From Evangelical to Nonbeliever

I was born and raised into a Charismatic Evangelical Christian culture. My dad and grandad are both preachers. “God is real” came as natural to me as “the sky is blue”, because that’s how I was raised. We attended church regularly. I saw speaking in tongues, God “speaking” through people, “miracles”, peoples lives transformed, etc. To head off a lot of the common assumptions, nothing bad ever really happened to me in church culture. Most of the people were genuinely kind people, I didn’t have a lot of negative baggage from being a pastor’s kid. I made great friends through church and church camps and, to this day, have many great memories. I still genuinely like many of the people I grew up in church with and consider my Christian family generally loving, good people (although many of them don’t know where I fully stand yet). The only real negative I remember from church is being afraid of burning in Hell.
As to my personal walk, I was pretty devout. Most people that knew me would be shocked to know I no longer believe. I read the bible often, I prayed constantly, I always asked Jesus to forgive me of my shortcomings, I didn’t drink, smoke, do any drugs (to this day, I’ve only had a moderate amount of alcohol and nothing else), I was active as a youth group leader, was a church camp counselor, was president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school and college, was willing to witness to kids at school and led a few kids to Christ. I only dated girls who were “on-fire for God” Christians. I didn’t have any sexual contact until I pledged to marry my wife and I generally tried to live as Christ-like as possible. I’m not trying to say I was perfect, but to explain I was a true believer that genuinely tried to be the best Christian I could be, not some edgy pastor’s kid that was always a trouble-maker.
I hope this doesn’t come across as arrogant, but I think people would generally consider me to be an intelligent person. I always enjoyed learning as much as I could about every subject that I could and enjoy learning about how the world works. Earlier in my life, though, it was simply a prerequisite to me that the Bible was the perfect word of God. So, everything had to be forced through that lens. For example, as I studied the evidence for Evolution I would accept “micro-evolution” and would accept speciation for some animals, but I refused to accept humans shared a common ancestor with other great apes, because that would contradict the Bible. That’s the way I thought and I never question it. Also, I was raised in a Christian bubble. I didn’t even know that different Christian denominations have such different views on the Bible until middle school (I didn’t know there were atheist until I was in high school), because the Bible was the true word of God, and God wasn’t the author of confusion. This changed when I started having lunch conversations with a Church of Christ kid who would explain how their church was. I couldn’t believe the difference and that they even thought we were probably going to Hell! He explained how women were to keep silent in church, and I thought that couldn’t be in the Bible! Imagine my surprise, when he showed me the passage. This is the earliest I can remember having any questions at all about the way I was raised to believe.
Now for the beginnings of my deconversion: Having been raised in such a bubble, I tended to just write off non-Christians as bad, evil people (as hard as that is for me to admit today). Homosexuals were in rebellion against God. Muslims and atheists were doing the work of Satan, etc. It was easy to have these beliefs, because I didn’t actually know any homosexuals (at least I didn’t know that I did) or any Muslims. However, this changed when I entered college. As I met people from different backgrounds, I started to realize that many of them were also genuinely good people who were simply raised differently than me or happened to be attracted to the same sex, etc. This made me so sad for them, because, believing what I believed, I truly thought they were going to burn in Hell, despite being good people. This made me ask myself these two questions: 1. How do I know the version of religion I was raised in is the right one and how can I prove its truth to people who weren’t just raised in it and don’t accept the Bible? 2. If it is true, can I really just stand by and do nothing, while these people go to Hell? The weight of those two questions started me on a mission. I was going to consume every bit of information about Christianity and challenges to Christianity that I could, develop the perfect argument in favor of Christianity (because I was still convinced that it just had to be true) and prevent as many people as I could from going to Hell.
My starting point was rereading the Bible piece by piece. I would read passages, think about what they meant to me and how they could be interpreted. I also began to realize how horrible some of the things in the Bible really were. I would then find atheist criticisms of certain passages and Christian apologetic responses to those criticisms. I would watch numerous professional debates between both Christians and non-Christians and even between Christians of different denominations on various topics. After a while of this, I had to admit to myself that the non-Christian answers seemed to make more sense. And the Christian vs. Christian debates were probably an even bigger hit to my faith, because I saw how easy it was to take the Bible and make it say completely different things and how unclear and contradictory it actually was when taken as a whole. It took a while, but, little by little, cracks in my faith started to show. I would even stop searching, because I wanted so desperately to hang on to my faith (that’s something a lot of Christians don’t understand. Leaving isn’t easy. I had no reason to, but I can’t just change what I’m convinced of and what I’m not).
Another thing I did during this time was reconsider a lot of my personal experiences with the church and try to honestly evaluate the miracles and experiences I had witnessed in church. I studied, for example, charismatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit and compared them to other religions. I considered how sufficient the evidence was of the miraculous things I had witnessed actually being attributable to God and, through that, learned a lot about common fallacies, such as the Argument from Incredulity, Confirmation Bias, Counting the Tits and Ignoring the Misses, etc. Long story short, I found that I didn’t have good reason to believe any of the things I had witnessed, or experienced, were actually from God.
The other big thing was prayer. I realized that I had never actually heard God’s voice like so many people claimed to hear. I just assumed that was something that would come as I got older and grew in my faith. But if I could just hear from God, none of the other stuff would matter. So, I cried out and begged God to reveal himself to me, to show me the right way, even if it was not what I thought it was, and give me the strength to bring others to know him. To this day, I’ve never gotten an answer.
So, after countless hours of prayer, Bible reading, consuming information and reflection, I failed to find sufficient reason to believe that the claims of Christianity were true. Even then, I didn’t fully leave the faith, mostly because of the moral foundation it provided in my life. I basically adopted a position of “Even if it’s not literally true, it provides a good moral foundation for people and helps people, and I’m not going to judge other people for believing differently, as long as they are good people”. This worked until I started watching debates and reading on secular morality and understanding many of the problems with religious-based morality. For example, learning that it’s better to make a child understand how their actions impact themselves and others to develop empathy and a clearer understanding of the consequences of actions, instead of just appealing to “God says so” or “I say so”, or “Santa is watching”. The final straw was when my girlfriend volunteered us to teach children’s Sunday School. We taught parts of Genesis and Exodus. The class was divided between 3-6 Grade, and K-2 (or something like that). We were teaching the Ten Commandments. We started with the older kids group. Most of them had already been taught them. So, when we asked what they were they could already list them. However, when we got to the young kids they had not been fully indoctrinated yet. They knew the obvious ones like “Don’t kill” and “Don’t steal”, but not many of the others. But something interesting happened, when we asked them what they thought the Ten Commandments were. Their answers were things like “Be kind to people”, “Treat people how you want to be treated”, “Share with people what you have”. As they began to answer, I began to realize that these 6-year-olds could come up with a better list of 10 commandments than God supposedly did. Is anyone really going to tell me that being kind to people isn’t a better creed to live by than “Don’t make graven images”? Those 6-year-olds taught me something that day. We’re not taking awful sinful people and giving them a moral foundation. We’re taking people that have the capacity to be good, people without any need for religion, and just brainwashing them into our world view. I informed my girlfriend that night that I could no longer be a Christian, but that I would respect her views and attend church, if she wanted. My only asks were that she read the Bible for herself and make her own decision, and not just believe because she was raised to or not believe because I didn’t, and that, if we got married, we raise our future kids to be openminded and come to their own conclusions.
We are now happily married nonbelievers. We are free from religious indoctrination and see the world with such wonder and possibility. I don’t claim to have all of the answers. I just know that I’m here on this Earth and I’m going to make the most of it and be the best person that I can be.