Reflections on Christianity

I pick up a book titled Digging for Spain by chance in an op shop in Wellington and it turns out to be one of my all-time favorite books. A memoir by a New Zealand author, it details a personal mental transformation, part of which includes the process of deconstructing her Christian faith. I send an audio of myself reading a passage of it to my mother. It begins I don’t know if I will ever call myself a Christian again. 

My mother refuses to listen to it past that line. She tells me that she finds it infinitely sad that I have nothing to believe in. Christianity is filled with a series of interlocking false dichotomies like this. If you don’t believe in God, you believe in nothing. If you don’t believe in Hell, you believe people shouldn’t face consequences for negative actions. Without God, there is no purpose. These fabricated logical boundaries are a self-imposed mental cage. Once you begin to see past the binary; to say “maybe it’s not x or y; but rather x and y but sometimes z,” you begin to see the infinite range of possibilities that the world truly offers.

Although my mother probably won’t read it, here’s a reflection on my relationship with the Christian faith with a prompt from Penelope Todd:

I don’t know if I will ever call myself a Christian again. I was bullied early into faith, or is it really faith if you’re told you’ll spend eternity in Hell if you don’t believe? I am a child of the faith: every day of my life for almost 18 years involved my family gathering to read a chapter of the Bible together. After particularly intense or confusing chapters, Strong’s Concordance would be brought out and verses cross referenced and debated. I learned to read on stiffly written Bible discussions from McGuffy’s Readers and from the Bible itself. Sunday school, Wednesday night service, Vacation Bible School—you betcha. I know Christianity inside and out. Although forgotten now, I once memorized Psalms and had a range of verses throughout the Bible on ready recall. 

For many, Facebook is a tool for radicalization but it deradicalized me. It was my lifeline out of a religion that was suffocating my very self. In the Dark Year after Daniel’s death, I spent a lot of time on Facebook. Luckily, I was friends with people who shared things that upheld the humanity of others. Daniel’s death opened floodgates of empathy in me and I began to see the world less legalistically and with more nuance.  

When I entered university I had a better foundation than some fundamentalist kids who leave their bubble and enter mainstream society—better than my brother Matthew and definitely better than the Frerking brothers. At that point I didn’t believe in racism anymore and I had decided not to care about evolution. I reasoned that whether it had or hadn’t happened was irrelevant to my relationship with God now, and besides-didn’t it kind of make sense? I was starting to unwrap myself from purity culture and I believed in equality in relationships. But fundamentalism holds tight and there were many beliefs that I felt I had to hide for fear of being rejected by my peers. Slowly, I came to realize why that might be. I started to let go of homophobia, misogyny and general disdain for large groups of people (those with tattoos, those who give blood, those who color their hair, those who use substances, the list goes on). The walls between myself and others slowly crumbled until I was left with the realization that at the core of things, we are all the same. 

During the summer break between freshman and sophomore year, Paolo would come over almost every day and talk through his deconstruction. Why would a loving God create Hell? Isn’t he in control of the whole universe? Why does Hell have to exist? One day he showed me a video that turned my life upside down and made me think of everything in a completely different way. It was “From God’s Perspective,” a satiric comedy song by Bo Burnham. A song with many powerful lines, this caught my attention: 

“You pray so badly for heaven

Knowing any day might be the day that you die

But maybe life on earth could be heaven

Doesn't just the thought of it make it worth a try?”

Maybe life on earth could be heaven. Maybe it really could. What if everyone had enough, what if there was not war, what if we treated each other with respect, what if we got rid of shame? What could we achieve, what kind of life could we create for ourselves and others if we admitted that this existence might be the only one we get? Christianity comes with a certain sense of martyrdom: a belief that the more you suffer in this life, the more you’ll receive in the next. But what if life on Earth could be heaven? 

Of course I still clung to Christianity after that. Leaving Christianity is like leaving a relationship and it takes years to divorce yourself from the control that the religion once had and to grieve the life you led and are leaving behind. For a long time, I held a loose concept of God: maybe He was everything, maybe He was anything that Love was, maybe He could be found anywhere. I once defined my Christianity this way and I even still like this way of thinking: that the tree will be known by its fruit and the Fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control; so therefore a Christian is someone who embodies those values. 

But these were weak ways of thinking, cop outs; and a way of pushing the conflict to the back of my mind. They were also a way of escaping valid criticisms of Christianity—those people are misinterpreting the Bible! But the fact is that, misinterpreted or not, a large portion of Christianity buys into ideology that disrespects another’s right to live their life peacefully. I wanted to stay in Christianity and I tried to but the more I saw, the more I learned, the more I experienced—I just couldn’t reconcile it. No matter how gentle or loose I tried to make it, the ideology refused to match up to the facts of the world around me. 

Here are a few things that I know are true: we are all human and all equal; we all have the same intrinsic needs—for love, for connection, for respect, for fulfillment; we all have the right to live in peace and free from mental coercions. The idea that we all are born unworthy is not an idea that respects our humanity, nor does it uplift or empower anyone. We are not sinners, we are just people trying to live our lives and we are driven by needs, desires and pain. Sometimes we pursue the solutions to our needs, desires and pain in ways that are detrimental to ourselves and others and some of us are born into environments that provide more barriers to self-actualization than others but we are all striving for the same things. We are all just trying to be happy.

I do not believe in Christianity anymore but I do believe in us. I believe in humanity. If we follow our compassion and curiosity, we can lift even our weakest members to higher standards of health and happiness and the effects of this will be exponentially expressed in the future of our species. We owe it to ourselves and to every other human to take the steps we are able to make life on earth heaven.