Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high-control environments. Last January I started writing about how I was no longer a Christian—which was a very big deal since my family, community, and career were all predicated on me being the Best Little Christian Ever. It’s been a bumpy ride, but I am honestly SO grateful to have this space where I can be honest and also be in lovely, thoughtful conversation with people on a spectrum of religious backgrounds. Thank you all so much for making this such a special place!
It’s been over a year since I publicly deconverted from Christianity (and wrote about it for this here newsletter. Here’s part 1 and here is part 2, which I have tried to make available to everyone to read for the first time). It feels like an anniversary of sorts. Maybe like a divorce? I want to throw myself a party and also wallow in self-pity and be proud and sad and silly about the whole thing. My entire personality was following Jesus and now it isn’t. So what has the past year been like for me?
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The first thing is that I have surprised myself by how much I am enjoying being an atheist1. Just straight up, I am loving it. There was (and maybe still is) a part of me that wishes I could be a cool agnostic spiritual person—you know, someone who loves Tarot and Jesus (and there are a lot of cool people who are like that and I envy them!). But that wasn’t what actually happened to me. What happened was that when I stopped checking in with “god”—or the voice I was programmed from birth to call god, that suspiciously sounded exactly like my parents and their beliefs about the world, reinforced through decades of white conservative Christian American teachings—I was furious. The second I gave myself permission to have privacy in my brain, I became absolutely greedy for freedom. I was able to clearly see the indoctrination I had been exposed to. I could see how the power differentials had always been stacked against me—first as a child, then as someone socialized as female, and always as an unsupported and undiagnosed autistic person who took the indoctrination literally. Becoming obsessed with god was my survival tactic in a home where anything else brought scorn, anxiety, shame, and fear. Once I was on this path, it was hard to get off of it—even as it increasingly made me more depressed, anxious, and suicidal.
The day I stopped praying was a euphoric day for me. I felt like my mind was my own, for the first time ever. Several days later, my giddiness crashed into what I can only describe as attachment panic. At night, especially, I would find myself reaching for the comfort of talking to god, of being reassured everything was going to be ok. I sobbed at the loss of that comfort, while simultaneously being able to understand that it had never truly brought me comfort. Instead, it had served to bypass my uncomfortable emotions, training me to seek an outside “divine” source of power and authority onto which I could transfer all of my big emotions—both positive and negative. In the past year, these are the times I most wish I still believed in a deity that interacted with humans—when things are really hard or when they are going really great. The depths of despair and the heights of joy. I want to ask for help and I want to say thank you. To who, though? And why does it need to be separate from my actual body, or the actual people in my life?
So I learned to say thank you to my physical body. To the ocean and its beauty. To my partner, for all his sweetness. To my kids, for all the ways they teach me and bring me joy. To the gigantic pine trees in my neighborhood. To my dog, and my cat. To my legs, my shoulders, my hips, my head—for the bones and muscles and veins carrying me through this life. I learned to feel grief and anger and fear in my physical body too, to ground myself in my one precious corporeal form. I’m still working on the asking for help part, because that is hard for people with CPTSD in general. But it is something I am working towards, and I feel really good about that.
I have also allowed myself to enjoy being an angry atheist who grieves all the harm done by white western patriarchal religions currently and throughout history2. After decades of having to shove down the truly negative feelings I had towards Christians, it felt good to allow a white hot heat to pulse through my veins. I was angry at everybody—my parents, my Bible college professors, myself, James Dobson, Christian publishing, progressive Christian institutions, former pastors and friends and mission organizations. The few times my mind idly wandered towards wondering if there was a god, I would be overwhelmed with fury. I imagined myself a witch, a person who makes it their life mission to prove the ways of “god” false, or at the very least—horrific. If god is real, I thought, then I hate them. If the god of my parents and white evangelicalism is real, then he is a monster who has condemned the majority of the world to a genocidal end and it would be a good life’s work to reveal him as such.
But those feelings come and go, because that is what they are—human emotions. I am learning to live with them, to ride the waves, and to not seek to offload them (as much) onto other people or the divine. I am not living my life for god, nor do I believe I need religion to make me a person who has basic human empathy and a desire for everyone to have human rights. In fact, I see white evangelicalism as doing the exact opposite for most people. The worst case of “loading the language” (to use cult terminology) is how evangelicalism latched onto the phrase “good news” way back in the 1960s and 70s. My parents were converted during this heyday, and almost every day of my life I was told over and over again that my religion was good news for everyone—if they would just agree to the terms and hand over their sense of autonomy.
