How I became a Christian and how I stopped

Hello, beautiful community.

I’d like to explain what I’m doing here. I’m here because, all my life, Christian apologists have told me politics is false religion.

And I think that’s backwards. Religion is false politics. Politics about the unknown.

This is my testimony.

I grew up easily and habitually acquitting myself of all my insecurities and anxieties, even my responsibilities, and certainly my errors.

My relationship with Jesus was bigger than any of them, and based on that relationship I expected to live happily ever after.

Jesus promised:

• as long as I had faith the Holy Spirit would provide the words to say in any situation
• and a ‘way of escape’ from any corner
• and nothing would ever be ‘more than I could handle’

as long as I kept ‘every thought captive’ to the message of Christ.

This was music to my ears because it absolved my responsibility for personal ignorance, unintended consequences and even basic empathy.

Instead of believing in personal responsibility, I believed in total depravity.

That is, I believed everyone ever in history was just as short-sighted & narcissistic as I was unless they happened to share my beliefs about Jesus Christ.

And I thought whoever did not agree with me about that was in for a fate worse than death.

Naturally, I was interested in the history of a belief system that could accommodate infinite hypocrisy in exchange for intellectual loyalty.

Being lucky, I had plenty to read.

Being homeschooled, I had plenty of time.

Reading was how I learned how lucky I was.

Even when I was socially disadvantaged by the homeschooling I knew I was still pretty damn lucky.

But that’s just the first lesson of history. You can be really, really lucky & still your experience be defined by disadvantage.

There’s a big difference between the actual history of your country & the historical myths that are popular there.

A citizen needs to know.

To review: the logical conclusion of my beliefs was that I was going to live happily ever after while other people were miserable.

And while no doubt I would sin every day, everything I did with Christ in focus was bound to work out for the best in the end.

Absolute foolishness, but theologically based.

I indoctrinated myself with the rawest, most revanchist Calvinism available:

the better to justify the decisions my parents had made in homeschooling us, in providing such reading materials and in selecting preachers.

It was even a theological decision when I chose to be circumcised just before junior high school.

I did not think, “if ‘God’ wanted us to be cut He would have made us cut to begin with.”

Instead I thought, “God wanted us to be cut so that’s why He made us need cutting.”

Many of the same people who circumcised their infants at birth – simply to feel better about these infants’ bodies – are trying to take away not only health care options from children and adults who only want to feel comfortable in their own bodies, but even the right to use public restrooms.

And the same voices in society who accuse trans people of menacing women and children in public spaces are intentionally creating cover for actual predators of women and children who take one another’s confessions and keep one another’s secrets covered in the blood of Jesus.

Doctors, parents and society let me get circumcised at age 11 for purely aesthetic reasons, but they won’t let other kids the same age get puberty blockers for well established medical reasons, and they engage in witch hunts to transfer public blame from the guilty to the innocent.

All these things I thought about before I got cut.

There were two reasons I could think of why I wanted to do it.

1. As a personal act of faith and identification with the biblical circumcisers. So that if anyone ever said I was a fake believer, I would know for myself how wrong they were.
2. To give myself a stronger perspective to advocate for children’s rights and the general human right of bodily autonomy.

I thought about these things, then I made a decision according to my values.

However, around 10 percent of men who’ve been circumcised do regret it. This is so much more regret than any gender affirming surgery, which religious conservatives would classify as witchcraft in the dictionary if they could.

Yet for thousands of years sincere religious conservatives have been surgically modifying their infants’ bodies in the name of their creator.

And the actual, intended reason why this was done was to make the children bigoted: that is, to make them think they were better than other people who were not circumcised.

In fact, lots of kids could benefit from puberty blockers, not just trans kids. Kids with precocious puberty need them too.

But people are still sometimes more inclined to trust ancient ideas than modern ones.

All my life the conservative party in the US has been openly planning to seize power & destroy all the facts they don’t like.

It doesn’t help that our national health care system is controlled by private interests and our educational institutions depend on private interests as well.

We were also reading many of his books around the same time. Books about how women would always be property of men according to God’s laws even if men’s laws sometimes knew better.

That sh*t has broad appeal to the coalition of ignorance & malice.

To defeat hate the wall of ignorance must be torn down.

Anyway, in the sermon after 9/11, Wilson said the attacks had been targeted at the US by ‘God’ because we had too many abortions & not enough theocracy.

He demanded GWB ‘stop lying,’ stop the abortions & impose theocracy.

And he compared the Supreme Court to Tolkien’s black riders.

