Losing My Religion
And gaining something a lot more interesting
Pity me, for I was raised by the three Cs: conservative Christian creationists. Naturally, I rebelled against the faith of my parents as soon as I was old enough to think for myself.
Actually no, that’s not quite right. My parents did a great job, and while they’re not exactly liberals, they’re not conservatives either: Dad’s a Hasan Minhaj-loving, Trump-hating, BLM-sympathising kinda guy, while Mum’s economic views border on full-bore Communism. “Christian” is simplistic too: Mum’s Catholic, Dad’s Protestant (or at least he was when he raised me). As for thinking for myself, that involved reading up on the history of the church and choosing Dad’s side over Mum’s.
But I never rebelled against the faith itself. I loved God too much.
After spending my teenage years boning up on doctrinal schisms, I went on to earn yet more cool points by doing Religions and Theology in college. Not that I was training for the priesthood or anything — this was a secular course, and the ancient history wing took an active delight in ripping the biblical account to shreds. Within a year, my creationism was firmly behind me. By the end of the course, the rest of my faith had followed it down the tubes.
Nope, wrong again. Yes, half my lecturers and most of my friends weren’t believers, but there were always a couple of Christians knocking around to keep me on course, and I’ve never been much of a “faith’s about community” person anyway. Bullshit. Faith’s about me and God.
After college I got into meditation, looked Taoism up on Wikipedia and read some material on Buddhism, most of which irritated me. That was about it for Eastern thought.
Then a friend gives me Siddhartha. It quickly becomes my favourite novel by anyone. The way Hermann Hesse takes all those difficult, alienating Buddhist teachings — non-attachment, non-thinking, no-self — and reworks them into a simple, beautiful modern-day parable is breathtaking. I suddenly see the radiantly positive outlook behind all the negations. It’s not that I’m nothing, I’m everything! I, you, he and she are one! Past, present and future are one!
My Christian faith instantly falls away as I realise I don’t need to be saved. I’m already perfect, and heaven is right here.
Nope, that didn’t happen either. True, Buddhism presented a radical challenge to my core beliefs: If people were saying stuff this good before Jesus was even born, how come no-one comes to the Father except through him? If people can tap into their higher selves without being “born again” first, then what did the Crucifixion accomplish? Also true that Siddhartha instantly kickstarted a period of enormous peace, growth and insight for me, and permanently rewired my thinking on sin, suffering and the self.
But at the same time my ecstatic response to the novel was heavily coloured by my biblical worldview: If time doesn’t exist then the future’s already here, and the future is heavenly bliss, which means I can have heavenly bliss now! If everyone in the world is one it’s because we’re one in Him! In a weird way, Hesse undermined and strengthened my faith at the same time.
The truth is, I don’t remember the day I lost my faith in Jesus. I just did. It happened early this year. And as with the West’s rejection of Christianity more generally, it was the culmination of a long process of questioning received wisdom, rejecting ideas that no longer fit and exploring alternatives.
I’d always had doubts. Choosing between Mum and Dad as a teen didn’t do much to stabilize my worldview. Studying philosophy in school didn’t help either. My college course did make an evolutionist out of me, and it did make me wonder how Jesus could be the “second Adam” if there hadn’t been a first, and why God would create a world that had death and destruction in it from the beginning. Over the years I decided that more and more of the Bible wasn’t necessarily literally true. Didn’t attend church or take Communion. Wasn’t big on hell.
I also exposed myself to atheist thought, read science pieces attempting to demystify everything from the birth of the cosmos to the origin of thought, and generally ran towards my doubts rather than away from them. My faith became an exercise in leak-fixing and hole-plugging. It had to stretch further and further to accommodate the barrage of new information. Once Siddhartha opened up the world of Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism to me it was just a matter of time.
Fast forward to a few months ago, and the camel’s back of my mind was groaning under the weight of all the straws I’d heaped on it. I don’t know which straw was the last one. I just know that the more sense the waking-up-from-the-illusion-of-suffering model started making to me, the less sense the redemption-from-sin model started making. One day I looked for it and it wasn’t there.
So am I bitter about all those wasted years spent chasing a mirage? No, because they weren’t wasted and it wasn’t a mirage. Christianity is one of the most beautiful systems of thought in the world. Does that mean I miss my faith? Not really. I always felt closer to God the Father than God the Son. Honestly, a lot of Jesus’ sermons always intimidated me; I’m not sure how he ever got a reputation as a laid-back hippie.
Of course, once my childhood faith had left the scene it was open season for my religious doubts in general. I tried to keep believing in God but it wasn’t easy. Eventually the constant anxious mental chatter — If I keep Him I’m deluded! If I lose Him life loses meaning and I don’t know what happens when I die! — became too much to take. In the spirit of What Would Siddhartha Do? I take a deep breath and let go of my beliefs completely. All of them. Just like that.
Boom. I’d done the unthinkable. Betrayed God, betrayed myself. Made a nonsense of the spiritual intuitions I’ve had all my life. Turned my back on my family; ripped all the meaning and purpose out of my existence; replaced everything that was hopeful, colourful and loving with a gaping void.
It felt great.
A flood of relief washes through my entire body. For a few minutes, even my chronic pain vanishes. I lie on my bed in a state of perfect serenity. That phrase of J. B. Phillips’ pops into my head: ‘Your God is too small.’ I’ve spent my life seeing the Man Upstairs as a gangster who’ll only preserve my soul from damnation as long as I pay Him the protection money of belief. Now I don’t have to see Him any way at all.
Almost as soon as my belief falls away, faith rushes in to take its place. I’m a spiritual person by nature and always have been. Atheism doesn’t suit me. The difference now is that I don’t have to force spiritual feelings when they’re not there, and when they do arise I can let them go wherever they want to go. I don’t have to believe that God is Three Persons in One, or entirely good, or a being distinct from myself, or someone that conforms to anything that’s ever been said about Him. I don’t have to believe anything. Belief clings; faith explores.
“Agnostic faith” is a strange balancing act. In a very real way God’s the centre of my life, the “pearl of great price”, the metaphysical ground that supports me even when everything else gives way. But if you told me tomorrow that God definitely doesn’t exist, my life would still have meaning. Higher states of consciousness exist whether or not they’re “about” anything. And whether or not God exists, the point of life is to live. That’s all there is.
I know. Some of you are thinking ‘Dammit Wabi, you were so close!’ You want to tell me that faith versus belief is a distinction without a difference, that this vague, fuzzy belief in a Higher Power is the last remaining vestigial organ of my religious upbringing, that in a year or two it’ll go the way of all my other beliefs. You could well be right. But you can only be where you are, and this is where I am for now.
And while I’m here, I don’t see things in terms of “I Used to Believe in a Bunch of Myths and Now I Don’t”. I prefer “I Used to Cling On to a Narrow Set of Doctrines and Now I’ve Opened Myself Up to a Wider Set of Possibilities”. It’s not that such-and-such isn’t true, it’s that anything might be true. Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, even atheism — they all have so much to offer me. I’ve expanded, not contracted.
One of the best things Christianity teaches is that death is always also resurrection. And the resurrected body is never the same as the body that dies. By sacrificing the seed of my belief in the literal truth of the Gospels, I’ve allowed a strangely coloured flower to emerge into a landscape that’s wild and rough, but all the more thrilling for that. The plains are wide here, and the air is fresh. I’m looking forward to seeing what it has to show me.
