believe that this hope of religion might be but a comfort and a dream, and who can blame them? It is a sad concept—that each of us may, in the end, come to nothing but nothingness, but just because an idea is sad and hopeless does not mean it is wrong.

I once did a project in school where I had to be a Muslim and my class had to try to convert me. Their arguments were, I felt, all weakly founded on the idea that the Christian God is kinder, more merciful, et cetera than the Muslim God. I pointed out that that doesn’t mean anything in the end, and that if God showed up in person and declared that we’d all have to start kicking each other, then we’d all have to start kicking each other and it wouldn’t matter if we thought it was right or not. Likewise, I asked, how can Christians dismiss Islam for essentially professing non-Occidental values? It has nothing to do with a religion’s validity, I said, but could be attributed to culture. This then led into my next question: Would I really have been a Christian if I had been born in Riyadh? I feel I would quite indubitably be a Muslim and I would have been as convinced of Islam’s theological superiority as I was of Christianity’s.

 I continued to grow in my doubts and also in my questioning why I didn’t hear from God or feel anything that couldn’t be described as fundamentally human (for example, something a non-Christian wouldn’t “feel”). I couldn’t see what made certain things wrong other than the fact that the Church had said God didn’t like x, y, and z; but why didn’t God like x, y, and z? My faith was certainly atrophying by 2007, but I was still a Christian at that point—trying to hold onto it all, trying to block out the simple solutions that made sense over the complex and mysterious dogmas that offered comfort.

When I was in high school, I vowed that I would not go to a religious school, and when I first visited Gordon College in 2008 or 2009, I didn’t know it was a Christian college. When I eventually did find out that it was a Christian institution, my choice was between my state college and Gordon. Gordon’s redeeming grace was that it was cheaper at the end of the day and a very liberal Christian college, or so that’s what I had thought. After having com here though, I have now experienced the way in which the Gordon community can be very close-minded, hostile to thinking differently, set and sheltered from the outside world, and very unforgiving. I thought Christianity would manifest itself in a community of Christ-like individuals, since that is whence the term comes, but precious few seemed to be emulating him. Instead I have seen Christianity manifested through compulsory worship, insertions of God in calculus classes, blind adherence to the existing institutions, and an inexplicable obsession with preventing intercourse at (what I see as) the cost of A) making many relationships very difficult/impossible and B) driving couples into early marriage and future divorce. I am confused as to why many RAs, RDs, and many others do so much work to prevent this when they could be building community or stymieing the far graver sins of self righteousness. This is what I believe to be our campus’ most severe problem—people raising their noses and turning their backs on others who have done wrong in their eyes. The worst part is that the self righteous, by virtue of their vice, are incapable of recognizing the fact that they are in sin. Where’s the redemption and acceptance on this campus?

At the climax of this theological story, after fourteen years of deep study and thought on the matter, I gave up the yoke of religion in favor of the freedom of reason. But wait- I know some of you reading this are thinking that misguided thought that so many people have about atheists: they just want to do immoral activities. Wrong: atheism has nothing to do with sex, drugs, or alcohol, which are what always come up in connection with this topic in campus discussions. As I said before, just because an idea is sad doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The issue is one of genuine convictions and not merely doing what brings the most comfort. Atheists don’t consider everything that Christians do to be immoral, do but that’s not why they leave or avoid the faith. It’s simply because they don’t believe in it. It would be much more insincere to do the opposite: to chain yourself to an idea that doesn’t make sense to you—in which you don’t fully believe—just because it brings you comfort. At times I feel the Gordon community may wrongfully project that atheists have no integrity because they have no concrete standard of right and wrong. Again, from an atheist’s point of view, religion is an evolutionary means of dealing with the problem of harmonizing mankind; it was once necessary, but now a vestige of mankind’s development. As an atheist, I know that there is right and wrong and a good reason for something being right or wrong. Most of us believe in complete freedom inasmuch as you’re not hurting anybody. It seems that Christians, on the other hand, may believe in control (but they use euphemistic phrases like: “keeping each other accountable,” which is code for: judging and ostracizing someone until negative reinforcement has taught them never again to err from the Church’s interpretation). That warm, fuzzy feeling some Christians get when they think God is with them, talking to them, leading them, many atheists interpret to be their conscience— remember, I’ve lived on both sides.

At the end of the day, I recognize that Gordon College is religious territory and I am not going to try to force my beliefs down anybody’s throat. I am just enjoying my mental freedom and while I do that I ask for nothing more than understanding and acceptance in the same way Christ would accept me. Atheists can be good people—moral and integral—exercising values that surpass in nobility and purity than many of those exercised by religious adherents who only fulfill their duties out of obligation. Remember, we know that we are going to die and that we have to seize each day that could be our last—it’s not hedonism, it’s an appreciation for the here and now, it’s especially an appreciation for those around us. I beg this community to truly treat each man herein as though he really were your brother in Christ. Christ, no matter who you are, was a great example of brotherly love.

