Earlier this year, I stopped writing and went off social media for quite some time. The public reasons given for that digital hermitage were true but incomplete. The full truth is, my crisis of faith was far deeper than I let on.
Shortly after the deep exhale following the presidential inauguration and then the disorienting process of coming to grips with being a full-time dad, I took some time to take stock of my life. That’s when I had the first of a string of troubling recent epiphany.
Yes, I’d moved from the fundamentalism of my Pentecostal background to conservative evangelicalism at Moody Bible Institute.
Then to moderate evangelicalism at Toccoa Falls College.
Then to “post-conservative evangelical” at Baylor University.
Then to “post-evangelical” or “ex-vangelical” upon arrival in Houston.
Then into Mainline Protestantism via The Episcopal Church.
Yes, where I’d spiritually come into was a drastic improvement over any of the spiritual expressions I’d tried before.
Nevertheless, it became clear that my spiritual belief system simply wasn’t up to the task of dealing with my personal history of religious trauma, sexual trauma, and the intersection thereof.
My spiritual paradigm still lacked the necessary imagination to move beyond my cultural and intellectual horizons.
My faith snapped and was dead.
From around Lent to Pentecost, I secretly existed somewhere between atheism and agnosticism. That may not sound like a long time for most people, but it felt like an eternity.
Many of my friends who’ve de-converted report feeling an incredible peace as they emerged into a purely secular perspective. That was not my experience.
Finally I picked back up Greg Boyd’s book, Letters from a Skeptic, which I’d begun again late last year and never finished. Something on an intellectual level clicked back into place.
Like it or not–at that moment I decidedly did not–there’s just something about Jesus and the Bible’s basic redemption Story that won’t let me go.
(Insert condescending Calvinist joke here.)
My heart remained heavy and my soul was still feeling left for dead, but my mind picked my faith up off the mat and said, “Let’s get to work.”
I began reading books at a clip not done since undergrad, which is saying something for a guy with five learning disabilities who’s taking care of an unvaccinated baby in quarantine.
Shortly thereafter I had the first mystical experience of my life.
The unsightly truth? It was drug-induced.
Despite asking for a low dosage of Delta-8 with calming CBD that would basically just help me relax, one of my friends who’s knowledgeable in this sort of thing suspects my supplier gave me Cajun food with an ungodly amount of THC and probably infused it with mushrooms.
Suffice to say, I did not consent and it was not a pleasant experience.
Back in my Pentecostal background, they loved quoting that passage in the Book of Joel about old men dreaming dreams and young men seeing visions. Well, I’m right down the middle at 36-years-old, so I guess it makes sense that I did both.
I don’t care to share the specifics of that experience, but it was a schema-rocking complete mindfuck… and I vividly remember it all.
The comedian Frank Caliendo does a Bill Walton impersonation in which he describes a drug trip: “I remember being at Berkeley… I could smell colors. I could feel sounds. Has there ever been a player better than Detlef Schrempf?”
I resonate.
All I wish to share is that it confirmed the big picture contours of my Christian faith, but also subverted the specifics regarding just about everything I’d ever been taught.
The priest in Rudy says to him, “Son, in 35 years of religious studies I’ve come up with only two hard, incontrovertible facts. There is a God, and I’m not Him.”
Yup. That about captures it.
In the days and weeks that followed, I discreetly made some phone calls for spiritual wisdom.
At first they all assumed I was just baked out of my mind, but as they heard the stories and how it impacted me most of ’em changed tunes and encouraged me to accept these experience as a valid encounter with the Holy Spirit.
But, being the Enneagram 5w4 that I am, I ended up rejecting that advice and increasingly became skeptical of the veracity of those experiences.
To quote Han Solo, “Hey, it’s me!”
The thick irony is not lost on me of rejecting the role of experience due to one’s experiences, but ya know what? I can’t shake it.
