losing my religion: the disillusionment of christianity

how a dedicated, born-and-raised lutheran decided to stop going to church

I’m weary to send this - it’s been in my Substack drafts for over a year now, most of these musings were written in late 2023 and early 2024 - and I know that many of my real life friends and family might be upset or disappointed by these words. I feel like I should apologize, like I’m letting some people down. Maybe I’m even letting down my younger self.

But I’m almost thirty years old and I have a public platform and the world is burning down around us literally and physically. If I “meet Jesus” tomorrow, I stand firm in knowing that I am doing everything I can to live in love. Jesus flipped tables, and regardless of what I believe happens to us when we die, I feel called to love people. And in this day and age, loving people means calling out fascism and corruption and hypocrisy. It means loving your neighbor as yourself. It means calling out false idols. And I’ll be honest. I do believe that most Christians have turned Christianity into a false idol.

I don’t know if I believe in a god or an afterlife, but I sure as hell do not believe that the Christian Church is acting like Jesus would. And it fills me with rage.

I’m no longer afraid of his neglect, so why should I be afraid of his condemnation?

— Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (Novel) Vol. 3 by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù

intro.

When I was in college, I volunteered as a part of our university ministry for three years. I went to a Christian college, grew up in the Lutheran church, and was baptized as a tiny child when I was a few months old. I spent almost eight years of my life creating photo/video content for a Christian non-profit.

And writing those words feels like a story I’m telling about another person.

These days, I do not think about god regularly. I don’t pray. I don’t listen to worship music. I don’t go to church. In fact, I actively distance myself from Christianity, to the extent that Christian spaces make me uncomfortable. I can’t take a pastor’s sermon seriously. I can’t listen to a hundred people speaking the same prayers in unison. I cannot understand how millions of people can go to church every Sunday speaking about a loving god, preaching about how you should donate to the poor, and then turn around and vote for someone who is actively destroying minority communities and giving tax breaks to the rich.

Admittedly, a big reason I’ve become disillusioned by the church in recent years is because of conservatives. Because of the genocide against Palestine. Because of the police violence against Black people. Because of how people claim that wearing masks violates their freedom. The more time passes, the more of a disconnect there is between Jesus’s teachings and the actions and ideologies of the Christian church. And I am allowed to say that because I have studied the bible, I went to church religiously, I know Jesus. (Or at least, I used to.)

I no longer have patience for Christians who refuse to accept that the Church is corrupt. There is a wicked hypocrisy running through the modern Church that many Christians choose to ignore, and as someone who dedicated the first quarter of her life to being more Christ-like, I’m insulted and appalled that anyone would actually claim that modern Christianity is following Jesus’s teachings.

Sure sure, not all Christians. (Not all white people. Not all men. Etc. Etc. Etc.) But I no longer care enough for nuance. All of us Christian-adjacent people are responsible for the harm that Christian Church as a whole is doing to our world. Because Christianity has permeated our world in overwhelming ways. I don’t go to church anymore, I don’t use the label “Christian” at the moment, but I grew up in the church and I am a white woman and people I’ve associated with - my extended family and various acquaintances and my alma mater - are all Christians. I live in one of (the???) most powerful countries in the world that was built on Christianity, that is currently being run into the ground by Christianity. I have benefitted from the power of the Christian church. I cannot pretend that I am not apart of the problem. I cannot pretend like I am not causing harm, that I have caused harm, that people I associate with cause harm.

Ironically, I feel like I am closer now to being Christ-like than I ever was when I was actively a Christian. I feel like I’m infinitely more conscious of the consequences of my actions. I’m more interested in actually helping people. I donate more money when I’m able. I do more acts of service for my friends. I spend less time shaming myself and shaming others. I feel more freedom. I love harder.

But maybe I’m further from god because I don’t see him as the cornerstone of my life. I don’t wake up and think, Jesus died for my sins and now I am free to live a life of joy! I don’t care if I end up in heaven when I die, maybe because I don’t really believe in heaven anymore. Maybe for all my talk of false idols, I’ve begun to idolize the world we live in now, the people who love me, the beauty I see right in front of me. Maybe that means I no longer have faith.

Maybe I’ve stopped caring.

It’s difficult to worry about what God thinks of you, what you believe about God, when the devil is razing earth to the ground. When God’s chosen people are committing acts of unspeakable violence and hatred in the name of Jesus Christ, suddenly you find yourself a lot less interested in following Jesus.

