"Deconstructing Belief: A Personal Journey Away from Faith

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” 

Hebrews 11:1

“For we walk by faith, not by sight:” 2 Corinthians 5:7

If you know anything about faith, it is firmly believing something with no evidence.

The whole point of being a “believer” is to believe. Believers are conditioned and taught to shut down logical reasoning. When something doesn’t make sense they are told “…[His] ways are higher than your ways and [His] thoughts are higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Or “…[He] has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise…” (1 Corinthians 1:27).

You don’t need to understand or have proof to believe. “Blessed are those who believe who have not seen” (John 20:29). Asking for assurance, for evidence, for proof is taught as the opposite of faith.  

This makes having meaningful conversations with believers very difficult. Engaging in dialogue with believers can often feel like having a conversation in two different languages. Attempts to engage in rational discourse can frequently lead to frustration on both sides, as the believer may feel that their spiritual convictions are being challenged, while I feel my arguments are falling on deaf ears. So, for the most part I don’t say anything. I once was a believer, so I understand.

However, for those who just might have an open mind, here is how I transitioned from being a born again, sold-out, on-fire believer to not believing in God at all. The simple answer:  it made no difference.

I was born into the Faith, and then I dug deep.

I was raised by the most real and sincere believer I have ever met. My mom is the most consistent, literal, and committed believer I know. There was never a time in my life that she let up. There was never a few weeks of being tired where we stopped going to church. There was never a difficult time in our lives where prayer and faith were not the things that pulled us through.  God was the answer for EVERYTHING. Knowing Him was the end-all be-all purpose of life.

As I became school aged, my mother decided to homeschool me. She wanted to ensure I had a good foundation in the things of God, and a Christian worldview so I'd be secure when I went 'out into the world' later. As a kid, we are learning so many things about ourselves, how to build friendships with others, interpersonal communication, It is not an exaggeration to say everything I learned academically and about the world around me was filtered through a Christian lens. I ate, slept, and breathed faith.

My upbringing was deeply connected to God, thanks to my mother. In adolescence and adulthood, I developed my own relationship with God. I sincerely desired to serve Him with my whole being and to fulfill His purpose for my life.

I felt called to ministry so I chose Bible College majoring in pastoral care and non-profit leadership. There, I learned about hermeneutics and exegesis – the proper methodology to study the Bible and interpret the text. I took semester long classes delving into one book of the Bible at a time. We studied the Bible verse by verse, exploring the original Hebrew or Greek, the historical and cultural context at the time it was written, the audience to whom it was written and the intended message. Then extrapolating its meaning beyond the moment it was written, inferring a message to us today. I had always been a student of the Word, and Bible College took that understanding deeper. I started trying to figure out how to explain it to people in a simple way that made a difference. I quickly developed a reputation as impassioned and inspiring preacher.

Following Bible College, I began working at my local church and served wherever I could, volunteering long hours, driving long distances, giving away everything I had to make a difference. I took over the teen ministry and poured my heart and soul into loving those kids and teaching them what I had learned about God. I wanted them to know God for themselves, to listen to that little voice inside of them, and trust it. I wanted them to know what the Bible said and why it mattered. I wanted them to be believers who lived the things they said they believed, like I did. It was beautiful and wonderful and pure.

My Conflicts

After nearly a decade, I began to realize that something was not right with me. This thing had been roiling under the surface for awhile and I'd always powered through. It's difficult to express in a few words the impact that years of self-suppression, sacrifice, and spiritual bypassing had on my physical and emotional well-being. I was not okay. I now understand that I was experiencing burnout (a condition of extreme mental, physical, and emotional fatigue resulting from prolonged stress or demand), although back then, I couldn't articulate it.

I was doing all the right things. I was serving God, maintaining my relationship with Him, sowing my time and money, walking in faith, doing my confessions, teaching and training those around me, laying my life down for the cause of Christ, serving my man and woman of God unquestioningly, having a humble heart, putting God first in everything, living my life as an example to others, denying myself daily – and it was killing me.

When sought guidance from my pastor and mentors regarding what I was feeling, they told me I needed to dig in more. They emphasized that one cannot experience fatigue and burnout when fully dedicated to God. I needed to find out how to get my fire back. Perhaps there was something in my life, some part of me that I had not fully killed or sacrificed. I apparently wasn’t fully dead to my flesh and my desires, or I would not be feeling this way.

I knew that I was doing all I could do. The thought of doing MORE was incapacitating. All my life I'd live pursuing God and his peace. THIS was not peace. I knew I was not where I needed to be or doing what I needed to be doing.

In the interest of brevity, I won't delve into the series of events which led me to leave that ministry and move to California. Though I will specify, I left under good circumstances. There was no falling out, no offense, and no bad feelings. My pastors supported me and gave me their blessings. If you'd like to read the whole story, you can check it out here.