Of course, what he wanted that court to do was to overturn abortion rights.

And what he & his allies want to do is create Calvin’s Geneva over the whole United States.

Their weapons are ideologies sharpened in the European wars of religion & taught to me before I ever entered a classroom.

His allies & their ideologies all have one thing in common.

They all think their church represents the one true multilevel marketing scheme Jesus Christ planned before all time, before the universe, to save the world.

And whoever questions any of those assumptions is a fake Christian.

After Bob Jones University lost tax benefits for segregating students by race, the Christian right had to find another issue to organize around.

They found abortion.

Abortion has always been controversial among Christians because it’s impossible for Christianity to explain the facts surrounding abortion.

At any rate, when a child hears a pastor who is a man say that a woman by definition cannot be a pastor, a child knows by definition that a pastor is lying.

As long as I was in homeschool I knew I was living on one side or the other of a big lie.

I knew I would have to make a choice about it that would define my life.

But I was protected from the kinds of experiences that would make me wonder which side I was on, or help me find out.

The first experience that challenged my fidelity was having to go to junior high school & face my peers.

Both junior high schools I experienced were Christian.

Both had many students I previously would have identified as fake Christians.

Which gets harder once you know them.

It wasn’t just Doug Wilson; there was a range of Christian pseudo-help books our family read while I was in junior high school.

At this point my folks were trying to save their marriage with purity culture & I was on the take.

What did my family get from purity culture?

Well, we got unrealistic expectations.

We got irrational phobias.

And our country was cursed with a spiritual despotism as infamous as it is absurd.

Fundamentally, the problem with my folks’ marriage was, my dad was a serial liar & an unethical slut.

Doubling down on unlimited repentance & absolution was never going to help.

Not even reading the Bible to his kids every night.

My dad pushed back on the Young Earth Creationism & the Southern Lost Cause Revisionism I was picking up.

He knew those beliefs were harmful. But he couldn’t tell me if they were true or false.

Instead he had to tell me symbols were more important than the truth.

Like a confederate statue.

One of my grandfathers espoused that view.

He thought there was some kind of ‘duty’ Robert E Lee had fulfilled in fighting to preserve a system of human traffick.

Our ancestors before the war included both slaveholding preachers who disinherited family members for intermarriage and a 16 year old boy who ran away and falsified his age so he could fight for the north.

My grandfather always looked up to the successful church family in town to whose church he belonged. The time when his family had that social class was before the Civil War. The reason they had it was slavery. And the reason they lost it was the war.

So here my grandfather was 150 years later second guessing whether ‘God’ had been on the side of the South all along.

Well, that would explain a lot.

As a matter of fact Robert E Lee had been fighting for slavery all his life.

His earlier military experience was in the US-Mexico war.

This war was over the Mexican territory of Texas.

Americans left the US during a financial crisis to escape their debts, took their slaves with them & fled to Mexico.

Unfortunately for these slaveholders, Mexico was about to abolish the practice of slavery fair & square.

Then these slaveholders rebelled against Mexico & appealed to the United States.

They rebelled against a free country liberating slaves.

They appealed for liberty to the slave country they had fled.

No wonder the US has always considered itself a free country.

Freedom rose & fell multiple times in multiple countries alongside the US without any help from the US before the US ever achieved anything like one person one vote democracy.

To be clear, 1915’s ‘Birth of a Nation’ was a picture of freedom falling, not rising. It is like a videotaped confession of a mass crime.

It shows us the self-concept of white supremacy at that time. It shows us the self-concept that was popular with white people to justify Jim Crow.

If you’re still with me this far, take a close look at the poster art for DW Griffith’s ‘Intolerance.’ Try to count the layers of physical cut & paste, try to see how much pure plagiarism & how much pure sh*t.

The sh*t gives it a quality akin to medieval art. The plagiarism, a quality akin to AI art. Or maybe vice versa.

These posters, of course, were not made to be looked at very closely.

They were made to unite the fears of people who were afraid of something happening to their kids with the hate of people who had made their money farming kids as livestock & the violence of their sons who fancied themselves paladins.

All these fears, all this malice, were political resources ripe for misdirection in the prevalence of public ignorance back then:

before there were any public schools

when the only schools were church schools.

When I was in junior high school I didn’t understand very much of this.

But some of it I knew crystal clearly.

Because I was educated by people who were planning openly to destroy not only the Department of Education but also Child Protective Services.

Anyway, the reasons it was so hard to see through the lies of the neoconfederacy were:

1) They were disguised as facts.
2) They were packaged in a clear narrative.
3) My community could refute neither the alternative facts nor the false narrative.

