War At the Christian Borderlands

Why I walked away from Christianity.

For years, I existed at the borderlands of the Christian faith. My faith in the core creeds of Christianity was dying, but I continued to love the many streams of tradition, symbolism, story, and community. Most of all, I loved the person of Christ, even as he became more myth than man.

What I wanted, as my faith died, was the space to do Christianity but not have to believe it. I wanted to live the story of Christ, say the prayers, and attend the liturgies. I wanted to live as if it was true even if I couldn't believe it was true, and I wanted the hospitality to live out this sort of Christianity in the world.

This admittedly flies in the face of Christianity's DNA. Christianity, for good or ill, is a doctrinal religion. This black-and-white orthodoxy can be traced to the Bible itself, in passages like 1 Corinthians 15:12-19:

 "Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied." (ESV)

To try to carve out a nontheistic space within Christianity was to exist at the very edge of Christian tradition, and living on the borderlands is hell. Every group engages in border maintenance and wages fierce disputes over what counts as membership in the group.

Finding myself on the borderland put me in an exhausting, untenable situation because I was suddenly the type of person at the obsessive center of every Christian's attention. I regularly encountered — even among progressive Christians — a lack of patience and outright hostility for people like me. When Flannery O'Connor encountered the belief that the Eucharist is not, in fact, the literal body and blood of Jesus, she famously said, "If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it." I encountered the same attitude, but a bit more personal: if it's all just a symbol, to hell with my Christianity.

I had scrapped bitterly for a decade for the inclusion of LGBT people in Christianity, but this new battle for a nontheistic Christianity was a fight of an altogether different magnitude. The theological fight for gay acceptance existed within the matrix of Christian beliefs; my new battle went to the very heart of the Christian faith itself.

When I get asked why I am no longer a Christian, the answer is simple: I stopped believing. But there is a second part to this story. When I tried to remain in the Christian world despite my persistent skepticism, I found myself in another fight, and I was just too exhausted from a lifetime of fighting. It was more sensible to walk away.

In my recent podcast conversation with Bo McGuffee, he told the story of someone who tried to be a nontheistic Christian and eventually gave up because the other Christians in her life simply made it too challenging:

I was on TikTok watching someone talk about her experience, how she stopped believing, and basically she still considered herself Christian. and people just keep coming after her: "oh no, this is terrible, how can you?" and all that other stuff. And finally she said she just stopped identifying as Christian. It's like, you know what? I'm not a Christian anymore. And it all went away. And she's like, oh, this is great. I feel so much better now.

I relate. It's hard to describe how much easier my life became when I threw in the towel and declared myself an atheist. Relationships with family immediately improved. Conversations with Christians are now pleasant and thoughtful when they were previously hostile and strained. I no longer found myself backed into a corner, having to defend my heretical Christianity from those who were disgusted by it. Everyone around me seemed relieved: I was finally admitting to just being the heathen I always was. It was easier for them, and it was easier for me.

I don't know what my life would look like if I had experienced welcoming hospitality instead of anxious border maintenance. But I do believe I would have remained a Christian, perhaps to this day. Instead, I found my home for years in The Satanic Temple — a purely symbolic religion that satisfied my yearning for the marriage of skepticism and religious structure.

The world needs expansive religions that can accommodate nontheism. The crises of meaning and loneliness are raging, and religion offers symbols, rituals, and communities that are less accessible in the secular world. Most people do not have the skills to build meaning-making structures from scratch and could benefit from institutions that provide structure for them. Western religions are making access to such meaning-making institutions incredibly hard. For religions to truly meet this need, they must be willing to accommodate heresy and even nonbelief. They will have to lower the intensity of the war at the borderlands.

Some conservative figures, like Jordan Peterson, are re-imagining what religion might look like in the modern world. This likely speaks to his enormous appeal — he is permitting people to embrace religion in purely symbolic and narrative forms. But in general, I think the borderlands will continue to be a war zone, and people desperately needing inclusion in meaning-making institutions will be left out in the cold.

Most people, when confronted with a black-and-white choice between dishonest belief or honest unbelief, will choose the latter. That inevitably means a denial of religion, but it doesn't have to, and I think the world would be better if it didn't.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and I might feature them in an upcoming post. Subscribe if you haven’t already, share this post with friends to rise on the leaderboard, and join the cult … I mean Discord server.