I have had to keep these thoughts either anonymous or simply to myself, fearing tremendous persecution as I do not know how those I love would feel or whether or not I’d be exiled by the administration for discord with my statement of faith.

People think differently of us in an instant even though we’re exactly who we were a minute before, save that we don’t think like everyone else. We’re already the most repressed and scattered group on campus, so please don’t make it harder for us. We’re more like you than you realize; and even without God, everything around us is still beautiful and amazing. We just refer to this beauty by a different name—the Universe.

I accepted Jesus in the 8^th grade. I was about to be confirmed in the Lutheran faith and, as part of the ceremony, I had to make a public statement about my belief in Christ. At my church’s annual Memorial Day retreat in Pennsylvania, the teachers of the confirmation class gathered all of us students in one room to write our statements, and most of the kids whizzed through it. Everyone jotted down their experiences with Jesus and how he died for their sins and how they were committing themselves to be devoted followers forever, and they brought their papers to the teachers to be approved, and then they ran off to have fun.

It took me a little longer than the other kids. It seemed like a routine exercise for everyone else, like they just regurgitated everything they had learned to say in church. I had to take some time. I needed the teachers to go over what I had written and tell me what was wrong with it and what I had to change when it wasn’t theologically orthodox. I had to deal with ideas that I didn’t want to think about. I had to wrestle with what I was writing.

It was painful.

I don’t remember much from that day, but I do remember breaking down. I remember crying. Loud, ugly, snotty crying. I remember getting up to deliver that statement a couple weeks later, in front of my entire congregation, and I remember choking it out and holding back tears and admitting that it wasn’t until I was forced to actually think about my confirmation and my faith and Jesus Christ and what it all meant, and to write it all down in my own words, that I made the conscious choice to be a Christian. The only thing I remember clearly from that statement was the part that made people gasp, the part that some friends came up to me afterwards to ask about, the part where I said that every day of my life until I wrote that statement, I had effectively been an atheist.

It was probably poor wording on my part. For as long as I could remember, I had believed in God at least nominally. In my fourteen-year-old mind, though, that day marked my conversion to a faith in which I would actively participate. Gone was the Christianity of my childhood, where I was to be a good little boy because God said so and someday I’d go to heaven. In its place was the horrible gravity of my sin and Christ crucified, and the unbearable joy of his gift of salvation—that indescribable warmth that overwhelmed you when the singing began on Sunday night and the weight of my sin was lifted and all that remained were tears of pure gratitude.

Christianity wasn’t “theism.” It wasn’t a worldview or a philosophy. It was a means to escape unbearable guilt, a vehicle to rescue me from myself—an insecure, self-destructive ticking time bomb of teenage angst. It was a week-long cycle of embarrassment and failure, capped off with a cry for mercy and cleansing and “this week I’ll do better, I promise.” It was a carousel that led nowhere because each Sunday that Jesus cleansed me of my sin, he removed what I wasn’t supposed to be anymore, but he didn’t change me into anything better.

And ten years went by like that.

There wasn’t a specific moment that I stepped off that carousel. There was no singular experience or epiphany that convinced me to swear off Christianity or stop believing in God. It was a slow process, the gradual shedding of a part of me that didn’t feel right or true anymore, so unconscious that it was almost as if I’d stopped paying attention for a minute and when I snapped back to reality everything had changed. I didn’t decide one day to stop believing in God. It was more like realizing that I no longer could.

The carousel finally sputtered to a creaking halt sometime during my senior year at Gordon. I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the good Evangelical I had become in high school. Each day I shed more and more beliefs that didn’t feel authentic to me anymore. Young earth creationism had to go, and with it, all of those anti-intellectual, anti-science pills I’d swallowed in my parochial high school. Biblical literalism went out the window too, as well as any interest at all in an afterlife. Eventually, anything supernatural at all became inconceivable as literally true concepts—from the garden and the snake, to the great flood, all the way to Christ’s resurrection and the existence of heaven and hell; it all fell away like old, unnecessary baggage that would hinder me instead of helping me in my journey.

It was the core of the message that Jesus taught that stayed with me. That was the baggage that I really needed, the tool set that might genuinely shape me into the kind of Christian that I think Jesus wanted. These were the values that had, during all those years on the carousel, shaped me into the person I am today, ready and able to accept the Gospel message as Jesus taught it. All of the superstitious trappings about heaven and hell and angels and demons seem trite in comparison to Jesus’ subversive message—a message more about bringing God’s just and merciful kingdom to earth than about guaranteeing eternal paradise for the faithful believer. In the end, I might not accept the divinity of Jesus anymore, but as an atheist I take his teachings far more seriously than I ever did as a Christian. When you stop believing in an afterlife, the stakes are raised exponentially here and now—each moment I spend on earth needs to count because this is all I am given, and it is my duty as a human being to use this time responsibly, justly, mercifully and compassionately.

I think that’s what Jesus really wanted from us.

