Thoughts of a Doubting Christian ✓

My Story, Part Two

My mother is Presbyterian and my father is Roman Catholic; I was baptized Presbyterian. For the first few years of my life, we went to a small Presbyterian church, the oldest church in our town. I don't remember much except for vague memories of vacation Bible school during the summer and my younger brother crying every time we went to Sunday service. (Looking back on it, he was never a fan of religion. He identifies as agnostic; he told me recently that he doesn't know if there's a God and doesn't really care one way or the other).

Around the time that I started elementary school, our church began to splinter when it hired a new pastor whom much of the congregation disliked. Eventually, our family stopped going to church, while an offshoot group formed their own church on the other side of town. We never ended up finding a new church community, but my parents continued to make God and Jesus a part of our lives, even as we veered off the traditional path.

I took most Christian teachings at face value until I hit middle school. You know the age when you start thinking for yourself and deciding whether you're going to keep or discard your religious beliefs? For me, it was during seventh grade, when I was about twelve. My best friend was the stereotypical Christian girl in the best possible sense of the phrase. She was honest and compassionate, humble and modest, a well-organized student, and not controlled by her desires. She was well-loved by everyone in our grade and had so much faith in God.

Suddenly, I saw all of the ways in which I was lacking, and I desired to be just like her. I finished the entire Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in a just few weeks and began to study the Bible in my free time. I bombarded my parents with religious questions, prayed frequently, and asked my parents to take me to church. I felt as if I was finally doing what God wanted me to do.

Unfortunately, I quickly hit a wall in my progress. It seemed as though every time I opened the Bible, I was destined to find a passage that wreaked havoc on my soul and filled my mind with doubts. (Why did God condone the Canaanite genocide? Why are there entire books of the Bible dedicated to His wrath and fury? Why do women have to be submissive to their husbands? How come slavery was allowed in the Bible? Does God truly believe that being gay is wrong?) Instead of bringing me closer to God, the Bible alienated me from Him every time I opened up its pages. Is this supposed to happen, I wondered, or am I just a bad Christian?

Things were made a thousand times worse when my friend lent me a book called God Girl: Becoming the Woman You're Meant to Be by Hayley DiMarco. I have many strong thoughts on this book now that I'm older (and they aren't good), but at the time, I took it as truth. I began to struggle with very strong feelings of guilt and shame. Was I displeasing God by cursing, dressing "immodestly," or daydreaming about cute boys? Did He hate me for being unable to control my desires? How often did I need to ask His forgiveness for my "sins"? If I continued to disobey, did that mean I had never been saved by Jesus in the first place? I fell into depression for the first time in my life, and it lasted almost a year. Instead of granting me wisdom and peace, religion imbued me with strong feelings of guilt, worthlessness, shame, and dirtiness.

Thankfully, little by little, my brief religious fervor began to dim. My friend who embodied the "good Christian girl" changed schools, and we quickly lost touch, even though I desperately tried to keep in touch with her. I stopped reading the Bible; it gathered dust on my shelf. I had deep spiritual discussions with my mother, who helped assuage some the guilt gnawing at my soul, and slowly, the depression fell away. Ironically, my connection to God was strengthened the farther I moved from organized religion. For a time, all was well.

Yet, the shame and guilt kept creeping its way back into my life. My freshman year of high school, I made another close friend who embodied the stereotype of the "good Christian girl." This time, it took until my sophomore year for me to start wondering if I should mould myself to be more like her. However, I was mature enough to have a decent grasp on my beliefs and a healthy amount of skepticism, so the turmoil was less drastic. For example, she was unable to change the fact that I support the LGBTQ+ community — I discuss this at great length in my first book, Christian and an Ally — or my opinion that men and women should be equal partners in marriage.

Unfortunately, the gradual increase of my religiosity again brought destructive changes in my life. Until I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, I thought that my constant worrying, stress, and depression were because I had poor faith in God. I absorbed the toxic Christian teachings on sexuality, so I felt guilty and horrified every time I had a sexual thought or was turned on. I was so afraid of disappointing God that I completely avoided masturbation, erotica, porn, and anything to do with sex. (To this day, I'm still struggling with the toxicity of what Christianity taught me about sex and sexuality.)

I feared God's wrath, I feared going to hell, I feared that everyone I knew and loved was going to hell, and I feared sinning. Any time I began to question Christian teachings, I shamed myself endlessly and was sure that God would punish me for straying from His truth. (Once again, I'm still struggling with this web of fear, even after I've learned to question and find the flaws in religion.) In all of these ways, US-Christian culture pushed me further from good mental health and from knowing God's love, instead of healing me and bringing me closer to God's loving embrace.

The most recent religious turmoil I experienced was during college. This turmoil is what inspired me to start Christian and an Ally; I needed a way to get my thoughts and beliefs down on paper, as well as a legitimate excuse for the sheer amount of hours I was putting into biblical research that should've been devoted to homework. For the third time in my life, I tried to get more involved in the US-Christian community . . . and for the third time in my life, I found myself quickly backpedalling and getting the hell out of there.

For the first few months at university, I joined a campus worship group. Everything seemed great at first: I met lots of new people, I started going regularly to church for the first time since I was a toddler, I joined a Bible study group, and I began to reexamine my old dusty copy of the Bible. But alas, everything was not as it appeared on the surface. The girls in the group liked to gossip and pass judgment on others; everyone had very stereotypical views of gender roles and marriage; the church acted modern on the surface but was secretly very traditional; and everyone in the group was horrified when I said I was an ally of the LGBTQ+ community. Even one of my old high school friends in the group said that she believed being gay was sin, which made me sad because she used to be supportive.

This time, instead of letting others tell me what God wanted, I went out and searched for it myself. What resulted was hundreds of hours of research, my first-ever finished book (Christian and an Ally), and the realization that I could no longer call myself Christian in the way that most devout US-Christians define it. I had completely reformed my worldview, for better or for worse, and there was no going back a fourth time.