Now that I am not a christian, I can finally start to deal with the reality of the situation, which is that evangelical Christianity is good news for only a very few people in the United States (and I would argue it’s not actually good if it causes you to gain the whole world and lose your soul). And not only that, but it has been terrible news for me personally. The more I heal from my childhood, the more I understand (and grieve) that I have always been a precious human worth protecting, who is worthy of good things regardless of what I “believe” or not. It’s been hard to be honest about this, because I have a million defense mechanisms built in to protect god/jesus/christianity/the good news/my childhood. But letting myself feel how bad Christianity has been for me and my mental health is slowly helping me work through these automatic responses designed to protect the religion and uphold it as “good news.”
Childhood religious indoctrination is one hell of a drug, but I am clawing my way out. I was raised from birth to believe I was worthless unless I devoted my life to god. I was given the addiction and also the drug at the exact same time—the only way to feel better was to learn to conform your will to that of “god” and submit without pushing back. Over the decades it became harder and harder to reconcile how I was doing everything “right” within Christianity but feeling less and less like being alive.
And eventually I realized how I would never put this kind of mental stress and strain on my kids, so why was I accepting it for me?
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It’s been a somewhat isolated year for me. There are still so few avenues for people to process what it was like to grow up in a high control religious group like white evangelicalism. It is so much more cult-like than any of us would like to believe, and even just saying this makes people unbelievably defensive and angry. Cults are a part of human society and always have been—so why wouldn’t they morph and remain powerful and impact enormous parts of our culture today? In the US we are surrounded by thought control tactics in media and advertising and politics—but only accuse communist countries of “brain washing.” Thought control and coercive control tactics are used in so many areas of our world, including religion, and I think we underestimate the power of these tactics within white evangelicalism to the detriment of our society and politics..
I knew that publicly deconverting would probably mean I wouldn’t get asked to speak / write / be on podcasts. And all of that is true (I think I have been asked by 2 different faith-based places to speak in the past 16 months?) but I was a bit shocked by the personal aftershocks. I think I expected . . . more arguing? Discussion? Questions? But mostly it was as if I became invisible. I was not exactly prepared for that, but it’s a big part of my reflection on this past year.
Before I say this next part: I don’t think anyone owes me their friendship. I do believe people show up as best as they can and we all have SO MUCH GOING ON. I absolutely understand that me talking about my issues with Christianity is triggering to folks and brings on their internal defense mechanisms3. I also have almost four decades of lived experience where I have constantly been told I am too much or too intense for folks. The hard part of this is that people within Christianity actually LIKED how into it I was (in part because it validated their own worldview/choices/religion), and so that group of people who held space for the intensity of my personality was a hard thing to lose.
But if I didn’t think white evangelicalism was a cult before, I certainly do now thanks in part to how the majority of Christians have treated me since I publicly deconverted. My experience has been: the second you no longer tell people that their worldview is the best one (Christian supremacy) they lose all interest in listening to you. I was a progressive Christian “prophet” (ugh) right up until I stopped being a Christian. It kind of makes me giggle now because of how sudden and pervasive it was. I was pretty angry at Christianity for the past decade, actually, and wrote and posted about it constantly. But the second I said I wasn’t a Christian, I no longer had anything valuable to say to people who still were in the group. Way to prove the point, guys! I also recognize that it was these-cult tactics that kept me a Christian for as long as I was. A part of me intrinsically knew this would happen, and I felt an enormous amount of responsibility to “get my people.” I tried so hard to shove down all of my major issues with Christianity4 itself because I wanted to try and convince evangelicals to hurt less people. And I knew they wouldn’t listen to a word I said if I didn’t make them feel good about their overall ideology.
It’s been a year of me NOT getting my people, and I definitely want to keep this up. In 2024 I recognize I can barely keep myself alive and my small household functioning. Maybe when things are better I will try to save the world again—but I hope that part never comes back, actually. I have been living in a state of fight or flight for so, so long, and my body and my brain just can’t do it anymore. I still feel the pull towards these impulses when I hear the heightened rhetoric of the 2024 election, and I know that this is going to be a tough year for me on the mental health front. I want to be alive and present and here for my children, my partner, and our slowly growing community. I have an ancient dread that was poured into me at birth, and it feels like the rest of my life I will try to become like the little child I never got to be—carefree, playful, curious, and hopeful about the future.