For a majority of my life I was living Pascal’s Wager. When I reached a certain level of intellectual maturity I realized that this was a weak philosophy. I decided to pursue an honest, true faith but my attempts repeatedly fell short. I have never, in my entire life, truly believed in god. Still, I yearn to have faith. I see my friends and my family, faithful Christians, fully believing in god, living life with contentment.  I applied to Gordon and came here hoping that it would change me and help me to believe. How wrong I was. Being surrounded by peers and faculty who mostly appear to have genuine faith has caused me to feel even more hopeless. Most of you are able to trust God when all else fails. You have someone you can always turn to, count on and trust. I have no one. My dirty little secret from my adolescence and the majority of my adulthood has been my lack of faith. I have pretended, prayed, talked to others; I have tried desperately but I do not believe. I ended up at Gordon in a vain attempt to have faith and have failed completely in that endeavor.

Besides my lack of faith, my sense of reason also precludes Christianity as a viable option for me. I trust science and reason to inform me about the world around me and I have never found compelling evidence for the existence of a god. I do not discount the existence of a divine being, but the prospect seems unlikely to me. My goal in writing this is not to try to convince anyone that god does not exist, just as I do not want you to try to convince me that he does. However, I would encourage you to become educated on belief systems that are different from Christianity. I have learned about Christianity even though I do not believe in it and I do not blindly discount it. A careful study of your own views as well as those opposing them provides necessary information to make an informed decision.

As an agnostic, bordering on atheist, there are things that I would like you to know about me. Just because I do not believe in god does not mean that I do not have morals or values. It does not mean that I do not care about others. It does not mean that I hate Christians. I have a yearning to be like you and I respect you for your beliefs. I wish you would respect me for mine. I do not want to be told that I am going to hell or that I am lost. Through receiving a Christian education at Gordon I have learned a lot about Christianity. It seems to me that a main theme of the teachings of Jesus and Christianity is unconditional love. Your motive to love me should not be my conversion. You will never make me believe. Love is what I should get and you should let god do the rest if you truly have faith. My religious orientation is not up to you.

I wish I were a person of faith. Those of you who are believers have faith that there is something else out there, some purpose for your life, some divine power that will take care of you when everyone and everything else fails you. I have strived to have that faith like that for my entire life. Instead I sit here, believing that I am totally alone, the universe is a complete accident, I have no one, and that when I die I will simply cease to exist. When I lose a loved one there is no hope of ever seeing them again. There is no Father in heaven to bail me out, no one there to save me. I watch you. Behind my mocking of your seemingly childlike blind faith is the deep yearning to feel safe, like you—not totally alone as I presently do.

“When Satan tempts me to despair/And tells me of the guilt within/Upward I look and see Him there/Who made an end to all my sin” (Selah, Before the Throne of God Above)

I was born into a very strong Christian family and have gone to church all of my life. I was Pentecostal, so I often saw people connect with God in very passionate and animated ways and have had various experiences where I believed myself to be communicating with God. In fact, this passion was part of what led me to continue to be a Christian during my time of greatest doubt. I would say to myself:  “These people cannot possibly be wrong, not entirely. How can someone who believes so deeply be entirely wrong?” When I was twelve, I was saved. I was at a Christian summer camp and I slept on the top bunk of my friend and I’s bunk bed. At that point, I believed the Christian version of supernatural reality was as true and real as the existence of my mother and father. There was no doubt in my mind that Jesus was a real person and deity who was in the business of saving souls. However, because of the strong emphasis placed on voluntary salvation in my denomination, I still did not consider myself saved at that point. This wasn’t for any logical reason, but simply because I had been encouraged to ensure that I was serious before I committed my soul to Christ. So in some sense, I was a Christian by belief, but not yet saved. I had said the “sinner’s prayer” (meaning that I had confessed that I am a sinner and asked Jesus to inhabit my heart) a few times before when I was younger and afraid of the possibility of hell, but I didn’t consider these confessions to have been as dedicated as they should have been. Think about that. I was a twelve-year-old trying to decide the fate of his eternal soul, but we don’t even let people drive until they reach 16 and you can’t join the military until you’re 18. Seems like weighty stuff. Anyway, as I fell asleep that night, I thought about the idea of death for some reason, but as an abstract possibility rather than something that could actually happen to me. A few hours later, I woke up outside of my bed. I had fallen out of my bed during the night and landed with my butt in the window. I was perfectly healthy, but a little shaken. In retrospect, the situation was kind of funny, but at the time, I was scared. All of a sudden, all of those previous thoughts about death came rushing back to me, but this time I saw death as a narrowly-avoided event, rather than something that happened to other people. What if my head had gone through the window first? What if the window had been bigger? What if a shard of glass had entered my neck? I might have never seen my mother again. I was feeling a deep fear of the possibility of natural death (not so much about hell), and I was terrified by the “what if?” questions. I lay back down in bed and could do nothing but swim in my fear. As I lay there, I started to mentally beg everything, all of reality, for any solution to my fear. I was scared and I needed a reason to not be scared. As I silently begged, I had a mental vision of Jesus. I didn’t see Jesus physically enter the room I was sleeping in, but in my mind I saw a bright humanoid-light figure move into me, offering peace and calm. Ready to reach for anything, I wrapped myself in that presence and identified it as Jesus. At this point, I felt peace as opposed to my earlier fear, and I was assured that I was saved in the Christian sense.

