I was raised in your standard “good Christian home.” Like whenever I got in trouble, my parents would always ask, how do you think Jesus feels about what you did? And still, when I drive to work I pass by signs that say “turn to Jesus.” I’m not even from the bible belt, and I remember how the church and my parents hated Harry Potter.
I can still remember being shamed for being born a girl. I have long, thick curly hair that my mother always brushed out and put in a ponytail because the church felt I was drawing attention to myself. Another time I got a cut on the outside of my shoulder. To avoid getting blood on my shirt, I pulled the sleeve just enough to avoid getting blood on it. My teacher immediately said I was distracting the boys in my classroom and to cover my shoulder. I was in second grade.
I started going to a youth group in about 3rd grade. I was totally that awkward kid with a bad haircut, glasses, and my nose in a book. I saw this youth group singing cheesy songs and having bible discussions. I felt they accepted people unconditionally. Which was perfect because I wanted friends.
Right around this time, my younger brother was adopted. His biological mother put him into adoption because he has epilepsy and is unable to care for his condition. The church had a discussion with us where they said they didn't want us to come to a service because if he had a seizure, that would disrupt the service. The church also ran a school. We stopped going to church but we still went to that school.
When I was in 5th grade the economy tanked. My parents switched us to a public school because the private school charged a $1000 per student, for a year of admission. I was upset at the idea of leaving all my friends and I remember being told that it was likely I would be bullied for being Christian. Not only that, I was told to avoid the non-Christians and that they were terrible people.
On my first day, I was genuinely shocked when I realized no one cared that I was Christian. I took a chance and went to talk to non-Christians and was shocked that they were nice people. Still, I held onto my Christian faith because it was all I had known. As I got older, I got exposed to horrific things that happen around the world. Despite being 4 when 9/11 happened, I was kept in such a tight bubble, I didn't know about it until I was in 5th grade.
Still it got me thinking, if such horrific things happen around the world, why was the church charging a $1000 a year for admission, just for that money to go to the church? When you get exposed to the nasty underbellies of a lot of religious organizations, you get left with a nasty taste in your mouth. I started to doubt my faith because of the politics, lies, hypocrisy, and exposure of the world outside of the church, and entered a battle of “Am I a good Christian?” that lasted years.
The nail in the coffin was when I was 14, and my parents told me that when I was a baby I was inappropriately touched by someone that my parents trusted enough to adopt him. My father caught him redhanded when he heard my screams, and my parents formally reversed the adoption.
I was lost and looking for advice. So I talked to a girl I was still friends with from my former Christian school. She told me to forgive him because that is what Jesus would want and I’d better if I wanted to go to heaven. I decided that was the nail in the coffin. I was so hurt that I had a lengthy discussion with myself, I ended that conversation as an Agnostic.
I didn't want to call myself an Atheist just yet. There’s so many negative connotations attached to Atheism, that I was quite an Atheist. Ifigured if my parents found out about my lack of faith, I could pull the classic “I’m not an Atheist, I’m Agnostic.”
When I was 18, l decided I can make my own decisions and if my family doesn’t like that I am Atheist, thats their problem. I haven't told my parents that I am Atheist and I don’t think I ever will. My parents still don’t believe in evolution. Not only that, but they got super upset at me when I told them I don’t plan on having kids.
I think my reason for being Atheist, goes much deeper than my falling out with my former friend. Historically, a lot of Christians had used the bible to justify slavery. And I have no idea how to interpret the stories in the bible where God commands people to commit genocide, or God destroys populations and wipes out cultures, and tears entire cities to the ground, or floods the world sparing only one family and a bunch of animals. But even fast-forwarding to today, it feels like so many Christians I met were content to pick-and-choose the parts of the bible they would follow. To a lot of people, the idea of condemning someone for getting a divorce is unthinkable, but discriminating and denying rights to people based on their sex, gender, or race is acceptable.
There is a clear double standard in many Christian denominations, and because of that, churches are actually not a place for fellowship for everyone. One person told me, in a conversation we were having about abortion and human rights, that if a child gets raped, she has to keep the baby. I know that these attitudes are reflective of the extreme and fundamentalist side of religious belief, but regardless, these were people I personally knew and connected with that said this to me, and I never thought I had come from a place and had relationships with people who could demonstrate such intolerance.
Fundamentally, morally, and ethically, I cannot follow a religion that would advocate such hate, judgment, and ignorance. I know that a lot of Christians do a tremendous deal of good things in the world, and advocate on behalf of many oppressed people, but I still really sorely miss the critical conversations where these double standards exist in the bible, the interpretation, and how that enacts itself in the world, and wish for more Christian leaders to speak about these issues. So maybe it should be up to me to fix the church, but it got to a point where I started to realize this kind of hate is larger than just a problem that needs to be fixed, but that it is ingrained into a really big part of Christian culture in North America.
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