My Deconversion: Long Story Short
TLDR: The main ideas in this article are highlighted in bold.
If I had one or two sentences to explain my deconversion from Christianity to Secular Humanism, I would say:
I unexpectedly stopped fearing what it would mean for me to lose my faith. This, in turn, dramatically changed my ability to submit my Christian beliefs to critical thought and change them over time.
Losing the Fear
If I had just a few paragraphs to explain the first half of that story (how I lost said fear), I would say:
After spending my college years researching how to authentically live out my Christian faith, I caught a renewed enthusiasm for Evangelism. To that end, some of the ideas I'd picked up would color my approach to it and ultimately lead to an ironic and opposite effect within my own views.
During those years, I'd come to understand Christianity as an appealing invitation to the life God made us for, restored in relationship to Him, our fellow humanity and all life was meant to offer us. More specifically, I believed it was the life that all humans longed for in the deepest and truest version of our desires (beneath our fallen sinfulness, of course). This way of life could begin in the here and now - but would only be perfected in the afterlife to come.
With an evangelistic intent and a narrow focus on the non-religious in our modern culture, I tried to imagine life through their eyes to better know how to first reach them with the Gospel. With an arbitrary list of desires and features of the Christian life in hand, I pondered how the non-religious might be trying to satisfy their parallel "God-given" desires for life His way in lesser "fallen" ways currently. These same God-given desires, I believed I could strategically appeal to and use to contrast the "superiority" of a faithful life with any such worldly attempts to satisfy them - not unlike Jesus and the Scriptures had done priors (ex. Ps. 37:4, Prov. 3:13-18, Isa. 55:1-2, Jn. 7:37-38, 10:10).
But then something strange happened. During this exercise, I was profoundly surprised to find myself imagining a secular life of deep purpose, meaning and empathic virtue - a way of life that began in those moments to make rational sense to me for the first time in my life. This had been literally unimaginable to me for years up to this point - for I’d always previously imagined something far more negative of a life without faith. But what I was imagining was good and appealed to me. By this evangelistic act of imagination, I unwittingly began to flesh out an understanding of life from a secular point of view1.
And that at least begins to explain the first half of my story as summarized above:
I unexpectedly stopped fearing what it would mean for me to lose my faith...
But the real difference this shift made would only became apparent when I next pondered my doubts.
Reason Unleashed
If I had just a few more paragraphs to begin to explain the rest of the story (how the loss of fear unleashed critical thought in my mind), here’s what I would say happened next:
Up until I had the above experience, whenever I encountered reasons to question my faith, it usually felt like everything was on the line for me. Whatever the source of the doubt or "cognitive dissonance" might be, the idea that my faith might not be true was equivalent to the feeling of my whole world, sense of identity and sense of well-being in life being under attack. For without it, I feared falling into something dark and nihilistic.
But once I found myself able to imagine a well-adjusted and ethical life of meaning and purpose from a non-religious perspective, my newfound lack of exclusive dependence on my Christian worldview to feel "right" or "okay" about life dramatically changed how I experienced facing doubts forever thereafter. As a result, my sense of well-being and security no longer felt threatened when I questioned my Christian views.
It seems, in this way, I had accidentally acquired a theoretical “plan B” worldview that I could potentially fall back on going forward. With that alternative in hand, I was immediately much more comfortable with faith challenging questions with so much less fundamentally at stake for me. Suddenly, despite still being a professing Christian (who still "wanted" to believe, but no longer felt a fundamental "need" to), I felt a new found emotional or psychological freedom to "go either way" - in terms of my beliefs - if that's what my truth seeking ultimately came to. Either way, I knew I would be alright now.
And this shift is probably the most foundational part of my deconversion story. But this same shift would soon lead to others including one more fundamental loss of fear. For I would soon leave behind not only my fear over losing my faith for this life - but also any fear regarding the next.
Then, like the next domino falling, this profound emotional - or psychological - shift swiftly lead to a related intellectual one. This next shift would see me shed one final fear of losing my faith. That is, regarding any consequences in the afterlife. After all, like many Christians, I'd been raised to believe that faith in Jesus was required for salvation - and that an eternity in Hell was the alternative to said belief.
Simultaneously and also like many Christians, I'd always been taught that “God's thoughts were higher than our thoughts” (Isaiah 5:8-9) and that if there were things about our faith - such as raised by doubts or skeptical inquiries - that didn't make sense to us, we should still abide in choosing to "have faith" since “surely God knows” the answers to the difficult questions we presently lacked.
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and don't lean on your own understanding." (Proverbs 3:5) one often quoted Bible verse had said.
But once I found myself free from a fundamental “need” for Christianity to be true, the internal experience grounding why it had seemed rational and justified to suspend disbelief - or critical thought - in this way completely evaporated for me.