The years my between this experience and my loss of religion, my deconversion, were very tumultuous for me. At first, I sang to God in church, witnessed to my friends with zeal, and read the Bible late into the night, enjoying the stories and theological writings. I even made a small Christian website and advertised it. I had a few minor doubts that I didn’t give much time to. However, as I grew, matured, and learned more about the world, my doubts became worse.

When I was in that place of doubt, I lived in a weekly cycle of highs and lows in my faith. On Sundays I would be at a high in my faith, but by Saturday I had almost none at all. My guilt about my doubts followed a similar pattern.  Usually, by Tuesday, I’d be questioning God’s very existence, and I’d drift between damning feelings of guilt for these questions and wondrous feelings of freedom in asking them. Thankfully, my questions would prompt me to read the Bible, which would generally calm my doubts. By Thursday, though, I could easily be found denying God’s very existence to my friends, just because it seemed helpful in the moment. I would feel horrible for doing so. But I’d forget my guilt by Saturday, telling myself God didn’t exist. At those points, I felt like I could have searched the entire universe and not have found any inkling of God. Then in Church on Sunday, I’d sing songs of praise to the God I could almost reach out and touch— I would experience the Holy Spirit like it was next to me. Throughout the week, I’d run across discussions of the inconsistencies in Christianity. I’d laugh at the funny bits, acknowledge that each inconsistency was true, and not feel as if I should stop being Christian. Not because I thought that my faith was unassailable and above this person’s attacks, but because of some gap in my logic that prevented me from really applying the perspective I had just accepted to my religion and to my life.

This was a common thread throughout my deconversion. I would hear, see, or think of an argument against Christianity that I couldn’t really argue against, hold it in front of me, look at it, observe it, consider it, and then throw it away after agreeing with it. I think it had to do with the fact that leaving Christianity would have meant more than just leaving the religion I was born with, which is a pretty big deal: it meant leaving the majority religion of my family, my circle of friends, and my country. I didn’t really want to be the odd one out. In addition, religion has many functions in a person’s life, from explaining what they are to describing how they should act. I knew a choice to leave Christianity was a choice to give up the set of explanations and descriptions I’d been brought up with, meaning I would have to find or make new ones on my own.

The day I did leave Christianity was on Easter Sunday, about two years ago, while I was in church. Just that weekend, I had, for the first time, met an Atheist who was young and shared other specific demographic characteristics with me. This person made me feel as if non-belief was open to me as well; that I didn’t have to force myself to believe if I didn’t want to. Sitting in the front of the church, I observed the celebration that was going on around me. Jesus had died and risen again, meaning that anyone who believed could be saved, and live forever after death! What a sweet victory! Thinking about this, I asked myself an honest question: “Do I truly believe this? Do I honestly think this is true? Do I really even believe in the basic tenants of Christianity (the death and rise of Jesus/the existence of Triune Christian God)?” My honest answer was then “no”, and is still “no” to this day.

I did not make a choice to reject a relationship with the Christian God. If I thought that He was real, then I could make that choice. I acknowledged that I was not compelled to believe that the Christian God was there to have a relationship with, and I chose to accept that I no longer believed in the Christian version of reality. During the time when I thought that choice of relationship with God was open to me, I said yes.

“And I don’t know what’s worse/the fact I’ll never believe/or that I miss that community from church” (Greydon Square, Myths)

I try to be respectful about the things other people believe. There’s no good reason for me to argue about things I don’t think are real, unless someone is trying to convert me or it affects my life in some other way (religious-based laws, for instance). One thing I really respect about Gordon College is that I don’t often find myself in situations where I either have to argue about religion and reveal to people that I’m non-religious, or have to pretend to be Christian. Normally, I do just fine without really worrying about religion. It’s not as if Gordon isn’t a religious school; I am constantly presented with Christianity, and I know that if I were to believe again, all I would have to do is walk through the wide open door in front of me. However, I don’t feel I’m not generally forced to be Christian, which is very welcoming to me.

On the other hand, despite the fact that Gordon is quite open for a Christian school, I’m still writing this anonymously. This is because I’m scared of people’s possible reactions to non-belief. I don’t want to be anyone’s “conversion project”; I don’t want people to stay up late at night, thinking their friend is going to hell. I’m afraid because I know people treat Atheists badly sometimes, even outside of Christian communities like Gordon, because of negative stereotypes about us. I don’t want to be the obvious “different person” here at Gordon, and I don’t want all the stereotypical questions like “What about Pascal’s wager?”, “Where do you get your morals from?”, or “What gives you hope?”. These questions are interesting to discuss with friends who aren’t using them as a way to convert me, but who are actually interested in my answer. But from general people who just are afraid for my soul, its unnecessary. I’ve already accepted what I can and cannot believe, and it’s between me and your God if He exists.