— Feb 2025

I.

text from my friend who is and always has been an atheist

There are four types of people.

1. You grew up with a religious/spiritual family and thus you went to church (or the equivalent in your religion) frequently and believed in a god. And then you grew up and moved out and stopped believing in God and/or the church and/or religion.

2. You grew up in a religious/spiritual family and you continue to practice that to this day as an adult.

3. You did not grow up in a religious family and therefore you are still not religious and you do not think about these things frequently.

4. You did not grow up in a religious family and somewhere along the way as you spent more time on your own, you discovered religion and/or spirituality and/or God and it has become a cornerstone of your adult life.

While each of these are fascinating in their own way, I think one and four remain the most compelling. To become disillusioned by something that inhabited the deepest parts of your life and cast it out as you age. Or to become so moved by something that you’re learning about firsthand and build a life around that new, fragile thing. There’s something to be said about two, being steadfast in your faith and not wavering in your beliefs over decades, because it’s a powerful thing in itself. And in my personal experience, I am also compelled by three because I am always searching for a higher power or a spiritual entity or some bigger meaning in the universe, and so how do atheists navigate the world without that?

Then again, as I age, I find myself apart of the first category. Which is to say, I do not know what I believe in. I find myself leaning on agnosticism. So maybe I have more in common with the atheists than I once thought.

As I’ve met more and more people who fall under each of these categories, I find that I know less and less about religion and theology and spirituality. And in many ways…I don’t care.

II.

When I graduated high school, my biggest fear in life was that I would go to college and lose my religion and my relationship with God. Having grown up Lutheran, I went to church almost every Sunday for almost twenty years, and even though I didn’t love waking up at 7am on a weekend, I had no reason not to accept Jesus into my life. I took communion, I had my 8th grade confirmation, I had a community at church because all my friends were also religious. Not to mention my entire extended and immediate family were very strong Christians. At eighteen years old, I had seen people stray from God, and it was devastating to watch because Christianity was all I knew.

So I went to a Christian university. I found a new kind of Christianity that was different from Lutheranism, more spiritual, more physical. I started attending non-denominational churches with modern pop-rock worship bands and sermons that I actually paid attention to. I listened to modern worship music. I joined communities of people my age who preached about the power of Jesus Christ. I began working for a non-profit bible study organization that spread the gospel and grew to serve hundreds of campuses all over the country. I fell deeper and deeper into my faith in a way that shocked me. It thrilled me. I felt like I finally understood God.

Christianity comforted me. I found a community in the Church that gave me strength and hope and made me believe I could be better. That I could overcome the “brokenness” that lived within me. God explained the universe and the meaning of life and made me think that one day I would find true joy after death. And something in my spirit woke up when I heard worship music, like we were made to sing like this, together, forever.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I don’t believe that now. But the fact is, religion is a complex thing and so is God and as I’ve aged in the past five years, a lot has changed.

III.

A few years back I did a buddy read of The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis with one of my friends who studies theology and is a passionate Christian, with an emphasis on spirituality. We picked up this book because it’s a collection of thoughts that explore the question: if God is loving and all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in our world? Or alternatively, why do bad things happen to good Christian people?

When we worked through this book, it was early 2021, when the pandemic still involved social distancing and nobody had gotten vaccinated yet. We spent a few times a month sitting outside and chatting about theology and God. I had not been to church since before COVID started, over a year ago then, and I had stopped making religion apart of my daily life. I’ve never been good at praying or worshipping outside of church, but in the heat of the early days of the pandemic, my faith became practically irrelevant. It did not comfort me like it once had, and without a community of people encouraging me to continue, I stopped seeking God.

There isn’t some grand answer I gathered from Lewis’ book. I was interested in his thoughts because I respect him and I love his ideas about the afterlife, and at the time when I had racism and policing heavy on my mind, I wanted to see if anybody could explain the violence that was so engrained in our society. I don’t recall much of the book now, but essentially Lewis suggested that free-will played a major role in God’s lack of interference in our human problems. The mystical workings and logical trappings of the universe God created did not allow him to intervene in the way he wished to simply because he had given us the free will to be human.

That book was probably the last time I really engaged in my faith. Since then, and since the pandemic started, I still have only been to a physical church service twice in five years.

IV.

More and more I’m finding that a lot of the people I know who started in the church are leaving the church. A lot of my generation specifically have given up on religion and God, and I do believe that’s because the Church has a reputation for hurting people.

