My History | Religious Post-Mortem
Introduction
This one is going to be a little rough, I think. It’s a concept that’s been rolling in my brain and something that I have wrestled with for some time. Titling it alone was a challenge because I’m not sure what to call the point that I’m at, now. I’ve heard this sort of thing referred to as a spiritual deconstruction, in the past, but I don’t think that really applies here because I’m still a spiritual person. I’m also not going to be doing an in-depth breakdown of my entire religious history as that would be an incredibly long and probably dull post to consume. Instead, I just want to talk about the key elements that brought me to where I’m at, now.
I know that this is something that may irk some people. I hope that you will approach this post with an open mind and heart as I talk about where I am at in terms of spirituality, as well as where I’ve come from.
If you’d prefer to consume this content in video form (or just want the video as a companion to the blog post), you can do so by checking out the video version of this post below:
Historical Overview
I was a churchgoing, Hell-fearing, bible-memorizing Christian for the first two-thirds of my life. I went to Sunday School and a sermon every Sunday, I attended youth group every Wednesday, and I went to every event that I could get into. I was part of the Royal Rangers for several years, I participated in Bible Quizzes, I went to discipleship groups, and I was loud about it. I was loud about all of it. As I got older, I participated in other ministries, including being a discipleship leader for a year, helping out with children's summer camps, and more. I did a lot. As I sit here trying to remember all of it and list it, I find that I really can’t. Something new is always coming to mind.
I want to be careful with what I say, here, because I absolutely believe that there were both positive and negative impacts on me as a result of religion. It was not all negative, and I want to get that across as best I can. In particular, counseling I received from a beloved pastor of mine helped me to get control of my own anger and frustrations. There were definitely positive influences on my life that resulted from religion, and I don’t want to give the impression that every single thing about my religious history was negative or made me a worse person.
That being said, religion is part of what made me an angry person. I see this when I get prompted by my Facebook memories and am taken back to old posts I wrote. The amount of anger I held was astonishing. Not just anger, but anger and hatred that I once fully believed to be justified and even righteous. Some of this anger wasn’t just from what was instilled in me, but rather from what I saw to be problematic within the church itself. I saw contradictions and problems and felt that I was the one to address them. I am glad that I was questioning some of what was being taught to me and was trying to employ critical thinking, the problem is that I wasn’t focusing on the correct issues.
In the end, the point I’m trying to make is that while the Bible repeatedly calls for people to be compassionate, understanding, loving, and accepting, I was none of those things. Truth be told, that wasn’t what I was being taught to be, either, though I also wasn’t told to be angry or hateful.
Lacking Empathy
What I primarily want to discuss in this post is empathy. I’ve chosen empathy because when I look back at my religious history, I find that it is empathy that was causing all of those problems I was having within myself. I absolutely and completely lacked empathy for everyone but myself. The was especially true for people who were different from me or who had views that differed from my own. I flat out refused to see their perspective and often viewed them as being less than me. This was, in truth, the natural conclusion to much of what was being taught to me, particularly in the youth group and camps I was attending in my early teenage years.
This shines particularly true with the so-called outreaches that I did with my first youth group. I recently listened to Rhett and Link’s spiritual deconstruction talks on their Ear Biscuits podcast and their talk about outreaches really resonated with me because even back then, when I was younger, I knew that there was something wrong with those outreaches, but I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time.
See, all of those events designed to lure people into the fold of Christianity had one singular motive: getting people to accept my religion. We couldn’t just talk to someone who was having a hard time. We couldn’t comfort someone who was hurting. We couldn’t bring someone around for a good time with friends. It always had to have an ulterior motive. It always ended with a “gotcha”. No matter what we called it, no matter what we were told, it was never about loving anyone. It was about us feeling better about ourselves.
