This is the story of my deconversion. Call it a testimony or whatever you will. I posted this on Ex-Christian.net and received several comments and encouragements. This sums up my life to this point.
My deconversion story
Where do I begin? I had my Christian testimony all nice and neatly packaged, and I had it all well-rehearsed. I’ve been free for about a year-and-a-half now, and while I have shared my story with many people, it is still not nearly as nice and neat as my sixteen years as a Christian.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist home. My mom has been a staunch conservative from the day she was born, though my dad had a period of time when he was a liberal (now he strongly refutes any liberal ideas, going out of his way to attack liberalism sometimes). My parents took me to church, read me stories from the Bible, and even had me memorize Bible passages starting at a very young age. I have always been seen as intelligent and gifted, and could memorize Bible passages pretty easily. When I was seven, our church had a revival the week before Easter. It was during that time that I felt “the tug of the Holy Spirit,” and though I came forward Thursday night at the revival, the preacher wanted to make sure that my feelings were genuine. That night after the service my mom sat down with me and talked with me about it, and I prayed to ask Jesus into my heart. I came forward for my public profession of faith on Easter Sunday itself, and was baptized by immersion two weeks later. My parents were so happy.
We lived in Utah when I was saved, and a couple of years later we moved to Missouri so my dad could pursue his doctorate. We quickly got involved in a church in the city we lived in. My mom is a pianist, and the church just happened to be looking for a pianist. She accepted the position and would end up being the church pianist until we moved away eleven years later. My dad started teaching Sunday School. By this time his political beliefs were already starting to change. He had voted for Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, but was finally starting to turn conservative. In the 1992 election he voted for Perot, and for Republicans every election after that. As his turn to conservative became more apparent, so did his teaching material. It didn’t take long before other church members came to view him as the resident fundamentalist.
I was in their shadow for many years until I was old enough to join the youth group. During the summer after eighth grade, our youth group went on a mission trip around the state, performing a series of dramatic sketches designed to be a witnessing tool. While on that trip, I underwent some radical changes (for many years I would label them as God working in my life), even going so far as to telling the youth minister that I felt called into some kind of ministry. I was a completely different person after that trip. As I grew older, many parents of other kids in the youth group saw me as a role model, always complimenting my maturity and confessing that they wish their kids acted more like me. I was starting to become very active in youth activities and around the church in general, and everyone in the church liked me.
When I was a senior in high school, there was a guy from a ministry organization who came to our church and told us about an idea called cell groups. A “cell group” was a group of teenagers who got together and talked about issues affecting their lives. These groups were led by the teens themselves, and were designed to be a comfortable setting in which we could share the Gospel. When the groups reached a consistent fifteen members in size, they would split into two groups and continue to grow. This would ensure the group was never too large to fit in a person’s home. I jumped at the opportunity, and told my youth minister that I wanted to be a cell group leader. The guy who presented it to us overheard me, and he said that I was the kind of person he had in mind when he thought of a good leader. For that year, I literally devoted my life to leading that group. I would pore over material for hours thinking of a good topic to present to the group, as well as how to present it. I diligently called the members of our group every week to see how they were doing and remind them of that week’s meeting. I had a buddy that I had known ever since he had moved to Missouri, and I knew he wasn’t a Christian. Neither one of us had a brother, so he and I had basically become brothers, and I was concerned for his salvation. I persuaded him to come to a group meeting, and during that meeting he prayed to accept Jesus into his life. I was so excited that I couldn’t even sleep at all that night.
Eventually I graduated from high school, and that summer I went to a Christian camp and “surrendered” to the pastoral ministry, planning to devote my life to the spreading of their poison. I had also been accepted to a Christian college, and so after that summer I moved away to the Bible Belt. My very first year of college was extremely rough. During the fall semester I lost one grandfather to bone cancer, and during the spring semester I lost the other to leukemia. I was on antidepressants and was seeing a counselor for a few months, and it took me awhile before I was finally able to move on. In the spring semester I met an attractive young woman who was a music major (the same degree my mom had) and she and I hit it off. We ended up having several classes together before she decided to major in nursing instead and transferred out of the college. We were still dating and saw each other on a regular basis, though. My father was offered a teaching position in the history department in that college starting the next fall and he decided to take it. This was a great event for me, as I no longer had to pay any tuition (which was nice considering I ended up being in college for a total of five years). However, it did mean that I was back under his shadow.
I don’t know exactly when my doubts started. I know I had had questions when I was in high school, but I just pushed them away because I was comfortable with my Christianity and didn’t like where they were taking me. I do know that I started to have some serious struggles with my faith during my first three semesters in college, which were the semesters I lived in the dorm. After my first semester sophomore year, I decided that living at home would be a much better deal for my pocket book. While I lived there I became more active in church and also more active in college activities, and my doubts were pushed back down for a little while. It was also during this time that I proposed to my girlfriend and she accepted, and we set a date to get married after I was out of college. I lived with my parents for two-and-a-half years, and then I moved into an apartment with three of my college friends. All of a sudden my doubts came screaming back to the surface, and a few months later I realized I no longer believed any of it.
I stopped going to church, except when my fiancee came to town to visit because I didn’t want to scare her. I started to withdraw from many activities at the Baptist college, and I just become much more reserved all around. I had no idea how to break the news to them, because I knew it would cause some serious ripples. Plus, since I was also under my father’s shadow, it was only going to make the situation even worse. I finally got to the point when I couldn’t take it anymore. The wedding was six months away, and I knew it would be a mistake to marry a staunch Christian when I no longer believed any of it. She came up to visit one weekend, and I decided I could no longer act like the Christian I was not, so I didn’t go to church. When she asked me why, I told her the truth. She ran off and cried for over an hour, and my mom came in and yelled at me for making her cry. When it came time to take her home, she told me that she knew I was confused, but I needed to continue going to church because that was where the answers were. When I asked about us, she said that she wanted to give me some time to sort things out (in other words, she was just going to wait until I came around).
A couple of weeks later she called me in the middle of my busiest and most stressful day of the week. When I answered, she said she needed to know if I still wanted to get married or not (not the conversation I wanted to have right at that moment). We cried on the phone together for about an hour, after which we mutually decided it would be best to call off the wedding. I broke the news to my mom, and she basically just shrugged me off (she was still bitter about my deconversion). I went home, pulled out my pocket knife and wrote a suicide letter. If it hadn’t been for one of my roommates coming home right then, I probably would have killed myself. Throughout the next year my life proceeded to get even worse. Many of my friends from the Christian school now shunned me, and my mom pleaded with me many times to “come back to the fold.” During that semester I also had a lady in a big truck cause $1,000 in damage to my car, I had to quit a job, and I had to drop the accounting major I had been working on for my entire college tenure. Upon graduation, it took me two months before I could find a job because I didn’t have much experience other than a college degree. I also started drinking and using a very large library of profanity.
I wish I could tell you that everything is all fine and dandy right now, but the truth is that I have wanted to kill myself every day since I came out in the open. It is not because I think it was a wrong decision (in fact, quite to the contrary), it is because of the way my life went to shit right after it happened. My mom still takes every opportunity she can to try and re-convert me, often using condescension and manipulation to try and win me back. I have lost several more friends since then, as I have become very open about my beliefs. I have a blog where I post anti-Christian arguments all the time, and some of them just can’t take the heat. Yet in the midst of all of this, I have never regretted my decision to leave Christianity. While life has been miserable since then, it is much better than the life I had as a Christian, when I was being suffocated by Christian dogma.
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