Losing My Religion

I’ve been losing my religion for about a decade now. I didn’t mean to do it. In many ways, I wish I could go back. In some ways, I’m glad I can’t. It hasn’t been easy. In fact it just about killed me. My life had become what others have since affirmed. I was a modern-day Job. Everything had progressively been stripped from my life – family, health, finances, and career. People say you don’t really know God until he’s all you have left. That was me, until I got to a place where religion would lead me to think that I had lost him too. Talk about despair.

It all started with my divorce. Actually it started with a herniated disc in my lower back that ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back of my marriage…and my back too (ha ha) but those are both long boring stories. Life continued to get worse following both my divorce and paralyzing back injury and no help to care for my then 2-year-old daughter.

In the religious world, prosperity and healing is often regarded as a sign that you are right with God. Injury, illness and catastrophe is often a symptom of unconfessed sin, unforgiveness, unfaithfulness, and a sign that you have gone wrong somewhere in the religious formula. When you are doing it right, the sick get cured, the lame will walk, the blind will see, bills get paid, money appears, your home is spared the tornado that devastated the rest of the street. There is no room for undeserved pain. So, my Christian friends told me that the only answer left for my continuing struggles was that I must have unconfessed sin. I took that to prayer and I asked. I got nothing. Religion taught me that I just needed to keep asking. Nothing. So, I began to beg God, over and over and over to reveal to me my unconfessed sin. I didn’t want to keep displeasing him so greatly that he would continue to strip me of my extended family, husband, child, finances, continuously losing in divorce court, my health, my sleep, my back. I was definitely a modern-day Job and I wanted that to change. I tithed. I served. I attended church every week. I wanted to do all of those things but I also wanted my life to get better and it just continued to get worse. Worst of all, my greatest prayer of wanting my unconfessed sin to be revealed was not answered. In fact I got no answer at all. After a time, I felt that even God had abandoned me.

As a last resort, I decided to read my new Chronological Bible in a Year. To stay accountable to my goal, I started a daily blog to create a structure to really understand what I was reading, rather than check off the reading for the day as completed. I often had to rely on Biblical commentaries to help me, but I was determined to “figure it all out”. Religion kept me in the belief that I was bad, wrong and sinful. It kept me stuck and this was my plan for redemption, or so I thought.

Unfortunately, my dark night of the soul ebbed into dark years of the soul. Going into this reading/blog endeavor, I was really familiar with The New Testament and had already read most of it. As the weeks turned into months, I started to realize that if the New Testament is the ‘ Gospel Good news’, than the Old Testament was…the Gospel Bad news. The Old Testament is full of events that were absolutely horrifying. It’s one thing to hear about God’s favored people on a random Sunday or how God killed unrepentant people. It’s another to read passage after passage, day after day of the brutality attributed to God. Regular church attendance is sold for being like mini seminary, the place where regular Christians get schooled on The Bible. So, in a way regular church attendance is exactly what ended up shielding me from realizing that God is apparently responsible for killing almost 3 million people, until now. There’s no sermon that ties together all of God’s mass killings! For good reason, people might stop going.

If people die at God’s hand, is it still murder? Is it okay for God to violate the 10 Commandments? Then there’s also the threat that if you don’t repent of your constant sinful nature you will spend eternity in hell and there’s never enough repentance. There is no holiday for being unclean. It sounds utterly exhausting and no wonder the sacrificial blood of Jesus was such good news! However, did the blood of Jesus also transform God from being a sick psychopath to unconditionally loving? God allowed Satan to inflict suffering upon Job to prove that Job would remain loyal to God even if all of his prosperity was taken. If you have kids, would you do that to one of them? I wouldn’t. Can we mere humans be capable of more love than an unconditionally loving God?  I began to wonder how many Christians have actually read the entire Bible. Because, no one ever talks about this kind of thing.

The brutality that I read God capable and responsible for was very much a problem for me. If my faith was in the Bible and its inerrancy than I had to revise my unconditionally loving God to being a complete psychopath. If I wanted to keep my belief in an unconditionally loving God, I had to change my beliefs about the Bible. I could no longer hold room for an unconditionally loving God AND an inerrant Bible. I ultimately kept my unconditionally loving God and concluded that the Bible is a collection of writings, possibly divinely inspired, but more likely, man’s attempt to document his experiences with God. At times, it was man projecting his anger, resentment, prejudice and privilege upon God. At others, it was man projecting his love, joy, peace and humility on God. It all sounds pretty human to me.

The deconstruction of my religion was and is terrifying. It’s lonely. I no longer fit into Christianity, but I’m not an atheist or agnostic. I have not found a new religion and I’m not looking for one. I desire to be in a place of no religion because religion harmed me and all around me I see how it has and is harming others. I don’t think it has to be that way and I’m still looking for my place in this world. God help me.