The Turning

I knew I needed a change and what I'd been doing was not good for me, so I stopped everything I had been doing and completely changed my life. I moved to California, joined a new church, and got a real job outside of ministry.

I was very involved in my new church. I wasn't 'working' in ministry, so this felt like a step down from what I'd been doing. At first I felt okay, and then as time when on and I began to settled into my new life, I felt worse than I had while working in ministry. Now I realize I had been surviving on pure adrenaline and will power. Then when I got to a safe place, I just crashed.

I kept cutting back what I did, letting go of leadership responsibilities and saying no. I was desperately trying to find the balance I needed. Eventually, I had quit all volunteer work and leadership and was just attending services "so I could just sit and be fed for awhile." Even there, I realized my entire body recoiled at the thought of going to church. I had to hype myself up all morning just to get myself out the door. This is not a normal reaction to something that is beneficial to you. I decided to just take a step back and not force myself to go to church for a while. The Bible says "not to forsake the fellowship of the brethren" and I was still connecting with believers and friends. I still had my relationship with God and whenever I felt the pull to return, I would.

That pull never came. Not once.

Instead, I felt my heart and mind and soul unwind in a way I had not known was possible. Years of stress and disassociating from myself in order to "present [my] body as a living sacrifice wholly and acceptable to Him, which was [my] reasonable service" (Romans 12:1) melted away. The longer I remained outside of church and not volunteering for anything I did not want to do, the more peace and ease I felt. I came back to life and my dreams began to wake up again. Every area of my life improved. My health improved, I went back to school, I thrived at work, my friendships deepened, and my relationship with my now-husband became the healthiest it had ever been.

The Plot Thickens

As time passed, church started looking a lot like a store or a business from the outside looking in. It seemed the whole purpose was to present an attractive image and create an experience that would keep people coming back week after week. The actual needs of the community were not being met. Diversity of thought and opinion was not invited. People who were different were not welcome. And most people’s lives were not being changed in a meaningful way. It was barely more than a social club, or a multi-level marketing scheme.

Don't get me wrong, community is important. But I would argue, the community that is most often built in church is not real community. It is mostly based on proximity (you see them every week) and being of use or value to the organization (they notice you're not there because the work, service, resource you brought is missed). I helped plant the church in California and was a member of the leadership team for three years. Not one person reached out to me when I stopped attending. Not my pastor, not church leaders, not my mentors, not those I served with. I was simply out of sight, out of mind.

Then Trump became president, and suddenly, I could see the fingerprints of White Christian Nationalism plain as day in the religion I loved so much. Preachers I previously would have trusted with my life, were vehemently supporting the worst individual I could imagine – someone completely devoid of morals, integrity, or anything that looked like Christ – and they were saying he was God’s chosen. The man couldn’t quote one verse or even name a book of the Bible, and yet he was supposedly a pious man who would bring America back to God. If men of God who'd taught me that holiness and godliness looked a certain way, were now telling me that someone who didn't align to ANY of those things was godly and holy...someone was lying.

I just naturally began to examine what I believed and why. I'd always taken things with blind faith. I didn't consider the inconsistencies, the lack of evidence, and sometimes even the lack of Biblical backing. For the first time in my life, I read the Bible without the inherent interpretations I'd been provided all my life. As I did, I realized so much of what I’d been taught as absolute fact and tenants of Christianity were interpretations created by people in the last 150 years.

For example, "the rapture" isn't mentioned in the Bible. The idea of the rapture didn't exist before the 1830's and didn't become a popular belief in Christianity until World War I. The whole world being at war and then a pandemic (the Spanish Flu) killing another third of the population right after, set a great stage for people to believe they were living in the last days. The point: it was made up. The theology behind it is cobbled together from unrelated verses taken out of historical context and original meaning. There may be some elements of truth, but it is just as likely false. Yet, it has been passed down as absolute fact to modern believers and has shaped how we live our lives. Or maybe I'm the only one who was terrified I was going to be left behind.

Another example is speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues is mentioned in the Bible, but it is more characterized as a miracle where people heard their native tongue even though the speaker didn't know it -- not what we consider speaking in tongues to day. As a practice in Christianity, speaking in tongues did not begin until 1901. Christianity was nearly two thousand years old, no one spoke in tongues, and then all of a sudden one woman (Agnes Ozman) decided it was a thing, started doing it and it caught on. I think this is a great place to share that the modern practice of speaking in tongues closely resembles mediumistic practices in paganism and shamanism and some African tribal religions.

