Hi!
Hello.
Hey everyone.
How ya doin’?
It’s been a minute. As in a lot of minutes, but lessons were learned in the silence.
Here’s a life hack for the mentally ill among my readership: if you find yourself in the middle of major depressive disorder, you can struggle to do absolutely everything as time rips by.
Depression is supposed to be that slow, mopey thing, with delayed motion, speech, and so forth. And it is. In the moment it’s all eternal, all beyond the scope of accomplishment; making one’s own bed in this state comes with a monumental sense of pride. And all the same, as time moves slow, it moves fast. Before you know it, you can find yourself having gone through two entire seasons of the year, while seemingly accomplishing nothing.
This is the first article I have attempted in months, and I hope that there are days, not weeks or months, until the next one. The point of this blog, selfishly speaking, is for ME. It is for working out my healing, my past, and my current challenges. By being absent for so long, I also slow down my own healing process, and I think it’s time that I hit the accelerator a little harder.
So buckle up, because here it comes:
This is the post that many of you will not like.
I suspect that some of you might actually hate it, and even consider it as reason enough to chuck this blog in the trash. That’s just the nature of the subject matter. I expect to lose a few Facebook friends over it, though I hope I don’t. I am still Nathan, and I still care about my friends, even when I only see them in binary code.
I’ve written over two dozen blog entires by this point, but they have mostly been outside the orbit of the trauma. I have shown you the mess of the fallout, but there is a ground zero, too.
Let’s journey into the rubble together.
If you’ve followed my blog up to this point, you know that I suffer from an unspecified anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and borderline personality disorder. These are the officially diagnosed conditions, though at this point I suspect there are other ingredients in the soup.
What got me to ground zero? Everything; it was a perfect storm of my environment, education, and personal choices. As a mental health patient, I sing the song of complex trauma. Unlike acute damage to a person’s being, complex trauma builds up, over time, like the growth of a progressive disease. If I think about my trauma long enough, I can find pockets of it in just about every area of life I’ve walked.
Trauma is life.
What trauma is not is simple. There will be some sources of pain I can write about, and some I cannot. There are some experiences that I don’t think I will ever feel comfortable showing to another person.
As far as what I will share now, in this entry?
It’s time for some religious trauma talk.
When I use the phrase, “religious trauma,” I generally get indifference, empathy, or derision as a reply. It’s not uncommon for my detractors to say something like, “Oh poor baby. It looks like you had to get up early for Sunday school. Boo hoo hoo.”
Boo-hoo hoo, indeed, and to start this religious slice of my past, which is a rather large slice of pie indeed, I am going to go all the way back to Sunday school. The same Sunday school where I invited Jesus into my heart, and was assured (early in my primary school years) that I was pardoned from the punishment of the Lord.
My earliest memory of church is my moment of salvation, where I was explained a brief and rather sanitized version of the Gospel (remember, it is a story that is ratified by blood and suffering) before thinking, “Oh ok, this makes sense. I don’t want to be bad, and I don’t want God to punish me, so I should adopt Jesus into my heart.”
And so I began a life of what I can only call indoctrination, where I was taught weighty concepts and outlandish truth claims by the supports in my family and in my community. As a child who wanted parental approval, and community approval, it became easy to believe in propositions (such as talking snakes, Noah’s Ark) that would eventually fail the reality test (and no, I do NOT blame my parents for teaching me the truth as they saw it, but more on that later).
It was never just about community and approval either. As I grew up, I took propositions to heart. Sunday school became less of a chore, and more of learning experience. Weeknight youth group gatherings provided me a place to discuss my faith with like-minded people. At one point, in my primary school years, I preached a brief sermon in my church about the story of Daniel and the Lion’s Den. I remember putting much emphasis on the idea that Daniel “trusted in his God.”
Like Daniel, I trusted God to the point where my faith was always in my heart, and in my mind. In my middle and high school years of education, I would routinely have discussions, often devolving into debates of a sort, about my faith and things related to it. I gave at least two presentations in support of literal creationism, and other talks about the supposed impossibility of evolution or anything that sniffed of Darwin. In my mind, the universe was no more than 6,000 years old. Humans and apes did not share a common ancestor, and science was playing the big “God” coverup. In a way, I think it was the biggest conspiracy I ever bought; the denial of much of observable reality. For much of my life, I really thought I knew better than countless workers, professionals, and dedicated experts in their fields.
I didn’t need the experts, as I own my own area of dedication.
To me, my faith had to be known among my peers; this happened through events like the annual morning prayer around the school flagpole, as well as outreach programs that would connect with the student body, such as Young Life Ministries.
My faith only accelerated in the freight train of adolescence. At times I flirted with the idea of going into some kind of ministry work, at least part time. When I was involved in a church, I was involved. When I went to church camp, I cried sincere tears of faith and healing and growth around the campfire, and everyone else did too. I knelt at the alter during revival surfaces, and I took communion with deep reverence and thought, and even though my detractors would say otherwise, sincerity.
I have to say this quite a bit these days, but I took all of it as literal gospel truth.
All of it. To those who say that I never truly believed, and that evangelical Christianity was just a social club or mind game, I can say this:
Only one of us has access to my mind, thoughts, and feelings at the deepest level, where sincerity is guarded fiercely.
And it’s not you.
