The Search for Meaning and Unexpected Turns

I was extremely fascinated by the readings this last week on the search for religious meaning in adolescence and emerging adulthood and how that changed. I consider myself to be something of a poster child for how religious indoctrination as a child may not work in the long term... but it can work for a remarkably long time if it's tied to enough unhealthy things. I spent the majority of my life as a Christian until one day I was not. Most of my friends have had various levels of this, having been raised in one faith or another, believing it to various degrees until they suddenly woke up one day and realized that they did not. It was never that sudden, of course. Sometimes it feels sudden but you can always trace it back pretty far when you look.

One of the important elements about searching for meaning has to do with not only religious affiliations but political affiliations. After all, youth are searching for their values and religion is only one way you express that. If you are raised in a proper evangelical family then religion and politics are basically inseparable. You can measure my personal movement towards atheism/agnosticism/what-have-you by my movement from conservative politics to a liberal perspective. This is certainly not true with everyone -- there are very liberal identifying Christians out there in the world -- but they have a much harder time fitting into the tribe these days.

So for my sharing of journal entries this week, I thought I'd juxtapose. I blog regularly myself and I actually did an entire series on what it was like to leave Christianity as an adult (message me if you're interested in the link) but I think that my first post about that initial moment has a lot to say about what it was like to experience that shift in values initially. My initial plan was to use one from my Baby B days to compare and contrast, but for a variety of reasons, I rarely actually wrote about God growing up -- at least not in any prolonged sense. It was more of a consistent, all around you sort of thing. There were a lot of inclusions of "God is good" or that "God allowed something to happen" but it was rare for me to engage with it in a prolonged sense at the time. It was more the water I swam in, it didn't need to be talked about.

So without further ado, my entry from a couple years back.

I don’t think I believe this anymore.

I couldn’t even whisper those words, I typed them out on a keyboard, to my best friend, in what seemed to be the longest sentence of my entire life. I don’t know how long it took me to type it but I can tell you that it hurt, every single word of it.

You know the Roadrunner cartoons? Where the Coyote would be running across a canyon of some kind, so sure of himself, and all of a sudden he looks down and realizes that there’s nothing holding him up? Real life doesn’t work that way. We all know that gravity doesn’t wait for you to notice it. But sometimes truth does. One really honest look and before you know it, you’re in freefall with a lot of unknowns at the bottom.

I never thought it would happen that way. I never thought it would happen at all. I spent 29 years of my life with this thing, this faith. This was who I was. It may not be fair to say 29 years, I suppose. Infants don’t have faith as such. But I was in church from the first week I was out of the hospital. I have no memory of ever having a moment of accepting my faith. It was just always there, for better or worse, like my parents or weather or gravity. These things could work for or against you but they were always there. There was no alternative. I grew up, I questioned, I thought about things, I changed how I looked at things but I never thought I could decide against them. It was how the world was formed. It was too big of a story to rewrite, it was too much a part of my DNA to undo. The framework could be creatively worked within but never torn down.

Except one day David looked at my dating profile and I was fascinated, I wanted to say hello. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a Christian, I was okay with that. I had already determined that the importance of that trait was exaggerated. He was married and in an open relationship with his wife. Understand that I had many friends in all kinds of relationships. I was at least somewhat familiar with the concept of polyamory, and open relationships but these things were for other people. They were wrong. I could (and did) love my friends who were in these relationships, of course. Just like I loved my friends who were gay or who were living with their significant others or whatever the thing might be. But there was a dividing line and it was important, it was vital, it was simple. I could love them but I could never be them. Those things couldn’t be an option for me. And that day I looked at his profile and thought “I might want that. It’s possible. I want to know more about that.” I knew my framework wasn’t flexible enough for these things. I knew that there were compromises I couldn’t reasonably make and still be honest So I stopped and I took a look down. And I admitted the thing I had been avoiding for I wasn’t really sure how long.

I don’t think I believe this anymore.

That day I started falling. It was as scary as I thought and also less so. To be honest? It was a little bit of a relief. The fall was more honest than the running had been. There are still a lot of unknowns at the bottom. I’m learning to be okay with it. Sometimes the best you can do is say the most painful truth you have and see what comes of it.

As I said, I wrote this... well, it hasn't been two years yet but getting there. It's not really scary anymore. While this entry doesn't get into it as much as others, I would say it's probably important to highlight that while my being open to my relationship with one of my now partners did push me to this realization, it was not about him (and he did not know for probably 6 months or so, as that seemed like a lot to put on someone :P). 

In general, the concepts we discussed about the changing generational views of the church anecdotally ring true to me based on my experiences and the experiences of many people I've met. But it was really wonderful to read studies and other evidence that backed that up.