The Biggest Loss Of My Deconversion

I met my best friend, Andrew, in college over twenty years ago. We lived in adjoining dorm rooms our freshman year and shared an apartment our sophomore year. I dropped out of college after that and got married the following winter but lost touch with Andrew until early the following year when I contacted him and we started getting to know each other again. We weren’t terribly close in college, but somewhere in our early twenties we started to click a little more and began sharing some heartaches and struggles. Well, I would share a ton and he would share a little, but that’s just our temperaments and it worked well for years. We became best friends. In fact, he was pretty much my only friend.

We lived several hours apart until our late twenties when our families moved to the same town in southern California. It was a fun time where we got to hang out several times a week. We even wound up attending the same church. Sadly, however, those good times were short-lived. After a couple years he and his wife felt “called” to spend the next twenty years at an orphanage in North Africa, being foster parents to up to ten kids and helping to establish a school there. Twenty years was shortened to three, however, when there were some major personality clashes among some of the couples and my friends were essentially asked to leave, which also meant leaving behind the three kids they had so far taken in to raise as their own. Needless to say, it was a very difficult time for them and it caused a fundamental shift in how Andrew viewed his Christian faith. The best way I can describe the shift is that he became a bit more jaded. And who wouldn’t? His whole “life’s purpose” had been yanked right out from under him.

Even before that experience he was never very demonstrative in his beliefs, but our mutual faith was something that really kept us together over the years. We didn’t talk about it a lot, but just knowing that we shared some core beliefs always provided a sense of camaraderie and comfort, even after his experience in North Africa. Sure, we had some other mutual interests, such as our favorite college football team and our families, but our faith played a pretty big role in our friendship. As it turns out, it played an even bigger role than I ever realized.

When I came out to him as an atheist a few years ago, he was definitely taken aback. He didn’t judge me or curse me or anything, but things were definitely different between us after that fateful conversation. We have stayed in touch since then – mostly through texting – and have even visited each other across the thousands of miles that now separate us. We always have a good time together drinking, watching football and playing poker, but it just doesn’t quite feel like it used to.

My atheism is the elephant in the room that we almost never talk about. It just sort of sits there, blocking the light from the windows and casting a shadow across our friendship.

When I visited him last year, his wife, who I hadn’t spoken to much after my deconversion, started asking a few seemingly harmless questions about how my morality has changed, etc. I answered them as best as I could during a very cordial, brief discussion and that was that.

Or so I thought.

Later that evening she started talking about how legalized gay marriage in Canada is causing problems up there and then wanted to ask me what my thoughts were on it, leading into what I can best describe as an attempt to “witness” to me.

A woman I have known and been friends with for over twenty years. Witnessing. To me.

I was so stunned by her interrogation that it took me a good ten minutes to even realize what was going on. I mean, how could I? Not only was I not expecting this from her, I had never been on the receiving end of it before.

It was surreal.

During the hour long conversation, Andrew didn’t say much, but he did interject a few comments to support her beliefs. She’s his wife, so I can’t say I blame him, but he certainly didn’t come to my defense. Earlier that day in a private conversation he had even told me he didn’t know why someone would have a reason to be moral without God.

At some point during that visit is when I came to terms with the reality that things would never be the same between us. I also realized that I had been the pursuer in our relationship for the entire twenty years or so. I can’t recall more than a handful of times where he suggested we get together or hang out, and especially not since The Patient One and I moved out of state six years ago. Nearly all the times I have seen Andrew since then, it has been because I planned the get together.

He rarely texts me anymore. I can go weeks without hearing from him. This, from the same guy who used to text me almost daily.

Even if he can’t admit it, something has changed. We don’t talk about religion at all anymore, other than the occasional “joke” about my atheism or his Christianity. Sure, we had a few Q&A discussions about my deconversion in the months following, but since then, nothing.

It’s just sad, is all. I know he cares about me. I can see that he misses what we had and that he has been struggling in his faith ever since that North Africa incident, but he doesn’t ever talk about it. As tight-lipped as he was before, he’s even more so now that I’m not on the same team.

As far as his personal life, he’s in really deep. His dad is a pastor. His entire family is Christian, including the majority of his in-laws. And perhaps the biggest thing is that he and his wife are heavily involved in the church.

Meanwhile I just plug along, doing what I can to be a good friend, showing him that nothing about me has really changed, despite the fact that we don’t believe the same things anymore about God, faith, etc. But of all the things I lost after my deconversion, the bond he and I once shared is the most jarring.

Obla di obla da. Life goes on.