Lastly, the doctrine of original sin is something that has been manufactured over time. Man being born into sin is not expressly found in scripture. There is no verse that says "when Adam ate the fruit, sin entered the world." That belief is also not held by Christianity's foundational Abrahamic faith - Judaism. The fall of man is alluded to in some verses, but the idea as we know it today is a combination of different verses and passages and taught with implied meaning. It is not blatantly and clearly expressed in scripture, but is the largest foundational belief of modern-day evangelical Christianity.

I'm not here to debate anyone. I'm just presenting information I found incredibly interesting and compelling. From these examples and so many more, I realized that I could not take the theology I'd been taught literally. If it was created by man and there was room for interpretation, it could not be absolute truth. And if it wasn't absolute truth, why would I stake my life to it?

I also realized that the Bible is a collection of ancient works by various male middle eastern authors. Some parts of it are attributed to 4,000 years ago. There is very little in it that we can truly understand in full context in our modern western culture. It just does not translate even though it has been translated into modern English. Much like in 1,000 years people probably won't know the different between a "butt dial" and "booty call" -- what is written in the Bible has inherent contextual meaning that has been lost to time and we simply do not understand in our modern age. Don't even get me started on how we extrapolate meaning from specific wording, but those words have been translated so many times, who knows if that is what the original text said. My point -- there are too many variables to know that what you read and believe is actually what was written or intended in the meaning. And if it is not for sure absolute truth, why would I stake my life to it?

If you grew up being taught that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and meant to be taken literally, you probably just glazed through that whole paragraph and couldn't accept any of it. That's okay. Faith is blind and I truly understand because I've been blind in it myself. But I'm not anymore, and that's okay, too.

Faith-Less

I have accepted that what I've always been taught and believed as fact about the Bible, God, and the core tenants of Christianity are not infallibly true. So, I stopped staking my life on them. I stopped twisting myself in knots to be acceptable in the way I was taught God wanted me to be acceptable and I just am. Shock of all shocks: without God and the threat of eternal damnation, I have not devolved into an immoral, selfish, hedonistic mess. I am not a liar, a thief, or an adulterer. I am not cheating and lying my way to wealth and riches. I am not taking advantage of other people or using them for my gain now that I don't believe hell is waiting for me if do.

My belief in God, is not what made me a good person. I am a good person which is why I was attracted to God. I don't need the Bible telling me not to hurt people to not hurt people. I listen to my body and what brings my heart and mind the most peace -- that is how I make my choices and decide what is the right thing for me to do. I do my best to not cause harm to others or myself. That is how I approach relationships and guide my words and interactions.

My life did not go downhill when I stopped serving God and believing in Him. In fact, I am living the best life I have ever lived. My actual quality of life has improved. I make better decisions. I do things that are good for me, my body, my emotions and my relationships. I am building the life, marriage, and career I want. It is fucking magical.

When I first started separating myself from Christianity, I thought maybe, when something bad happens, I'll want the comfort of God back in my life. They say there are no atheists on the frontlines of battle. Everyone calls on God in times of trouble.

Nope. That hasn't been true for me either.

Since leaving my faith, I have experienced some really hard and soul-crushing times: unexpected deaths of people I love in ways that were hard and meaningless; job insecurity; relationship difficulties; family stress and trauma; a world-wide pandemic...you name it. Not once in all of it did I feel the need to pray, draw close to God and cast my cares on Him, or take comfort in Him having a plan for my life.

The ONLY time I felt the need to pray in the last 5 years of my life, was watching videos of the murder, brutalization, and trauma of children in Gaza. My heart and mind could not cope with such evil in the world, and I reverted to the first coping mechanism I’ve ever known – crying to God about it. Maybe He can do something because I sure can’t.

In summary: God didn’t hurt me. God’s people didn’t hurt me. I am not dismayed by life and blaming God. I didn’t fall away from Him because I never truly knew him. I didn’t walk away to sin and do whatever I wanted.

I don’t believe in God because I see no evidence that the Bible means what I was taught it did; and serving Him, loving Him, and having a relationship with Him made no difference to my life at all.

In fact, my life has IMPROVED since walking away.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace. My peace and security are more profound without Him. God is supposed to have a plan and a purpose for my life. I am more fulfilled and the work I do is more meaningful than anything I did trying to be in His purpose. God is Love, and supposedly you cannot know love unless you know God. Well, my friendships, family relationships, and marriage is healthier and more meaningful than anything I experienced with God. I was taught nothing good lived in my body and that I must fiercely distrust anything my flesh wanted. Now, my body is no longer fighting against me. and fully alive and well.

I know that none of these facts; my lived experience; the inconsistencies in the Bible that have been taught as fact; or harm caused by white nationalist Christianity means anything to someone who is committed to believe. Faith requires belief without evidence. You must choose belief over all else.

If that is where you find yourself, I wish you well. Because I sure am.

Happy growing!

Sarah Dawn