My beliefs in junior high school were simply totalitarian.

But when my mom picked me up after school one day & quietly said she was leaving dad, that changed everything in an instant.

Suddenly I knew totalitarianism was wrong for us.

Suddenly I knew totalitarianism itself was wrong.

I did not know how close this would be to mom’s story.

It was a Christian novel. The husband finds Jesus again at the end just before he freezes to death in the street.

There really wasn’t a coherent response to the sincerely held beliefs of the churches, because the author of the book still held those beliefs even though he was on her side

Still, the novel showed me I needed to broaden my ideas rather than confine them to what the Bible said.

At this point we moved back to my mom’s very small high school town – initially in the house of her parents:

her dad having spent the last 20 years telling her to take her marital concerns to the LORD in prayer & not to tell her mother about them.

Once she did tell her mother about her marital concerns, then suddenly it was possible to begin divorce proceedings.

It’s not that my grandfather was always opposed to divorce. His father had married a divorced woman & he thanked God for it.

Only when it was his daughter.

And they did.

Even though we were in a small town that might have had a klan presence, the public high school there was still way more pluralism than I was used to.

In this town’s high school, a student could tell a teacher the earth was only 6,000 years old & the teacher would have nothing to say.

Perhaps there was nothing honest the teacher could say. Certainly my liberal teachers were in fear of their neighbors’ opinions.

Yet they were clearly the best teachers.

And that was my encounter with the paradox of tolerance from both sides.

A small town public school was too beholden to small town superstitions to be able or willing to contradict them.

But you know who would contradict them?

Professors at a Bible college.

Anthropology professors, geology professors, even Bible professors.

What people need to understand about Bible college is that there’s been a certain disconnection between the facts known by scholars & the beliefs of prospective students.

That gap has been widening since the Protestant reformation. It grows as scholars learn faster than the general public.

Every Bible college is a booth in an unregulated marketplace for alternative facts.

The faculty of each school will be sworn to uphold the same set. And yet every school’s faculty will absolutely disagree on the alternative facts they are sworn to uphold.

They are a little too honest to be faithful. But they are dishonest enough to get paid for pretending.

There is a real difference between Bible professors & Bible preachers.

Professors get paid to educate. Preachers get paid to sell.

Professors create knowledge in place of ignorance.

Preachers evolve ignorance in place of knowledge.

In my geology classes at Bible college, I learned that the shape of the earth had been known for hundreds of years before Jesus’ time.

But Jesus’ followers were not educators. They were salesmen. They confirmed popular prejudices rather than educate. They evolved ignorance in place of knowledge.

At my Bible college, about half the freshmen believe the earth is 6,000 years old. Way more than half come from conservative backgrounds both religiously & politically. Professors every year swear they still believe in Adam & Eve.

Yet science majors know better and most alumni are liberal.

This is a predictable consequence of the emerging split between conservatives’ precommitments & the scholarship they call liberal.

Students who ‘integrate faith & learning’ successfully are creatively finding new ways to balance cognitive dissonance within their Christian precommitments.

But some, such as myself, advocate disintegrating faith & learning.

My degree represents completion of a 4-year indoctrination program designed to educate ignorant people as much as possible while still sustaining their belief in Christianity.

I’m here to say that project has an eternal conflict of interest with reality.

They know their anti-intellectualism is embarrassing. Or at least they know it’s irresponsible. But they’re still willing to institutionalize it.

In my first semester I was disillusioned of journalism by a disillusioned journalism professor.

In my second semester I took geology instead & fell in love.

I quickly realized something my journalism professor did not: scientists had been telling the truth all along while preachers had not.

The geologists made no bones about it.

• Our planet is not 6,000 years old.
• It was never under a worldwide flood.
• We never had just 2 parents.
• Those communities didn’t survive.

And while on paper we believed Jesus died for us, we knew as a matter of fact dinosaurs did.

For 4 years studying geology from Christians, the only time I met anyone who believed in a 6,000-year theory was when we saw them at conferences, presenting some poorly photographed landforms out of context.

As if this might overturn the last 300 years of collective peer review.

Far from it: every single thing I learned in my geology major was in contradiction to the alternative facts that I had hung my mental health on just a few years earlier.

To be clear, everyone who had anything to do with instructing me was a sincere believer in Jesus.

Other subjects besides geology gave the same experience. Anthropology, for example.

Anthropology, as knowledge, is hard to integrate with the Christian faith because you can’t possibly appreciate another culture if you think they deserve a fate worse than death until they learn something from you.

