November 14, 2022
This is the 200th article on the Deconverted Man Blog!
Holy crap! Hard to believe. It feels like just yesterday I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to set up the website (I’m happy to say my skills in that area have developed since then).
To celebrate such a milestone, I thought I’d give some history and background on this blog and my book. Where did it come from? What inspired it? How did I go about creating it?
For reference, it’ll help to know a bit about my story. Some of the best articles in which to learn it are here:
How My Belief in Christianity Slowly Fell Away
After the events of those articles, I took a job overseas, which I talked about briefly in my article Travel Will Help You Deconvert. I stayed in that job for five years. In that time, I did not go to church (although, contrary to popular belief, there were Christian churches in the Middle Eastern country I was living in; they’re quite tolerant). I did not pray. I did not read the Bible. Faced with an entirely new group of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, I chose for the first time in my life to not refer to myself as a Christian when asked about religious beliefs. Initially I felt a tremendous amount of guilt, but it got easier as time went on.
Before I’d even left the US for this new job, I knew I needed to take a step back from the Church. I’d been doing some reading, some thinking, and some talking to people who’d already deconstructed ahead of me. I needed a break. I needed to take a breath. I needed to process. That was what mainly motivated me to not get involved with the local Christian churches in my new country.
But instead of doing all that processing, I got distracted.
I mean, shit, I was in a new country. Instead of spending time inside a dark room thinking, I was out with new friends, having a good time, and traveling the Middle East region. I was learning new things, having new experiences, and overall just growing as a person.
This went on for quite some time before I finally paused and realized I hadn’t been doing much of the “processing” I’d told myself I’d do (I didn’t have the word “deconstruction” in my vocabulary yet). But I didn’t feel guilty about that. Instead, I’d been living—doing cool things with cool people. This went on for years. God did not strike me down, bad things didn’t happen, and my life didn’t fall apart. In fact, during that time, God had been just as silent as he’d been back when I’d most fervently believed.
Somewhere along the way I’d decided I no longer believed in God. Unfortunately, I don’t remember when I’d made the decision since nothing big happened to prompt it. Just one day it occurred to me that it no longer made sense anymore, and then I’d just proceeded to turn my attention to the next thing I was doing.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the processing (the deconstruction) would still need to occur, even though I’d already decided I didn’t believe in God anymore. It was something that couldn’t be suppressed and ignored forever.
Fast forward to 2019. I’d spent 5 years essentially living without God without any of the disastrous results that had been promised to me by my pastors. One day, I finally sat down and started contemplating on my past life as a Christian. It seemed so long ago at the time. I had one burning question:
“What was all that?”
The sermons. The worship music. The Christian culture. The purity culture. The mission trips.
Now that time and distance had been placed between me and all that stuff, it all seemed so foreign—more foreign than the new country in which I’d made my home for the past five years. It seemed so strange and bizarre. I wondered how I’d ever gotten so caught up in it. I’d never examined that before. I’d never retraced my steps. I’d never analyzed the road that had led me into that belief system.
Around that time, I’d really gotten into podcasts. I did a quick search to see if there were podcasts for people who had left the Church, and was delighted to find many. That was when I was introduced to the term “deconstruction.” I then began to binge.
While listening to these shows, a lot of things came up for me: memories, beliefs I once held that no longer made sense and that needed to be analyzed, ways of thinking that needed to be broken down. I also needed to look into the ways that religion had harmed my life that I had not yet acknowledged.
In short, even though I no longer believed, all the processing (the “deconstruction”) that I promised myself was all bubbling up at once. I didn’t intentionally suppress it all; I just got distracted. But as I always say, suppression does not work. There was a huge part of my life that needed to be revisited.
And the best way I process anything is by writing. So that’s what I did.
As my thoughts started pouring out through my keyboard, it took the form of a communication to my younger self. How would I teach Younger Me to live if I were losing my religion today? How would I cope if I wasn’t lucky enough to be distracted by a cool, overseas experience and lifestyle?
Those writings eventually became my book: The Deconverted Man: A Guide to Happiness, Freedom, and Purpose After Leaving Fundamentalist Religion.
But when the book was done, there was tons more I’d written that was not included because it didn’t fit. There were some things that I felt were very important to say, but just didn’t belong in the overall flow of the book. I knew I’d need a place to continue writing, so I decided my book needed a blog to go along with it.
Writing that book was a huge part of my actual deconstruction—even if it occurred years after deciding I no longer believed in God. I finished writing the rough draft at the end of 2019.
I moved back to the US in January 2020. I set the book aside as I was busy setting up my new life infrastructure back in my hometown after having been gone for so long.
As you know, the pandemic started a few months later. Along with everyone else, I was locked down inside. But instead of watching Tiger King, buying a Peloton, playing Animal Crossing, or downloading TikTok, I broke out my book again and started revising. I began lovingly referring to The Deconverted Man as my “pandemic project.” I did a self edit, then hired an editor to read through it and offer up his feedback. While he was working, I built the website and wrote the initial batch of blog posts. I secured social media handles. I got the edits back and implemented them, then I hired a cover designer.
I launched this website on September 23, 2020. The book was released shortly after the website was up on October 4, 2020. I’ve been posting articles here regularly ever since then. I’ve begun cross-posting them to Medium as well. I’ve also been posting regularly on Instagram and Twitter since the beginning. I’ve also done an interview.
Now, 200 articles later, here we are. I never had a specific goal for how for long I’d write here (and still don’t). Honestly I’m quite surprised by how much I’ve had to say about the Church, Christian culture, and my past life as a Christian. There’s a lot to unpack, and I’ve written it all down and posted it all here.
This website is very much a side project. It takes a lot of time, but I use productivity hacks (primarily task batching) to get the job done. I’ll write all the month’s articles at the same time (usually on the same day) and then edit them all the next day. I’ll create the month’s Instagram posts all at once and schedule them. I’ll do the same thing for the Tweets. That means I only periodically have to log in and check the responses and reply to the comments. With this batching, that means I only work on this website for about 4-5 days a month, and the rest is just checking in and responding to things.
I purposely do it this way because I practice what I preach: at some point, you need to move on from deconstruction. I’m long past that point, and running a website that is so focused on this topic puts me at risk of constantly thinking about religion all the time. But I don’t want to constantly think about religion all the time. I want to move on with my life and think about newer and better things. I want to live my life as a non-religious person. As I’ve said before, continuing to think and talk about religion after you’ve deconstructed and deconverted is still a low-key way of giving your time and attention to the Church. I don’t want to do that, so I cram all this website’s work into a handful of days per month. The rest of the time I’m doing other things.
Anyway, that’s the gist of how this whole thing got started. I’m glad that my processing resulted in a body of work that I can leave up on the internet forever. It’s out there for whenever I feel like revisiting it, and it just might help someone who comes along and reads it. If you’re reading this, thank you for being here, and I hope your own deconstruction is going as well as it can.