I guess the best way to summarize the past year is to say that I wish religious trauma was taken seriously in our society. Maybe I would have recognized my own story of childhood indoctrination and religious abuse much sooner if this was talked about more in wider society. As long as we are talking about wishes—I truly wish there were more avenues for people to heal from high control religions that emphasized humor, creativity, and somatic exercises. I wish more people would understand the immense courage it takes for folks to deconvert from evangelical Christianity, especially when they have no support systems outside of their religious programming. I wish it wasn’t quite so controversial to say that both America and Christianity in general have been inexorably shaped by propaganda that aims to make them appear to be good news for all, when in reality it has only ever been good news for some.
My past has been shaped by Christianity and I struggle to come to terms with how to process what that means for my future. Some days I am an angry atheist, some days I am a depressed witch, others I am a numbed-out zombie in survival mode. Some days I find incredible comfort in nature, some days I laugh hysterically at Gen Z TikToks. I marvel at activists and poets and construction workers and freshly made donuts and the love of a loyal little Corgi. I am learning to love myself as a human being in an incredibly complicated world. No longer on a mission for god, I am finally able to simply learn to accept reality as it is—and not what I wish it was. I love honoring my anger and my lack of belief in god. And I’m also excited to continue to explore being playful and silly and irreverent as I experience about being a human in this wild, wild world.
So I’m celebrating not being on a mission this year5. I’m celebrating wanting to be alive much more than I was 12 months ago. I’m celebrating the ways people have and continue to show up for me and my family. And of course—I’m celebrating you all for being a part of this journey. As always, thanks for being here and for listening and for sharing your deep, hard-earned wisdom with me and with others.
For those who have experienced a faith shift like mine—where you no longer adhere to the basic tenants of a religion you were exposed to as a child/teen/young adult—how are you doing? How was the past year for you? Let’s have a little check in!
One of the reasons I am enjoying being an angry atheist is because I am not Online like I used to be and therefore do not have to engage with any annoying white male atheists and their hot takes on the world. No thank you I will not be reading any Christopher Hitchens I just get to be my weird little angry witchy self.
I am barely starting to grapple with the impact of Christianity on my gender/sexuality, for instance. I’m so happy I am free now but so sad for all the years I wasted on some old white dude’s dream for society.
I have also distanced myself from Christians! I simply cannot handle being in shallow relationships, and it is hard to have deep relationships when people have little to say beyond spiritual platitudes at this moment in my life. I have experimented a little bit with asking people in my life not to talk about god/christianity as a boundary I have, and that has been surprisingly helpful (while also naturally distancing me from those that simply cannot tolerate that request).
My two major issues with Christianity that I was never fully allowed to say were: 1). I believe the idea of an interventionist god is ethically abhorrent (he gives you a good parking spot at the mall but doesn’t intervene in a genocide if it is happening to Arab folks? sounds like a great guy!). I was raised in charismatic spaces and was in them as a young adult and this shit is toxic AF and really messes you up ethically without you even noticing it. It is also extremely popular because it makes people feel good (but it only ever made me feel really bad). 2). I don’t think Jesus is the only way to heaven, and to claim an exclusivist totalist idea like this when we have access to SO many other people and ways of being/seeing the world also feels ethically awful. It feels like at this point evangelicalism or exclusivist Christianity of any kind attracts people who have no problem with the idea that paradise will only be populated with people just like them.
I bought myself some mini cakes at Trader Joe’s and if you are reading this the day I put it up, then I am probably eating them RIGHT NOW and ENJOYING EVERY SECOND OF IT.
In regards to “saving the world,” I’ve thought a lot about how the most important part we all play is in our own small community of family/friends. When you think about how much of Christianity is about child sacrifice, if I break that cycle and raise my child to know she’s loved unconditionally and isn’t broken or condemned, or needing to be saved.. I’ve changed the world as far as my personal responsibility goes. That’s the kind of love that’s really good news. <3
There are so many moments in this essay that struck me, I can’t decide what to respond to!
I’ll start with a word from a fellow autistic: There are other communities that will appreciate your muchness 💖 In my experience, they can be hard to find, but Substack and writing in general have been great ways to connect with those right people.
Second, just thank you for sharing your experience. I’ve had a complex relationship with the effects of Christian supremacy in a rural community throughout my life (in addition to the cPTSD of being autistic, a woman and queer in such a society), and reading your words has given me language to describe the insidious harm that’s so hard to recognize. That simple gift is so vital for fighting the gaslighting these institutions do to our communities.
Congrats on celebrating one year, and I look forward to reading more!