My deconversion story

There is no definitive moment that I can point to and say, “This is when I started on the road to deconversion.”  There were certainly rumblings that began four or five years ago when I began reading authors such as Brian McLaren and Donald Miller, but (at most) those writings simply challenged me to begin moving away from my more conservative, Evangelical roots to a more liberal, progressive Christianity.  I wasn’t even considering any form of unbelief at that point.  Yet if someone were to put my feet to the fire and ask me to point to a particular event or moment where the first serious doubts about my faith began to creep in and perhaps deal the first of many damaging blows to it, I suppose it would be when my family and I quit attending church almost two years ago.  As such, that’s where I’ll begin this story, in the days, weeks and months immediately following our departure.

Our main reason for leaving at the time was that we, like many these days, had become disillusioned and discontented with the institutional church (hereafter “IC”).  But despite this disillusionment, I still held hope for Christianity as a whole.  So when I stumbled across some Christian websites and books where people were sharing stories similar to mine yet had still managed to hold onto their faith–a faith outside the walls of the church–my heart leaped.  I didn’t have to be alone.  The message they shared of God’s love and grace sounded beautiful.  So beautiful, in fact, that I continued to listen to the podcasts and revisit the books regularly for well over a year.

Yet as time progressed, I realized that something still didn’t sit quite right.  Those ideas only seemed to sound cogent when I shared them with others who believed the same as me, but less so when I tried to explain them to someone else.  A prime example of this is when I was explaining to an atheist friend of mine why I still believed in a loving God.  My basic argument was that I had decided to assume that God loved me, then live life from that presupposition.   In a way I was testing my own version of Pascal’s Wager: either God loved me, and by believing it I could somehow prove it to be true, or he didn’t and I would find out anyway.

After a couple more months of investigation and introspection, I “found out anyway.”

One day I finally grasped the notion that, although this particular version of Christianity seemed in many ways to be better than the previous one, it still had the same fatal flaw as all others: it was based on faith.  There was no way to know for sure if this new, improved version of God was real other than “living from the heart” as if it were so.  I could find no reason to continue to hold onto any form of Christianity other than for the sake of ritual or tradition, neither of which held any sway with me in the first place.  I no longer believed.

Fortress mentality

Although it has been almost two years since my family and I quit attending church, I can still remember how we (and our fellow members) used to view the “outside world.”  The best thing I can compare it to is living inside a fortress.  Going “out into the world” was a necessary but dangerous thing.  We were encouraged to “love” those outside the walls (more on this in a minute), but never get too involved with them for fear that they might somehow corrupt us.  Our ultimate goal was to entice them into our particular fortress, or, failing that, at least get them into another similar fortress somewhere else.  And if we managed to lure them in, keeping them was critical.  Everything within the church was designed to make people feel “comfortable,” from the fancy coffee maker, to the nice banners, to the layout of the Sunday school rooms.  As my pastor once put it when I questioned the necessity of these things, “It’s Church Building 101.”

The mission statement of the church was “Love God and Love Others” (real original, eh?), but loving others basically began and ended with trying to get them to come to our church.  That’s the problem with living inside a fortress: no matter how much you try to love someone outside the walls, you can never really love them in any deep sort of way so long as you maintain an Us versus Them view of the world.  Everyone is seen as the enemy or, at best, someone you shouldn’t be too involved with unless there is a possibility you can get them to come to church with you.

This fact became all too real when we decided to leave.

Never mind our two-and-a-half years of membership and loyal service within the church (kids’ ministry, Small Group attendance, running the sound board, etc.); after we left, all communication with us effectively ceased.  Our alleged friends, many of whom we had shared good times and intimate moments with, basically disappeared.

We lived outside the walls now.  We had become Them.

My wife and I made a few attempts in the following months to get together with those we had had relationships with, but every meeting basically started with, “So, where do you go to church now?” and ended with, “Let’s keep in touch.”  The middle was mostly a feeling-out session to see if we planned to come back.  Once they realized we weren’t, we were back to being persona non grata.

As I mention in other posts here on this blog, I have since become an atheist.  But I tell this story for two reasons:

(1) Despite what some may think, I didn’t become an atheist because I was somehow hurt by the church.  Sure, it’s sad that things ended the way they did, but our departure was actually very amicable.  Yet the way we were treated after we did leave helped me to realize something: if the members of a supposed grace-filled church such as this could so quickly disassociate with us, what did that say about the rest of Evangelical Christianity?  And what did it say about my Christianity that I was such a willing participant in it up until the time that we left?

(2) Hopefully anyone reading this who still attends a church and thinks they are simply “loving others” by trying to get them to attend their church will stop and realize what they are actually doing.  It’s not really love if there is an agenda behind it.  If you think your particular church is somehow above that sort of mentality, ask yourself how members who have left in the past were treated.  Are you still in touch with any of them?  Is anyone?  And to what end?