November 15, 2021
I have a group of friends in my hometown and we’ve all known each other since high school. Over the years and one by one, most guys in this friend group have deconstructed their faith and deconverted from Christianity altogether. I was one of them.
There’s one guy, however, who hasn’t. He’s still a Christian, married to his Christian wife, has a couple of kids and they still attend church and do all the usual church things. He continues this despite watching most of his friends leave the faith over the years.
That’s fine. I don’t expect him to deconvert just because we all did. That would be ridiculous. But I do find it curious that even when surrounded by people who would support him if he chose to question his faith and not shun him (as is what usually happens to friend groups when people deconstruct) and could provide him with tons of resources for his journey, he isn’t interested at all.
We’ve even asked him how, now that we’re all in our 30s, he still holds the exact same beliefs that we had when we were in high school. He just shrugged and said “meh.” He told us that after watching us all deconstruct and listening to our reasons for doing so and hearing about all the new stuff we’d learned that had led us to our decisions, he can reluctantly admit that religion is probably all bullshit, but he’s choosing to not go down that road.
Fair enough. I wouldn’t wish deconstruction and leaving religion on my worst enemy. But his response did kind of surprise me.
He was complacent. He was fine with the way things were. He figured he was probably wrong in what he believed, yet he didn’t care. He was going to stick with it and roll on because that was easiest thing to do.
And to be totally fair to him, it probably would be the easiest thing for him to do given his situation. His wife is completely “souled out” for the Lord. If he chose to deconstruct his faith and leave the church, he’d have a huge problem in his marriage. As I’ve written about many times before, one area of life that leaving religion damages the most is your relationships.
But this got me thinking even more and I realized that complacency is a condition that strongly permeates through Christian and Church culture. Why is this?
Well, first and foremost, the Church pushes complacency. The church wants its members to be obedient, comfortable, and not curious at all. Once even one of those things begins to shift, the Church is in danger of eventually losing that person as a contributing and paying member.
There’s also the fact that fundamentalist Christians aren’t usually very good at taking personal responsibility. They have God to direct, guide, and preplan their entire lives. That mindset doesn’t necessarily scream “grab life by the balls.” In fact, doing so may even suggest that you aren’t trusting God enough to take care of you, and is thus frowned upon.
I’ve written before about how leaving religion means taking personal responsibility—perhaps for the first time in your life—because there’s no longer a god there to sort out your life for you in accordance his mysterious master plan.
And although I’m never going to tell my friend what to think, feel, believe, or do, there was something else about his decision to “not to go down that road” and to just “keep believing” that stuck out to me. In my experience (and the experience of many others I’ve heard from) belief doesn’t necessarily work like that. You can certainly force yourself to keep going through the motions of a believer—going to church, singing the songs, and saying the prayers. But you can’t really force the belief, or the lack of belief. If the belief isn’t there, then it just isn’t. I’ve written before about how faith deconstruction can feel inevitable.
Something tells me that my friend probably stopped truly believing a long time ago and what he’s doing now is just “doing what he’s supposed to” in order to keep the harmony in his marriage and family. I understand the desire—perhaps even the necessity—of doing that, but ultimately, I wonder how long he can go on being inauthentic (if indeed my assumption is correct). I guess technically he could do it for the rest of his life, but that sounds like a lot of effort bottling up uncomfortable things.
I was certainly guilty of complacency during my time in the Church. I struggled with the idea of wanting more out of life while feeling guilty for wanting that because it implied God had not “blessed” me enough. When I finally came to the realization that God did not exist and that my life was entirely my own to do with as I pleased, I realized that complacency is actually a very dangerous place to be. It’s good to be content and grateful, of course, but it’s also not bad to challenge yourself to strive for more, to build something better, and to put in the work to become the best version of yourself.