“Meanwhile, freethinkers are afraid to be seen/coming out to friends and family like an AA meeting.” (Greydon Square, Judge Me)

At this time, I think that the natural universe is all that exists in any meaningful, provable way. The supernatural might exist, but God is as likely to exist as a fairy, and vice versa. I see no reason to pick one version of supernature over another.  Since all supernatural possibilities would exist outside of nature, and sometimes outside of human logic, we can’t use natural or logical means to prove or disprove them. The problem with this is that the only real methods we have for producing evidence for any claims are limited to nature and human logic. This means that the possibility that I am a brain in a magic jar has the same evidence as any denomination of Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism. There are literally an infinite number of possibilities, including ones that no human has ever thought of, and most of the ones that have been thought of are mutually exclusive, like Roman Polytheism and Judaism are. My chances of picking the true one (if, in fact, any is true), are literally 1/∞ ≈ 0. Why should I believe in any? I’d rather not play the game. I think the default is non-belief unless there is reason to believe. I use this logic with ghosts; why not use it with gods?  As such, I could be described as an Agnostic, Atheist, or Naturalist.

A major stereotype about non-believers is that they lack morality. While it is true that my views on morality have been affected by my deconversion, they have not changed very much; I still have the same moral reactions to most of the same real world events. However, my answer to why I should think a choice is right or wrong has changed dramatically. When I was a Christian, my answer would boil down to “because God said this is right or wrong, it is right or wrong.” This was simple when it was “clear” what God had said on a topic (murder, disrespecting parents), but was insufficient when I was confronted with issues that were less clear (how to deal with bullying, abortion). In these cases, I would make a decision based on what was least likely to cause pain to people (a decision informed by the people and opinions that I was surrounded by). However, there was one issue where these two approaches to morality clashed powerfully.

In Leviticus 20 (NIV), the Bible says: “The LORD said to Moses: ‘Say to the Israelites: …Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the LORD your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the LORD, who makes you holy….If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” God clearly does not support homosexuality, at least not for males. However, I cannot find a way that homosexuality hurts any living thing. To clarify, I am not gay. However, homosexuality is something that is clearly said by God to be against His wishes in the Bible and is something the church follows His lead on (except for the execution piece). In addition, it is something seems to cause no pain in itself to any living thing but is something that does cause pain when it is repressed by society. It is simply the loudest and most obvious issue where modern mainstream Christian morality and my own system of morality conflict obviously and irreconcilably. For me, an action that is intended to cause more happiness than suffering to living things, especially human beings, is justified to be called “good”. One which does the opposite is something that should be avoided and could be called “evil”. There are some more nuances, but this allows me to be self-assured of many of the decisions I make. Whether this is “moral” or not is a secondary concern, because if morality does not mean to cause happiness and to stop suffering, then it seems to me that morality is a bit meaningless and impractical. Instead I think that causing as much happiness as possible, and as little suffering as possible, extremely important.

Recently, I’ve encountered the idea that extra-natural explanations are required for things like emotions and beauty or else they would not be as powerful as they are. It is plainly evident that humans experience great and powerful insight and emotion. The question, then, is how such powerful experiences could simply be the result of biochemical processes in people’s brains and bodies. Being a Naturalist, this is a strange question for me. I already assume that human emotions and experiences are truly great and profound and are truly the result of physical and chemical changes in our bodies and that these are not in any sort of conflict at all. Why would someone need a “soul” in order to write poetry? They already have their mind and experiences.  To say this in a slightly different way, I am my body. The physical human being that will decay when I die, from the DNA in my brain to the cells in my toes, is the entirety of my being. I have no soul, no spirit, and no part of me that is meaningfully separate from my body.

“Atheism offers nothing to me/it never has and never will…I want to feel reality and nothing more/Atheism offers me everything/Religion has stolen before” (Richard Coughlan, Atheism Is)

Writing this submission has been extremely difficult because I’m at a point of extreme philosophical flux in my life. I’m not a Christian anymore, but I’ve still been having a strange crisis of belief. It’s like every time I open my computer to write a few more lines, I start to ask myself “do I really believe this sentence? Is this piece really true?” and then I just never finish. I can’t just settle with “God doesn’t exist, and none of these supernatural fairy-tales exist!” I never expected this confusion. I guess I just expected that when I left Christianity, I’d be gone. That I wouldn’t worry about what’s true or what I really believe because I’ll know what I believe. Religion won’t bother me. In reality, though, it’s not that simple. Christianity is equipped with a holy book and several creeds that give Christians quite specific directions on what they should and should not believe; yet, in near defiance of this fact, there are a vast number of religious ideas, viewpoints, and denominations within Christianity, many of which have little basis in the Bible or any creed, and many of which do not consider their counterparts to be truly Christian. How could I have ever expected that non-religion, which holds nothing as a necessary belief, would be simpler?

