lanes

I recently wrote a paper for one of my sociology classes detailing my motivations for leaving Christianity. It was pretty silly to try and cram it down into five pages while attempting to incorporate random quotations from papers and presentations, but it did cause me to reflect on precisely how much I’ve changed over the years. I’ve reversed my position on nearly every issue I argued so vehemently over, four years ago.

A part of me continually wishes that someone, or something will come along that will make it impossible for me not to return to Christianity. Growing up, I read countless stories of people like myself that left the faith, but were confronted with some undeniable truth or overwhelming experience that brought them back a greater faith than they had left it. When arguing my stance against my extended family a few months ago, a few of them treated me with the assumption that I would simply do the same.

The more I change on these issues – abortion, gay marriage, sex – the less I feel it’s possible I could ever make that return. I live with a small terror that I’m simply adopting all the views around me wholesale, but as I reflect on how I approached these issues before, that was precisely how I came to obtain my stances in the past. Still, I dislike becoming less distinguishable from those around me; it feels like I’m giving up what once helped make me unique. This might be a hold-over from having spent so much time looking down on modern society, but there’s a numbness that comes along with knowing that no one around me will disagree with what I’m saying. It’s one thing to have support, but it’s another to simply not have opposition.

This leads me to wonder why, exactly, I didn’t feel this way inside the church community, where solidarity within was certainly stronger there than I’m finding within the college community. I think it’s because I always had an issue that I knew many of those around me didn’t agree with me on, and I focused on that. It started with rethinking my opposition to evolution (I’m sure some of you still remember that epic bible study), then my stance on social services and capital punishment, then my views on sexuality and sex as a whole started to change, and so on. Maybe my departure from the faith was just an inevitability, as each of the dominoes tipped over, each issue I rethought being a logical consequence of the next.

I still pray, on occasion. My prayers focus on roughly the same issues that I have always prayed about. It doesn’t feel much different than it used to, and I don’t know if that’s comforting or disturbing. As always, God’s responses are enormously silent, though I wait for them as I ever have.