I had no empathy for people who were outside of the church. None. I could not and would not see things from their perspective. When I looked at someone outside of the church, I only saw someone who was wrong and needed to be brought into the church. That’s all the people around me saw, too, and it’s all that some of them still see to this day when they look at someone who is different from themselves. This lack of empathy permeated the church in general but was especially true for that first youth group I had in my life.
To make matters worse, there was a special disdain for those who did things that those in the church found to be the “most abhorrent” as if we had any right to rank wrongdoings. It’s absurd the way that these things were subconsciously ranked, too. Somehow the idea of cheating on your spouse was not given the same harsh lecturing as sex outside of marriage or having a sexual orientation other than being straight. There was also an absolute lack of any sort of care for mental health in general.
While I was in that youth group, I had no concept of anyone who could have mental health struggles. That was an absolutely foreign concept to me. I didn’t get it. I didn’t know about it. It was this weird, obscure thing that probably only affected a minor percentage of the world’s population. This only compounds the complete lack of empathy that I had. All of it contributed to the truly terrible things I said, did, posted, promoted, and blurted. I had no empathy whatsoever for people who were different from me.
Learning Empathy
As I got older, I became more rebellious against some of the things I was being taught in church. I especially rebelled against the youth group I was part of, though I truly did not understand why I had so many problems with it. I knew that something was wrong and I knew I didn’t like what I was being taught, but I can’t say that I understood why I was struggling to adhere to what was being taught, there. Eventually, I stopped going to that one and wound up attending a group across the street. This was the best move I could have made and was the first step toward the growth I have experienced that brought me to where I am, today.
Second Youth Group
Attending the youth group at the church across the street changed my life and trajectory in an incredibly positive way. The youth pastor there was incredible, intelligent, welcoming, and put up with more nonsense from me than he ever should have. He was always willing to have a conversation with me and hear me out. He was always there to talk through things with and he called me out when I needed to be called out. The people present there were also more loving, accepting, and empathetic than anyone I’d known in the first youth group. Within just a couple of months of attending, I was already experiencing drastic change.
One of the most important things that this group did was an outreach that was never about making ourselves feel better by bringing people to our church. Once a month, we had something called Mystery Wednesdays. Sometimes that would mean we’d hang out and play some games together, other times it meant we’d take a trip to do something positive in our community. When we did take those trips, I don’t recall a single time when we were told to pressure people into being afraid that they were going to hell. It was always just about being loving, compassionate, and (here’s that word again) empathetic.
In particular, an evening we spent at a nursing home had a significant impact on me. We were just there to spend time with people who probably didn’t get to see their families very often. We were there to just love people who were different from us. That was it. No ulterior motive. No secret agenda. It was just about being compassionate and kind. I remember talking to someone who was bed-ridden with my friend Emily, I remember playing cards with a few of the residents, and I remember most of all that I learned a lot from people who were vastly different from myself.
Pastoral Abuse
I don’t want to dive too deeply into this one because talking about it has caused issues for me in the past. However, it was absolutely crucial in the shift that I experienced toward becoming more aware of hypocrisy within the church. From the ages of fifteen to eighteen, then especially at nineteen, I would stay at the home of a pastor in another state. He was a genuinely terrible person who abused his family, especially verbally but there was physical abuse as well. I was completely lost in this, didn’t know what to do, and didn’t really understand it. Matters were made worse when he would try to rope me into it by explaining why he “had to do these things”. I remember once, distinctly, that he called me while I was home in my own state to defend himself so that I wouldn’t think less of him. I was a kid. I didn’t know what to do, and people I told either didn’t believe me or dismissed it as something that wasn’t important.
I heard a couple of years ago that he’s better. Maybe he is. Maybe it’s more lies. However, seeing that man behave that way in his home an hour before he got on stage to preach was something that wormed its way into my mind and never left. It took a few years, but eventually, that worm had nibbled away enough that I realized that being in the church doesn’t make you a good person and it doesn’t even make you a good person compared to the people outside of it. In fact, people outside of the church are perfectly likely to be decent, loving, kind people.