Every so often, I think I’ve settled on a framework for understanding what it means to be human and how to understand morality, along with other functions that religion normally performs. But maybe that’s a wrong approach. Maybe I shouldn’t try to have a completed or even an incomplete “framework” of belief. Maybe I should stop trying to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have,” (1 Peter 3:15 NIV) like I was taught to when I was growing up. The simple fact is that I don’t have a comprehensive answer for a lot of things, and for a few things, I can’t even make a good guess. Maybe I should just accept this.

I can’t tell you if a god exists and I’m just unaware of it. I don’t know how life began, or exactly what or where the matter and energy in the universe came from, before the big bang. I don’t even know if that question means anything. I don’t really have a good basis upon which to reject miracle claims, besides appealing to the power of the human psyche and the way stories grow when you tell them often enough.  I don’t know if I have a soul, though I’m fairly sure I don’t. I don’t know if there really is or isn’t a reality beyond nature that does or does not affect nature. It’s not as if I would become Christian again if these issues were dealt with in the proper way; Christianity has its own set of problems that have nothing to do with my belief system. The issue is that I don’t have absolute knowledge, so I cannot step forward and believe that supernatural things don’t exist. I think that belief is an activity one participates in, and I just can’t honestly believe in any possibility related to the supernatural.

“Human beings in a mob/What’s a mob to a king?/What’s a king to a God?/What’s a God to a non-believer/Who won’t believe in/anything?” (Frank Ocean, No Church in the Wild)

If you see any contradiction in this piece, it’s likely because I am a 20-ish year old who left the religious tradition he was born in, and who hasn’t yet had the time to completely think through the implications of this transition. Religion does a lot for people, and I can really see this now that I’m trying to both find other ways to have these functions performed in my life and decide if those functions are even really needed. However, even though it’s a confusing exercise, it’s also very fulfilling. When I finally figure something out in a way my religious self could have never imagined, it’s invigorating. And, if I were to be wrong about something, it’s not as if my entire understanding of myself would be challenged. It would simply mean that the one section that I was wrong about would have to be thought over, because it’s not wrapped into a single package with everything else I know about reality.

I’m thankful for the place religion brought me to, and I’m thankful for the fact that I left it, because if neither of these things had happened, I wouldn’t be who I am, and I wouldn’t know so much about myself.

I close my eyes and count to ten.  “Ready or not, here I come!”  There it is – the infamous chant from everybody’s favorite childhood game.  Suddenly, I am a child again, playing hide and seek.  I am playing with older, wiser kids, all of whom know the best places to conceal themselves.

Off I go, running around blindly, desperate to discover them.  I continue to turn in circles, search around every corner, peer into each crevice I see, and glance over my shoulder.  Frustration creeps in.  Where are these kids hiding?  Frustration turns to desperation.  My breathing comes faster; I feel perspiration beading on my forehead and my stomach drops.  Panic sets in.  Did they stop playing and forget to tell me?  I shout out for them, expecting that at any moment one of them will pop out from behind a tree smiling and say, “Here I am!”

But there is no relief when I play hide and seek with God.  How do you find a spirit?  How do you find something so big and so invisible?  I thought it would be easy, for He is omnipotent, omnipresent.  So where has He been hiding?  I did not even realize we were playing this game.  Why would God want to play this game with me?  If He sees me running through my life, desperately searching for Him, and clearly awful at hide and seek, then why has He not revealed Himself to me?  I thought my days as the neighborhood baby were past, but here I am crying that I am once again losing the game.  I do not want to be “it” anymore.

If I quit the game, if I stop seeking Him, if I stop running, will He sneak up from behind?  Do I have the game mixed up?  Is He “it”?  If I stop to catch my breath, do I lose and do I fail?

If I sit still for a moment, will He find me?

[This piece was written in response to the article “The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church” by Drew Dyck published in the November 2010 edition of Christianity Today.]

After reading Drew Dyck’s article, “The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church,” in Christianity Today, I found myself feeling viscerally and personally offended. While numerous other valid critiques could be made of the piece, I have to concede that my response was sparked by a deeply personal experience: in December, my formerly Christian husband left me; in February, he asked for a divorce. With each month, new and nightmarish revelations followed.

Needless to say, in my particular circumstances I was not blameless, but I tried to do everything in my power to save my marriage; to “win” my husband “back to the Lord,” and try to extricate him from his seemingly immovable depression. I believed—and still do—that marriage is sacred and was committed to stay in mine, no matter what happened, even if that meant I could foresee only a life of misery at home. In other words, I did everything Al Mohler, John Piper, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, or others who decry the culture’s casual view of marriage would have suggested or demanded. Every Christian I knew tried to approach my ex-husband, and I would guess that even my non-Christian friends and family offered up their own versions of prayers. But, in the end, he walked away from his faith and from his vows. And left me scraping myself up off of the floor.