You know, exceptionalism is kind of central to Christianity. ‘Chosen priesthoods.’ ‘Holy nations.’ ‘Elect of God.’ And exceptionalism is positively antithetical to the sciences. Especially the social sciences.

When Christians speak of a ‘Christian worldview’ they mean:

• they think existence has a dictator
• the dictator has an enemy
• & their convictions represent a connection to the dictator
• while other people’s convictions represent connection to the enemy

This is the basic fascist move: to define life as a struggle & define politics as a dominance game that begins with the identification of the enemy.

Resist the urge to think of politics as a zero-sum contest.

And resist the urge to base politics on fear.

That’s a path to the dark side.

Politics should be about liberty & justice for all.

Resist the urge to say both sides are the same.

Saying both sides are the same because both sides try to influence your vote is like saying Sith & Jedi are the same because both use the Force.

One side helps people who make more money than you.

The other side helps people who make less money than you.

One side is like the Sith & the other side is like the Jedi.

You have to figure out for yourself which side wants to help you & which side only wants your power.

Slavery evolved with civilization. Most civilizations exploited labor. But some civilizations industrialized injustice more than others.

Abolitionism also is ancient. Like the knowledge of earth’s shape it predates Jesus.

But under medieval Christianity, to criticize slavery was to become an infidel. And to be an infidel under Christianity was to risk death or enslavement.

As long as Paul could not be criticized neither could institutional slavery.

When Christians first began discussing slavery as a topic for social reform, it was thought freedom came from ‘God,’ king & country.

And whoever did not serve ‘God’ could be lawfully enslaved by the king ‘God’ had appointed to build a realm for the free people who did serve ‘God.’

While slavery was the law, Christians who believed in hell were not interested in emancipation. They were interested in evangelism.

They became interested in emancipation as the prospect of emancipation became a tool for evangelism.

For hundreds of years, those who had empathy spoke of evangelizing slaves so they could live happily ever after with their enslavers. Those who did not have empathy made sure their slaves were not able to read.

Next to evangelism the subject of emancipation was a total afterthought. That was kind of the point of evangelism.

Only after deists entered the conversation was there an articulate position in favor of emancipation.

Emancipation didn’t happen because Christian faith reached new heights. It happened because Christian faith reached new lows. Because believers could no longer control the conversation with infidels.

History, for Christian believers, is absolutely grueling material to study.

There is hardly a primary source in existence that will match the spin your pastor put on it in church.

In fact, the story of Christendom’s global expansion is quite consistent.

Soldiers & missionaries always benefitted from one another’s work.

What varied case by case was whether the soldiers went first or the missionaries, whether they worked hand in hand & whether or not they were the same people.

You can think now those poor people are in heaven, despite the fact that they were killed by Christians, after hearing the gospel, for refusing to convert, conform or assimilate.

or you can think now they are in hell, and you can thank ‘God’ for that.

It bears mentioning here another popular myth exposed by history.

The ‘libertarian’ idea that the government exists primarily to create roads & bridges for commerce & enslave successful business owners with taxes.

The truth is almost the opposite.

In the state of nature, slavery comes before government. Government is invented later, primarily to protect people from becoming trade. Which people to protect is the national question.

Probably the ancient Hebrews were not the first to raise religious discrimination as a distinction of citizenship. Certainly they were not the last.

But the Romans, for example, did not, until Christian, operate that way. Welcoming new gods was something of a national pastime until then.

At any rate, it was not possible to advance the conversation in Christendom from evangelism to emancipation until that conversation included non-Christians.

In order to maximize the number of Christians who would oppose slavery, first it was necessary for the slaves themselves to be converted to Christianity.

Next it was necessary for the institution of slavery to become a hindrance to evangelism. These changes each took lifetimes.

Once emancipation had been achieved it became necessary for Christians to believe emancipation had been their idea all along.

Therefore Christians today are more likely to know the name William Wilberforce than Thomas Paine.

In the US every churchgoing Christian has heard of Wilberforce, has been told from the pulpit that Wilberforce and Christianity are the reasons slaves have ever been freed.

They have not been told the truth, which is that Christians such as Wilberforce encountered the arguments of Thomas Paine in the discourse of deists like Benjamin Franklin and became part of the change that resulted. Wilberforce deserves credit for the work he did. Paine deserves credit for the conversation he started.

Actually the US was one of the last countries in its century to abolish slavery.

And about the only one that had to fight a war to do it.

Who deserves credit for that?

The reason there was a war in the US was because in the US the slaveholders chose war.

