These days, I try not to think about religion, faith, or deconstruction. I honestly get too overwhelmed—tangled up in the mess of leaving behind what I knew and believed in so passionately for the better part of 28 years and entrapped in the guilt of not knowing what I actually do believe anymore. It’s a never-ending cycle of grief and guilt so you’d see why I actively try and avoid it. Perhaps not the healthiest way to deal, but when you have a ton of other stuff going on in your mind and life, well, you kind of learn to let things like this slide. After all, something’s gotta give.
So then why, after that introduction, am I writing this piece on faith/religion/Christianity? That’s a great question. Not that I, or anyone ever, owes anyone else an explanation but I can see how it might be confusing. The honest answer is while I’ve actively avoided thinking about such things, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take up space in my brain still. Even if unwanted.
I’ve found, especially lately, more thoughts surrounding this topic are swirling around in my head. Mostly around what I’m continuing to deconstruct—we’ll get to reconstruction eventually, but I’m learning that I’m allowed to stay in this angry, frustrated, confusing, sad space of deconstruction a little longer if I so choose. And I do so choose. I’ve had this idea for this post for a while and this morning, well, it just felt profoundly like the right time to sit down and write (the morning I wrote this, not the morning you’re reading it). And as we’ll get to later in this piece: here’s to listening to and trusting my gut.
The main purpose of writing this will largely be catharsis for me, the writer, and finally getting a lot of these thoughts, realizations, frustrations, and sadness off my chest and out of my dang head—a place thoughts go to get loud and stay a while. But I do think this piece too has purpose for you, the reader. Letting you hear a new perspective, giving you food for thought, helping you understand and respect those whose journey is different from yours, offering validation and a safe space for those also in deconstruction/reconstruction/the aftermath.
Wherever you’re at, whatever brought you here, you’re welcome and your experience is valid. Just because I share about my frustrations, negative experiences, beliefs about why I think religion can be harmful, doesn’t mean your positive experiences or beliefs aren’t valid or are negated in any way. HOWEVER, on the flip side, the exact same is true. Just because you’ve had great experiences or found hope in faith/religion/God doesn’t mean the stories or truths of anyone who didn’t are any less valid or worth being heard. None of us truly know (that’s quite literally the definition of faith), we’re all just doing our best to make sense of this world and ourselves.
Losing Yourself
A big theme surrounding my deconstruction, and much of my recent noodling, is how religion, especially Christianity today, leads you away from your true self. Maybe on accident, but I think a big part of it is on purpose. It’s interesting as I dive into parts work in therapy (internal family systems aka IFS). You can look it up more on your own, but the idea is that despite all the parts that make up a person—how they think, what they do, what they believe—every person has a true capital-s Self, which is who they really are at their core. And Self has a spiritual element, something bigger than ourselves or our lives. Call it God, call it Buddha, call it Universe, call it Intuition. It’s innate within every single person. But often, faith and religion become a part themselves, a part that takes over and drowns out Self. I believe that’s what we are primarily taught to do in Christianity.
So, what follows is going to be some ways I see that’s happened in my life and in general in religion. And maybe how losing my religion will gain my Self back.
False Comfort
I think religion brings false comfort. It gives you answers you’re just supposed to accept. It gives you an out to place the burden of being human onto something/someone else. It tells you everything is going to be alright when no one has any way of knowing that, and then makes you feel inferior if you can’t seem to believe that because you’re not trusting this false comfort.
I think if I’m being honest, I never truly felt comforted by God or religion; what I mistook as comfort was really just the shoving down of my emotions for the sake of “trusting”. It was the relief of not having to feel the discomfort of what I was desperately trying to get myself to feel. Maybe I’m being too hard on my experience and I did feel that “peace that surpasses all understanding”, but I’m not sure. Especially in my hardest, darkest moments.
Which of course, the “answer” given is God is near in the dark even if you can’t feel him. The false comfort of religion and Christianity is that there is an answer for everything you could ask to suffice and politely shut you up. When you think about it, it gives you a way to let go of all your questions, which my mind became very good at despite not being the way I was wired. Questions like: how is knowing God is near, even when I can’t feel or hear him, actually comforting to me? When I let my brain—who likes logic and asking questions—simply be, it really opened my eyes.
It’s not comforting to me, especially if the answer is “well you must be doing something wrong to not feel or be experiencing him”. No, I think that’s just called gaslighting and control. All of 2025, with how fucked up the world/country is right now, I wish I could just trust this is all part of some “plan”—bypass my emotions and the despair and the fear. But I won’t can’t trade these feelings and experiences of being a human for this false sense of security that takes me away from my true Self and being with her.
Not Listening or Trusting Yourself
I’ll try to reign this one in because this is a huge source of anger for me as I heal mentally and physically. But no promises. Because I cannot and do not trust myself—my wants, my feelings, my needs, my intuition, my decision making—and I singlehandedly have growing up in the church / Christianity to blame for that.
Whether you call it your gut, your intuition, your knowing, yourself…we are vehemently taught not to trust it. The infamous Proverbs 3:5 being constantly thrown in our faces as our fatal reminder. Or, on the offchance we do “feel” or “hear” something, it’s God or Holy Spirit, not our own Selves. Never our own selves. Like God forbid I might actually know myself better than anyone else…? What a concept.
