March 24, 2022
I’ve written before that deconstructing your faith and ultimately leaving religion should improve your life. However, anyone who has deconstructed their faith knows well that it brings some significant challenges.
Not only does leaving religion completely wreck your seven life areas—as I describe in detail here on this blog and in my book—but there are some intangible experiences that also arise.
For me, one such challenge I faced after deconstructing my faith was that I suppressed by emotions.
I’ll explain why. First, a quick story of how I got “saved.” My old “testimony” if you will.
I was eleven years old. I’d been going to Sunday school for pretty much my entire childhood, and just figured I was a Christian because of that (a mistake that many youth pastors love to remind teenagers that they’re making, as I would soon find out). When I reached sixth grade, I started attending my church’s youth group. It was fun, the youth pastor was cool, all my friends went, and due to my blossoming interest in female attention, it helped that the youth group had lots of girls my age.
Anyway, like all good youth groups in the late 90s and early 2000s, we went to church camp in the summer. This youth group liked to go to “Big Stuf” (spelling is correct) camp in Panama City, Florida. If any of you reading this ever went, please let me know in the comments. Because shit, even if I went today, I’d probably still have a good time, if I’m honest. Maybe that’s only because I really like the beach.
(Years later, I would return to Big Stuf as a youth leader with the youth group that I volunteered with at my church. Don’t get me started about my wandering eye toward the other female youth leaders who were there with their youth groups).
Anyway, like all good church camps in the late 90s and early 2000s, the messages were light and funny on Monday, and then got deathly serious on Thursday night. That’s the big night when the guy who’s been preaching all week connects all his points together in one big final reveal, convicts everyone of their sin (in my case, simply going to Sunday school was not enough to make me “saved”), the guy on acoustic guitar plays soft rifts as the speaker makes his final points, the music is loud and overbearing, the drums are booming, everyone is standing with hands raised while crying and worshipping, the laser lights and fog machines are maxed out, and the whole place just feels like this is the time to finally commit to Jesus. So basically, total emotional manipulation.
Anyway, at the tender age of eleven, all of this shit worked on me and my vulnerable and innocent heart. In an artificially-heightened state of emotion, I “gave my life to Christ,” so they say. Afterward, we all went to the moonlit beach to sit in a circle and talk about it. Years later, after being a youth leader myself, I now realize that all the leaders of the various churches were pulled into a room on Thursday afternoon before the big night and coached through how to handle their youth that evening when a good portion of them would be tricked into “giving their lives to Christ.”
From that point on, I considered myself saved.
Many years later, after I deconstructed my faith, I realized—as many do—that the only reason I’d felt saved by Jesus that night was because I’d been emotionally manipulated to do so. On top of that, I had a better perspective of my few-and-far-between “spiritual highs.” Meaning, as a Christian, I’d go to certain events or go through certain “seasons” which made me feel “on fire for God” which would inevitably fade away and I’d return to baseline (which I’d feel guilty about). I noticed a pattern: all of these events were associated with periods of high emotion, whether I had worked to pump up my emotions myself or they’d been increased by way of some worship band or Type-A, well-spoken pastor.
So after I left Christianity, I had a long list of negative experiences that I attributed to emotions. I wanted to avoid falling into that trap again. Whether I realized it or not, my chosen method for avoiding that trap was to avoid and suppress my emotions. After all, my emotions had led me astray many times before. I didn’t want them to do that again.
What followed was a period in my life that was dominated by hyper rationality. I have since even deconstructed that and realized that is not the optimal way to live life.
Really, the optimal way to live life, as I’ve now discovered (better late than never) is a balance. Rationality is good, yes, but emotions cannot (and should not) be suppressed. Emotions are energy in motion (e-motion) and to suppress them means creating a blockage in your body, and that will manifest in things that aren’t good, usually as bad physical health and mental health challenges.
I’m a man who tends toward a traditional masculine approach to life. That means I am prone to fall into the traps of having my masculine energy being thrown out of balance with my innate feminine energy. I suspect that this is something I’ll be working on and improving for the rest of my life, and that’s okay. As long as I’m making progress, I’m happy with myself.
But one of the big steps to making progress in this matter was identifying why I suppressed my emotions in the first place. And a huge part of that was religion. But even more so than religion, it was the process of leaving religion that made me suppress my emotions. When I was a Christian, I was a bit more emotional than I was immediately following, simply because there’s a lot of emotional stuff tied up in Christianity. But after I left, I shut it all up and shut it all down because I just wasn’t ready to trust my emotions again. After all, I blamed my emotions for letting me “be saved” that night in Panama City. When really it wasn’t my emotions that were wrong, it was the manipulation that was done to the emotions of my eleven-year-old self by people who know precisely what they are doing and how to manipulate the emotions of their young audiences.
Which goes to show, as I briefly explored here, deconstructing your faith and leaving religion does not mean you are “done.” You have not arrived at the finish line simply because you no longer believe in the Christian God or the Bible. Rather, there is more to do, more to uncover, and more to explore within.