Leaving your faith can be lonely

One of the unspoken realities in the “exvangelical” community – those who have left evangelicalism or some form of conservative Christianity – is that it can and oftentimes is an extremely lonely process. For those who aren’t familiar with the Christianity of the 90s and early 2000s, it was more than just going to church. For many of us, it was our entire culture. Sure, we had school, but on Sundays, Wednesdays, and any special occasions we were at church with our church friends listening to our Christian music. As you grow older in the church you typically meet your spouse there, form a family, can find business connections, and so on. When you deconvert or question your faith tradition, you lose access to all of that.

Humans evolved to be social creatures. Packed throughout our evolution and the archeological evidence is that we’ve always been social and that has been our advantage. There’s reason to believe – through DNA evidence – that the human ability for complex speech gave us a leg-up over all other rivals, including Neanderthals (they lack the gene responsible for speech in modern humans; that isn’t to say they didn’t speak, just that the gene we know that is responsible for speech in us is absent in them). It’s why being cast out of society, being ostracized, being the outcast has always been a punishment and something looked down upon. The ancient Sumerians believed that nomads were cursed to be like wild animals and wander around. Most of the punishments in the Old Testament – at least the oldest records, before the priestly punishments were added – include being removed from the community.

In our modern era, having a community is even more difficult. With people driving 45min to an hour just to get to work and having to drive that same time back after having spent 8 hours there, they don’t usually have time for in-depth social activities. The weekends are busy, but even then the social activities tend to be more surface-level. You’re not taking a week-long vacation to help build a house in some developing nation. You’re not spending 2-3 days a week seeing these people. And so if you come from a culture that was tighter-knit than the larger culture in the world, leaving it can be an absolute shock.

The decision to leave your faith can result in a complete loss of identity. We grew up in a world where you could rely on other people, where you had some semblance of community even if at times it was toxic. When you leave that, what do you replace it with?

I spent the first 25 years of my life going to a church of some type. Between the ages of 25 and 28 I started going sporadically. By the time I was 30 I had stopped going all-together. I must say, the time since I left the church has been among the loneliest and difficult in my life. Job prospects, friendship groups, just having a group of people to rely on became extremely difficult to come by. Most of my friends from before had centered around church, and it was easy to maintain those friendships.

The big secret about deconverting is that you’re giving up your social status and essentially having to start over in a world that doesn’t believe in community. With one of my churches we would go and work on a project together in Mexico, go to a camp together and bond together at the camp, spend actual time with each other around an organized ritual – but when you leave that faith you’re leaving your center of ritual.

Ritual, more than anything else, has guided human social evolution more than we realize. Ritual serves as the foundation for so much of what we take for granted. There’s a reason that when archeologists find some ancient artifact their first assumption is that it was used for ritualistic purposes – it likely was. That’s not to say it didn’t have practical purposes as well, but many of our rituals often serve the dual purpose of being practical but also being a ritual. And religion, especially Christianity, is full of ritual. The ritual of getting up on Sunday morning to go to church, no matter how painful or tedious, was still a weekend ritual for most of us. The ritual of having people to talk to when you were down, even if the advice they were going to give you was absolutely horrendous.

When you leave the faith, you abandon ritual and are subsequently left with nothing. For a species that’s evolved on ritual, this absolutely causes an existential crisis. For me, I had no idea what I wanted to do in this world. For years I studied philosophy and wanted to become a professor. As I began to move away from the faith and lost sight of that, I began to wonder what my calling was. I suddenly had no place in this world. This has resulted in years of job hopping and ending up from one bad situation to another worse situation, because none of my training in my important years was around skills that’d help me secure a job.

I had the ritual of buying the newest book on philosophy and reading it then writing a blog post about it. I had the ritual of attending apologetics conferences and philosophy conferences and talking to other like-minded people. I had the ritual of evening debates with my friends, of debating theology, of looking into the Greek of a passage, of studying the Bible to gain knowledge. All that ritual is gone.

Instead, it’s been replaced with a ritual around studying the world just to understand the world, catching up on the history and science I missed out on because my faith didn’t allow me to learn the truth. For the most part, most of my rituals were replaced with time. I am, after all, only human. But the one that hasn’t been replaced is the community. I’ve yet to find anything that can match the community that the church provided. Deconversion is a lonely business.

It’s at this part of the essay where I’m supposed to offer the solution, “Here are 10 easy steps to follow to build your community after your deconversion!” But, if I’m being honest, I have no idea. I came closest to it when I was in New York, but that’s mostly thanks to the dynamics of the city and how it lends itself to being easier to hang out with people. I haven’t been able to really find any community or anything like what the church offered.

So there really isn’t a conclusion to this, because I’ve yet to find the answer. Rather, it’s to let people know that when they question their faith and look at leaving, understand there will be real life consequences for it. The more central your faith has been to your life, your identity, the more of your life and identity you’re going to have to rebuild. You’re going to have to learn how to form friendships outside of the church, which is honestly complicated and fraught with difficulties. But what you’ll find, at the end, is that it’s worth it to be true to yourself, no matter the cost.