I took the healing services seriously, even though those who were prayed for seemed to suffer and die at the rate of a coin flip. I took the lessons on creationism seriously, and I wrecked my epistemology along the way. I never considered my future to be anything outside of the the conservative Christian nuclear family, and I did what I could to apply my skills in worship and good faith. This involved things like acting and puppeteering, as well as volunteering for church trips. I once went to Kentucky to work in a vacation bible school for children. There I met a lovely little girl named Whitney. At the time my heart ached, as I knew that her fate would be horrendous, marked up and down with Hell, fire, brimstone, outer darkness, and the weeping and gnashing of teeth, if she did not grow up accept the good news, by faith, in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
For years I wondered about whether she’d taken Jesus and his gospel seriously.
Now I wonder how much damage I did. If you get Hell nightmares too, Whitney, I am oh so very sorry. I rolled out the red carpet for that fiery path, and you have my apologies. Among the worst of all things I’ve done, it’s the propagation of that carrot and stick mentality. If you took the carrot I gave you at vacation bible school, I’m confident someone came along, years later, to give you the stick.
And that stick hurts.
I should know, as I used it on others for years. In my mind, there was no way to preach the good news of the Gospel without preaching the bad news. If you are being saved from something bad, and that is backed up by divine anger, then you probably want to know what you’re being saved from. In this way, the gospel as presented to children is often disingenuous; it asks for assent to a claim that is kid friendly in its demonstration.
There is no child who fully understands the proposition of sin, death, heaven, or the lake of fire. These are mysteries to children, but they were always on my mind.
In hindsight, believing fiercely about something of which I knew very little was a bad idea. A handsomely terrible idea.
Speaking of such things, one time I delivered a terrible idea to a coworker of mine. I can’t remember the words exactly, but it had something to do with a question about what God would do to those who heard the gospel and rejected it, and things got worse from there.
By this point I was a calvinist. The reader’s digest of calvinism is this: Before the foundation of the world, the plan of salvation was set in all of its details. Some people are only made for the purpose of receiving God’s wrath, while others are made to be glorified in Heaven. And according to the doctrines and scriptures, the number of those off to the divine kiln are much larger than the ones off to heavenly getaway. Isn’t that grand? These are the sorts of things I told my coworker in perfect sincerity, with no hint of irony or shame.
But wait! There’s more: Under this model, there’s really nothing a single person can do to get to heaven. The sinner is born that way, literally with a sinful nature, and can do no good, and will do no good, including accepting the gospel, unless the Holy Spirit wills such acceptance and change. This sort of makes the history of salvation like a series of dominos. Once they start to fall, they will fall according to their setup.
When people say that God’s ways are not my ways, that makes me glad. I would not create living creatures with emotions, hopes, and dreams, and box them into a trajectory like that. I believed Yahweh’s horrors were true once, and I will never believe them again. For my money, there’s no value or piece of advice in christian scripture that I can’t arrive at elsewhere. I don’t need Christianity to seek moral virtue, and I never did, and those who would blame my apostasy on Calvinism are mistaken.
I find just about every Christian theology odious, including ones produced by Calvin’s detractors. To me it is mostly word salad non-sense, built on the flimsy foundation of a priori conclusions.
This isn’t a light stance, I know. I never predicted I would become an agnostic atheist (which is a way of saying, in reverse order, that I don’t have a god belief, and I don’t know what the epistemic process for getting one would even look like).
Whether you’re upset, pleased, or indifferent to this, you’re probably wondering.
How did it all unravel?
That’s a subject that (in all its details) I plan to tackle in much more detail in other places and mediums, though I will briefly tackle it in this post, and the second half of it. Suffice it to say, single reasons elude my path from faith to apostasy; I am not simply a detractor of the faith, but one who was once in the fold, and no longer is. I didn’t walk out for any one cause.
In other words, I didn’t get mad one day, take my ball, and go home. I left slowly, over time, by degrees and small steps, and I did so until I had taken enough steps to be out of it and in a different frame of mind.
And on the other side of it? I am hurt. I am angry and admittedly, I have an axe to grind (though the grinding will not get much space on this blog).
As part one of this entry is becoming a novella, please forgive the bird’s eye view of my religious deconstruction. If I give every last detail in this space, I won’t be able to write the planned book about it later. If I don’t write the book, I can’t publish it, and if I can’t publish it, I won’t sell it, and if I don’t sell it, you won’t buy it, and there go all my plans of monetizing my calamity.
Here is when things started to go terribly wrong:
Around 2002, I worked at an Old Navy location at the now defunct Century III Mall in Southwestern PA. On a 15 minute break, I wandered over to the bookstore and found myself in front of a copy of “Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible, and Why,” by esteemed UNC Chapel Hill professor Bart D. Ehrman, a former evangelical who now considers himself an agnostic. I opened the book and read from the preface. In the opening pages, Ehrman talks about a well-known problem between the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John. The contradiction puts the execution of Jesus on different days of the passover week.
To me, getting an important detail about the most important event in history wrong? That’s a problem.
When his professor told Ehrman, “Maybe Mark made a mistake,” in response Ehrman’s class essay, Ehrman felt the comment “go through” him.
And from where I was standing, I felt the comment in his preface go through me. And what do you think happened next?
Nothing.
I put the book back, returned to work, and continued to praise the Lord for years and years and years.
Until I picked that book up again.
This is how it began. Soon, I will show how it ended, no crucial details spared.
Stick with me. I’m still Nathan, and I have some things to say. The toxic doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity tore me apart, and I am no longer quiet about the damage.
Keep that seatbelt on. I’ll see you in part 2.
Yours, Mentally,
Nathan
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