Trigger warning: discussion of suicidal ideation and mental health inpatient treatment

I never wanted to be an atheist. It was never something that I chose. It was something that happened to me, over the course of more than a decade. The irony of this is that it was my post-secondary education at a Midwestern Conservative Christian university that started me down the path of deconstructing my faith.

It wasn’t just one thing that caused me to start questioning my faith. There were several things that happened in close proximity to each other that caused me to have questions in a few different areas.

All Scripture Is Inspired

During my undergraduate education, every student was required to take a certain number of Bible credits in order to graduate. They were considered something akin to general education requirements, and when you graduated, you did so with a minor in Bible. And me being me, I wanted to learn as much as I could about as much as I could, so I took a couple of Bible classes beyond what was required.

One of the very first things I can remember causing a true crack in the veneer of my faith was sitting in class one day and hearing that what is now considered the canon of the modern-day Protestant Bible was actually compiled by a group of men nearly more than 300 years after Jesus walked the Earth. There was an entire council dedicated to deciding which documents would comprise the whole of the biblical text. I didn’t know as much about what this process involved then, sitting in that class, as I do now, but I remember being floored that this took place hundreds of years after Jesus’s life and ministry, hundreds of years after Paul, hundreds of years after any of the writers of what is now the New Testament. And this didn’t even include the even more ancient texts of what is now the Old Testament. These men added documents to the canon, disregarded others, and Martin Luther a thousand years later removed some (e.g. the Apocrypha) that the Catholic Church still includes.

Why this blew my mind was because all my life I had been taught that all Scripture was inspired by God, through the Holy Spirit. But here were men deciding, after the fact, what documents were, in fact, inspired. (Supposedly. I know more now and know this is not actually the process the Council of Nicaea used.) So, what I realized in that moment, in that classroom, was that while the documents themselves may have been inspired, the process of selecting the canon was itself most certainly not.

And that cast a shadow on the entirety of the Bible for me, that it was, in fact, almost certainly not 100% inspired, that mistakes were made (because people make mistakes and misjudgments), that the Bible I knew was probably flawed. That little crack appeared in my faith, and what were mere doubts or questions before became uncertainties about things I had always been sure about.

Where Everything Came From

Origins became the second crack in my faith armor. By Origins, I specifically mean the origins of the universe, of life, of everything. It took me a long time to discover that, in the science community, the origins of the universe and the development (evolution) of life are two entirely separate theories. But where I stood at the beginning of my deconstruction, they were one and the same. And the reason for that is because of Genesis 1, where God commands everything into existence over the course of six days, where the universe and life as we know it now were created at the same time, in the same event.

But the more I learned about science, the more I began to suspect that there was actually something to this whole evolution thing. And let’s be clear — the Big Bang and evolution were absolutely not taught at my school. For all the places where the scientific community differed from the Bible — and there were many — the professors had some biblical explanation for why Creationists believe the way they do.

But the more I heard some of these explanations, the more they rang hollow, or at least insufficient. We were presented with “theories” from Scripture that simply couldn’t explain all the things science was finding. For instance, carbon dating was basically the devil because it consistently found that fossils held ages way beyond the 6,000-10,000 years of age the Earth was believed to be. One professor from our university actually got caught trying to submit a “dinosaur” bone for carbon dating as proof that dinosaurs lived during the age of humans, only to be revealed that the bone he used was from an entirely different and more modern species. He had submitted something like an elephant bone and hoped he wouldn’t get caught.

And there started to pile up a list of things like this that undermined my confidence in the biblical origins stories I had long been taught and held onto. Each one sent me to off to search outside sources for more information, sources both Christian and secular, and what I found steadily eroded everything I’d grown up believing in.

At some point I recognized that I now accepted evolution as the explanation for how a species develops and adapts. I now accepted the Big Bang Theory as a possible explanation for how the universe came into being. I recognized that Mankind was still learning and discovering new things and changing its views of the universe and life accordingly. This was world-shaking for me.

Christian Apologetics

One of the reasons I chose to take additional Bible courses in college was to increase my knowledge and skill at Christian apologetics — defending faith and biblical positions using Scripture, logic, philosophy, and other tools. I wanted to be able to defend what I believed from the strongest place possible, and I felt that taking additional Bible courses would enable me to do that.

Instead, I started to see arguments from a Christian perspective that felt shallow and contrived. Most argued using the Bible as a position of authority, of course, and we were taught that the Bible has all the answers you need for life. Except that the more I learned, the more I realized this was simply not the case. There were gaps, in certain necessary details and in logic itself. Many arguments became almost recursive, referring back on themselves for support. If A, then B, then A, and so on. And that was something I began to find less than fulfilling. But I still had faith in the process.

Shortly after university, I launched a website called Open Dialogue. I designed it as a safe place for Christians and non-Christians to come together to discuss their views, have debates and arguments, all without dissolving into the kind of hatred and vitriol we commonly see on the Internet now. And for the most part it worked. I moderated with a steady hand, and many excellent discussions were had there over several years.

And those discussions continued to erode my faith. For every argument I had for Christianity, for biblical “truth,” my counterparts had arguments for science and philosophy. Many of those arguments were ones I had no ready rebuttal for, and when I researched for Christian responses, I frequently came up with only the arguments I had already used. I was beginning to realize that secularism had better, more thought out, more cohesive, and more evidence-based answers than Christianity did. And I began to be swayed by those arguments as a result.

