November 29, 2021
Deconverting from your fundamentalist religion does more than shake up your paradigm and worldview. It actually damages your life on many practical levels as well. I go into his in great detail in my book and on this blog.
One of the biggest areas of life that can be damaged by leaving religion is your family. When it comes to leaving the faith, your religious family members often take it the hardest and can put a lot of undue additional stress on an already difficult transition.
Losing religious friends during a deconversion sucks, but it’s far more manageable because you can always go out and make new friends. Hell, losing a spouse or girlfriend sucks even more, but technically speaking, you can get another one of those as well. But when it comes to family, you can’t really go out and find a new a family.
Or can you?
We’re big fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race in my house. Despite being a reality competition, the show is good at contributing to ongoing conversations about our society, particularly regarding the LGBTQ+ community. It’s also friggin’ hilarious.
Many seasons ago, there was a moment that’s now become quite famous among fans of the show. One of the contestants broke down crying as he told the story of how his family does not accept him because he’s gay and does drag. RuPaul responded with one of the show’s most famous quotes in one of its most poignant moments:
“We get to choose our family.”
Here, RuPaul was referring to the unfortunate yet commonplace occurrence of families disowning their children for being gay. These people then go on to find acceptance in other like-minded people, places, and communities—sometimes growing so close as to become like family.
What RuPaul said is true in any situation where a family may disown someone simply for being their authentic selves. This can absolutely apply in the case of religious deconversion.
It’s never happened to me, but I can presume that being outright disowned by your family is perhaps one of the most painful things someone could go through. It might even be worse than the moment of finally coming to understand that God does not exist.
But I do know that blood relation seems to rapidly lose its importance when it comes to finding people who absolutely belong in your life for the long-term.
In my writing both in my book and on this blog, I try my best to impart some practical advice that helped me heal from my deconstruction and subsequent deconversion. Just a little something to share and if it resonates with you, great, and if it doesn’t, also cool. I was able to do that when it comes to making new friends after leaving religion, but when it comes to finding a new family… I got nothing.
I highly doubt there’s some tested and proven, step-by-step technique to finding a new family. It’s likely a process that requires meeting lots of people, investing time into relationships, and being in tune with yourself enough to realize when you’re drawn to someone or a group of people. It’s probably not something you can write down as a goal on your vision board that you can check off one day. Most likely, it’ll just happen on its own and you’ll realize it sometime later. Something will just click in your brain and heart and you’ll say to yourself, “Oh… this person (or these people) are my family now.”
But just because there’s no practical step-by-step method to finding a new family should your blood relatives disown you over religious differences doesn’t mean it’s not worth writing about here. It’s a good thing to keep in mind because it brings hope to a terrible situation. It means that healing can be found. It means there’s something better coming.