May 16, 2022
A few weeks ago, I posted the following tweet:
“What would you say is the BIGGEST reason you left Christianity?”
(By the way, if you aren’t yet following me on Twitter, you totally should 😉 )
This tweet was my most popular to date, generating hundreds of comments and responses. I tried to respond to them all, but simply couldn’t.
Most of the comments were fantastic (as always with social media, there were a few shitposts). As I was reading through them, the usual list of things quickly began to form:
- The claims of the Bible just didn’t seem to be true anymore.
- My pastor was a manipulative and abusive asshole.
- I realized that my church was a crazy cult.
- I turned 18 and finally got the hell out of my religious family’s house.
- Purity culture.
All good reasons. All very common, unfortunately.
There was one response, however, that stood out from all the rest. It was simply this:
“It was not where I belonged. It was not home.”
I stopped scrolling though all the comments and paused on this one. I reread it over and over. It struck something that was buried deep inside of me that I had not reflected on in a while.
It’s common when discussing faith deconstruction to speak about the things on the bulleted list above. But rarely do I see it discussed that there are some internal and amorphous things that are going on within that are just as valid as the external reasons.
As I reread that response over and over again, I remembered feeling the exact same way. Back then, I could never pinpoint it. Now, I know I felt this way because the Church was never where I belonged. I was trying to force it. I was trying to force it because of fear: fear of hell, fear of being different in my conservative southern town, fear of losing all my friends who were Christians. I wrote about this in my article Fear Makes Religion Powerful.
But underneath all the fear that kept me in place and obedient, there was still a stirring gut feeling that I was not where I belonged. That I was not home. At the time, I considered this to be temptation from Satan. Now I know that it was my intuition. It was the inner wisdom deep inside of me (and that is deep inside of everyone) telling me that something wasn’t right. I wrote about this in more detail in my article Intuition & The Deconverted Man.
I know this is not the case for everyone. It seems that the people who have the hardest time with faith deconstruction and leaving religion are those who do feel totally at home within the Church. That breakup hurts the most because it feels like they’ve lost that home and lost the place where they belong.
However, I’d gotten so good at burying my intuition that I had nearly forgotten about the underlying feeling that followed me every single time I went to church, or volunteered with the youth group, or feebly attempted to share the gospel with someone. So good, in fact, that I hadn’t thought about it in so long and it took this tweet to shake the memory lose.
These days, I am focusing on reintegrating my intuition. Following my gut, so to speak. From now on, I’m trying to no longer require a logical reason to do or say something that I feel I must do or say on a deep level. This is hard for me since I’m a big thinker anyway, but I see it as an exercise in balancing out the mostly-dominant masculine energy inside of me.
Also, I think this concept is useful even outside of religion. Think about your job. Think about the city or country in which you live. Think about the culture that you were born into. Think about your politics. Think about your relationship, whether you have a girlfriend/boyfriend and/or spouse.
Do you feel like you belong? Do you feel at home?
If the brutally honest answer is no, then perhaps it’s time for a change. If you can change your religion—which once served as a foundation for your entire life—then you can certainly detach something from the above list and bring in something new that suits you better.