I’m not here to argue with you about the intentions of Christians or your home church or the community of Christians you belong to who “really do love everyone!” As I said before, religion is complex. And as I’ve grown - in age, in knowledge, in personal experience - I’ve come to a place where I really do separate the Church from God.

When I say “church” what do I mean? There’s the church building, a place you go to worship. Your local church community, a group of people you interact with who believe similar things to you, who support you personally and encourage your faith journey. The church overall, a broad way to reference Christians as a whole, people who believe in Jesus, who belong to a lot of little churches around the world, most of which you don’t know or interact with. And of course, the Church as an institution, specifically a group of leaders who are in charge of the little churches that tell the broader church how they should act and what they believe in accordance to God’s word and Jesus’ teachings.

I, and many of my peers, have been hurt by each of these. I have a friend whose church community turned out to be a toxic cult. Atheist friends who do not set foot in church because their seemingly-non-biblical identities have been demonized. Friends who get ostracized by their church community for their “modern values” and beliefs. I’ve seen the effects of the institution of the Christian church harming people with conversion therapy, with genocide, with condemnation. And I myself have left three separate church communities because each of those three head pastors acted immorally (or so the churches told us). All my life it has been proven over and over again that the Church - any church, all church - cannot be trusted. And that isn’t God’s fault, but it is in his name.

V.

Recently I’ve started talking more with my mom about adult things. In the past we had a lot of tension, as many mother-daughter relationships do, and I found it difficult to be open with her about myself and my life. For a long time, as I underwent personal changes in my identity, I wasn’t sure I could trust her to understand me in the way I needed at the time.

I’m lucky that I have such a wonderful family and I needn’t have worried. Each of them has grown to be nothing but supportive of me, my sexuality, my life choices, and my beliefs. Even if we don’t see the world exactly the same, they are always open-minded and interested in hearing my perspective. As I’ve talked more with my mom in recent years, we’ve discovered that we’ve been feeling a lot of the same things. We share a lot of beliefs and we didn’t even realize it.

Which is to say, a two summers ago, my mom and I got candid and had a conversation about religion.

I always thought of my parents as deeply religious people. They too grew up in strong Lutheran households, went to a Christian university, have spent the better part of their 30 year marriage going to church and serving in Christian organizations. Even though I didn’t witness their spirituality outwardly - Lutherans are very bad at this - I know that they believed in God very strongly.

So when Mom asked me where I was at with religion these days, I did worry that she wouldn’t understand. But you know what they say, the good lord works in mysterious ways…

I want to stress once again how lucky and blessed I am by my parents, and my mom specifically in this moment. The more we talked, the more we connected and the more we both resonated with what the other was saying. We’ve found it hard going to church. I haven’t wanted to, she hasn’t found a church that fits. We’ve found it difficult to relate to a lot of the Christians we know or we see around the world. There’s a disconnect between what we believe to be God’s message of love versus what the church is pushing (violence, hatred, self-orientation). Certain events have radicalized us like the pandemic, like the racist policing of the USA, like the anti-trans legislation. We see God, we recognize him everywhere, but we cannot condone the things that his people are supporting. It makes it difficult to spread the gospel when the gospel that is being pushed by most major organizations is to support a genocide.

VI.

I need to make it clear that I do not believe all Christians are bad people. I know the world isn’t black and white and some churches are doing great things and God’s message still continues to be love. But you have to understand that it is difficult being raised Christian, to be told over and over again that you should love your neighbor and be a good Samaritan and give your money to the poor and hang out with prostitutes and lepers and outcasts, and then when you try to live that truth in your own life, realize that your church does not agree with your lifestyle.

Believe it or not, I’ve found more love and acceptance from my atheist friends than most of the Christians I’ve met over the years. I’ve seen God in drag shows and protests and secular concerts. I think there is an inherent goodness to man that is drowned out by Christians yelling about sin and determinism.

What I find most frustrating as I age is that there is such a disconnect in my own experience between Christianity and God. I’m not here to discuss theology or what any denomination believes. When we talk about the majority of Christians, specifically conservatives, specifically traditional churches like Lutherans or Baptists or Protestants etc, I see a lot of hypocrisy. Argue all you want, but doesn’t it seem a little strange that God is Love and yet there are all these rules? Stipulations? Exceptions? Isn’t it odd that we are fighting so desperately to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven and yet we are creating someone else’s hell on earth?

VII.

