Faithless, Or Faith-Less

The Spiritual Journey of Letting "God" Go

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Nothing lights more of a fuse in me than when someone comments on a piece I’ve written about struggle, pain, or plain ole heartache with a quote from scripture, a line about Jesus, or a simple suggestion to pull out my Bible. Especially… ESPECIALLY… when it comes to addiction and recovery.

This feels like gaslighting at it’s finest.

It’s a huge trigger for me. But why? And how did I get here? I am, or was, Christian most of my life. I’ve spent years processing this, and it’s not a simple answer, so let me take a step back because this is not something I write about much but I think about it all the time.

I grew up Christian. I went to church each Sunday, attended Sunday School, and did a confirmation ceremony when I was 15 where I gave a speech about the importance of church. In college, when I started to really struggle with my eating disorder and mental health, I connected with the Christian group at my school. And when I became a mother and felt the sandbag to the gut sensation of postpartum depression, I again turned to a local church for connection. I’d always identified as a Christian and I always felt like a Christian. (Note - This does not make me an expert on Christianity or the Bible — not even close — it just makes me one person with a crap-ton of indoctrination. And for a long time, I drank from the communal well.)

I felt like a Christian when I married my agnostic husband, and felt certain I could help convert him over time and as our family grew.

I felt like a Christian when I joined the writers community of Her View From Home, a faith-based website focused on motherhood, and a place I still feel deeply connected.

I felt like a Christian when I first quit drinking, and prayed for a force greater than myself to hold me and guide me along this new path.

But after five years sober, feeling clear-headed and arguably more spiritually-driven then I’ve ever felt, I have something astonishing to say.

I no longer identify as Christian.

I felt the boat starting to drift from the dock early into motherhood, even as I found refuge in the mother’s group at church and attended a small group on Life Changes. Even so, I dug my heals in. I decided it was my own fault because I never took it seriously enough and I decided to read the Bible cover to cover.

But that only made it worse. I saw, for the first time, the bare scripture underneath the pastor’s dogma and it felt stark and inconsistent. Scripture that’s supposedly divinely written but dictated through man, and then translated a hundred different ways. And manuscripts that made it in to the Bible versus ones that didn’t, like a writing contest.

Then I started to read *about* the Bible. People had told me that everything I needed to know was in this book, so maybe I didn’t understand. But even peoples’ explanations were murky, inconsistent, and condescending. Explanations felt strained by agendas and ripe with double standards. I felt more confused than ever.

Still, I clung to this identity. After all, Jesus made sense to me. He was and is the only thing in the Bible that felt consistent. Jesus felt real, unfiltered by human bias or interpretations. Jesus was and is something I understood, didn’t feel forced, and I could get behind.

But the rest of it? I felt this firmly-planted foundation disintegrating beneath me. I attended sermons where they spent an hour describing hell, or telling me divorce makes me un-savable. I would go to church seeking hope and validation, and was handed shame and the villainization of my own humanity - the very thing God created.

Then, I started to read my fellow Christians’ beliefs on gender and sexuality. On the women’s place, role and best use of her body. And I got tired of defending it, or trying to find the silver lining. So I let go of the dock completely and decided to drift to sea. I can’t be part of a community that tells people there’s a right and wrong way to love. I will not identify with people who believe the way they feel love and identity is driven by the devil. Maybe someday I’ll write about my own journey around sexuality but for now I know one thing to be true: love is love, and the Jesus I believe in would shout this from the rooftops.

I’m not open to a debate on this. I’ve been debating this for years externally and internally. And after all this, if you tell me to pick up my Bible, or you send me a meme of scripture, I will find out where you live and add your address to every junk mailer list I can get my hands on. THIS is why I’m triggered. THIS is why I get angry.

I don’t share all this because I need grounding back towards the Christian faith. I share this because my Higher Power followed me out to sea and sits with me there.

Recovery has given me the gift of learning to trust my gut again for the first time since childhood. While in my drinking I looked towards others for answers, in my sobriety I look within myself. Sobriety has connected me back to my intuition, and my intuition tells me that when something feels ick or wrong, it probably is.

My intuition has taught me to let go of the God of religion and to embrace the God of my own inner knowing. Laura McKowen calls it the diamond at the center of our chest and I love that visual. To speak to God through meditation and nature. Through prayer and gratitude. Through giving and receiving. Gardening. Watching my kids sleep or play. Eating fruits and vegetables. Moving my body. Swimming in lakes. Standing at the top of mountains. And yes, drifting at sea.

My sobriety continues to gift me new, beautiful perspectives every single day, and my reconstructed relationship with my Higher Power (HP) is perhaps the greatest of them all.

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