How does this relate to Dyck’s thoughts on “leavers?” I would suggest that it relates fairly directly: where Dyck observes a shallow, uninformed, utilitarian faith, my church background has been in the Presbyterian and Anglican traditions; that is, my maturation and establishment in the faith consisted of both the robustness of Reformed theology and the tradition and history of sacramental worship. I attended a Christian college, spent a year in missions work, over a year working for a Christian social services organization, and nearly 2 years in an evangelical seminary known for its integration of intellectual depth, Christian orthodoxy and engagement in culture. But, no amount of theology, liturgy or depth can really and truly inoculate you against what Dyck refers to, in passing, as “the hard rocks of reality,” which is how he refers to suffering. This might not be true of the first collision, or the second, or even the third, but at some point, as I have done, you begin to question at least two pillars of Christian faith: sovereignty and love.

Though I knew that there is suffering in the world, it never made me look the doctrine of sovereignty in the eye, or made me question the refrain, “He is for your good.” On some level, I felt that if one had “good theology” and was a thoughtful person, then she wouldn’t question her faith because of suffering. I guess I believed that suffering was somehow a silly reason, one not fit for a deep person or an intellectual Christian. I learned in reading Job that we cannot fathom or grasp the mind of God or His workings in the world. I always thought that, if we could understand or “pin down” God, He wasn’t a God big enough to be worth believing in. If the gospel is true, the things that we observe and experience cannot prove it false.

But, what did it mean that, while God is sovereign, and while He works all things for my good, great sin was allowed to occur that would change my life forever. Was God using sin? Could He have done this to me? Is this what He wanted for me? Did He want me to honor my marriage and try my best to save it, only to have it fall apart in the cruelest of ways? I know that we don’t always get what we ask for, and I realize that this view proves Dyck’s point, in that it reflects a “naïve, coldly utilitarian view of God.” But, if God seemed fairly “hands-off” here, the next logical question seems to be what was the role of personal, intercessory prayer, or the belief in a personal God? And, if He was “hands-on,” what did it say about His character?

Every time I think about returning to church, standing and singing hymns about God’s care and love for us—songs that I used to sing, standing next to my husband in our beloved Massachusetts church—every time I want to return to “my only comfort in life and in death, that I am not my own, but belong—in body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful savior Jesus Christ,” à la the Heidelberg Catechism, I am overcome with sadness and anger. He is either sovereign and cruel or removed and abstract. I could read all of the theology in the world; I could worship in the oldest and most rooted of churches and it would not settle this question for me.

Surely, I am not the only person to have “crashed” on these “rocks” of sin and suffering, sovereignty and certainty. And I no longer think that it is a sign of immaturity or ignorance that these rocks give birth to doubt; in fact, I think it is immature and ignorant to deny these very real questions: about rape, about mental illness, about earthquakes, about affairs, about divorce, about children born into extreme poverty. Where does sovereignty end and sin begin? And what does that say about God? Shouldn’t this be relevant to any discussion of disbelief?

But, my own suffering was not the end of doubt for me; rather, it has been a beginning. Now, the things that I used to have the energy and the will to battle or persuade myself of, I can no longer face. Many of these are things that friends—mostly from Christian colleges—who have already left the faith have been testifying to for a long time; things that I have long tried to verbally refute (God didn’t bring about your suffering! He created a world without sin and death!), or prove wrong with my life (evangelicals can work for social justice!). In the same way that I can no longer dismiss suffering as a legitimate impetus for doubt, neither can I dismiss the state and behavior of the Church, issues of identity, and the reality that life in this world is complicated as hell.

So, while the next portion of this reflection will treat a group of less personal issues, they have been of equal consequence for me, and were all but neglected in Dyck’s piece. As he frustratingly and quickly passed over the question of our encounters with suffering, so he gave only cursory attention to some of the areas that I and others have found to be most problematic.

I see three of these issues as primary; the first is the state of the Church itself. Dyck certainly acknowledges the holes in our church programming and in evangelicals’ reflexive responses to questioning and doubt. Unfortunately, he neglects the larger issue of the Church’s witness. He fails to see how faith crises and innate longings push evangelical youth, people who were raised in or came to faith in the context of an individual church community that formed their idea of the Christian world, to grapple with ecclesiology and the grim scene with which they are faced. On the one hand, the non-denominational bible churches—whether in houses, storefronts or school gyms—have been riddled with crises of authority, scandals, cults of personality, and other challenges that suggest a need for greater structural accountability. But the more traditional denominations are likewise riddled with conflict and declining attendance. For a young evangelical to wade into the broader ecclesial morass is discouraging, to say the least.

The stakes become higher when denominational choices and theological forays are attached to questions of identity. For women who feel called to ministry, this is not an abstract issue, as our home church or our new denomination has likely debated—or will likely debate—our role in the church and in the home. That is, while these are academic questions for male theologians and pastors, and even for many women who do not feel called to positions that would precipitate a run-in with these debates, for many of us it is not only deeply fraught, vocationally, but also deeply painful, personally.