The biggest place I saw / see this is in decisions. When you are at a fork in the road or you have to make a decision, you’re told to pray about it, offloading decision making to someone or something else—in this case God. Which, if you believe this “God” has a specific plan for you then of course you’re going to look to him to make decisions for you and lead you in which way you should go. (I no longer believe in specific plans for people’s lives, and even if I find my way back to believing in the Christian God, I don’t think I’ll take that belief back.)
But even that idea of “God’s plan” for your life makes you not trust yourself, takes a level of the autonomy away. You’re no longer in full control of your life, there’s always a blueprint behind the scenes leading you to places already picked out for you. You don’t get to decide, God does. Well, technically, you do get to choose (you know, free will and all that), but if you choose “wrong”, you’ve messed up and are going to hell unless you believe in the same God who created you and your plan then told you it was wrong.
To me, making a decision by praying is like taking responsibility or accomplishment off your back. If you prayed and followed God’s leading, and it turned out bad, then you can blame God or tell yourself that God’s teaching you a “lesson” or “it’s all part of his plan”. Like no, sometimes life and this world is just fucked up and you’re also a human who is going to make mistakes. On the flip side, if a decision or direction goes well, it’s all praise to God for making it happen without even a single glance in your own direction to celebrate what you did. Like no, I fought like hell to get through countless breakdowns and not wanting to be alive anymore and mental and physical health issues and putting in the work to face my demons on the daily thank you very much.
Now I don’t want to seem like some bigger person on the other side of all of this. Many days and many decisions, some part of me still wishes I believed and could offload my decision making to God in prayer instead of having to face it myself and trust myself to decide. But doing so, while “easier” or more “comforting”, takes me further away from my true Self. And I’ll never get closer to her if I’m constantly running away from opportunities to let her speak.
Poor Self-Esteem + Constant Self Improvement
One of the biggest traps I’m caught up in right now, from my church/religion background is poor self esteem and the never ending self-improvement pressure. We are literally taught that we are bad, evil, sinful. But don’t worry as long as you believe this very specific thing about God and Jesus, you’re suddenly good and fine. Talk about a mind-fuck. The more I think about God, I don’t think a true, loving God would see us as this or want us to see ourselves that way either. But most of y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.
Religion tells you to see yourself through a horrible lens. That you’re the one to blame if you make a mistake (stupid flesh) or if you can’t feel God (you must be doing something wrong). It’s your fault (don’t even get me started on purity culture here). I’m reading The Handmaid’s Tale right now and in it is a scene (**trigger warning**) where a girl shares that she was gang-r**** and had an abortion. One of the female leaders asks, “but whose fault was it?” to which the rest of the girls chant “her fault. her fault. her fault.” “Who led them on?” “She did. She did. She did.” “Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen?” “Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.” While this may be an extreme example, the self-blaming and poor self esteem in this scenario are very real to our lives.
Religion also tells you to constantly improve yourself. Reflect on your flaws or weaknesses so that you can be aware and change everything that’s ever wrong about you. Or rather pray and ask God to change everything that’s wrong about you. As if you can’t simply just be and be enough. Sanctification, being turned more and more into God’s image. As if we weren’t already supposedly created in His image in the first place? As if the place we’re in now could never be good enough to be loved or worthy; we must improve. My sister sent me a meme the other day that said “if you consider yourself self-aware but only acknowledge the things you need to change and not the things you do really well—you aren’t self-aware, you’re just being mean to yourself.” I’ll leave that there.
But in all honesty, much of Christianity teaches you that you aren’t enough. There’s a toxic as fuck book by a well-known Christian author called “You’re Not Enough” with the message essentially being you’re not enough but with God, you’re okay. Again, talk about a mind fuck. If I’m lucky enough to have kids, or even for my own niece, I cannot think of a WORSE message for them to hear than that. No, thank you.
Final Thoughts
I’ll be honest, a thought and feeling that’s plagued me lately is this: leaving religion / Christianity / a belief system without having another one to go feels reckless. Like others could say I’m just being rebellious or I’m being deceived or I took the easy way out. Like fine you left, but what do you believe instead? How can you defend it? Where does your purpose come from now? I hold death-grippingly tight to the “right vs wrong” mentality religion teaches.
It’s all so overwhelming and I don’t fucking know so I get paralyzed and ignore it all. I understand why I ignore it but ignoring it all also feels like the easy way out. You wouldn’t leave one job without having another lined up, right? (Small voice in my head: although maybe you would if job was toxic enough or really not good for you). So why would I do that with faith / my beliefs? Again, it seems reckless or rebellious or doing it “just to be cool”. And honestly part of me wants to be viewed or be that way because I’m so fucking tired of 20 years of being the “good Christian girl” who always did, said, believed the right thing and kept the peace and made everyone else comfortable and stayed in line. But this isn’t “cool” and this isn’t easy.
With all of this, if my ship was sinking, and there wasn’t another boat or life raft around, would I still jump ship? Yes. Because if I stay, I for SURE am going down. If I jump, while it’s unknown and into the big, deep, vast scary ocean, I at least have a chance to figure something else out and survive. My metaphorical faith/religion ship is sinking. But I think often I’d rather stay on the sinking ship that’s at least comfortable and familiar and I know my ending than jump into potential safety, potential danger but not know.
And that’s a hard pill to swallow.
So here’s to building up the courage to abandon what I know and jump.
Here’s to being brave as I face the unknown.
Here’s to losing my religion but gaining my Self back. May I find she’s been right here with me all along.