There came a moment when I was going to church in post-grad when I felt the beginning of a shift. This was in the few years after graduation but before the pandemic (2018-2019). I had a difficult time going to church because I started to notice the glitches in the simulation, so to speak. I would start looking around during services, noticing how bizarre it is to witness a hundred people “worshipping” a god together. I started paying attention to how churches spend their money, how much money they ask for, what they’re doing with the money that is given to them. I started to reconcile my own view of the world - the things I felt called to and the people I wanted to serve - with what the church was preaching. It’s like when your third eye opens. The veil was lifted.

I felt so much disappointment.

Because in truth, I expect more from Christians. If we’re supposedly the best of us (now I’m not so sure), then why aren’t we as Christ-like as we preach? How can we convince ourselves - how can they convince themselves - that bombing hospitals is God’s will? How can they convince themselves that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a winter wonderland Christmas extravaganza holiday concert complete with laser lights and real snow and an orchestra and performers in the air is what Jesus would want?

To me, the root of God and Christianity and Jesus’ teachings is simple: love your neighbor as yourself. I don’t quite care about theology like I once did. I don’t actually know if the afterlife matters to me as much as our time here. I have so much love to give and receive in the next fifty or sixty years that I don’t need to spend a lot of time worrying about what happens after. Not yet anyway.

VIII.

Midnight Mass (2021)

Admittedly one of the things that has given me the most peace about religion and faith is Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass (2021). Even though it’s a horror show, and it does a great job portraying the hypocrisy of Bad Christians, it started me on a path that I still think about from time to time.

There is a scene, I can’t recall what episode, where two characters are discussing the afterlife, trying to answer the age old question: what happens when we die? The first character to answer has lost his faith and no longer believes in a heaven or an afterlife. He speaks on the magic of science, how our brains simply cease to function and that is the end. The second character, a devout Christian (and one of the few good ones in the show), details her heaven where everyone is loved.

At the time of watching this, I was still contemplating religion as I had just read The Problem of Pain a few months before. And this scene shook me to my core. Flanagan does such a fantastic job of making both ideas seem not only plausible, but probable. Depending on the day, I may believe either one. I thought it sounded nice to cease to exist. I thought it sounded nice to spend eternity loved with people I love. And though we cannot confirm if either of those things happen, that is the power of faith. That you will not have an answer, but you must believe something regardless.

I think so many Christians have fallen into the habit of looking to Heaven while earth is stuck in hell. I grew up being told to look beyond earthly things, to not be tempted by this world, that God’s kingdom is where we are meant to spend the rest of our days. But even if that’s true, surely this, what’s happening right now here on earth, matters. Surely our deeds here will follow us, or else there is no reason for us to be on earth in the first place. Unless of course, the reason we are here is to love one another. To enjoy each other’s company. To learn, to live, to breathe. Believe it or not, you can prepare for a Heavenly life (if you so choose) while also caring for the people (and plants and animals and earth) of this world. In fact, I think that’s kinda the point. It doesn’t have to be a test, it can simply be a gift. But the beauty of the gift is that it tests us anyway.

Midnight Mass VII, “Revelation”

Where am I now?

The truth is, I don’t know.

It’s clear based on what I’ve wrote thus far that I have known a god. I would truly love to believe in an afterlife, and some days I think I do. But I live in fear (in freedom?) that after this is over, we End. I think a lot of religions overlap, so much so that there may only be one god. I believe that if there is a god, God is love and that we are called, regardless of religion, to love one another and to be kind. I believe the Church as an institution needs to be more accepting, to practice what it preaches, to rediscover what Christ-like means, to help people better. I believe there are good Christians and bad Christians and good Atheists and bad Atheists and that religion actually doesn’t equate to morality. I believe in being pro-life…but only because we should fight for the freedom to get an abortion, for a living wage, for people of all identities to be safe to express themselves as they see fit, for regulations that slow the damage of climate-change, for an end to prison slavery and human trafficking, for an end to colonialism in all its forms, for gun control that we might stop seeing children get gunned down in schools, for free healthcare, for trans-inclusive laws and spaces and healthcare that they might get to live the lives they want and deserve, for a free Palestine that celebrates the lives of Palestinians the way they want to live. I believe that I still have a lot to learn and that I need to be better and more selfless and that I’m not perfect, that I’m not a good example of Christ-like behavior. I don’t know that I’d call myself a Christian today because that word has caused irreparable damage and it sends a bad message and I do not want to associate with those people at the moment.

But above all, I believe in love. And honestly isn’t that a religion all its own?