The reason they chose war was because they had already fought and won two wars that were perceived at the time as slave revolts and the victors sincerely believed they were ‘heaven-rescued.’

They believed their country was heaven-rescued *precisely because* they had been able to win wars while holding people in biblical slavery.

They believed that until they lost a war and could no longer hold people in slavery.

Then they believed their country was a lost cause that would rise again one day.

This belief they validated to themselves by keeping their former slaves in poverty & by restricting their access to vote.

In all these decades of civil strife over social injustice there have been very fine Christians on both sides. Humanists have been on one side only.

Ever since our Civil War, old men in church have been giving young men two equal & opposite misconceptions about biblical & American slavery.

Either they say biblical slavery was not so bad because it was nothing like in colonial America or they say colonial slavery was not so bad because it was nothing like in biblical times.

People like Pastor Wilson told me the war was not about slavery.

They said it was about duty, family, God, country & constitution.

They said everyone is a slave when you think about it. They said they were slaves of righteousness & by following them we could be slaves of righteousness too.

They said racism had been invented by evolutionary biologists.

As if Charles Darwin had traveled back in time to 1619 & done his fieldwork there.

The same creationists taught me the story of Noah & his three sons, on which Christian racism was actually based.

Noah’s son Ham, supposedly, embarrassed his father one time & as a result Noah decided Ham’s descendants should be slaves to his Asian & European brethren.

This manifest destiny was part of ancient Jewish mythology. It was part of the crusades. It was part of the transatlantic slave trade.

If we want to understand ancient Israelite cosmology at all, first we need to imagine we don’t know anything about our planet except that it has land encircled by water that’s not safe to drink.

If we want to imagine ancient Israelite cosmology any more, we also need to put back in all the gods that were removed over time or lumped together to make Jehovah, his Son, his Spirit, his vassals & his adversaries:

to name a few.

And if you really want to understand early Christianity, you need to put all the heretics back in. If the history of Christianity teaches us anything, it’s that the heretics were likely to have been correct all along.

Ken Ham told me British colonists were horrible to Australian aborigines.

He said it was because they listened to Charles Darwin when they should have read their bibles instead.

Colonialism came to Australia in 1788, with bibles, almost a century before Darwin published his work.

I’m spelling this out because I want people to understand how I was self-radicalized. I did not know better than to take Ham at face value. I did not know better than to take THE BIBLE at face value.

But really, I was bribing & intimidating myself into make-believe, simply for fear that critical thinking would amount to an unforgivable sin.

I was hoping climate change was unreal:

• that justice awaits everyone in history
• history was according to God’s plan
• ‘truth’ was according to God’s word
• non-christians were in denial
• experts were wrong
• God put men in charge
• & democracy exists at the pleasure of a king

Of course, when Christians come up against the topics of sustainability, the word ‘stewardship’ leaps to mind.

But if you believe history ends with an apocalypse, a deus ex machina & a new creation, then stewardship & sustainability have nothing to do with each other.

Suffice to say, if you believe history was written with a certain outcome in mind, don’t be surprised if you’re the one who makes apocalypse a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The same mechanisms that can induce you to die for a lie can all the more easily induce you to live in denial to the bitter end.

In fact when one dies for a lie that’s how it works.

It’s not the case that we must fight for scarce resources to the bitter end.

Rather, we should work together to maximize scarce resources. The payoffs are much better.

And if, ultimately, we do bring about a mass extinction for ourselves, all we will have done is died for a lie.

Stewardship means following imaginary orders & waiting for a deus ex machina. Stewardship means maximizing the benefit for yourself.

Sustainability means working together to maximize scarce resources. Sustainability means maximizing the benefit for all.

This is the same moral dilemma we face whether a Christian ‘God’ exists or not:

What would you do if an eternal being starts a holocaust in front of you?

All we know is that’s the ultimate trick question.

We all know the right answer would be civil disobedience, self-sacrifice and solidarity.

We all know that’s what a good being would want from us.

I don’t think we needed Jesus’ example to figure this out. But it definitely proves the point.

Sadly, Christian history was mainly written by people who got the wrong answer.

That’s what happens when you have a religion of martyrs but all your systematic theology was written by survivors.

You can tell Christian theology was crafted by people with little use for creativity or compassion, because their sincerest idea of happily ever after was an eternal prison state.

And because people who tried to come up with something kinder were often killed, enslaved or imprisoned until they died.

As for me, once my faith decomposed into the Platonic ideal moral dilemma, I realized Pascal’s wager actually points toward unbelief.