Looking back now, it was almost as if this critical thought-stopping rationalization of choosing to "have faith" in spite of logical or moral issues was like an intellectual “ransom” I’d been willing to pay. Though, at the time, I'd interpreted it more as a form of intuitive "proof" - because of how much worse life had appeared to me without it (i.e. this must be the true and good way to live). Better to believe then lose my psychological well-being (hope, meaning & purpose) which was depending on - or being figuratively held “hostage” by - my belief that Christianity was true, I’d seemed to instinctively conclude. Though again, I'd consciously taken this as proof that is was actually true at the time. But now, suddenly the beliefs that had previously held me captive had no power over me.
To clarify this shift, it was not so much that I immediately stopped believing that a God existed or who surely knew the things we finite humans didn't or couldn't know. I still believed that for some time thereafter. Instead, the shift was in how this belief was completely overshadowed and superseded by a new conviction of mine: that any good, loving and just God would surely not punish human beings for using their "God-given" minds to the best of their ability to decide what to believe is true or not in the first place!
In this way, it was my abiding faith in such a good and just God combined with my first-hand evangelistically-driven experience of thinking different by which now I would forever lose any fear of eternal damnation for “thinking freely” in an honest and well-intentioned fashion. The God I believed in was not only too morally just for that but also still transcended my imperfect understanding. That imperfect understanding, I was now coming to admit might even include some of my long held religious views on things like secular or non-religious perspectives - and the people that held them. As a Christian opening my mind, I was confronted with a key distinction: the difference between having faith in a God that surpasses my understanding and having faith in my current understanding of God itself (Prov. 3:5). One allowed some room for growth where the other prevented it altogether, but the later would prevent it for me no longer.
And so, free of this fear and the rationalization it enticed, I would no longer make a special exception for my Christian beliefs by exempting them from critical thought. I would no longer arrest the development of my mind in the name of "having faith" or cause “God knows” how what doesn’t make sense somehow still does make sense (?), halting critical thought from ever reaching its useful logical conclusion: This idea doesn’t make sense - and should be rejected until it does! Period.
Instead, like Thomas Jefferson affirmed by letter to his nephew lifetimes ago2, I immediately came to see it as a necessary means of honoring and being faithful to God to continue forward in prayerful intellectual honesty by accepting or rejecting from my mind any beliefs - religious or otherwise - per their reasoned soundness and this without excuse. Anything less would be to bury the talent of our "God-given" minds and intellect in the ground - a surely damnable offense, I now concluded.
And the Rest Will Follow
From the above personal shift from "Dark Age" to more "Enlightenment Age" thinking, further dominos would fall as I inevitably reconsidered and further amended many aspects of my religious views over time. First I’d become an increasingly theologically "liberal" Christian and then, only a few years later, leave the faith entirely. I’d even spend the last 6 months of the 5 years I worked at a Christian bookstore in college as a non-believer (one who could still recommend his favorite Christian books to Christians - with many having ironically played a role in my still young evolution towards secular thought).
A few years after the shifts above, at age 26, I’d become a secular humanist - a label or phrase, I would only learn well after adopting the views that defined it in advance. For, as you may have noticed, my deconversion journey was a rather Christian one and with limited explicitly secular influences (outside a public education and university3). Apparently I've needed to invest a quarter of my life "reinventing the wheel" of some Enlightenment Age thinking rather than directly learning from history lol (e.g. I wish I'd read that Jefferson letter sooner). Nevertheless, this secular worldview has stuck with me a good 17 years and counting now. It's seen me through starting a career, the loss of a birth parent, health scares, marriage and more - and is still kicking.
Once again, to summarize simply my whole deconversion journey like at the start:
I unexpectedly stopped fearing what it would mean for me to lose my faith. And this in turn dramatically changed my ability to submit my Christian beliefs to critical thought and change them over time.
While there are myriad details I could share in addition to those above, I believe anything else I might share played a minor supporting role at best to what I‘ve already described here. In short, from the above foundation, everything else naturally followed upon further time and reflection. And so, to conclude: that’s my deconversion story in a nutshell.
Footnotes
(1) For example, I'd been persuaded by John Piper's argument that self-interest had a legitimate place in moral action in his book Desiring God. Now, imagining a secular life, this empowered me to consider how I might intrinsically still desire to think and act morally in the world - even without the extrinsic motivation of consequences from a divine parent. A view I would later come to recognize as Enlightened Self-interest, its name in ethical philosophy. By this, my worldview caught up with the moral development every adult should hopefully possess - graduating from "because Mommy/Daddy says so" onto the more independent "Because I care and choose to act accordingly."
(2) "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision." - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to His Nephew (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0021)
(3) I imagine that one import influence of my public education was taking "English 102 - Argument" at the local community college. For it was in this course that I, as yet a Christian, became familiar with a handful of common logical fallacies. As these left a lasting impression, I believe this helped sharpen my critical thinking skills and would ultimately impact how I re-examined my Christian beliefs down the road.