Later Church Attendance
I eventually moved north to Arlington, Texas, and began to attend a new church. This was absolutely the best church that I attended. There was a lot more love and compassion for people outside of the church present in there than there was at my prior main church south of Dallas. There were of course still problems, particularly that I can notice now as someone with more life experience, but this was definitely an improvement on my past church experiences. My attendance there continued to push me toward where I am, now.
Moving to Kansas City
The final thing that really pushed me toward the stage I’m at now was my move to Kansas City. If you want to learn how to be empathetic toward people who are different from yourself, leave your hometown. Leave your home state. Kansas City is an incredibly unique, diverse, and thriving area. The people here are incredibly different not only from myself but from anyone I’ve ever known. This was apparent within the first few weeks of my being here when I began to date a single mother with a mental illness. The relationship was brief but extremely challenging, eye-opening, and impacting. It isn’t a situation I should have been in, but it accelerated my personal growth significantly. By the time it ended, I was already a completely different person.
The change I experienced from that relationship only continued over time. In the next few years, I went on to meet, date, and befriend many people who were absolutely nothing like me or anyone I had ever known. They challenged and changed me in incredible ways. I fell in and out of love, I made and lost friends, and I continued to grow as an individual who was learning about the world as if for the first time. This rapid transitional period for me went from the ages of nineteen all the way to the age of twenty-three when I went through what may be one of the hardest, most heartbreaking experiences I’ve had to date.
I have, of course, continued to grow since then. I am always a work in progress, as everyone should be, but the ages of nineteen to twenty-three were the most defining and life-changing for me. It is unbelievable how much I experienced in that time period. For better or for worse, I’m grateful for who I became as a result.
Where Am I Now?
The changes and growth that I experienced have led to an overwhelmingly positive change in who I am. I am far less angry than I was. I have more understanding and empathy for others. I am calm, relaxed, and capable (most of the time). I actively seek to de-escalate situations rather than escalate them. I desire always to understand where others are coming from. I approach people with love, kindness, and compassion wherever possible.
The differences between who I was back in 2011 at 17 and who I am now in 2021 at 27 are night and day. This is, of course, true for many people, but I find it is especially true for me. This is most notable when I see and talk to people from my past and can sense just how different we are from one another now despite having once been so similar. I still love and care about those people from my past, but the contrast between us is striking, now.
I have not completely abandoned spirituality. In fact, I am probably a more spiritual person than I was when I was younger. All of this has resulted in me being a kinder, more compassionate, more loving person than I ever have been. I am far, far from perfect, but I am definitely a better human than I was back when I subscribed fully to religious dogma. The amount of hate and anger that I harbored back then was unreal and I’m glad I’ve let so much of it go, now.
Conclusion
I believe that this is the most intensely personal post that I’ve released since I started this series of content back in early October. I struggled with this one for a while because I’ve feared that it would come across as me stating that there was nothing positive whatsoever to be gleaned from my religious history. Instead, that part of my life was riddled with both positive and negative experiences that shaped who I was then and who I am now. I am definitely a better person now than I was then or could ever have hoped to be if these changes had not started for me nearly ten years ago.
Thanks very much for checking out this post, I really appreciate the time that you took. I know that it was a long one and that, for some, it may have been emotionally exhausting. I am definitely grateful to you for staying here for the whole thing, it means a lot. I hope that, if this post impacts you, that the impact is a positive one. If you have a similar story or experience to share, I would love to hear it.
I promise the next few posts I have planned aren’t quite this intense. I’m going to do one about the trip I took to Arizona soon, then I’m planning to talk about my career in IT. See? Those sound light, don’t they? Nice and fun? Hopefully? Hopefully. If you’re interested to see what’s coming up next from me, please consider following me on social media and subscribing to my YouTube channel! It would mean a lot to me.
Anyway, until next time, bye!