LGBTQIA+

Given all of the above, it came as little surprise to me when I realized that my views on homosexuality had essentially flipped. I saw the biology and evolution of same-sex attraction and understood it. It made sense to me that variety in sexual attraction would exist as a species develops in complexity.

So, it was with not a little wonder that I realized I was accepting of homosexual relationships. I didn’t personally know anyone who was gay (that I was aware of), but I now had this weird dichotomy where I knew with absolute certainty that homosexuality was natural and normal but where I also still had to figure out how I was going to come to terms with what the Bible said about this subject. To say the cognitive dissonance was strong would be a major understatement.

It would be many years yet before I would learn that the Bible is actually entirely silent on the subject of homosexuality. It would also be some time before my concepts of gender and sexuality would broaden to encompass the spectrums we know now. But this was my starting point. This is where I began to understand.

Fear and Trembling

If my telling of this gives you the impression that this was an easy process, well, nothing could be further from the truth. This whole shift in my thinking, in my beliefs, took place over most of two decades. And for the first decade, at least, I fought it with every fiber of my being.

I began as a Christian who realized that his faith could be broader than the narrow evangelicalism he grew up with. I adopted the term “progressive” because I knew that was the way forward. Not long after, I added “skeptic” to my identity. I questioned everything. I looked for answers everywhere. And all during this process, I saw myself losing my grip on my faith.

And I was terrified.

Bit by bit, I was losing the identity that had defined me for the first 25, 30 years of my life. I was losing my God. I was losing my hope for a better place after I die. I was losing my life’s meaning. I was at risk of losing my friends, my family, my entire community. And it scared the ever-living shit out of me.

Eventually, I became agnostic. Grudgingly. I wasn’t sure anymore that God existed, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he did exist, he didn’t look anything like the God of the Bible, or at least nothing like the God I was raised to believe in.

For years I was lost, adrift in an ocean of uncertainty. I couldn’t talk to anyone I knew about what I was going through — not my wife, not my pastors, not my parents, not anyone. I didn’t know how. But I knew the reactions I would get. I knew the “sermons” I would receive. I grew up with them. I studied them in college. I had lived them. Hell, I had delivered most of them myself. I knew them by heart. And I didn’t need or want anyone spouting them back at me.

So I floundered in the dark. I was scared, terrified. Nearly everything that held meaning for me was gone, and I had no idea what to replace it with.

My mental health took a nosedive. I became increasingly depressed and anxious. And I couldn’t talk to anyone about that, either. You didn’t discuss mental illness in evangelical Christian circles. Because there, mental illness was a sin issue, a depravity of the heart, and failure to have relationship with God.

There was nowhere for me to turn. So this void I’d found myself in swallowed me alive.

Forging a New Identity

In April 2016, everything came to a head. I was so depressed, I was seriously contemplating suicide. My marriage was coming apart at the seams, and I was struggling to function at work. It took a friend nearly halfway across the country to reach out to me at the moment I needed someone most to get me the help I needed.

I spent five days in the hospital. It wasn’t an immediate fix. You don’t go from where I was to perfectly whole and healthy in just five days. But it was a beginning. I got on some life-changing (and life-saving) medications, had some intensive inpatient therapy, and found some direction for my mental health. It was like someone had turned on a single light bulb for me so I could see, just a little. It didn’t address the issues of theology I’d been wrestling with. None of that even came up while I was there. It turned out that the core issue of my depression was brain chemistry, so taking steps to solve that started me on a new and different path. The other stuff I’d been silently wrestling with was still there, of course. But for the moment it was… less, and more manageable.

The bottom basically fell out of my life that April. I lost nearly everything important to my security, but I gained some perspective. Just a little. It was enough. The last ten years have been me creating a new identity for myself. I’ve made new friends, most of whom are not Christian and therefore far more accepting of who I am. I’ve done the work on myself to figure myself out, to learn who I really am, and to embrace new ideas and ideologies. I’ve gone from a right-wing conservative evangelical Christian to someone far more open to loving others just as they are.

And somewhere in there I realized I was an atheist, and I was okay with that. It wasn’t something I sought out. It wasn’t something I wanted. It was something that happened to me, over time, over the course of more than a decade.

I look at myself now, though, and I love who I have become, who I am right now. And I’m not done growing, not done learning and changing. I still consider myself an atheist for the moment, but I know my atheism is almost exclusively an atheism of the Christian God, the evangelical God. I’m that atheist, sure, but in other ways, I’ve become spiritual with some pagan leanings. I’m growing and changing and learning. I don’t know what I’m going to become, and I find that thought exciting, even exhilarating! Because I know I can become anything and anyone I want. I have that freedom, and it’s an amazing feeling!

I’ll be writing more about this process of growth and change in the days, weeks, and months to come. I’d love it if you’d come along with me, and the easiest way to do that is to subscribe to my blog. This thing is the archive of my growth since around 2003. It, like me, has gone through iterations and changes over the years, but it’s the chronicle of my journey — past, present, and future.

Stay tuned! There’s more to come!