This particular “identity” issue is another area in which the evolving complexities of the world come up against the absolutes of the evangelical church. I don’t mean to suggest that the church should adapt to culture or any such thing that would raise the hackles of purists, but, rather to highlight the reality that many women hold powerful and prestigious positions in the world, and yet are constrained in their churches. Although this is couched in language of “complementarity” and “difference in roles rather than worth,” the fact remains that it is an inherently jarring experience to be encouraged to pursue influence and achievement outside of the Church but not be allowed a vote or have a place at the table in the Church. I suspect that, after the dust settles, many women will begin to ask questions about their role, and will be unsatisfied with the answers. Because I was pursuing an MDiv and, ultimately, ordained ministry, this is something I was constantly evaluating. I would weigh my options thusly: this church is theologically orthodox, but doesn’t ordain women, or even allow women elders; this other church allows women in ministry, but seems to sell out the gospel; still, this other one has a rich history and clear doctrine, but says that only a man can represent Christ in the Eucharist. I can say, from experience, that this is utterly wearying both in terms of an ecclesial journey and in terms of affirmation and validation of one’s identity.

And now, as a divorced person, I have unfortunately been exposed to a new manifestation of Christian identity politics. While my divorce seemed fairly straightforward, biblically speaking, and I had no control over my ex-husband’s decision, I engaged in a little exercise a few months into the process, and researched churches’ and denominations’ positions on divorce and remarriage. As we all know, the Catholic Church does not recognize even the accepted biblical allowances, except via the apparent “loophole” of annulments, but I was surprised to find that Reformed icon John Piper also opposes remarriage. While the Southern Baptists affirm the abandonment, adultery and apostasy allowances, Al Mohler has recently taken to the blogosphere regarding the prevalence of Christian divorce. I have no problem with a high view of marriage—God knows I tried to adhere to it—but I do have a problem with having to try to discern what a given church’s pronouncement will be on my tragically unavoidable status.

The world is complicated, unpredictable, volatile and tragic, but the Church rarely has room for this, except in theological debates that do not touch the laity, who are merely expected to toe the line. We cannot be surprised when young people are tired of facing in the Church what they do not have to face in the culture.

As a woman, and now as a divorced woman, I must spend far too much time trying to discern how a given church will view my role, my identity and my “rights.” Admittedly, like many evangelical, egalitarian women, I have always fought the “slippery slope” argument against women in ministry, insisting that it was unrelated to the homosexuality issue. But, despite knowing that this might serve to discredit me, I am increasingly cognizant of the fact that this must be how gays and lesbians feel in the Church. As we have seen, many efforts to “change” one’s sexuality have ended tragically and lifelong celibacy must seem a cruel fate, much like not being permitted to remarry would feel to me. When you see something as an immutable but integral part of your identity, it is heartbreaking to have that rejected in the Church. I always held that personal experience, such as that of homosexuals, did not change biblical truth; I now have a harder time with this. Personal experience is often all that we really know.

I want to end this litany of criticisms by acknowledging a point that I found both offensive and mildly insightful, but for different reasons than Dyck identifies: I do think that moral compromise plays a role in a person’s decision to leave Christianity, but I think that the negative influence is actually exerted on the developing doubter, rather than on the moral transgressor. Having attended youth group religiously (yes, I am going with this idiom despite the pun) and a prominent Christian college, followed by years in communities, churches, faith-based organizations and Christian graduate school, I can easily attest to the willingness—even eagerness—of young evangelicals to compromise biblical standards and call it doubt or rebellion. But, sooner or later, these people will find a nice Christian husband or wife and return to the church of their childhood, because doubt is not their real issue. It is those of us who are trying to build a thoughtful, substantive, deep faith who observe this behavior in young people raised in the church and wonder what has gone wrong. What the hell is going on here? I often asked myself, observing this profound lack of authenticity. Why do these people—and, in all honestly, I became one of them in college—bother retaining the trappings of Christianity at all?

My initial reaction to Dyck’s piece included a list of solutions to the “young doubters” problem, but, upon review, I realized that these are the same things we can—and do—read about anywhere: call for a more culturally engaged church, or more listening and less anti-intellectualism, more civility, and a renewed connection with the historical church and liturgy. These things might help, but they may also serve only as stopgap measures, a kind of reupholstering of the furniture. I worry that, once one begins to truly comprehend the depth of suffering and complexity, and the Church’s repeated inadequacy in responding, there may be no return. I also fear that I will run out of energy and will give up at some point in the search to discern my place in the Church, or that I will get tired of weighing one sacrifice against another (preaching or liturgy? egalitarianism or vibrant urban ministry? Anglican and orthodox or Episcopalian and tolerant?). Surely these issues are not insignificant, and, even if there were easily accessible answers, I do not know when or how I will believe again as I did before. Whatever the solution, it must take us—“doubters,” “leavers,” or whatever your preferred label—on our own terms, rather than attempting to rope us back into the old paradigm with only a new look to offer.