Growing up in the batshit crazy world of fundamentalist Republican Pentecostalism with all of its conspiracy theories and claims of direct revelation from God, I learned to be acutely distrustful of mysticism and talk about a “personal relationship with God” <– which is novel language as of the Jesus People Movement in the early-1970s, BTW. Do with that what you will.
No, to this day I unapologetically place my trust in reason as my primary decision-making apparatus rather than feelings and experience, which I find fickle and untrustworthy.
At the same time, it occurred to me that true intellectual integrity in this situation must be holistic and integrated, involving a humble acknowledgement about the possibility that there was some kind of real mystical truth communicated that surpassed my skeptical disposition.
Remember the train station scene in Deathly Hallows Part II where Harry asks, “Professor, is this all real… or is it just happening inside my head?” Dumbledore replies, “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry. Why should that mean it’s not real?”
Eventually I decided upon a middle-way forward.
While I wouldn’t accept these mystical experiences outright, I would use them as inspiration. I’d use these experiences to fuel a critical reexamination of just about everything I thought I knew about the Christian faith.
That’s what I’ve been privately up to ever since.
At this point, I remain pretty well convinced of the truth of all the basic creedal stuff, but my heart remains desperately heavy and my spirit continues to be broken.
Another one of those recent epiphanies is this:
At every possible turn I seem to disagree with the enculturation and implicit values that nobody ever communally recites during a worship service, puts in a doctrinal statement, or tells you about when you first agree to follow Jesus during an evangelistic message.
I love Jesus but cannot put into words how much I feel estranged from American Christianity.
This year I’ve come to accept that it’s not about the theology, history, philosophy, or psychology I’ve deep-dived so much the past 15 years.
My core problems these days are instead about cultural anthropology: gender norms, power structures, social etiquette, cultural expectations, nationalistic rituals, taboos regarding appearance and rhetoric, honor-shame culture, presuppositions about how we understand and interact with this compilation of Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman sacred texts, etc.
It would seem I intuitively zig every time the underlying Christian culture zags.
FYI – No, by “Christian culture” I don’t mean implicitly mean just American conservative evangelicalism.
As just one example, yeah, I have grave concerns about the sex-negative messages of evangelical Purity Culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, but I have just as many issues with the sex-negative precedents established by Augustine back in the 4th and 5th centuries.
Have none of these people read Song of Songs? I now believe The Way of Jesus contains way more wisdom and flexibility regarding sex than almost anyone wants to admit.
(In my experience, the traditionalists like to defensively skip right past Scripture’s sexual flexibility and the revisionists like to condescendingly dismiss its sexual wisdom.)
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
*sigh*
I love God and apparently am back to being a dedicated follower of Jesus, albeit with a new imagination about the possibilities of what that means.
Yet I still cannot seem to find a way to peacefully exist within faith communities that are grounded in the unstated cultural assumptions of Christianity regardless of all its diverse forms.
High church or low church, historic or restorationist, affluent or impoverished, liberal or conservative, educated or uneducated, multi-ethnic or homogeneous… ? It doesn’t seem to matter.
There’s always slightly different nuances and ideological twists, of course, but beneath it all these religious communities all have the same cultural norms that my conscience rejects.
Just this past week I got blasted by a priest for having an “unnecessarily contrarian voice” when, in fact, I’d been tactfully holding back despite my firm conviction that the Church needs more contrarian voices and not less. Sure, I believe he actually meant well but, Jiminy Christmas, I just have no resonance with all this extra-biblical cultural stuff.
I’ve pretty well decided that Christian culture is the absolute worst thing in the world, but there is still a remnant of Jesus followers who don’t suck. So far as I can tell, however, the way they survive seems to be keeping quiet OR accepting a lifestyle of perpetually living on the fringes of their faith communities. In other words, play nice or stay out of the way.
So, where does that leave me?
Quite honestly, I’m not sure. All I know is my faith died and was resurrected already in 2021. We’re not out of the woods yet but, then again, it’s only mid-August.
